Right to Work Blog

The following U.S. Senators co-sponsored a cloture vote to end debate on Big Labor Lawyer:

Harry Reid, Roland W. Burris, Tom Harkin, Debbie Stabenow, Dianne Feinstein, Benjamin L. Cardin, Bill Nelson, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Amy Klobuchar, Mark Begich, Byron L. Dorgan, John D. Rockefeller IV, Edward E. Kaufman, Daniel K. Akaka, Sheldon Whitehouse, Sherrod Brown.

Please contact your Senators today and tell them to vote NO on cloture and NO on SEIU/AFL-CIO* union lawyer Craig Becker’s confirmation to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

*SEIU = Service Employees International Union AFL-CIO = American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations labor union

Racing against the clock, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pushed through another Obama Big Labor nominee, Patricia Smith, before Senator-Elect Scott Brown becomes a Senator. Reid won this race, see the Senate votes here.

In addition, Reid is prepared to add radical SEIU & AFL-CIO lawyer, Craig Becker to the list of Obama nominees approved before Senator Brown arrives.

Please thank your Senators who voted against President Obama’s U.S. Labor Department Solicitor of Labor nominee Patricia Smith. And, urge your U.S. Senators to Vote NO on the impending Obama National Labor Relations Board nomination of Craig Becker. 

As the new U.S. Solicitor of Labor, President Obama’s nominee M. Patricia Smith will control the largest civilian pool of government lawyers after the Justice Department.

Then New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed Smith Commissioner of the New York State Department of Labor (NYDOL). Having spent her entire working life as a government employee, Smith brings only bureaucratic experience to the table.

As NYDOL Commissioner, Smith used her position and federal funds to override a state hiring freeze to hire a politically connected union organizer as a state employee.

In her former NYDOL position, Smith fostered and named a program “Wage Watch” that created a direct and integral relationship between NYDOL government enforcement agents and the “program’s partners” who are Big Labor organizers and Big Labor front groups.

Then NYDOL Director of Strategic Enforcement and recently withdrawn Obama DOL Wage and Hour appointee, Lorelei Boylan referred to these Big Labor partners as NYDOL “community enforcers.”

In one giddy e-mail obtained by NRTW, Boylan wrote, “the ‘role of the commuity [sic] enforcer’ is where we will have to come up with original material.”

For a real world example of how this works let us take you back to the Clinton Administration’s Labor Department which colluded with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizers in an attempt to shakedown an employer to extract an agreement to hand his employees over to labor bosses. Watch the National Right To Work Committee’s interview with Randy Schaber (Link) and read the congressional investigative report (Link) that caused the firing of a Clinton appointee at the Labor Department in the 1990s.

It is past time to stop these political favors and manipulations of federal resources and laws to benefit Big Labor Bosses. And, that is exactly what we can expect with Smith’s confirmation as Solicitor of Labor. She did it in New York, and now she plans to do it across the USA.

ACT NOW, thank your senators who voted against Smith and encourage your senators to vote against Big Labor Lawyer Craig Becker’s nomination to the NLRB.

The Committee was forwarded an e-mail that, in part, read:

We have just learned from our contacts in Washington that the HELP committee [U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions] has postponed other scheduled business and will conduct a hearing on the [Craig] Becker [National Labor Relations Board] nomination next Tuesday at 4 p.m.

– Martin F. Payson

Talk about embarrassing.  The unionized workers of the Teamsters’ Washington-based national staff are locked in a contract dispute with their own national organization and are threatening to strike against Boss Hoffa and company.

Incredibly, Hoffa is preparing to make contingency plans to operate in case of a strike. Do you think he will cross his own picket line? What happens if Boss Hoffa wants to meet with President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden?  What if federal officials are scheduled to meet with Teamsters officials?  This could get very confusing for the administration and the Teamsters…  Stay tuned.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul is a champion of workers’ rights. He is an ardent supporter of the right to choose whether to join a union. And he opposes any and all attempts to push Big Labor’s coercive agenda.

Paul was the first Presidential candidate to be condemned by the AFL-CIO.

His crime?

He appeared on the ABC-TV show “The View” — crossing the writers’ picket line to be interviewed by the hosts of the show.

Funny, we didn’t hear the bosses condemning Whoopie Goldberg and the other hosts for interviewing Paul.

The Northwest Indiana Times reports that “[n]onunion workers at the Hilton Garden Inn construction site . . .” in Hobart, Indiana, “. . . were victims of an attack that went well beyond a union-based picket line.”

Project Superintendent Kim Lackey was cited in the report:

“We were verbally harassed and property was damaged,” she said. “These people acted like a mob of crazy lunatics.”

Lackey said that Friday, the day of the union pickets, workers at the site found evidence of vandalism, including 14 slashed vehicle tires, a cut phone line to the trailer and epoxy glue in the locks on the gate and the framer’s trailer.

Lackey and other workers said the union representatives spewed both racially and sexually biased slurs at them, including targeting Hispanics, blacks and women.

“They were totally out of line,” she said.

Indeed!

As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friederich A. von Hayek wrote, “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise . . . is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.”

Walter Williams, a respected economist and syndicated columnist, has been more blunt.

“The union struggle is not against employers,” Mr. Williams wrote. “It is against workers. One way you see this is to ask: Who gets beat up or killed during a strike? It’s not the owners or management; it’s workers who’ve disagreed with the union and wish to work.”

The coercive powers union officials wield courtesy of federal labor law not only rob individual employees of fundamental freedoms, but exert a damaging and corrupting influence on work places, the economy, and other aspect of everyday American life.

Picketing isn’t what it used to be. National Public Radio [NPR] notes that the 30 people picketing in front of a bank in Washington, DC are not from the Carpenters Union, but, are homeless people being paid $8 an hour. Isn’t that a type of outsourcing top union officials at the AFL-CIO rail against?