LaborPains.org

We’ve noted before the impact of union spending funded by members’ dues money on national and state elections, but union political cash trickles all the way down to the local level. The latest example is the Los Angeles city elections being held this year, into which unions have poured significant sums.

Our Executive Director outlines some of this spending at Forbes:

The unions did their best to make this a reality. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers-backed […] super PAC raised more than $4.1 million to elect its candidate. The police union chipped in with another $1.4 million, while other unions—the Longshoremen and the Teamsters—made contributions to the tune of $300,000 and $100,000, respectively.

But do union members support the candidates that their unions are funding? Not necessarily, despite over 90 percent of union political money going to Democrats. Our Executive Director notes two cases where against all union harangues many members of union households chose the Republican candidate:

That’s where the real issue lies. Exit polling from 2012 indicates that 31 percent of union households in California voted for Elizabeth Emken, the Republican nominee for Senate. Elsewhere, even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—the most hated politician in America, according to union officials—received 38 percent of the union-household vote.

There’s a solution to this divergence between union officials’ politics and the politics of large numbers of union members. The Employee Rights Act contains a provision that would require unions to obtain the affirmative consent of their members (many of whom are under forced dues arrangements in non-Right-to-Work states) before using their dues money for political purposes. That provision would allow union members to have a real say in their union’s political activity, which they lack today.

President Obama’s plea for “no red tape” in the response to Hurricane Sandy was a memo that the electrical unions in New York and New Jersey might have missed. New documents appear to reveal labor’s interests in keeping the red tape tangled.

Electrical utility workers from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia have all complained that they faced delays, confusion,  and miscommunication that forced them to turn around and head home before they could help the storm-ridden communities.

Decatur Utilities in Alabama said that its crew turned around once the utility was given documents that seemed to indicate that the crew had to join the union in order to get to work in New Jersey.

Elsewhere, a central Florida utility lineman complained that his crew was given a 300-page document to decipher before starting to work on Long Island. He told the Daily Caller, after idling for over a day:

“It turns out there was a 300-page contract that the union controlling LIPA [the Long Island Power Authority] wanted everybody to sign first. We don’t have time for that. We’ve got guys ready to go. You need lawyers for this.”

Diverse Power from LaGrange, Georgia said that it had crews in Maryland, but when they made it to New York, they were asked to sign union contracts. The crew turned around and returned home.

Union officials have continued to deny these reports, but the Daily Caller said that it received these documents from the Florida Municipal Electric Association that were allegedly sent to it by International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1049. Some of the highlights include the requirements that the assisting utility companies:

• Pay the wages as ordered by the local
• Contribute $9.75 per worker for the Union Health and Welfare Fund
• Contribute 22.5% of employee gross salary to the local’s Annuity Fund
• Contribute 3% each to the local’s Skill Improvement and the National Electrical Benefit Funds

If these documents are authentic, it’s clear that the union is looking to protect itself against non-union workers from the South and hold up the recovery — and skim a bit off the top.

Since then, however, Local 1049 has backpedaled:

Barry Moline, the association’s executive director, told TheDC that by Nov. 1 the union, based in the central Long Island town of Hauppauge, had relented and stopped insisting that nonunion crews pay dues and other union fees.

“The union director” himself placed a phone call to withdraw the letter, Moline said during a telephone interview Saturday. But that came only after Moline had notified a national trade group, the American Public Power Association, which turned outrage into action.

The devastation in the northeast is incredible: there are some parts of the Jersey Shore, Staten Island, and the south shore of Long Island that may never be rebuilt. One of the largest power companies in northern New Jersey will not guarantee that the lights will be back on until Friday—roughly 11 days since the superstorm began to knock out power lines. (It doesn’t help that a nor’easter is forecast to hit the area on Wednesday.) Even when things are back to “normal” it will still be a different world for many people in the northeast.

But it appears that those residents can look for signs of normalcy in the way unions do business.  The mere existence of so much confusion is a cause for concern.There is always going to be some paperwork, but the petty union politics and maneuvering should be suspended. Are labor unions really worried that these short-term assignments given to out-of-state utilities will actually affect the local’s agreements?

President Obama was right: there should have been no red tape.

There is an ongoing dispute between two unions over which should represent two Port of Portland workers, and now it has become so acrimonious the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has intervened.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) dispute which union has the right to represent the two employees who plug in, unplug, and monitor refrigerated cargo containers. The Port’s operating contractor, ICTSI Oregon, recognizes the IBEW, so the ILWU has staged a work slowdown.

The slowdown has already caused one ship to bypass Portland for Oakland. Now the IBEW has declared its intent to picket the Port if it loses representative status.

The NLRB is now intervening. The Seattle regional office has filed suit in federal district court to declare the ILWU work slowdown unlawful. The ILWU has also filed for a court action, arguing it deserves to represent the two employees and isn’t staging a work slowdown.

This is concerning in light of the NLRB’s Specialty Healthcare decision, which will allow unions to form multiple smaller bargaining units (“micro-unions” to critics). The NLRB has already ruled that shoe salespeople at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman constitute a bargaining unit separate from other salespeople. Will micro-unions create more inter-union acrimony like that seen at the Port of Portland that will threaten business? Only time will tell.