The boss of the largest union representing federal workers questioned the wisdom of President Obama’s policy to direct federal construction contracts to companies associated with big labor. John Gage, the head of the American Federation of Government Employees is concerned…
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) says senators are “still negotiating.” From The Hill: McCaskill said that while senators were still negotiating the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a controversial bill to reform union organizing rules, it was unlikely to even…
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved a policy initiated by President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13502, encouraging federal agencies to discriminate against nonunion workers and employers by adopting so-called “project labor agreements” (PLAs) on all federal construction…
(Source: April 2010 Forced-Unionism Abuses Exposed) By declaring bankruptcy, an insolvent municipality may avoid paying its bondholders anything near what it owes them. It may even succeed in cutting public employees’ health benefits. But it will not succeed in doing one thing that the bankrupt city of Vallejo, California absolutely must do to get back on its feet: Rescind labor policies that encourage healthy municipal employees to retire when they are 50 or 55 with lavish pensions. That is what public-sector union bosses are now out to prove in the Golden State. Two years ago this spring, Vallejo, a seemingly prosperous San Francisco suburb of roughly 120,000 residents, voted to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. In 2008, Vallejo’s budget, like those of many other California municipalities, had been driven deep in the red by government union bosses. Union officials wielding monopoly-bargaining power handed to them by state law had driven up taxpayer costs for compensation of public-safety employees and retirees so high that they consumed 74% of Vallejo’s $80-million general budget. Public-safety employee wages, though surely generous, were not the reason municipal spending was out of control. The real culprits were overtime costs, driven by complicated and counterproductive Big Labor work rules, and pension costs, driven primarily by union boss-instigated retirements of employees still in the prime of their lives.
In the midst of a recession, while Americans are tightening their belts, big labor unions monopoly bargaining privileges are taking taxpayers for a ride. The Examiner examines the data: For decades, public sector unions have peddled the fantasy…
General Motors is owned in part by the United Auto Workers. In an effort to help spin the bankruptcy and bailout, the Obama Administration recently made an outrageous claim declaring that the company had "repaid" its $6.7 billion loan from the government. Malarky. Fox News reports that the repayment was made by dipping further into the bailout money pot: "The hype is not the reality," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a column on FoxNews.com over the weekend. "It is far from clear how GM and the Obama administration could honestly say, much less trumpet in prime time television ads, that GM repaid its TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) loans in any meaningful way." Grassley wrote a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner expressing his concerns and asking for more information about why the company was allowed to use bailout money to repay bailout money. The $6.7 billion is also just a fraction of the $52 billion General Motors received in government aid. Grassley said lawmakers are being told government losses on GM are expected to exceed $30 billion.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is taking on the government unions head on. George Will describes the financial situation in New Jersey as “the nation’s worst.” Christie has issued executive orders that have saved $2.2…
Andy Stern is living in a world of delusion. According to the soon-to-be retiring union boss and President Obama confidant, forced unionism “is the greatest middle-class, job-creating mechanism that we have ever had in America that doesn’t…
Monopoly-Bargaining Mandate Would Bust Budgets Across Nation (Source: April 2010 NRTWC Newsletter) Over the course of the past few decades, public servants, especially state and local government employees, have become Big Labor's bread and butter. By 2009, union officials wielded monopoly-bargaining power over 7.5 million state and local employees, nearly 43% of all such employees nationwide, compared to just 8% of private-sector workers. Moreover, for many years now, Big Labor featherbedding and counterproductive work rules have sharply increased real taxpayer costs for compensation of state and local government employees. In fact, from 1998 to 2008 alone, taxpayers' aggregate real costs for compensation of state and local government employees soared at a rate nearly 50% faster than the total real growth of private-sector employee compensation! And now, incredibly, the Big Labor Congress is poised to sock it to taxpayers again. This spring, the U.S. House and Senate are on the verge of rubber-stamping a new federal mandate ensuring that public-sector union bosses get monopoly-bargaining privileges over additional hundreds of thousands of state and local public-safety employees. Kildee-Gregg Would Pave Way For Dragooning All State, Local Employees Into Unions This federal mandate (H.R.413 and S.1611), respectively introduced in the House and Senate by Big Labor Congressman Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) and Big Labor-appeasing Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), goes by an innocent-sounding moniker, the "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act." But this label mocks the reality that the legislation would incite conflict between government agencies and employees and hurt taxpayers. H.R.413/S.1611 would institute a federal mandate foisting union "exclusive representation" (monopoly bargaining) on state and local police, firefighters, and other public-safety employees nationwide.