Right to Work Blog

The Arkansas News recognizes that the President’s nomination of Craig Becker is a “bad pick.”

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Then NYDOL Director of Strategic Enforcement and recently withdrawn Obama DOL Wage and Hour appointee, Lorelei Boylan referred to these Big Labor partners as NYDOL “community enforcers.”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

Radical Big Labor lawyer Craig Becker has been renominated to that National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by President Obama. 

The National Right to Work Committee has opposed Becker’s nomination from the start and other groups are joining the chorus.

The Committee’s Becker Alert highlights the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Founder Wade Rathke’s ringing endorsement of Obama’s Becker nomination. Rathke wrote, “Here’s a big win no matter how you shake and bake it: Craig Becker being nominated for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)!

Becker, an associate general counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO, will likely support measures to eliminate a workers right to a secret ballot through executive action.  

The New York Post is reporting that the New York Mets shelled out nearly $52 million for construction of their new baseball stadium to contractors with ties to the Mafia and labor corruption.  Of course, the work was part of a city-imposed “Project Labor Agreement” that forces contractors to submit to union-only monopoly bargaining agreements to get work.

The construction industry is mired in a slump with more layoffs coming thanks to the demands of the union bosses.

Brett McMahon notes in the Washington Examiner:

The newest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the construction industry’s unemployment rate rose to 19.4 percent in November, up from October’s 18.7 percent.

Job growth is desperately needed in the construction industry, like in many others, but government spending may only create jobs for the politically-well connected. President Obama’s staunchest political patrons, Big Labor, will soon benefit from an executive order signed earlier this year that encourages government-mandated project labor agreements (PLAs) on all federal construction projects over $25 million. The final regulations to implement Executive Order 13502 and these special interest giveaways are currently under review by the Federal Acquisition Regulatory (FAR) Council and this gift to Big Labor is expected to be delivered any day.

The reason why this order is a lump of coal in the stockings of taxpayers, nonunion employers and employees is simple: It favors Big Labor over the majority (86 percent) of the construction industry’s nonunion workers. See, the order discourages competition from nonunion contractors by requiring that the jobs be awarded only to contractors agreeing to recognize unions as representatives of their employees for the life of a construction project.

Less competition means higher prices and fewer jobs brought to you by the union bosses and their friends in the Obama Administration.

A new study conducted by George Mason University’s John M. Olin Institute exposes the existence of construction union slush funds that have expended more than $1 billion in union wages from 2000 to 2007 on a scheme known as “job targeting” aimed at bankrupting non-union businesses.

Union construction contractors — who are paid much higher wages and benefits than non-union workers and comprise fewer than 15% of the work force today — rely on the government-controlled “prevailing wage” diktats on public-sector projects for their bread and butter. Through these programs, organized labor officials collect fees from union members then funnel that money to union contractors — and in a few cases non-union contractors — to subsidize wages for the purpose of circumventing prevailing wage mandates and submitting a winning low bid. In many instances, these unfair business practices are used to target specific competitive, non-union businesses for extermination.

Despite heavy lifting by the Iowa Governor and House Speaker Pay Murphy, who used extraordinary efforts to pass a state “prevailing wage law,” Iowa union bosses suffered a legislative setback when the bill failed to pass the House by a 49-49 vote. Unfortunately, “Murphy told reporters, the bill’s defeat does not derail the bill permanently, nor does it mean Democrats will table three other labor-related bills that unions hope pass the legislature in 2009.” They include an attempt to repeal the 60-plus year old Right to Work Law that guarantees an individual’s right not to join or pay fees to a labor union as a condition of getting or keeping a job. More to come….

Massachusetts labor bosses are used to getting their way, especially from Gov. Deval Patrick. But labor activists are throwing up the red flag at Patrick’s proposed idea to use civilian flaggers on highway work projects instead of state troopers. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation that uses police officers instead of civilian flaggers at nearly all road and utility construction sites, giving union officers a way to make overtime pay. In fact, nearly five percent of the state highway construction budget went to pay state troopers.

Patrick’s draft regulations, which could go into effect as soon as October, would encourage the state to use less expensive civilian flaggers or electronic signs on roads with a 45 mph speed limit or less, and the AFL-CIO isn’t happy about it.

AFL-CIO spokesman Tim Sullivan, who blasted the plan as unsafe and questioned the cost savings, said the union would fight the regulations. “Who’s going to pay for these flagmen to be trained, who’s going to pick up their unemployment insurance? We just don’t think the cost savings are there,” Sullivan said.

This, of course, raises a more important issue in the eyes of David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute. Under Massachusetts Prevailing Wage Law, the state pays about $40 an hour to police officers who do flag work. Union activists note that the law would require civilians to be paid the same amount — thus create no savings to the taxpayers.

Tuerck correctly argues, “By making this argument, the unions have done us a service. If a law compels the state to spend the equivalent of $80,000 a year for someone to flag down oncoming traffic, then it’s time to rethink the law.”