Posts tagged big labor
Big Labor’s Quid Pro Quo Political Convention
July 8, 2024 // During the convention’s opening remarks, CT AFL-CIO Executive Secretary Tiano Ocasio revealed as much, saying, “Our endorsement means more than other endorsement,” adding, “It means more because we put boots on the ground and work hard to ensure our endorsed candidates are elected.” She vowed to hold candidates “accountable for their shortcomings and applaud them for the times they stood with us in our fight for justice.” Strangely, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Shellye Davis has yet to receive an endorsement, even though she is running for State Senate in the 2nd District.
Opinion: Trump, Republicans Must Resist Dem-Funding Union Leadership’s Attempt To Con Them
July 3, 2024 // A new report from the Center for Union Facts, first reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation, shows that the Teamsters spent $9 million on politics between 2019 and 2022. Of that, a staggering 99% funded Democrat-aligned groups and anti-Trump media outlets. More than $2.6 million in Teamsters political donations went toward registered Democrats and Democratic campaign arms. The Teamsters also funded anti-Trump activist groups that plan to bury a second Trump presidency in litigation. Given that nearly all of the Teamsters political spending went to Democrats and far-left causes, it would be reasonable to assume that rank-and-file union members uniformly vote Democrat. That is not the case: In 2020, 40% of households with a union member voted for Trump.
MEMBERSHIP IN SEIU 1000, CALIFORNIA’S LARGEST STATE EMPLOYEES UNION, FALLS BELOW 50 PERCENT
June 20, 2024 // In May 2018, the month before Janus was decided, 96,229 state employees worked under SEIU 1000 contracts, effectively all of whom had union dues or fees deducted from their paychecks by the state. The next month, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the number of represented employees with union payroll deductions had dropped to 58,953 — a membership rate of 61.4 percent — reflecting the loss of fee payments from nonmembers rendered unconstitutional by Janus.
Has Pushback to Full of ‘S’ Labor Unions Finally Arrived?
June 10, 2024 // Written by I4AW’s Sam Adolphsen and F. Vincent Vernuccio, the study warns that the initial “Environmental” focus of ESG is being supplanted by labor leaders, who are focusing on the leftist acronym’s “social” component in order to intimidate companies and force membership growth: With help from the whole of Biden’s big government, Big Labor is replicating the ESG strategies used by environmentalists and other activists. These groups aim to cajole fossil fuel-producing companies and other businesses they consider socially unacceptable into abandoning profitable business ventures. The tactics of the Big Labor plan call for hijacking the shareholder resolution process through proxy voting and shareholder activism to force pro-union policies. Unlike typical shareholder proposals, those supported by Big Labor do not seek to advance shareholder value. Instead, they seek to increase union membership and strengthen Big Labor’s power.
The Biden administration wants free speech for Big Labor, not businesses
May 9, 2024 // What’s more offensive — and, for that matter, illegal? An employee calling a coworker a “gutter b****” and a “queen of the slums”? Or a CEO saying that bringing in a labor union will make the workplace “much slower” and “more bureaucratic”? The answer is clearly the employee who racially and sexually demeaned his coworker. Yet in President Joe Biden’s administration, the CEO is the one getting punished. On May 1, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated federal labor law when he said that unionization comes with downsides.
Parity in Labor Transparency
April 24, 2024 // The institutional left has sought to reward Big Labor by making union organizing campaigns shorter, or bypassing them with “card check.” Big Labor knows that the dynamics of union organizing rely on labor unions being able to make their pitches to workers from trusted positions without skeptical responses from other workers or employer representatives. And they only need to win the vote once to start collecting dues and engaging in compulsory bargaining. As long as government-recognized and government-empowered compulsory union bargaining exists, the government require workers be given all the information before deciding whether to form a union and bargain collectively. The SALT Act would accomplish this needed reform.
How Big Government and Big Labor Colluded to Get VW to Unionize
April 24, 2024 // Failure to meet government sales mandates will be met with massive fines that increase by leaps and bounds after 2026. California, the nation’s biggest auto market, will, for example, require that 35 percent of automaker sales be of battery-powered vehicles by 2026. Failure to meet that number will cost them $20,000 per vehicle for every vehicle below the threshold. The percentage jumps to 43 percent in 2027, 51 percent in 2028, 59 percent in 2029, and 68 percent in 2030 on the way to outlawing the sales of gasoline cars in 2035. Federal penalties are similarly harsh. Tesla aside (as an EV-only seller, it is not only exempt from penalties, but also receives generous subsidies), just 5 percent of sales today are electric, with 50 percent of EV buyers returning to a gas car when they go back to market.
Opinion: Why union-free workers shouldn’t believe UAW bosses
April 16, 2024 // Even as laid off unionized autoworkers are expressing their dismay about the UAW brass, Fain and his minions are pouring, by their own account, $40 million in dues money extracted from workers like Woods and Roberson into campaigns to secure monopoly bargaining privileges over currently union-free autoworkers employed in right to work states. Fain’s message to production employees at facilities like the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is that they will get “higher pay, more paid time off and more generous health benefits” if they help UAW officials seize power to “negotiate” how they are compensated and managed. Given the miserable track record of making good on his word, Fain has already established during his still-short tenure as UAW president that there is no good reason Chattanooga or other currently union-free autoworkers ought to believe him.
Commentary: Biden fosters Big Labor cronyism
March 25, 2024 // It is bad enough that union dues go to political activity that workers may or may not agree with. It is worse that some union bosses are stealing money from the workers that they claim to represent. Every dollar that a union boss steals is one dollar less that a worker can put toward sending their children to school, putting food on the table, or building a nest egg. The Biden administration enables union corruption because union dues overwhelmingly go toward electing Democrats. Biden’s refusal to pull union bosses away from the trough directly harms workers. Unlike Biden, House Republicans are leading the charge to stamp out union fraud and corruption.
Biden’s war on work undermines the American dream
February 6, 2024 // Biden’s Labor Department rule pursues the same goals as AB 5 and would put the monthly incomes of tens of millions of people — disproportionately women (especially mothers) and minorities — at risk.