Top Union Boss Huffs and Puffs, But Cannot Blow the Facts Down

Top Union Boss Huffs and Puffs, But Cannot Blow the Facts Down

(Source: June 2010 Forced-Unionism Abuses Exposed) It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes or an Hercule Poirot to deduce that state policies promoting “exclusive” union bargaining and forced union dues and fees in the public sector have played a major role in driving multiple states to the verge of insolvency this year.  All it takes is the willingness to look at, and respect, the facts. In 2009, according to respected labor economists Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson, 41% of public employees nationwide were subject to a contract negotiated by their employer with a union monopoly-bargaining agent. However, in 22 states, none of which authorize forced union dues for government employees and most of which don’t authorize public-sector union monopoly bargaining, either, fewer than 30% of public servants were unionized.  Not one of these 22 low public-sector-unionization states was to be found on Business Insider’s list, published just last month, of the nine states “most likely to default.” 
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.
California Public-Sector Union Bosses Proving They Can Squeeze Blood From a Turnip

California Public-Sector Union Bosses Proving They Can Squeeze Blood From a Turnip

(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.