Right to Work Blog

Every year economist Ronald Pollina studies the economic environment of all 50 states and culls the information into a list of the “Top 10 Pro-Business States.” Pollina has just completed his 2009 study and the winners are:

1. Virginia

2. Utah

3. North Carolina

4. Wyoming

5. South Carolina

6. South Dakota

7. Kansas

8. Georgia

9. Florida

10. Nebraska

Readers please note that all 10 states have a critical component in common — they all protect workers with Right to Work laws.

Michelle Malkin looks behind the curtain at who is funding the effort to enact a government-run health care plan.  Not surprisingly, some of the seed money came from the union bosses including the ethically challenged SEIU.

The big government health care power grab moving through Congress contains a special interest provision aimed to help the union bosses.  The Investor’s Business Daily takes note:

Spending a trillion dollars as a down payment for a government takeover of health care is a dream of many Democrats. The current plan in Congress would create a government insurance plan that would drive out the private ones.

The problem, though, is the cost. Even moderate Democrats are having second thoughts about that, as well as all the quality problems associated with socialized medicine. Even so, health care nationalization’s biggest boosters are cooking up bad new plans.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., both would like to slap a tax on private health plans to pay for a new government one.

But they’ve carved out one very big exception: unions and their gold-plated benefit packages. This effectively gives Big Labor an advantage in the market and forces nonunion workers to subsidize unions for their share of this bad idea.

The logic behind this tax giveaway is that union health plans, which are lavish, would be subject to higher taxes than those of workers with regular private sector health care plans.

According to news reports, if unions get a special tax break for themselves on health care taxes, they’ll gladly muscle “their” Congress members into supporting a “public option” health care bill.

In short, it’s little more than a political payoff to unions for spending $400 million in campaign cash to elect Democrats to Congress and the White House last year. As if the outrageous favors they’ve received from the auto bailouts aren’t enough.

But unions don’t just get a tax break. They also get a great recruiting tool. After all, nationalizing health care in itself undermines any reason to belong to a union, since unions exist to squeeze more out of companies. If a company is no longer involved in health care and thus can no longer be squeezed, why belong to a union? The answer: special tax privileges.

This will artificially beef up union membership. Who wouldn’t want tax-free health care over subsidizing someone else’s as the current congressional bills dictate?

With the Employee Free Choice Act to coerce workers into unions now dead in the water, this could be a backdoor means of doing the same thing — while bringing in more campaign cash to Democrats.

This may be great for the Democrats and their union backers, but it’s bad for the rest of us. By creating a two-tier system of pricing for health care, and with it privileges for party elites, it’s fundamentally unfair to the public as a whole. The people who will get the short end of the stick on this — the rationing, the shortages, the wait lists — will be the very ones forced into paying for other people’s health care. Unions will get a free ride.

Remember that whenever health care is “free” or subsidized to consumers, it distorts the market and creates disincentives to cut costs. So under the Kennedy-Baucus plan, union health care costs will soar without restraint. And ordinary Americans will pay.

This will turn unions, whose members comprise only 6% of U.S. workers, into a privileged caste, for no other reason than their political muscle with Democrats.

There’s a word for this: Peronism. That was the populist political patronage system that took Argentina from one of the richest countries in the world in the early 20th century to the economically troubled nation it is today. It’s a bad model for the U.S. to follow.

Spending big, carving out tax niches for no other reason than campaign contributions, and creating two-tiered pricing systems, is little more than a kind of corruption. It will lay us low, too.

The headline highlights the cost of union monopoly bargaining power over New York schools, children and taxpayers let alone individual worker choice.  The Associate Press reports: 

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

Interested in knowing what the country would be like if the Card Check Forced Unionism bill became law?  Look no further than Fresno County, California for your answer.  

Homecare workers report scores of incidents of voter intimidation, illegal threats and ballot manipulation by SEIU staff as they pushed for an election to swap unions.  

The SEIU would not give up those member dues money without a fight.  

Indy Media reports that ”the SEIU “spent an estimated $10 million on attack mailings, robo-calls, TV and radio ads, and 1,000 paid staff flown in from across the country,” to keep workers from leaving.  

Workers were subjected to intimidation and even “physically threatening behavior by SEIU staff.”  Remember, California does not protect workers with the RIght to Work and they have no choice and little voice in the process.  

It’s worth the read, but keep in mind, these tactics were employed with the use of a secret ballot election.  Just think of the intimidation and threats available in the big labor organizers arsenal if the Card Check bill was law.

Some on the Left are calling SEIU’s “victory” in Fresno their “Vietnam”:

SEIU defeated NUHW by 233 votes in their bitter election over Fresno’s 10,000 home care workers, but now faces a situation analogous to the United States in Vietnam. It took nearly one thousand staffers and an estimated $10 million for SEIU to eke out a victory in Fresno, the labor equivalent of carpet-bombing. But just as the massive bombing of North Vietnam failed to bring the United States an ultimate victory, SEIU’s Fresno campaign left its opposition unvanquished, and likely better positioned than SEIU to win future elections. 

SEIU won’t give up the massive amount of union dues it takes from workers.  If workers in the Golden State had the Right to Work they could make a free choice — to join a union or not — and not be subject the the harassment and intimidation tactics of the union bosses.

As big labor tries to grind out 60 votes on the Card Check Forced Unionism bill, it is critical to note that the two Democrat Senators from Montana have yet to stake out an official position.  If you live in the state, please let your Senators know of your opposition to forced unionism.  From the Missoulian:

Although Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester co-sponsored the 2007 bill, they are not tipping their hands on how they will vote on the 2009 version. 

“It would be very hard to support the bill in its current form, but that is why I’m working with my colleagues in the Senate to bring some common-sense modifications to the bill to make sure it balances workers’ interests with small-business interests,” Baucus said.

Baucus went on to say that any legislation that passes “must be good for both Montana workers and Montana small business owners.”

Forced Unionism is not good for workers or small business people Senator!

Tester also wouldn’t say what he how he intends to vote.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Minority Whip, correctly charged that taxpayers are footing the bill for the General Motors, United Autoworkers Union bailout because Michigan refuses to enact a Right to Work law.  

“I think all of us can look at the model in Detroit and understand what was wrong, and structurally compare that to the other manufacturers in the right-to-work states and see what we needed to do,” he said during an appearance on CNBC.

Cantor also echoed concerns by some other Republican lawmakers that the Obama administration had favored union interests over bondholders in its bailout agreement with GM.

“There has been a downright suspension of the law,” Cantor complained about the bondholders’ treatment.