“More than 500 decisions by the leading federal agency that referees disputes between labor and management will have to be reopened after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the five-member board had operated illegally when its membership dwindled to two.

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling in which the court’s leading liberal — retiring Justice John Paul Stevens — sided with the court’s four most conservative members, said the law does not allow the National Labor Relations Board to operate while it is short-staffed because of political arguments. [...]

The decision means that more than 500 of employee-employer cases decided by the NLRB while its membership had dropped to two must now be reopened by the board, which currently has four members.”

Image courtesy of IslesPunkFan.

I decided to brave the weather–without a union branded poncho, of course– and take a few shots. There were a plethora of union colors, a giants cutout of a K Street “corporate” type which reminded me of another protest puppet, posters calling for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to “protect small businesses”. Riiight.

–The SEIU District 1199 and UFCW Local 1059 have made it clear that they will no long support Ohio’s U.S. Rep. Zach Space, the state’s only Democratic representative who voted against the health care legislation. Business Week

–The Hill offers this helpful roundup of who needs to watch their backs come November after the health care vote, thanks to the AFL-CIO and the SEIU.

–Denial is not just a river in Egypt……Bruce Corsaw, SEIU Local 620 field services director, said to a local paper that “a coincidental thing that occurred” when 13 of 14 total SEIU employees in the city all were conspicuously absent and sick on the same day during a contentious contract negotiation.

–Anthony Rumore, former longtime president of the Scarsdale, N.Y.-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 812 and Teamster District Joint Council 16, has plead guilty to forcing, coercing, and threatening union members into performing “domestic” tasks for him…..like installing home furnishings, running errands for his daughters wedding, taking his wife to the doctor, and delivering their Christmas tree. The list continues ad nauseam. So does my nausea.

–The SEIU-UHW and NUHW trial started yesterday.

What will it take for public-sector labor — with no ties to private, for-profit employers — to understand that the steady gravy train of the past 50 years has ground to a halt?

In autos and steel, the UAW and the Steelworkers finally learned brutal lessons for lagging the competition. In aerospace and airlines, the machinists paid a price. In transportation, the Teamsters got it. In construction, the building trades intuitively understood the price they would pay in membership and the work to sustain them if the bills for their services weren’t competitive. But in government, where a labor monopoly insulated from competition is funded by typically increasing revenue, they never really needed to learn any of those lessons.

“The public-sector unions don’t face the same thing,” Ficano says. Increasingly, they will — even after a national economic recovery starts taking hold, adding jobs and building confidence shaken by the Great Recession.

Two things:

There were certainly some brutal lessons learned. But this isn’t just about private-sector unions “learning their lesson”. It’s more about Big Labor seeing the writing on the wall and looking for a way to get in on the governments “gravy train”.  Think rent-seeking, bank regulation, health care legislation, Craig Becker, “High Road” rule changes. The list goes on and on.

Howes says that public unions will increasingly learn their lesson too.  I’d like to know when.  When competition suddenly appears in a government building? When tax payers have finally had enough? When public pension funds are bankrupt? I guess that’s not too far off after all.

“Unions are rapidly becoming an economic anachronism. In recent decades, barriers to international trade and investment have fallen, and domestic markets, including transportation, energy and telecommunications, have been largely deregulated. U.S. industries, on the whole, have accepted and even embraced the more competitive environment. Sectors such as steel, textiles and sugar continue to demand protection from foreign competitors, but they are now the exceptions and not the rule. But leaders of organized labor, on the whole, do not accept the new, more competitive environment.

A return to the era of more closed and regulated markets should be strongly resisted. Although it may be seen by labor leaders as a golden era, it extracted a heavy price on Americans in the form of lost consumer welfare, product innovation and freedom. The preferable policy alternative is to allow competition to work in labor markets just as it has been allowed to work more fully in product markets.”

Out of place, out of good ideas, and out of time, unions are indeed as anachronistic as they come.  At times it seems that unions are the Luddites at the tech convention, imploring everyone to replace their iPhones with a union made CB radios and their iPads with clipboards.

Image courtesy of Kenn Wilson.