Right to Work Blog

The Washington Post had an interesting article the other day. Seems the Carpenters Union can’t find enough real members who care sufficiently about the issue of low wages to man their picket sites. Instead, they are paying people that are truly down on their luck, even lower wages, to stand in for them at picket sites. Said the Post:

Supporters of the practice consider it a creative tactic in an era of declining union membership and clout. But critics say the reliance on nonunion members — who are paid $1 above minimum wage and receive no benefits — diminishes the impact and undercuts a principle established over decades of union struggles.

“If I was a member of the general public, and I asked someone picketing why they were there, and they said they don’t work for the union and they were just hired to stand there, that wouldn’t create a very positive impression on me, nor would it create a very sympathetic position,” said Wayne Ranick, spokesman for the United Steelworkers of America.

Indeed.

There was a time when the House of Representatives at least paid lip service to the idea of federalism, fiscal responsibility and state’s rights, but, it appears those days are over. The House, overriding state laws, has passed a bill that would give union officials the federally mandated power to obtain monopoly bargaining privileges over all firefighters, police and emergency medical technicians across the country.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) was right when she said, “Let’s not mince words. This bill is not concerned with public safety. It’s a payoff from the left to the powerful labor unions that finance many of their campaigns.’’

Right to Work champion, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO), defended what used to be a Republican principle — federalism — when she noted that, “State and local governments are capable of managing their own public employees.”

In the end, 98 Republicans voted for this bill. Word from the House floor is senior Republicans actually lobbied their fellow members to support the legislation — doing the bidding for the public employee unions. They should all be embarrassed.

The New York Times (Registration Required) reports on a federal lawsuit filed in Washington State that contends the National Education Association (N.E.A.) union has been overcharging for fees associated with annuities offered its members:

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs said they had been unable to calculate the total payments received by N.E.A. officials from Nationwide and Security Benefit since 1991, when the products were first endorsed by the organization. But a recent Security Benefit prospectus indicated that fees paid to N.E.A. Member Benefits might exceed $2 million a year. That prospectus said Security Benefit paid the N.E.A. subsidiary $510,000 a quarter.

The suit, filed in United States District Court for the Western District of Washington at Tacoma, said that such payments were not disclosed to N.E.A. plan participants. Instead, N.E.A. Member Benefits maintained that it selected Nationwide and Security Benefit based on competitive criteria, the suit said.

According to the San Francisco Weekly:

[I]n the 1990s some $76 million was siphoned from union worker benefit funds under the influence of San Francisco labor boss Larry Mazzola. More than $50 million of that money was used to prop up Konocti Harbor Resort, a Lake County concert venue abutting and near more than 100 acres privately owned by Mazzola and his family.

Last year, Mazzola cut a deal with a real estate investment firm owned by Democratic Party lobbyist Darius Anderson in hopes of pulling political strings that might turn the resort into a much more valuable Indian gambling casino complex. While Mazzola, business manager of Plumbers union Local 38, and his agents were pursuing the gambling deal, Mazzola’s personal attorney attempted to re-zone Mazzola’s own land near the resort so that the entire area might become a condominium, housing, and commercial development with a gambling mecca at its core. Local opposition stalled the re-zoning and gambling plans. But had they succeeded, the escalation in property values could have personally enriched Mazzola by millions of dollars. And these schemes wouldn’t have even been conceivable had Konocti Harbor Resort not been kept afloat with vast amounts of money that was docked from workers’ pay.

By docking workers’ hourly pay to finance an ambiguously named “convalescent trust fund,” then causing $50 million to disappear into the worthless investment that was Konocti Harbor Resort, Mazzola and union officials under his control deprived workers of benefits money they paid for out of their own union dues. By attempting to leverage that “investment” in a way that would increase his own net worth, he was engaging in the sort of apparent attempted sweetheart dealing that gives union bosses a bad name.

Indeed! That’s $50 million in workers’ retirement funds that Mazzola is treating as his own personal candy store. And, since California doesn’t have a Right to Work law, these are workers that are also forced to pay dues and fees to Mazzola as a prerequisite for getting or keeping their jobs.

The Weekly continues:

Yet, appallingly, regulators will not punish Mazzola in any meaningful way. Despite years of federal investigations and lawsuits pertaining to the funds diversion, Mazzola is poised to get off without so much as a slap on the wrist. . . .

According to a new settlement agreement between Mazzola and the Labor Department described in court proceedings earlier this month, Mazzola emerges from a three-year legal ordeal stemming from the funds diversion allegations unscathed.

Mazzola won’t be removed from his union leadership role. And he will continue to help overseeing some union benefit money. As a concession Mazzola will be required to step down as a member of a board of trustees overseeing worker benefit funds, perhaps by the end of the year. Mazzola will be allowed to remain for two years on a board overseeing a worker training fund. And Mazzola’s son, Larry Jr., will be allowed to sit on the board of trustees overseeing the union local’s various pension and other benefit funds.

As part of the settlement, Larry Mazzola Jr. will be required to take a course on the concept of fiduciary duty.

WOW! Even understanding that the Department of Labor’s budget is now controlled by a Democratic majority beholden to Big Labor’s largess, the distinct odor coming from this decision is too obvious to ignore.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal weighs in on Democrat leaders’ most recent attempt to “cut spending” and benefit the Big Labor bosses. Highlights include:

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget it wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law. . . .

Far from oppressing unions with burdensome reporting requirements, the Office of Labor Management Standards [OLMS] is doing what governments often do best: provide information and punish people who abuse the public trust. It has posted an impressive array of data on union governance at its Web site, unionreports.gov, where any dues-paying member can access it.

Investigations conducted by OLMS also have led to an impressive list of successful prosecutions of union officials. Just last week Willie Haynes, a member of the Saginaw, Mich., City Council who also served as a United Auto Workers financial secretary, pleaded guilty to falsifying his union local’s reports. In May, Chuck Crawley, a former Teamster’s local president in Houston, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for stuffing a ballot box so he could be elected president of his union local and embezzling dues money.

Union officials have publicly stated that they believe many of OLMS’s requirements are burdensome and unnecessary. Since unions helped elect the current Congress, they are now seeking action on their agenda, which ranges from holding fewer secret ballot elections to cutting back on the oversight that is at the heart of the 1959 union “bill of rights” that JFK championed.

The Big Labor payback by congressional leaders continues.

Big Labor must feel under siege. Their efforts to eliminate secret ballot elections for union certification — so they can intimidate and pressure workers into joining and paying dues to a union — have stalled in Washington, D.C. And now even some of their most fervent supporters — including the Los Angeles Times — are questioning the wisdom of the whole exercise.

Now Michael McGough, a Times senior editorial writer who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of Big Labor, compares the fate of the Card Check Scam Bill to the immigration reform legislation:

Immigration reform wasn’t the only initiative stymied in the U.S. Senate last week. In a largely party-line vote, senators refused to cut off debate on a bill that had been a legislative priority for the Democratic majority: a change in labor law that would make it easier for unions to organize workers. Unlike immigration reform, however, this legislation deserved to die.

McGough understands that labor law should not mean unionism at any cost:

But that choice should be a free one, and nothing ensures a free election better than a secret ballot in which neither the employer nor the union organizer is looking over a worker’s shoulder as she makes her choice. The labor movement used to support the secret ballot (and there’s evidence that a majority of union members still do). The movement was right then and it’s wrong now.

Forced unionism apologists in the North Carolina House, seeking to remove the Tar Heel State’s 50-year-old ban on collective bargaining by state and local government employees, moved one step closer to getting the camel’s head in the tent.

Big Labor Rep. Dan Blue’s pro-monopoly bargaining bill seemingly died in May, when it missed a legislative deadline without securing a vote. However, early this month Blue resuscitated the scheme by tacking on a $100,000 appropriation and thus transforming it into a “spending” bill.

According to Gary Robertson of the Associated Press, the bill that cleared the House Judiciary Committee last Tuesday:

. . . doesn’t require all governments to enter into contracts or meet with their workers to discuss how workers will be paid or treated. But it would order the Office of State Personnel to set up a process by next spring to certify employee organizations to participate in state negotiations.

North Carolina and Virginia are the only states that expressly ban state and local governments from entering into collective bargaining deals with their employees. A United Nations agency earlier this year urged North Carolina to remove its 1959 ban.

All North Carolina Right to Work supporters should contact their state representatives and remind them that handing union bosses monopoly power to bargain the contracts of government employees, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, undermines our democratic institutions. Urge them to do everything possible to prevent union monopoly bargaining and taxpayer-subsidized union payroll deductions from becoming law in North Carolina.

When Sen. Arlen Specter cast the lone Republican vote in support of the card check scam, he might have thought he was buying peace in Pennsylvania. Not so. Picking the union bosses over the rights of rank-and-file workers just isn’t smart politics.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review takes Specter to task — and rightfully so:

Sen. Arlen Specter voted with his Democrat colleagues to curtail workers’ rights, advance union thuggery and destroy the secret ballot.

Of course, the Philadelphia Republicrat, always the parser, sees it differently.

The Senate last week came up nine votes short of the 60 required to end debate and bring to a vote the House-passed (and deceivingly titled) Employee Free Choice Act.

The measure would have federally certified unions once a majority of workers had signed cards, in public, under union pressure and without a private vote.

Mr. Specter was the only Republican to vote with the Democrats. And his “reasoning” was on par with his “not proven” vote in the Bill Clinton impeachment trial and Thursday’s contention that rejection of amnesty for illegal aliens was “silent amnesty.”

Specter said his “yes” vote on the union-enabling measure did not necessarily indicate his support of the bill — only that he wanted to end debate so the Senate could “consider a great many very important and complex issues.”

Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President William George and Secretary-Treasurer Richard Bloomingdale didn’t get the memo: They “applauded” Specter for his support.

Specter will seek a sixth term in 2010. But 26 years of such nonsense is enough. Arlen Specter would do Pennsylvania, the nation and rational thought a great service by stepping aside now.

Former Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith has an excellent piece on campaign finance “reform” and freedom of speech.

As former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt once said: “two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can’t have both.”

We believe that more freedom of speech will lead to a healthier democracy.

Much of the political establishment, as Smith points out, does not.

Despite the highest unemployment rate in America, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm refuses to support true reform for her state.

Granholm announced she would not upset her political benefactors by supporting Right to Work in the Wolverine State. Confident she could bring jobs to the state because “I’m a really good salesperson . . . ,” instead, she announced a trade mission to Japan. In the same breath she proclaimed support for an income tax hike and a sales tax increase.

Now tell us Gov. Granholm, what business in their right mind would voluntarily move their business and families into this sort of economic environment?

A growing movement for enactment of a Right to Work law has taken hold in the Wolverine State. Both Republicans and Democrats are prepared to make concessions as they move forward with a reform package aimed to bring jobs back. But Granholm will have none of it. A state Right to Work law is a no-cost incentive with demonstrable evidence of success.

And remember, a Right to Work law does nothing more than allow workers themselves to decide whether to join or pay fees to a union. That’s all!

Granholm would be better off selling the true reform of freedom in the workplace to the voters in the state than trying to sell economic snake oil overseas. She would have much better results.