Right to Work Blog

The Politico’s Ben Smith exposes more attempts by Big Labor Bosses to use clout gained from forced unionism; union pension “trustees” are attacking the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation.  While ignoring pension fund trustees’ fiduciary responsibility requirements, Teamsters union’s health, welfare and pension fund trustees are trying to intimidate Wall Street against NRTW and away from any opposition to their card check forced unionism bill. 

Just by listing NRTW in their letter, the union is trying to create a scarlet letter-effect that will steer Wall Street away from the Foundation.    

To sum it up: Big Labor Bosses are using the public votes of congress to intimidate congressmen into taking away workers’ private ballots and now they are using the pension fund gains through forced unionism to intimidate Wall Street against opposing card check forced unionism; and yet, we are supposed to believe that card check will not lead to increased intimidation?

The labor movement is taking square aim at Wall Street with a new tool in its fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act: the hundreds of billions of dollars in pension funds it manages for union workers and retirees, some of it held by the same firms that are fighting the provision known as “card check.”

“Has your company made any public statements in support or opposition to EFCA?” asks one of nine pointed questions in a polite, detailed four-page questionnaire.

“If ‘Yes,’ please explain.”

The detailed questionnaire has three parts. The first asks about fund managers’ public positions, lobbying and political contributions. The second asks managers to “disclose any relationships during the past five years between your company and any organization(s) opposing the passage” of EFCA. The form lists [the National Right To Work Foundations specifically]. 

Another labor official said the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation, is set to ask its own pointed questions of money managers soon.

“In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out initiatives from shareholders, investment groups and businesses in support of the Employee Free Choice Act,” said AFL spokesman Eddie Vale, who declined to discuss targeting Wall Street.

Financial industry officials took a darker view of the survey. “The fact that union bosses would try and shake down financial institutions by asking that they disclose information” about the bill “is beyond outrageous,” said an aide to one trade organization, who – like other industry officials rattled by the letters – refused to speak on the record. He also called it “troubling that Big Labor would use their pension plans as the bargaining chip.”

An Ohio union activist has been caught forging documents to take money from worker’s wages to pay for union political activity.  The organizers forged 40 “PAC cards” to take $14 a month from employees.  Besides the obvious outrage, this incident certainly begs the question — would union organizers forge Card Check cards if the law went into effect?  

In a scathing editorial, the Columbus Dispatch dispatches arguments in favor of the forced-unionism scheme called the Card Check Scam:

The absurdly named Employee Free Choice Act is bad for business and bad for workers, who should look beyond labor leaders’ talking points to discern for themselves the risks of this misguided idea.

Opponents’ name for the bill, card-check, is more accurate because the proposal would allow unions to organize work sites by collecting signatures on cards instead of voting by secret ballot.

Labor say this is to prevent corporations from blocking unionization. The likelier outcome, if this bill becomes law, is that labor organizers more easily can strong-arm workers into unions.

The secret ballot is the cornerstone of democracy and always will be the fairest measure of the will of the majority.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with this Democratic gift to labor. The bill mandates that once a union is certified, management and labor have 120 days to reach a bargaining agreement. If they fail, the matter can go to binding arbitration. Compulsory arbitration is a potentially destructive government intrusion into an employer’s work-force decisions, with the potential to impose a contract incompatible with an employer’s business model. Employees could find themselves subject to contract terms that they had no opportunity to change or vote on.

Also, the measure imposes stiff penalties on companies for violations of federal labor rules during the unionization process. Small- and medium-sized companies, with staffs less familiar with the intricacies of labor law and less able to afford high-priced legal advice, are more likely than major corporations to find themselves penalized heavily.

The bill is aimed at reversing a trend of fewer Americans belonging to unions. But many nonunionized employers pay competitively, so workers see little need for a union and don’t want to their take-home pay reduced by union dues. Plus, employees know that in today’s world market, unionized businesses have a tougher time competing with foreign companies. The U.S. automotive industry’s troubles demonstrate how union-negotiated wages and benefits can burden a company. Also, many worker protections that once were bargained for by unions now are enshrined in law and apply to all workers, unionized or not.

The Democratic-controlled House is expected to approve the measure, but Senate Democrats need at least one Republican to reach 60 votes, the number needed to overcome an expected GOP filibuster this summer. Democrats weren’t surprised by Ohio GOP Sen. George V. Voinovich’s comments on Tuesday against the bill, but they were surprised that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who sometimes votes with labor, also opposes the measure.

If Senate Republicans hold firm, they’ll do President Barack Obama a favor, although he is unlikely to admit that publicly.

Obama’s economic advisers are struggling to find ways to rev up the economy; the last thing they need is a federal law making workplaces easier to unionize and reducing those businesses’ ability to compete in a global marketplace.

The Advertiser-Tribune of Ohio doesn’t like Big Labor’s effort to eliminate the secret ballot election for workers. In a policy editorial entitled “Preserve Freedom of Secret Ballots,” the paper joins other editorial boards in protesting efforts to enact the Card Check Scam Bill.

If you voted in the Nov. 4 election, you did so privately and secretly. Candidates and their supporters had to stop attempting to win your vote when you stepped within a certain distance of the polling place. That’s the law.

For more than two centuries, Americans have believed that important decisions involving politics ought to be made by secret ballot. It is one of our most cherished, important traditions.

For decades, federal law involving labor unions has abided by that tradition. But big unions want to change that. They want to know how workers vote when asked whether they want to be represented by a union. There can be just one reason for that – to use the power of intimidation to pressure workers to support unions.

Current law requires if a union attempts to organize workers at a particular company, it must ask them to sign cards authorizing a referendum on the issue. The process of collecting signatures on authorization cards is done in public, with no guarantee of privacy for the worker.

If 30 percent of workers at a company sign the cards, the matter is put to a vote. Employees use secret ballots in referendums handled by the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB counts votes and, if more than 50 percent of workers ask for a union, one is certified.

Too often for the liking of union leaders, the card-signing process goes well but the secret ballot vote does not. That is because, of course, some who sign cards are afraid not to do so. They may simply bow to peer pressure at the time a card is presented to them – and, of course, it always is presented by staunch supporters of unionization. Once they are given ballots with which they can vote secretly, some of those who were intimidated into signing cards vote “no,” defeating the union.

Labor union leaders want to change that – and they have allies among the many members of Congress to whom they have doled out tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations.

The chosen vehicle for change is a bill referred to dishonestly as the “Employee Free Choice Act.” Far from guaranteeing free choice, it would, if enacted, ensure just the opposite. It stipulates that a union must be certified if more than 50 percent of its workers sign authorization cards. The secret ballot process is eliminated.

Already approved by the House of Representatives, the bill has been blocked in the Senate. But unions hope to revive it this year, using the clout they have obtained by supporting many candidates for the Senate.

Make no mistake about it: If the bill is enacted, it will be the end of free choice about whether workers want to join unions. That is why organized labor wants the bill so badly. That is why unions are exerting so much pressure on Congress. That is why, according to some union leaders, it is the unions’ top priority.

If the bill is approved in the Senate, it will mean the end of an important freedom – that of using the secret ballot on an issue of major importance to working men and women.

We urge Sens. Sherrod Brown and George Voinovich to oppose the bill. To do otherwise would serve the interests of big labor union bosses – but not of working men and women.

Tom Ryan, a Democrat Congressman from Ohio, has a secret plan to help the ailing U.S. auto industry — enact the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill and unionize Honda and Toyota whose plants are located in Right to Work states. That would “level the playing field.”

Of course, leveling the playing field in this instance means forcing more workers into union collectives, which will result in more forced union dues, which results in more political activity, which results in more legislative privilege, which results in . . . you get the picture.

Unfortunately, Ryan is not a lone voice of unreason. Dale Kildee (D-MI) is drinking from the same kool-aid jug. Referring to the Card Check Scam Bill, Kildee said the first step toward helping the monopoly union controlled U.S. auto industry is to make everyone else share their pain.

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.

Spending a record $60 million on the presidential campaign alone, the big government union American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is putting 40,000 “volunteers” on the ground in Ohio to carry the state for Sen. Barack Obama and, as AFSCME union boss Gerald McEntee says to “increase worker-friendly majorities” in the House and Senate. “Worker friendly?”

Those “worker friendly” House and Senate members will eliminate workers’ right to a secret ballot election. Those “worker friendly” House and Senate members will coerce more workers into joining unions as never before. Those “worker friendly” House and Senate members will try to eliminate your Right to Work.

The only thing they are friendly to is the union bosses who put them in power.

Readers know the difficulty Michigan is having creating jobs and economic prosperity. But defenders of Big Labor like to deny that the regulations and costs the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other big unions have imposed on the state have anything to do with the state’s mired economic conditions. Albeit already difficult, it is getting harder to make such an argument.

Phil Gramm and Mike Solon writing in the Wall Street Journalnote:

The Competitiveness Index created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) identifies “16 policy variables that have a proven impact on the migration of capital — both investment capital and human capital — into and out of states.” Its analysis shows that “generally speaking, states that spend less, especially on income transfer programs, and states that tax less, particularly on productive activities such as working or investing, experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more.”

Ranking states by domestic migration, per-capita income growth and employment growth, ALEC found that from 1996 through 2006, Texas, Florida and Arizona were the three most successful states. Illinois, Ohio and Michigan were the three least successful.

The rewards for success were huge. Texas gained 1.7 million net new jobs, Florida gained 1.4 million and Arizona gained 600,000. While the U.S. average job growth percentage was 9.9%, Texas, Florida and Arizona had job growth of 18.5%, 21.4% and 28.9%, respectively.

. . .

There also appears to be a clear difference between union interests and the worker interests. Texas, Florida and Arizona are right-to-work states, while Michigan, Ohio and Illinois are not. Michigan, Ohio and Illinois impose significantly higher minimum wages than Texas, Florida and Arizona. Yet with all the proclaimed benefits of unionism and higher minimum wages, Texas, Florida and Arizona workers saw their real income grow more than twice as fast as workers in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Incredibly, the business climate in Michigan is now so unfavorable that it has overwhelmed the considerable comparative advantage in auto production that Michigan spent a century building up. No one should let Michigan politicians blame their problems solely on the decline of the U.S. auto industry. Yes, Michigan lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs during the past decade and a half, but more than 91,000 new auto manufacturing jobs sprung up in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas.

Gramm and Solon ask whether any of these facts play into the presidential debate and the positions the candidates have on issues like Right to Work?

So what do the state laboratories tell us about the potential success of the economic programs presented by Barack Obama and John McCain?

Mr. McCain will lower taxes. Mr. Obama will raise them, especially on small businesses. To understand why, you need to know something about the “infamous” top 1% of income tax filers: In order to avoid high corporate tax rates and the double taxation of dividends, small business owners have increasingly filed as individuals rather than corporations. When Democrats talk about soaking the rich, it isn’t the Rockefellers they’re talking about; it’s the companies where most Americans work. Three out of four individual income tax filers in the top 1% are, in fact, small businesses.

In the name of taxing the rich, Mr. Obama would raise the marginal tax rates to over 50% on millions of small businesses that provide 75% of all new jobs in America. Investors and corporations will also pay higher taxes under the Obama program, but, as the Michigan-Ohio-Illinois experience painfully demonstrates, workers ultimately pay for higher taxes in lower wages and fewer jobs.

Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit, as part of a credible and internally consistent program to balance the budget by the end of his first term. Mr. Obama’s program offers no hope, or even a promise, of ever achieving a balanced budget.

Mr. Obama would stimulate the economy by increasing federal spending. Mr. McCain would stimulate the economy by cutting the corporate tax rate. Mr. Obama would expand unionism by denying workers the right to a secret ballot on the decision to form a union, and would dramatically increase the minimum wage. Mr. Obama would also expand the role of government in the economy, and stop reforms in areas like tort abuse.

The states have already tested the McCain and Obama programs, and the results are clear. We now face a national choice to determine if everything that has failed the families of Michigan, Ohio and Illinois will be imposed on a grander scale across the nation. In an appropriate twist of fate, Michigan and Ohio, the two states that have suffered the most from the policies that Mr. Obama proposes, have it within their power not only to reverse their own misfortunes but to spare the nation from a similar fate.

Financial Week takes an insightful look at Big Labor’s big hope and big bet — the effort to end the secret ballot election — despite underestimating the amount they will spend to buy enactment of their scheme:

The labor movement’s big-money campaign for Sen. Barack Obama faces stiff challenges in getting rank-and-file union members to overcome their concerns about the candidate, according to labor specialists and polls.

“There’s been a cultural and political divide between union members and Democratic candidates who may not care as much about trade and some other issues as they do,” said Bruce Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. “That makes it hard for union leaders to deliver the vote.”

This clearly worries union leaders, who see the November election as pivotal in getting key legislation passed. At the top of the list: the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would allow workers to organize via card checks rather than the usual secret ballots. Mr. Obama endorsed the legislation, which passed the House before stalling in the Senate. Sen. John McCain opposed it. Last week, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue said his group would lobby against the bill.

“All of labor’s eggs are placed in this legislation’s basket,” said Mike Asensio, a management labor lawyer for Baker Hostetler in Columbus, Ohio. “If they don’t get the bill passed, it raises a specter about their future.”

Given the stakes, it’s hardly surprising that organized labor is splashing massive amounts of cash on the election. The AFL-CIO and its 56 member unions plan to spend a whopping $300 million to support Democrats in the presidential and congressional campaigns this fall and produce about 250,000 volunteers. The breakaway Service Employees International Union plans to pitch in another $85 million.

To put that in perspective, the Democratic Party as a whole had raised $416 million through July.

The campaign at the AFL-CIO is typical of labor’s big-money strategy. The union will target 3 million undecided members, voting family members and retirees in 24 battleground states, the group’s political director, Karen Ackerman, said. That target group consists of about a quarter of all union members.

The umbrella labor organization’s highest priorities will be voters in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania—swing states with large numbers of union members. It plans to spend as much as $18 million to reach undecided union voters and others in those three states with TV ads, flyers, phone calls, e-mails, mailings and one-on-one visits.

“Union members vote at a higher rate than the rest of the population,” said David Karol, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “Many are basically Democratic who will end up coming around.”

Maybe. But the largest block of undecided U.S. voters consists of older white, blue-collar, church-going men and women, according to a recent bipartisan poll of 1,000 registered voters conducted by Lake Research Partners and the Tarrance Group.

Blue-collar workers in Macomb County, Mich., a Detroit suburb, favor Mr. McCain over Mr. Obama by a 51%-42% margin, according to a survey by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg that was released Aug. 25.

The Michigan workers, many of whom voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, harbor doubts about Mr. Obama’s experience, values and patriotism, with lesser concerns about his race, the poll found. “Many folks have never voted for an African-American,” Ms. Ackerman granted. “It’s complicated by unfamiliarity, inexperience and rumors. Our job is to make sure people know who Barack Obama is and what he stands for.”

But earlier labor-funded ads seem to focus on what John McCain supposedly stands for. One flier about Mr. McCain’s proposal to privatize Social Security said: “McCain’s worth over $100 million…. He owns 10 houses…. He flies around on a $12.6 million corporate jet…. He walks around in $520 loafers…. If John McCain lost his Social Security, he’d get by just fine. Would you?”

An online video showcases Mr. McCain’s houses and condominiums in Arizona, California and Virginia while also needling the Arizona senator about his calfskin loafers made by Salvatore Ferragamo. The video, distributed by the AFL-CIO and SEIU, then focuses on a person whose house was lost to foreclosure.

“Labor’s money provides them with the potential to make a significant impact in publicizing who Obama is, and it doesn’t really matter that it’s coming from the unions,” said Alan Gitelson, a political science professor at Loyola University of Chicago. “Political advertisements have an impact if they are repetitive.”

With the rolls of organized labor down nearly a quarter since 1979, union leaders will no doubt continue to hammer away.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation issued a news release announcing parallel federal lawsuits concerning illegal forced dues:

With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, three UPS employees in Kentucky and two UPS employees in Ohio filed federal lawsuits Friday and Monday, respectively, against national and local Teamsters officials for illegal extraction of forced union dues.

In the lawsuits, the nonmember employees claim that the national and local unions breached their duty of fair representation and violated the employees’ First and Fifth Amendment rights by charging and collecting fees used for organizing nonunion workers throughout the United States and financing a members-only “Strike and Defense Fund.” . . .