Big Labor Contracting

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the Obama big labor contracting kickback scheme to hand government contracts to unionized companies: There's almost a direct correlation these days between the Obama Administration's complaints about "special interests" and its own fealty to such interests. Consider its latest decree that federal contractors must be union shops. The federal rule, which went live yesterday, implements an executive order President Obama signed within weeks of taking office. It encourages federal agencies to require "project labor agreements" for all construction projects larger than $25 million. This means that only contractors that agree to union representation are eligible for work financed by the U.S. taxpayer. Only 15% of the nation's construction workers are unionized, so from now on the other 85% will have to forgo federal work for having exercised their right to not join a union. This is a raw display of political favoritism, and at the expense of an industry experiencing 27% unemployment. "This is nothing but a sop to the White House's big donors," says Brett McMahon, vice president at Miller & Long Concrete Construction, a nonunion contractor. "We've seen this so many times now, and how many times does it have the union label? Every time."
President Obama Hopes U.S. Taxpayers Forget The Past While He Condemns Them to Repeat It

President Obama Hopes U.S. Taxpayers Forget The Past While He Condemns Them to Repeat It

(Source:  May 2010 Forced-Unionism Abuses Exposed) Just last summer, the Obama Administration handed over $49.5 billion in federal taxpayers’ money to the Big Labor-controlled, money-hemorrhaging General Motors Corporation (GM). At the time, bankrupt GM was on the verge of being forced into liquidation. Its assets would then have been sold off. The White House pitched this costly taxpayer-funded bailout as a bid to save American jobs. In reality, GM’s reported U.S. employment has shrunk by nearly 25%, down to 68,500, just since last year’s bailout, and is almost certain to continue falling. More than 80% of U.S. automotive manufacturing jobs are now in union-free firms, and these firms, not bailed-out GM and Chrysler, surely represent the future of domestic auto manufacturing employment. Rather than workers, the single greatest beneficiary of the GM bailout was the United Autoworkers (UAW) union hierarchy. Along with sympathetic Obama agents, union officials were effectively left in charge of the company. Given that the wasteful work rules that UAW bosses, wielding government-granted monopoly-bargaining power over employees, insisted on for decades were largely what drove the company into bankruptcy, they certainly didn’t deserve kid-gloves treatment. Yet that’s what they got.