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union

Official: Wisconsin Gov. Signs Bill Stripping Unions of Collective Bargaining

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Today, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed the bill stripping unions of collective bargaining.

FoxNews/AP report:

The state Assembly passed the bill Thursday after the Senate approved it Wednesday without 14 AWOL Democrats. The vote in the Senate followed more than three weeks of dramatic protests that clogged the streets, hallways and meeting rooms of the Capitol.

Walker has notified public employee unions that he’s rescinding notices he sent last week that could have resulted in 1,500 layoffs. Walker said the layoffs would not be necessary since the bill, which includes $30 million in concessions from state employees, had passed.

Wisconsin Passes Anti-Union Bill

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After days of protests by both union and tea party members, Wisconsin voted to pass the bill limiting union rights after nearly three days of debating.

FoxNews reports:

The vote ended three straight days of punishing debate in the Assembly. But the political standoff over the bill — and the monumental protests at the state Capitol against it — appear far from over.

The Assembly’s vote sent the bill on to the Senate, but minority Democrats in that house have fled to Illinois to prevent a vote. No one knows when they will return from hiding. Republicans who control the chamber sent state troopers out looking for them at their homes on Thursday, but they turned up nothing.

“I applaud the Democrats in the Assembly for earnestly debating this bill and urge their counterparts in the state Senate to return to work and do the same,” Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, said in a statement issued moments after the vote.

The plan from Republican Gov. Scott Walker contains a number of provisions he says are designed to fill the state’s $137 million deficit and lay the groundwork for fixing a projected $3.6 billion shortfall in the upcoming 2011-13 budget.

The flashpoint is language that would require public workers to contribute more to their pensions and health insurance and strip them of their right to collectively bargain benefits and work conditions.

Democrats and unions see the measure as an attack on workers’ rights and an attempt to cripple union support for Democrats. Union leaders say they would make pension and health care concessions if they can keep their bargaining rights, but Walker has refused to compromise.

Public-Sector Unions Choke Taxpayers

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by John Stossel

“I thought unions were great — until at Chrysler, the union steward started screaming at me. Working at an unhurried pace, I’d exceeded ‘production’ for that job.”

That comment, left on my blog by a viewer who watched my Fox Business Network show about unions, matches my experience. No one ordered me to slow down, but union rules and union culture at ABC and CBS slowed the work. Sometimes a camera crew took five minutes just to get out of the car.

Now unions conspire with politicians to rip off taxpayers.

Steve Melanga of the Manhattan Institute complains that politicians get union political support by granting government workers generous pensions and health benefits. After those politicians leave office, taxpayers are liable for trillions in unfunded promises.

“It’s squeezing out all other spending,” Melanga says. “Where are we going to get this $3 trillion dollars? … When they’re (government workers) allowed to retire at 58 and the rest of us are retiring at 60 and 67 — and by the way we’re living to 80 — it’s crazy. The public sector is the version of the European welfare state which, by the way, in Europe, they’re actually rolling back.”

Continue reading . . .

Big Labor is Worst Enemy

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by Michelle Malkin

The Service Employees International Union plans to send 25,000 rank-and-file workers on 500 buses to Washington this weekend to protest the tea party movement, Republicans and Fox News. If SEIU members had any sense, they’d be demonstrating at their own bosses’ D.C. headquarters. It’s the Big Labor Left, not the Tea Party Right, that is flushing rank-and-file union workers’ hard-earned dues down the collective toilet in these hard times.

The co-organizer of the so-called “One Nation” protest by a coalition of progressive groups is George Gresham, president of the behemoth SEIU Local 1199 based in New York. (This is the same SEIU affiliate that employed current Obama domestic policy adviser Patrick Gaspard as chief lobbyist for nine years.) Peeved by all the attention that grassroots conservatives and limited government activists have received over the past year, Gresham spearheaded the rally plans earlier this summer to “counter the Tea Party narrative” and reclaim the voice for “working people.” Perhaps Gresham should pay more attention to his workers’ pensions than to tea party leaders’ media appearances.

Continue reading . . .

The Union Boondoggle

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by Michelle Malkin

President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” I’m calling it “The Mother of all Big Dig Boondoggles.” Like the infamous “Big Dig” highway spending project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure spending binge guarantees only two results: Taxpayers lose; unions win.

The plan would add at least $50 billion more to the nearly $230 billion already allocated in the original trillion-dollar stimulus law for infrastructure. Less than one-third of that infrastructure stimulus money has been spent, but the urgency to pile on has increased exponentially as the midterm elections approach and unemployment hovers near 10 percent. So, the president says he wants to “put people back to work” through a new “upfront investment” in surface transportation, airports and the air-traffic control system paid for by repealing tax incentives for the oil and gas industries — followed by massive, unpaid-for expenditures on pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail, “environmental sustainability” and “livability,” whatever that means.

Obama spoke emotionally at an AFL-CIO rally on Labor Day about unemployed construction workers. A “lot of those folks, they had lost their jobs in manufacturing and went into construction; now they’ve lost their jobs again,” he said. “It doesn’t do anybody any good when so many hardworking Americans have been idled for months, even years, at a time when there is so much of America that needs rebuilding.”

But here’s the rub: Not all workers are equal in Obama’s eyes. And most of them will remain “idled” by the Democrats’ own design. The key is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office, which essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for its employees.

Continue reading . . .

The Union Movement’s New Face

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A Heritage Foundation Report:

Unions have been a familiar part of American working life for more than 70 years. Less familiar is the state of the union movement today: More union members now work for the government than for private employers. The above-market salaries and benefits that government employees receive are paid for by taxpayers. So, the union movement that began as a campaign to improve working conditions and salaries for workers in the private sector, now pushes for ever-higher taxes to increase the generous compensation that government employees enjoy. Heritage Foundation labor policy expert James Sherk details the changes in the union movement, and explains how Congress can react to this new reality.

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