Union Bosses And Senate Democrats Try to Stop Worker Pay Raises

Union Bosses And Senate Democrats Try to Stop Worker Pay Raises

Sen. Marco Rubio writes on the pages of National Review about the RAISE Act, legislation that would permit an employer to award individual employees with financial incentives beyond the pay or compensation level specified in a collective bargaining agreement (CBA): The basis of the American Dream is that one can work hard, play by the rules, and realize one’s potential. But big-government policies deny this freedom to millions of Americans. One of these policies can be fixed when the Senate votes on the RAISE Act later today. Under federal law, private-sector union contracts do not just set the minimum wage employers pay, they also set the maximum wage. Businesses may not pay more than the union rate without negotiating it. Unfortunately, unions often say “No” when employers propose rewarding productive workers. Unions prefer contracts that, to quote Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, “create uniform standards for all employees” — no matter how hard they work. Only about one in five union contracts permit performance pay.

NH Gov Lynch: Compulsory Fees Are Freedom!!!

NH Gov Lynch: Compulsory Fees Are Freedom!!!

New Hampshire Governor Lynch claims that it is okay to force someone who is not party to a contract to be obligated under the private contract. For Example: Let’s say Paul is hired by Peter to work. Brutus sees Paul earning money and wants a share. Brutus meets with Peter. Peter and Brutus make a private contract of the kind Gov. Lynch endorses. Peter agrees to pay Brutus a cut from Paul’s paycheck before he pays Paul.  The agreement cost Peter no more money, it gave Brutus some of Paul's money and Paul gets less money for the same work, an amount exclusivley agreed upon by Peter and Brutus.  Gov. Lynch endorses the idea that Peter and Brutus can force Paul to pay Brutus against his will or lose his job. This is what Governor Lynch wants to defend as freedom, compelling a third party (any employee) to be part of a private contract? From National Review’s Brian Bolduc article, Work Free or Die: New Hampshire is “an island of common sense” in blizzard-blue New England, state representative D. J. Bettencourt tells National Review Online. As the Republican majority leader in the state house of representatives, Bettencourt, along with Speaker William O’Brien, hopes to fortify this bastion of liberty’s defenses by passing a right-to-work bill. Although H.B. 474 passed the Republican-controlled house by a hefty margin of 225 to 140, Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, promised to veto it. “We’re reaching out to members of the GOP caucus individually and making the case,” Bettencourt notes. He makes two points in the bill’s defense: One, “the individual-freedom component,” is that “people who don’t want to join a union shouldn’t be forced to do so.” Two, New England is awash in government, and a right-to-work law would further distinguish New Hampshire from its left-leaning neighbors Vermont and Massachusetts. “To be a right-to-work state carries the potential to be a magnet for small businesses,” Bettencourt argues. Governor Lynch retorts that the bill smacks of bureaucratic meddling in business decisions. “The governor has maintained for some time now [that] so-called right-to-work legislation has state government dictating to private businesses and their employees what should be included in a contract,” Lynch’s press secretary, Colin Manning, has said. Technically, the bill is written in such a way that it forbids private contracts from including provisions to mandate that employees join unions. [Is freedom from compulsion or mandates a bad thing?] But Speaker O’Brien is having none of it.

Government by Decree for Big Labor

The Obama Adminstration's penchant for issuing executive orders and decrees that benefit their political allies is creating a backlash. From National Review: The dispute can be traced back to the Railway Labor Act, a 1926 law that made it relatively difficult for railroad workers to unionize — the idea being that without serious limits on union power, labor organizations could hold the nation’s crucial transportation infrastructure hostage to unreasonable demands. The following decade, none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the law to cover America’s emerging airline sector as well. One limit the law puts on airline unions is that in order to unionize, they need consent from “the majority of any craft or class of employees.” Note that there’s a difference between the “majority . . . of employees” and the majority of employees who choose to vote in a union election. The way the law is written, if a “craft or class” — say, flight attendants or customer-service workers — has 100 members, and only 80 cast votes, the union still needs 51 votes, not 41, to win the right to represent the workers. This puts the onus on the unions to get the word out and increase turnout. The National Mediation Board — which has decided RLA disputes since 1934 — interpreted the law this way for its first 75 years. But then, Obama took office and changed the composition of the board to 2–1 Democrat. In 2010, with no deliberation by Congress whatsoever — but with urging from the unions — the NMB simply changed course, declaring that from now on, a majority of voting employees is all that’s needed to unionize a work group. The board made several smaller changes as well, all of which favored the unions. The unions immediately began exploiting this rule change. In the case of the Delta-Northwest merger, the unions already had filed election applications before the rule change, but withdrew them and then re-filed so that the elections could take place under the new rules.