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.
GM and Union Boss Bailout Spin

GM and Union Boss Bailout Spin

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.
Right to Work Revving Up Survey 2010

Right to Work Revving Up Survey 2010

Pro-Forced Unionism Federal Candidates Will Have Nowhere to Hide (Source: April 2010 NRTWC Newsletter) Federal reports show that, in 2007 and 2008, Big Labor PACs directly contributed $73 million to federal candidates. And Big Labor-operated Section 527 groups spent an additional $57 million on an array of get-out-the-vote efforts for pro-forced unionism candidates. These two types of political spending officially acknowledged by union bosses add up to $130 million in the 2007-2008 campaign cycle. That's no mean sum. But Big Labor's officially acknowledged campaign expenditures represent only the tip of the iceberg of union electioneering, as union insiders like Jon Tasini, a former union official who now heads the New York-based Labor Research Association, have acknowledged again and again. In a February 20, 2005 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Tasini reported that several "union political experts" had admitted to him that "unions spend seven to 10 times what they give candidates and [campaign organizations] on internal political mobilization." "Following Jon Tasini's formula, in the 2007-2008 campaign cycle, Organized Labor spent between $900 million and $1.3 billion, mostly forced-dues money, on 'internal political mobilization,'" noted Matthew Leen, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee. Candidate Survey Is 'One of the Committee's Most Effective Tools' "Forced-dues money pays for political phone banks, propaganda mailings, and the salaries and benefits for tens of thousands of campaign 'volunteers,'" Mr. Leen continued. "And the Wall Street Journal reported last month that the AFL-CIO hierarchy 'plans to roll out its biggest political campaign ever' in 2010." To meet union bigwigs' challenge, the National Right to Work Committee has launched its federal candidate Survey 2010.