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.
Big Labor's Grip on Financial Reform

Big Labor's Grip on Financial Reform

  There isn't a bill coming out of the Senate nowadays that doesn't contain a special interest provision aimed at empowering the labor union bosses.  The financial reform legislation is no exception.  Tucked inside the bill -- which a handful of Republicans are considering supporting -- is a provision that would give labor activists unprecedented power.  BigGovernment.com takes a look at the provisions which includes: Under the American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S 3217), several provisions tucked away in the bill will give labor bosses unprecedented powers that, especially if abused, could threaten the very structure of our free market system.
Big Labor's Grip on Financial Reform

Big Labor's Grip on Financial Reform

  There isn't a bill coming out of the Senate nowadays that doesn't contain a special interest provision aimed at empowering the labor union bosses.  The financial reform legislation is no exception.  Tucked inside the bill -- which a handful of Republicans are considering supporting -- is a provision that would give labor activists unprecedented power.  BigGovernment.com takes a look at the provisions which includes: Under the American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S 3217), several provisions tucked away in the bill will give labor bosses unprecedented powers that, especially if abused, could threaten the very structure of our free market system.
Iowans Again Defeat Forced-Union-Fee Scheme

Iowans Again Defeat Forced-Union-Fee Scheme

But Hawkeye State's Popular Right to Work Law Still Under Fire (Source: May 2010 NRTWC Newsletter)  Over the past four years, union lobbyists in Des Moines employed every conceivable tactic to ram through the Hawkeye State Legislature legislation gutting Iowa's popular, six-decade-old Right to Work law. Again and again, union officials have threatened to recruit and bankroll primary challengers to run against Democratic legislators who refused to back forced union fees. This March, one union lobbyist is even alleged to have told a state lawmaker, "You could have $100,000 in your account to fight off any challenger," if he switched his position and voted for the forced-union-fee bill then pending in the Legislature. However, the National Right to Work Committee and its grass-roots ally, the Des Moines-based Iowans for Right to Work Committee, energized freedom-loving Iowans to fight back every step of the way. And this spring, the Big Labor politicians who run the Iowa House and Senate finally backed down and adjourned the 2010 session without ever bringing up for a vote H.F.2420, the Right to Work-gutting measure introduced in the 2009-10 Legislature. Union Bosses Remain Determined To Destroy Right to Work Law Not taking anything for granted, the National Right To Work Committee legislative department kept the heat on until the Iowa Legislature called it quits after an unusually short 2010 session on Tuesday, March 30. And the battle to save Iowa's Right to Work law is far from over even now.
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.