March 21, 2023 // “Capitol Hill staffers’ unionization attempts are not about worker’s rights but building political power and political capital,” said Brigette Herbst, AFFT organizing director, “Unions today are a far cry from unions in the past because they care more about organizing ‘elite’ employees, such as university graduate students or Capitol Hill staffers, than taking care of blue-collar basic concerns. It’s just a new money grab from worker paychecks for union bosses to siphon to politicians.” “As with all public employees, when Capitol Hill staffers unionize, then they will directly negotiate collective bargaining agreements with the politicians that they work for and help elect,” she added, “how is this not a conflict-of-interest and a breach of public trust?”

March 21, 2023 // According to a January 2022 Freedom Foundation report, labor unions and related organizations procured some 223 loans totaling $36.1 million during the period between the passage of the CARES Act in March 2020, which created the PPP program, and the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, which modified it. Leading recipients included teachers’ unions, government employees’ unions, and AFL-CIO advocacy groups. As the Freedom Foundation asserted in its report: The ineligible loans diverted resources away from the purpose of the PPP, namely helping businesses keep employees on payroll. Further, given that union revenue derives primarily from dues deducted from members’ paychecks, direct support to unions was unnecessary; to the extent the PPP loans to businesses allowed union employees to keep working, it also allowed unions to continue collecting dues from their paychecks.

March 21, 2023 // Federal unions saw a roughly 20% increase in bargaining unit membership governmentwide, with close to 80,000 feds joining a union between September 2021 and September 2022, according to a March 17 update from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. The Biden administration credited the “significant results” to the work of the task force, a group that President Joe Biden created through an April 2021 executive order seeking to strengthen collective bargaining rights for federal employees. Following the initial executive order, the task force, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, laid out 70 recommendations to improve labor-management relations for the federal workforce. Similar to the first priority of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), the task force said it aims to position the federal government as a model employer, including through worker empowerment.

March 22, 2023 // The House is set to vote Thursday on overriding the veto, which requires a two-thirds vote, or support from 290 members. That outcome is unlikely after the resolution of disapproval first passed the House 216-204 last month. The Labor Department regulation was finalized last year and sought to strike a compromise between financial services companies that wanted clear rules and plan sponsors that did not want to be required to consider environmental, social and governance factors. It reversed a Trump administration policy that made changes to how a 1974 law, known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, is implemented.

March 22, 2023 // Unionized Starbucks Corp. baristas plan to welcome their new chief executive officer with strikes at about 100 cafes Wednesday, demanding that the company drop its alleged anti-union coercion. Striking baristas from Oregon and Washington state plan to converge for a midday protest outside Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. The work stoppage, which organizers said will involve stores in more than 40 US cities, is the union Starbucks Workers United’s latest effort to force a pivot by the coffee giant.

March 23, 2023 // “At a time when government unions are losing membership due to partisan political spending, government union executives have really decided to double down on the partisan political spending,” CF policy analyst Andrew Holman told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “The recent data shows this. They’re using millions of dollars collected with taxpayer resources to fund these political-advocacy activities and I think that, really, members of government unions need to be aware of where their money is going and what their unions are advocating for.” Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro is a prime example of a Pennsylvania pol enjoying overwhelming advantage in this political-spending category. Government unions bestowed over $5.5 million on his 2022 campaign while state Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) garnered a mere $1,000 from these associations while running against him. Public-sector labor money was only slightly less lopsided between the candidates for lieutenant governor: Democrat Austin Davis raised $77,000 from these groups while his GOP state House colleague Carrie Lewis Delrosso got only $1,550 from them.