Right to Work Blog

“Half of Colorado’s United Food and Commercial Workers would stop paying union dues if they could,” according to the union’s boss, the Denver Post reports.

In a May 1 letter to members, Ernest Duran warns that the right-to-work initiative headed for Colorado’s November ballot would decimate his ranks of dues-paying members.

“If this amendment passes, we will enter all future negotiations divided,” Duran wrote. “In my opinion, we will enter with less than 50 percent of the workers as union members.”

In other words, if given a choice, most union members would keep their dues money in their pockets. No wonder union bosses insist in coercing people to join.

Colorado union bosses try to justify forced-union dues, and their opposition to a state Right to Work law, by claiming that all employees “benefit” from forced-union representation.

But here is a clear case (one of an increasing number) where the school board wants to offer a substantial pay increase to a significant number of teachers in fields where there’s a shortage, and the union bosses oppose it and can almost certainly block it. Without a union, math and science teachers would get paid more next year than they actually will get paid with a union monopoly-bargaining agent. How are they benefiting? Forcing such teachers to pay union dues, even when they don’t belong to the union, adds insult to injury.

According to the Rocky Mountain News:

Denver Public Schools is eager to offer the largest annual pay increase in memory to its classroom teachers - one of its proposals would hike base salaries an average of 7.7 percent.

There’s more. With incentives available through the ProComp performance-pay system, average salaries, the district calculates, would rise by a jaw-dropping 18 percent.

Given the slumping economy, stagnating wages in the private sector and the fact that salaries at other local school districts may not keep pace with inflation, you’d think the Denver Classroom Teachers Association would be all over the offer. Instead, the union has flatly rejected it.

The district’s three-year-old ProComp program is the sticking point. All new hires are covered by ProComp, which is building up a sizable reserve from a tax approved by voters. The district wants to use that revenue to sweeten its incentive-based pay, such as for those who teach difficult subjects in hard-to-staff schools. It also wants to direct more money to teachers who are early in their careers.

The union instead is insisting that a new contract largely preserve the current salary structure, which gives a larger slice of the compensation pie to senior teachers and funnels less money into incentives.

Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) is stepping down from Congress due to personal indiscretions and Big Labor is salivating at his possible replacement — New York Assemblyman Peter Abbate.

Abbate is “Albany’s steady ally of public employee unions,” according to the New York Sun.

. . . His Capitol office serves as the primary receptacle for hundreds of pieces of legislation drafted by labor unions.

Each year, Mr. Abbate, the chairman of the Assembly’s committee on governmental employees, introduces hundreds of bills — the great majority of which are drafted almost in their entirety by public sector labor unions [officials].

At the behest of labor lobbyists, Mr. Abbate has attached his name to the most costly bills before the Legislature: pension sweeteners, early retirement provisions, collective bargaining enhancements, and expansions of health benefits. One early retirement bill he introduced this year would alone cost taxpayers $200 million a year, according to New York City officials.

More than a dozen of his measures have drawn protests from Mayor Bloomberg, whose Albany lobbying office late last month sent a memo to lawmakers to try to put a stop to them.

“We believe the enactment of any of the following bills … would violate the spirit of no new unfunded mandates,” the memo stated. Mr. Abbate was the prime sponsor of 13 of the 16 bills that were flagged by the Bloomberg administration.

Among his other bills is a measure that would permit public employees to go on strike “after the collective negotiation process has been exhausted,” and one that would that would allow employees to strike without having their pay docked.

“I don’t think he’s ever introduced a piece of legislation opposed by a union,” a fiscal analyst for the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon said.

Mr. McMahon is quick to notice that Abbate is throwing taxpayers under the bus to help the public union bosses:

. . . “He represents a minority of people, the people who belong to the public sector unions. They already have people representing them. It’s called the unions.”

Mr. Abbate has more than $400,000 in his campaign coffers, an amount that is on the high end for state assemblymen. Most of his money comes from organized labor groups (such as the International Longshoremen’s Association, 1199 SEIU, the Civil Service Employees Union, and the New York City Central Labor Council) and a variety of uniformed officer associations.

Public employee labor unions, he says, approach him with bill proposals, and most of the time he introduces them.

The unions take care of the language and the preliminary fiscal analysis. As the New York Times [italics added] reported last week, the actuary who prepared the Assembly’s fiscal bill notes is a paid union consultant.

The sad reality is there are hundreds, if not thousands of Mr. Abbates across the country to carry water for the union bosses in return for political largess from their political action committees. Time will tell whether Mr. Abbate gets to Congress but you know the public union hierarchy will stop at nothing to see him take the next step up. Hold on to your wallets.

Despite bipartisan abandonment of taxpayers and workers by members of Congress from both parties who are trying to curry favor with police and fireman unions, the Winston-Salem Journal understands what the real issues are:

The U.S. Congress shouldn’t be meddling with the decisions that city and town leaders must make regarding local government salaries.

Yet that is exactly what Congress is trying to do with legislation that would require all cities and towns of more than 5,000 population to bargain collectively with the leading union that represents public-safety officers — police, firefighters and emergency-service workers.

The bill was moving toward Senate approval last week when Republicans suddenly stopped supporting it. Senate leaders now say they will try to work out a compromise and bring the bill back to the floor.

Although President Bush has promised to veto the bill, it’s entirely possible that there is enough support in Congress to override that veto.

At the very least, an override vote will be close because, for a pro-union measure, the bill has had a good deal of Republican support. (North Carolina’s two senators, Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, and 5th District Rep. Virginia Foxx have opposed the bill as it has moved through Congress.)

Even if a Bush veto is upheld in Congress, this is not likely to be an issue that will go away. But it should.

The bill is offensive for a number of reasons.

The first and foremost is that it is probably unconstitutional. That annoying 10th Amendment, the one that reserves for the states all powers not explicitly enumerated for the federal government, is still on the books. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the authority to mandate collective bargaining.

In the past, the amendment has been used as the constitutional basis for a lot of bogus arguments — mostly to oppose the civil-rights movement — but this is not such a case. Setting salaries for government workers is a state and local matter.

In North Carolina, public employees do not have the right to bargain collectively. The N.C. State Employees Association has just affiliated itself with a union, but that doesn’t mean it has the right to hold negotiations with the governor and legislators over salaries and benefits. Congress should not come along and decide that it will change the labor structure in this state.

With HR 980, the Congress is also passing a huge unfunded mandate for cities and towns. Collective bargaining would put upward pressure on salaries, and the federal government would not help with them at all. If Congress wants to do something to raise safety officers’ salaries, it should send some money to cities and towns for that purpose.

Congress is meddling here, involving itself in an issue that is best handled by towns, cities and states.

Let’s hope there are enough votes to sustain a Bush veto if the bill passes the Senate. This is an idea best forgotten.

Despite victories in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton is reeling from the defection of union bosses to the camp of Sen. Barack Obama.

As the Associated Press reports:

More and more labor unions are lining up behind the Illinois senator, who on Thursday picked up the 600,000-member United Steelworkers union and the personal endorsement of Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America.

“I’m convinced that Senator Obama’s message of hope and ‘change we can believe in’ has resonated across our country,” said Cohen, whose union will not endorse until June.

Those endorsements, including recent ones by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the American Federation of Government Employees, are helping Obama cement his front-runner status against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Department of Labor is demanding that union bosses make public more details of the internal finances to protect union workers’ dues money from abuse. The Department has proposed new changes to its disclosure forms.

As reported by the Associated Press (AP):

“This proposed rule provides union members with more complete information about union finances and will better protect their legal rights to transparency and accountability under the law,” said Don Todd, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Labor-Management Standards.

But the union bosses are not happy, wanting to rule their fiefdom of unlimited coerced union dues without interference or disclosure to the workforce paying their salaries. AP continues:

“The administration is showing once again that it would rather spend its time on a witch hunt aimed at unions than on advancing the interests of workers,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement.

Some of the changes in the proposed rule include:

_ Asking union officials and employees making more than $10,000 to itemize their benefits like life insurance, pensions and deferred compensation. The current form allows benefits to be combined and disclosed as one number, leaving the amount of individual benefits undisclosed.

_ Requiring disclosure of expenses when the money is not reimbursed directly to the union employee or official. Labor officials say indirect reimbursement, when payment for expenses goes to the vendor instead of to the employee or official, currently does not have to be disclosed on the forms.

_ Requiring unions to disclose who bought or sold any union asset worth more than $5,000. The current form only requires disclosure of the sale.

_ Requiring itemization of certain cash receipts of $5,000 or more.

Reporting rules require national, regional and local unions with an income of more than $250,000 to provide financial details in the annual reports they must file with the Labor Department.

Unions that have less income get to file a simpler form, but the Labor Department said it wants to revoke that privilege and require the more detailed form for unions that are late with their forms, fill them out incorrectly or get into other trouble.

“The proposed rule builds on the administration’s continuing commitment to transparency and accountability for corporations, pension funds and labor unions,” Todd said.

In its infinite wisdom, Congress has decided to fund a $125 million pilot program to create “green jobs,” a training program to teach installation of solar panels, etc. But there is a catch — the money is only given to programs affiliated with Big Labor.

The business lobby protested the move in March, writing to the House Appropriations Committee, “As Congress moves forward with many proposals to help curb the effect of global warming, lawmakers need to be acutely aware that this effort cannot be done without the help of each and every person, business, industry or organization, regardless of union affiliation.” The letter was signed by the Homebuilders, General Contractors Association and the Independent Electrical Contractors.

The new Congress is so beholden to the union bosses, they didn’t listen.

Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has pledged to fight for the inclusion of the union-only language in the Senate version of the bill.

The American magazine asks an interesting question with an obvious answer:

Why do the headquarters of state teachers’ unions tend to be so close to state capitol buildings?

Authors Jay P. Green and Jonathan Butcher write:

If you stand on the steps of a state capitol building and throw a rock (with a really strong arm), the first building you can hit has a good chance of being the headquarters of the state teachers’ union. For interest groups, proximity to the capitol is a way of displaying power and influence. The teachers’ union strives to be the closest. It wants to remind everyone that it is the most powerful interest group of all.

. . .

In Nebraska, the state teachers’ union office is only 210 feet from the capitol building. In Pennsylvania, it is only 312 feet away. In Alabama, Delaware, and South Dakota, the teachers’ union headquarters is about 500 feet away.

As we said, the answer is obvious. As the authors conclude:

The teachers’ unions don’t want people to think they can lose. They want to impress folks with their prime real estate and well-heeled lobbyists. But eventually it is hard to sustain really bad ideas in public policy—and the teachers’ unions have embraced some really bad ideas. Eventually the “puffery” of well-placed offices succumbs to the substantive pursuit of good policy. In the end, the power of the teachers’ unions may be, in the words of Chairman Mao, little more than a paper tiger—or a well-placed building.

What an outrage!

To justify his vote to eliminate workers’ input in the unionization process, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) is claiming that his vote to enact the Card Check Scam Bill was the “first step toward modernizing American labor law.”

First step?

We would hate to see the next step in the process.

Although we can assume that repeal of all Right to Work laws including Arkansas’ might be something he is thinking of.

When U.S. Immigration uncovered illegal aliens working in a meatpacking plant in Iowa, the United Food and Commercial Workers asked authorities not to raid the plant while it was trying to unionize the workforce — including the illegal aliens.