INK: July 08, 2010

by | Jul 8, 2010 | Labor Relations Ink

inkquill22 Labor Relations INK In this issue:

  • EFCA Update
  • See No Evil, Hear No Evil…
  • Health Care Industry Takes Center Stage
  • SEIU Watch, Sticky Fingers and more…

EFCA Update A couple of judges weighed in on behalf of Big Labor the last couple of weeks. First, a federal Judge granted summary judgment in the ATA/Chamber of Commerce suit against the National Mediation Board to stop the proposed voting rule change, effectively allowing the NMB to reverse the voting rules for RLA elections away from they’ve been conducted for 75years. In Arizona, a state judge squashed that state’s attempt to mandate secret ballots in all union elections by blocking a proposition that would have allowed Arizona voters to add such an amendment to the Arizona constitution. The House of Representatives attempted a huge end run of state sovereignty by attaching a union-friendly bill to a piece of appropriations legislation. The egregious bill known as the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (PSEECA) would force states that don’t already do so to collectively bargain with firefighters, police, and other public safety employees. The bill’s constitutionality is questionable, and although it remains to be seen what the Senate will do with it, Sen. Harry Reid has introduced it a couple of times already. Enactment of such a law would only worsen the budget battles facing many states and municipalities, and decimate volunteer fire departments across the country. Finally, in another show of support to unions, Sen. Harkin offered hope that another run at passing the Employee Free Choice Act may be made during the upcoming lame duck session of Congress after the November elections. ********** See No Evil, Hear No Evil… The collaborative effort of the current administration and Big Labor to reduce scrutiny on labor mischief seems to be working! You may have noticed that our “Sticky Fingers” section at the end of each newsletter has been much shorter than in the past. According to the National Legal Policy Center (from whom we secure our information for that section), the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) hasn’t updated its website in over 3 months. The Solis DOL has relaxed reporting requirements – making fraud more difficult to detect – and shifted budget allocations away from monitoring labor corruption. ********* 12 Union Myths Exposed In our eleventh installment of The Cato Journal’s January 2010 “Are unions good for America?” issue, we cover the eleventh myth. Here is The Homeland Stupidity web site’s synopsis of this myth, and a link to each of the 12 Cato articles. Myth Number Eleven: Paying workers higher wages will reduce unemployment and stimulate the economy. Fact: The “high-wage doctrine” increases unemployment and drags down the economy. This doctrine originated with a 1921 report that Hoover commissioned while he was Secretary of Commerce dealing with what was, in retrospect, a minor recession. In addition to recommending higher wages, the report also said that government spending (now known as the stimulus package) can help the country recover from a recession. Neither is true, of course, and the report might have been completely forgotten had Hoover not become President. He put his disastrous ideas into practice, and the rest, as they say, is history. Worse, proponents of these theories, which John Maynard Keynes gleefully signed on to, are more concerned with theories than facts, according to Lowell E. Gallaway, economics professor at Ohio University. That’s just a polite way of saying they’re full of crap. Galloway writes:

“In the intellectual world, the high-wage doctrine continues to have its appeal. Prior to his appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, collaborating with Martin Parkinson, noted: “Maybe Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford were right. Higher real wages may have paid for themselves in the broader sense that their positive effect on aggregate demand compensated for their tendency to raise costs” (Bernanke and Parkinson 1989: 214). More recently, Paul Krugman reiterated this view in a New York Times oped (3 May 2009), arguing, “Many workers are accepting pay cuts in order to save jobs.” He then asks, “What’s wrong with that?” His answer refers to what he calls “one of those paradoxes that plague our economy right now . . . workers at any one company can help save their jobs by accepting lower wages, but when employers across the economy cut wages at the same time, the result is higher unemployment.” This is simply a reprise of Klein’s (1947) views. Never mind the existence of more than a century of empirical evidence to the contrary. Krugman’s concern is not with the empirical problem, but with the theoretical connection between wage rates and employment. The high-wage doctrine still lives. In all probability, this persistent adherence to an incorrect doctrine once again will prove to be detrimental to the U.S. economy, just as it was in the 1930s.”

Download the PDF here. Check out the Cato Journal and access all 12 PDFs here. ********** FREE 2009 NLRB Elections Report With the DOL bending over backwards to make it easier for unions to attack your company, now more than ever it pays to have solid intelligence about what unions are up to. LRI has created a new NLRB Elections Report that will provide a bird’s-eye view of union activity. Filled with colorful, easy-to-read charts and graphs, and broken out in a variety of ways, the information is easy to digest. We want to send you this free 22 page report for 2009 as a thank you for being an LRI INK subscriber. Head to this page to see more details, and to download your free report. https://lrionline.com/elections-report ********** Health Care Industry Taking Center Stage The 12,000 Minnesota nurses that staged a one-day strike several weeks ago threatened again to launch an open-ended strike, endangering patients across the state. The Minnesota Nurses Association (part of the new National Nurses United) settled the dispute, choosing to retain pension benefits in exchange for giving up their “rallying cry” issue of standardized staffing ratios. (Seems a bit self-serving, doesn’t it?) This recent lead story is just the tip of a growing iceberg. In recent weeks, • Nurses rejected a contract at Washington Hospital Center in D.C., and are preparing a strike vote. • Negotiations (and rhetoric) escalated between SEIU Local 49 and McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Springfield, OR. • Seven unions and the Red Cross squared off with a round of strikes and lock-outs across six states. • Watsonville Community Hospital nurses picketed during negotiations at their Silicon Valley hospital. • North Adams Regional Hospital in Massachusetts filed a grievance against the local chapter of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, alleging the union refuses “to bargain in good faith.” • With a recent sweep of 1900 nurses in 5 South & West Texas hospitals under their belt, unions are now gunning for Dallas area health care employees. “I think it’s only a matter of time before we see nursing unions in Dallas,” said Dan Rodriguez, vice president of labor relations for Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. If health care unions continue to do to health care what public employee unions have done to state and municipal governments, no amount of “health care reform” will stem the tide of reduction of quality and higher costs. ********** SEIU Watch:  Gunfight At The OK Corral In what will be the largest union representation election since the 1940s, health care 45,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente may soon enter the ballot box. If the NLRB agrees with the petition, these SEIU members will be offered the opportunity to switch to the NUHW. The election (barring further blocking charges) could occur sometime after August. The NUHW has done yeoman’s work to bring this election to reality, as it required a minimum of 13,500 signatures from 350 different work locations in one of the largest states in the country. By all accounts, their efforts far exceeded the minimum. The SEIU ethics track record received another ding when it was discovered that Patrick Gaspard, the former SEIU Local 1199 political director turned Obama political director, failed to disclose a $40,000 payout by SEIU on government disclosure forms. Copying another move from the playbook of revisionist historians, the SEIU funded a new coffee table book that “substitutes the ideal for the real, and reads like an extended SEIU press release,” according to labor insider Steve Early. In typical fashion, those commissioned to produce the book were/are SEIU insiders, who made out quite nicely on the project. In his review, Early wonders how much dues money was squandered on the glossy PR piece. ********** UFCW Loses Another One Although Berkeley is known as a union-friendly town, 200 former union members have left the fold, as employees at Berkeley Bowl booted the United Food and Commercial Workers. One of the employees of the gourmet grocery store said he voted to decertify the union because they didn’t get what they paid for with their $50 per month of dues. He cited one example under the union contract, with workers having to wait three years to get health and dental benefits. “Where my dad works, he got benefits after six months,” he said. “Why pay extra money for bad negotiations?” Good point! ********** Shoe On The Other Foot Apparently, a blinding flash of the obvious can strike labor officials who suddenly find themselves having to balance state or municipal budgets. Stephen Sweeney, president of the New Jersey State Senate and a top official in New Jersey’s ironworkers union, argued that the state can no longer afford the benefits won over the years by public sector unions. “At some point, you reach the limit of your ability to pay,” he said. Similarly, Oregon Governor Theodore R. Kulongoski is demanding wage concessions from the state employees, whose union he used to represent as its lawyer. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is demanding $100 million in union concessions (he’s a former teachers’ union organizer), and in New York, Governor David Paterson says that if public sector unions don’t agree to a pay freeze and to re-open contracts, large-scale layoffs are on the way (he is a union ally whose father is a top advisor to several unions). The unions are reacting with cries of “betrayal,” and are accusing their former allies of political posturing, which must be another way of saying fiscal responsibility. ********** Coming To A Construction Site Near You Setting: Construction site, daytime – surrounded by picketers and protestors. Action: Enter two construction trucks attempting to get to their work site. Finding the way blocked by an angry mob, they drive over and park in a mall parking lot to await the police. As they are sitting quietly in their trucks, a black SUV suddenly screeches to a halt in front of them. Out of the SUV pounce several baseball bat-wielding thugs, who commence to shatter the glass on the trucks and otherwise cause mayhem. As the workers exit their trucks to protect themselves, they too are assailed with baseball bats, sending one to the hospital. Sounds like the latest action thriller, but unfortunately, it is business as usual for union thugs in Upper Merion, PA. The victims were targeted simply because they wanted no part of a union. Even though over 9000 such incidents have been recorded since 1975, there have been convictions in only about 3% of the cases. ********** Sticky Fingers! Current charges or sentences of embezzling union officials: Stacey Spalding- IBT: $29,516 Daniel Hughes- NY Port Authority: $300,000 Bill Dugan- IUOE: Monthly Kickbacks David Come- IBEW: $2,850 http://www.nlpc.org/union-corruption-update ********** Labor Relations INK is published semi-weekly and is edited by Labor Relations Institute, Inc. Feel free to pass this newsletter on to anyone you think might enjoy it. New subscribers can sign up by visiting: https://lrionline.com/free-stuff/newsletter-signup/ If you use content from this newsletter please attribute it to Labor Relations Institute and include our website address: www.LRIonline.com Contributing editors for this issue: Phillip Wilson, Greg Kittinger, and Shaun Fanning You are receiving this email because you subscribed to receive our labor relations newsletters and updates. You can manage your email preferences by clicking the link at the bottom of any of our email communications.  

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