Right to Work Blog

Newspapers from across the nation continue to urge Congress to fight the Big Labor power grab known as the Card Check Scam Bill. The Augusta Chronicle believes that a Pro-Big Labor Senate with a 60 vote super-majority should send shivers down your spine:

George Orwell is turning over in his grave. But if you live in Georgia, you can put a stop to it.

The so-called “Employee Free Choice Act,” is as Orwellian a name for any law we’ve ever seen. The proposed law before Congress, in fact, is not about free choice at all; rather, it seeks to restrict the free choice of those who don’t want to join a union, in a most underhanded way.

Democrats love the law for what it will do for their bread-and-butter Big Labor friends: It will take away employees’ right to a secret ballot when voting on whether to form a union.

Democrats and union bosses know that public votes on unions will put crushing pressure on intimidated workers to vote in favor of forming or joining unions.

And what kind of reprisals might the workers risk if they vote against the union?

This is precisely what Big Labor bosses are demanding as payback from the large Democratic congressional majority that they helped get elected.

The “card check” law, as it’s called, provides yet another reason why it’s critical to re-elect Republican Saxby Chambliss to Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat.

Chambliss won the most votes in the Nov. 4 election, but just not enough to avoid a runoff on Dec. 2.

Now, with Democrats closing in on a possible 60-vote advatnage [sic] in the U.S. Senate — enough to end debate on bills and proceed to a vote — the Chambliss race has become one of the most-watched, most important elections in the country. In one of the most important election years in our lifetimes.

Chambliss may be all that stands in the way of Democrats gaining a filibuster-proof Senate majority — and their virtually certain approval of “card check.”

Here’s how it would work: Under current labor rules, if you are approached by a couple of burly, threatening-looking 200-pound guys asking you to sign a petition to establish a union shop at your place of work — and you are opposed to the idea — you can smile nicely and sign the petition, safe in the knowledge that you can vote against the union in the privacy of the voting booth. But under card check, you wouldn’t get a chance to cast a secret ballot. The petition would empower labor bosses to form a union shop if more than 50 percent of workers signed on.

What could be more un-democratic than abolishing the secret ballot? That’s what they do in dictatorships.

Union bosses claim that secret ballot elections are unfair because of management coercion and intimidation. This is simply not true. Government investigations have uncovered no evidence of widespread management abuse. And workers themselves say they have no problem with the National Labor Relations Board’s oversight of union elections.

Even more significant are polls showing that more than 70 percent of both union and non-union workers favor the secret ballot over card check. Moreover, coercion and intimidation is more likely to come from Big Labor’s thuggery than anything management does.

The misnamed Employee Free Choice Act is nothing more than Democrats paying off labor bosses — special interest legislation at its worst.

And didn’t President-elect Barack Obama promise he’d put an end to the clout of special interest lobbyists? Don’t count on it; he was for card check when he was in the Senate.

The re-election of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss on Dec. 2 would greatly enhance the chance that Republicans could mount a successful filibuster against card check.

It’s not card check that the nation will need over the next few years, but a check against a left-wing Congress run amok. You can be sure Chambliss will help provide that check. His opponent would only add to it.

The actions of the American Federation of Musicians in California hit a sour note with seven nonmember musicians who were blacklisted by the union. They have filed a lawsuit in federal court with the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

Film Music Magazine has the story:

Filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the suit alleges that union officials conspired to blacklist musicians in retaliation for resigning from formal union membership. Union officials are accused of violating their “duty of fair representation” by refusing nonmember musicians access to a rehearsal hall, hindering their efforts to find employment, and enshrining certain discriminatory policies in contracts with several local symphonies.

Under the Foundation-won Supreme Court precedent Communication Workers v. Beck, workers have the right to resign from formal, full dues-paying union membership. Because California has no Right to Work law making dues payment strictly voluntary, employees in a union-controlled bargaining unit can still be obligated to pay certain dues for union activities related to collective bargaining. However, employees who exercise their right to resign from formal union membership cannot be discriminated against by union officials or employers. The lawsuit contends that every plaintiff musician has met its forced-dues obligation to the union’s local affiliates.

The Foundation, in a press release describing the lawsuit, described the specific allegations claimed by the musicians:

* “AFM union employees attempted to blacklist dissenters who resigned their union membership by informing prospective employers that they were “not in good standing” and therefore ineligible for work. As a result, several orchestras and producers declined to hire nonunion musicians.”

* “AFM union officials included a discriminatory clause in contracts with local orchestras explicitly forbidding the employment of nonunion workers.”

* “Union officials from one local also prevented nonunion employees from accessing a rehearsal hall used by several employers.”

Foundation attorneys are seeking financial restitution for the plaintiffs as well as a court injunction preventing future discriminatory practices.

“Ugly union discrimination and intimidation of this nature is a widespread practice in the entertainment industry,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “We expect the union will face a substantial and embarrassing defeat as a result of this lawsuit.”

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Times, the government-affairs director of the AFL-CIO said he is certain that organized labor’s top priority — the Card Check Scam Bill — will pass Congress and be signed by President Barack Obama. “I have no doubt it will pass and will be signed,” William Samuel told reporters and editors of the Washington Times.

Mr. Samuel also said that the more than $300 million spent by labor unions to educate workers was crucial to the Democrats’ success in key battleground states, such as Ohio and Michigan — and as such, Samuel expects a return on his investment of the forced union dues money of thousands of workers.

In this week’s episode, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason sits down with Stanley Greer, Senior Research Director at the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, to discuss the proposed $25+ billion auto bailout and the close connection between compulsory unionism and Detroit’s economic woes. Click here to listen to the entire episode.

One thing is clear: Enactment of the Card Check Scam Bill will impose forced unionism on millions of Americans who do not want to join a union. But there is another impact — it will kill jobs and raise the cost of goods and services.

Dan Morain, writing in the Los Angeles Times, notes the bill is already creating a problem for president-elect Obama — and its true job-killing impact hasn’t been felt. Big Labor is pressing hard for its enactment, however; Obama needs to work with business to create jobs at this critical time for the economy.

But Morain’s news story doesn’t tell the whole story. The liberal Denver Post is more direct in its advice for the new president:

Barack Obama has pledged to be the president of all the people after he’s inaugurated Jan. 20.

We hope so. It could prove to be difficult, considering his party strengthened its majority status in Congress and some of the special- interest groups that helped propel the gains will want some payback.

Obama and the Democratic majority should resist the urge to pay off organized labor by passing the divisive and unnecessary law known as “card check.”

It passed the House this year but stalled in the Senate. It would force-feed union organizing drives by ending the current requirement that gives workers the right to a secret ballot when deciding whether to unionize. Pushing card check would immediately endanger the new administration’s ties to the business community and complicate the delicate but vital task of getting the American economy back on track.

Labor played a supporting role in the Democratic sweep, but it was mostly Obama’s own efforts at energizing and organizing voters that put him in the White House. Business and labor did run ads assailing or praising candidates for their card-check stands. But the issue played only a marginal role in an election that turned on broader economic issues.

If Obama or congressional Democrats now put a card-check bill high on their agenda, they will risk a “Ritter moment” that would damage their relations with moderates and the business community. That’s what happened to Gov. Bill Ritter in 2007 when a bill gutting long-standing rules limiting “union shops” in the Colorado Peace Act hurtled through the legislature with little public input.

Ritter rightly vetoed that bill, but the move angered his labor supporters. Later that year, the governor tried to make amends by granting limited collective-bargaining rights to state employees. That move, in turn, alienated much of the business community. This year’s wholly avoidable fights over a right-to- work initiative and four anti-business initiatives that labor later withdrew all followed.

The Colorado squabbles weren’t worth it. Whatever benefits labor might have gained by disrupting a decades-long accord with business were far outweighed by the disruption these duels caused.
Likewise, if President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put this ragingly insignificant card-check issue above the need to right the American economy, rationalize our health care system, rebuild the national infrastructure and revitalize American education, they will sacrifice the bipartisan spirit that Obama so dearly earned in his pathbreaking campaign.

We hope the incoming Obama administration learns from Colorado’s example and sidelines the card-check bill while it pursues vastly more important goals.

There is no hiding the fact that pushing the Card Check Scam is bad — bad for workers, bad for politics and bad for the economy.

As Washington considers writing a blank check to the U.S. automobile industry and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, it’s worth learning a little more about the golden-plated UAW contract negotiated by the “Big Three.”

Paul Ingrassia knows the auto industry. He is the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. His article “Detroit Auto Makers Need More than a Bailout” points out that:

. . . For decades, the United Auto Workers union stoutly defended gold-plated medical benefits that virtually no one else had. UAW workers and retirees had no deductibles, copays or other facts of life in these United States.

A few years ago the UAW even waged a spirited fight to protect the “right” of workers to smoke on the assembly line, something that simply isn’t allowed at, say, Honda’s U.S. factories. Aside from the obvious health risk, what about cigarette ashes falling onto those fine leather seats being bolted into the cars? Why was this even an issue?

The answer is that the Big Three caved to every demand of the Big Labor unions.

From paying 12,000 “workers” not to work, to the current outrageous contracts, the UAW monopoly bargaining power and its privilege of forcing every worker to pay dues and fees as a condition of getting or keeping a job are the “main” ingredient in this long-developing crisis.

A Big Labor front group headed by former Rep. David Bonior, who is reportedly being considered by the new Obama Administration to head the Department of Labor, is brazenly running television ads promoting enactment of the Card Check Scam Bill. Spokesman for the misleadingly named group, “American Rights at Work,” says the ad purchase was a “significant buy.” No word on where the group got the money, but it is obvious that forced union dues are somehow footing the bill for the purchase.

One thing is clear, however, Americans’ right to vote in a secret
ballot will be taken away if the bill ever is enacted into law.

Perhaps a better name for the group would be “American Rights at Work for Now.”

As President-elect Barack Obama considers appointments to major cabinet positions, word from Washington suggests that former Democrat leaders Dick Gephardt and David Bonior are being considered to head the Department of Labor.

Gephardt, of course, has long-standing ties to the union bosses. He was always a top recipient of Big Labor’s political largess as a member of the House of Representatives, and when Gephardt ran for President, most Big Labor bosses endorsed his run and over 800 union organizers were sent to Iowa to assist his campaign. He opposed the Right to Work and every other measure to bring accountability to the worker-union boss relationship.

As bad as Gephardt is for workers, Bonior could be worse — if that is possible.

Mark Mix, the President of the National Right to Work Committee, makes the case against a federal bailout of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union:

For decades, United Auto Workers (UAW) officials have wielded their monopoly power under federal labor law to negotiate wages, benefits and work rules for virtually all front-line employees of the Big Three, including union members and non-members alike. UAW bosses’ irresponsible exercise of their extraordinary, government-granted bargaining power, and Big Three managers’ unwillingness to resist outrageous Big Labor demands with fortitude, have played leading roles in rendering the firms uncompetitive.

And the UAW bosses’ stranglehold over the Big Three hurts not just employees of those firms, but all auto-industry workers in regions of the country, especially Michigan, where significant numbers of Big Three plants remain. As economist John Tamny noted recently in an op-ed for Investor’s Business Daily, in Michigan, GM’s “continued existence under weak management has served as a capital repellent such that capital and jobs will continue to flee the state if GM is saved with the money of others.” On the other hand, if the Big Three automakers go bankrupt, the U.S. auto sector and its employees will ultimately benefit, because bankruptcy will allow either Big Three managers themselves, under Chapter 11 provisions, or a future purchaser of the firms’ assets to get front-line employees out from under the UAW union monopoly so that they can be deployed far more efficiently.

Firms that currently furnish supplies for the Big Three and their employees would benefit enormously from having more stable commercial relationships with better-managed companies. Overall employment in the American auto sector would almost certainly resume growing in the wake of Big Three bankruptcies.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi would have Americans believe that autos and trucks can’t be manufactured profitably in the United States any more, so in order to save jobs the industry has to be converted into a taxpayer-subsidized utility – perhaps even led by a presidentially appointed “auto czar.” Their premise is pure bunk. Today, Toyota, Honda and other non-Big Three, nonunion manufacturers employ more than 110,000 Americans, mostly in right-to-work states, where forced union dues and fees are prohibited, and are proving you can still make money building cars in the United States.

Big Labor and Big Labor puppet politicians are desperate not to protect American employees, whose fortunes do not depend on the Big Three, but rather the UAW union monopoly over GM, Ford and Chrysler auto assemblers.

Even more than they fear the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues every year, union bosses fear the example Michigan would set when its long-dormant economy sprang to life in the wake of the collapse of the UAW’s forced-unionism empire.

Americans who instinctively oppose another massive industry bailout shouldn’t allow the self-interested claims of union officials, feckless Big Three CEOs and their propagandists to cause them to second-guess themselves. Instead, they should call their senators and congressmen today through the congressional switchboard (202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121) and urge them to oppose the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Big Three bailout on all votes.

The Washington Times lends a voice of opposition to the proposed billion-dollar bailout of the Big Three carmakers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.