Committee President to Trump: Don't Put Anti-Right to Work Congresswoman in Charge of Your Labor Department
The following letter was sent to President Trump by National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix on November 20th, 2024.
“[C]ompulsory unionism and corruption go hand in hand . . . .”
— U.S. Sen. John McClellan (D-Ark.)
Just three weeks after signing into law on March 11 a mammoth $1.9 trillion spending bill that, under the guise of COVID-19 “relief,” transfers hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-pressed federal taxpayers to mismanaged and underfunded private-sector Big Labor pension plans and union boss-dominated states and localities, President Joe Biden was at it again.
On March 31, Biden unveiled an additional $2.3 trillion in special-interest spending proposals, many of them geared towards benefiting powerful union officials who helped install him in office, dressed up this time as “infrastructure.” As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, just 5% of the spending proposed in this “infrastructure” package is actually designated for “traditional public works” like roads, highways and bridges.
The bait-and-switch tactics are the same in Biden’s COVID and “infrastructure” spending schemes, but the financing methods are different. The former amounts to $1.9 trillion in new debt spending. The latter features an estimated $3 trillion in tax hikes on businesses and individuals over the course of the next decade. As a share of GDP, that’s the biggest tax hike since Lyndon Johnson was President!
Half of the $3 trillion tax bonanza is projected to come from Biden’s proposed 33%-to-38% increase in the marginal tax rate and other assorted tax hikes for thousands and thousands of U.S.-based companies that sell basic items purchased by all kinds of Americans, including even food and medicine.
As competent economists of all stripes recognize, the burden of Biden’s $1.5 trillion in business tax increases will fall most of all on consumers of groceries, prescription drugs, and electricity, to take just a few examples. Employees and shareholders will also get hurt.
Rank-and-file union members and their families, along with countless other American households, will see their real incomes cut if taxes on businesses soar as the President intends. And higher business taxes will also mean fewer good employment opportunities.
But such problems for dues-paying workers are not the concern of powerful, D.C. Beltway-based union bosses like Sean McGarvey, president of the AFL-CIO-affiliated North American Building Trades Unions (NABTU) conglomerate.
As soon as Biden’s so-called “American Jobs Plan” was announced, McGarvey lauded it as a “bold vision that is broad in scope [and] robust in funding.”
McGarvey and other construction union chiefs love this scheme because the roughly $115 billion it would pour into public works projects over the next few years would, as a consequence of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act and other federal policies that put union-free hardhats at a gross disadvantage in competing for federally funded contracts, ultimately empower Big Labor to seize monopoly control over a much larger share of building trades jobs.
Of course, effectively limiting federal public works projects to politically connected unionized firms at the expense of the roughly 87% of American hardhats who have chosen to accept a job with an independent construction company is not a smart or efficient way to spend taxpayers’ money.
In fact, there is ample reason to expect Biden’s $115 billion infusion into transportation-related construction projects will actually fuel Big Labor corruption in the same way that embattled Big Labor New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has done in the Empire State.
Just last October, plumbers union boss James Cahill, then the president of the 200,000-member, NABTU-affiliated New York State Building and Construction Trades Council (NYSBCTC), and 10 of his lieutenants were indicted on charges related to their alleged receipt of bribes from contractors in return for bid-rigging.
As Kevin Barry, himself the director of a small construction union in Queens, explained in a commentary published a couple of weeks after the NYSBCTC union indictments, big public works spending, combined with Davis-Bacon and government-promoted union-only “project labor agreements,” makes unscrupulous men like Cahill into “the ultimate power brokers, controlling numerous jobs and commanding the loyalty of countless beneficiaries down the line.”
The so-called “COVID Relief and Response” Act is already law. Fortunately, concerned citizens still have time to stop the cynically mislabeled “American Jobs Act.” And Right to Work supporters across the country will be joining the battle against this scheme.
If you have questions about whether union officials are violating your rights, contact the Foundation for free help. You can also support our cause and help those suffering from Forced Unionism by donating.
The following letter was sent to President Trump by National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix on November 20th, 2024.
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