Posted on Feb 17, 2016 by LaborPains.org Team
One pressing issue in the Democratic presidential primary is campaign finance and its impact on policy, with Senator Bernie Sanders pressing his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on her record taking money from various business groups. This caused one Clinton surrogate, former Democratic National Committee chair and Vermont Governor Howard Dean, to speak […]
Posted on Jul 16, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
Teachers unions in Massachusetts have tried before to obscure their involvement in political races: The Boston Teachers Union (BTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) led by Randi Weingarten, was criticized by the Boston Globe for a shady political scheme designed to elect BTU’s favored mayoral candidate. Now, Massachusetts legislators are trying […]
Posted on Jun 04, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
Last year, Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City, thanks in large part to hundreds of thousands of dollars in union “independent expenditures” — election spending not formally coordinated with a campaign, and funded by member dues. Now, it appears that Big Labor’s network of outside spending was even broader (and better disguised) […]
Posted on Apr 21, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
As we reported last Thursday, when SEIU Local 500 came knocking on Media Matters’ door, years of spewing pro-Big Labor rhetoric couldn’t lead Media Matters’ CEO David Brock to enter into a voluntary recognition (a.k.a. “card check”) with the union. We were curious about some of the particulars of the SEIU’s representation petition, so we […]
Posted on Apr 14, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that “aggregate limits” — maximum totals on contributions to all candidates and party committees combined — on individuals’ election contributions were unconstitutional in a case titled McCutcheon v. FEC. This ruling annoyed Big Labor, which enjoys 10 of the top 14 spots in the ranking of organization contributors to […]
Posted on Mar 26, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
Unions used to be the leading source of organizational political contributions. A quick look at the Opensecrets list of “heavy hitters”—the top outside donors since 1989—shows that of the top 15 donor organizations, 10 are still labor unions. And Opensecrets only counts federal PAC contributions (which are opt-in); unions also maintain sophisticated state- and local-level […]
Posted on Jan 07, 2014 by LaborPains.org Team
Last November, unions including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its Boston local (the Boston Teachers Union or BTU) heavily backed Marty Walsh in the city’s mayoral election. (He won.) Part of that support was a $480,000 ad buy by the AFT national headquarters that the BTU swears it didn’t know about. The money […]
Posted on Jun 27, 2012 by J. Justin Wilson
Do you deserve a raise? If you’re in a union, good luck getting one. Chances are your union contract is one of the 80 percent that do not allow individual workers to receive merit-based pay increases. That problem could have been solved with the Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees (RAISE) Act, sponsored by Sen. Marco […]
