Posts tagged organized labor
Opinion: Big Labor Bullies
September 3, 2024 // For many unions, the corruption isn’t even in the past. The United Auto Workers today operates under the watch of a court-appointed monitor, who is currently investigating president Shawn Fain for financial misconduct and workplace retaliation. This summer, the IBEW Philadelphia local had its longtime president and business manager each sentenced to federal prison for bribery and embezzlement. This isn’t a case of a few bad apples ruining the bunch. Corruption is systemic to American unionism, and it has been for over 100 years. For a long time, these bullies had disproportionate economic and political power, and that rubbed many Americans the wrong way.
Walz will address union members in first solo campaign stop
August 13, 2024 // As Minnesota governor, Walz signed a variety of pro-worker laws supported by labor — most significantly paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave. He also supported laws that banned noncompete agreements, prohibited employers from holding mandatory meetings intended to persuade workers against unionizing, raised safety standards in warehouses and meatpacking plants, and expanded unemployment benefits to hourly school employees who do not work during the summer.
Unpacking Kamala Harris’ record on federal workforce issues
July 26, 2024 // As vice president, Harris led a White House task force that made recommendations for how agencies could reduce barriers for public and private sector workers to organize or join a union. In the year after agencies began implementing these recommendations, the number of federal employees who are dues paying members of a union increased by 20%. “We are fighting to protect the sacred right to organize. We are protecting the sacred right to organize because we know when unions are strong, America is strong,” Harris said at a Service Employees International Union convention in May.
Commentary: What Does a Likely Harris-Trump Matchup Mean for Labor?
July 25, 2024 // Those in organized labor who publicly support Harris see her as likely to advance Biden’s agenda. The Biden-Harris administration also tapped outspoken pro-worker former officials from California to lead the U.S. Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, tasked with protecting workers.
‘Betrayed’: Unions, White House irate over Teamsters president’s RNC speech
July 18, 2024 // President Biden secured a pension bailout that restored retirement accounts for about 350,000 Teamsters members, appointed staunchly pro-labor allies to the National Labor Relations Board and instituted labor requirements for federal contracts. The backlash against O’Brien’s speech reflects the high stakes of the 2024 presidential election for the nation’s labor movement, which fears Trump will undo these policies.
Thousands Of Virginia Public School Teachers And Staff Vote To Unionize
June 12, 2024 // The labor victory is the biggest for Virginia unions since Democratic lawmakers overturned a decadesold prohibition on public-sector bargaining.
Commentary: Anatomy of a political breakup: Why the Culinary Union unendorsed Democratic lawmakers
May 20, 2024 // The union’s canvassing efforts and transportation of workers to the polls also supported down-ballot victories for several vulnerable Democratic constitutional office candidates, aided the state’s three House Democrats in keeping their swing seats and helped Democrats expand their legislative majorities. Some 18 months after those 2022 victories, the relationship between some Democrats and the union, which represents more than 60,000 workers in Reno and Las Vegas, has soured. In March, the Culinary endorsed two candidates to run against incumbent Democratic lawmakers. And last week, the union unendorsed every sitting Democratic lawmaker who voted in favor of a 2023 resort industry-backed bill removing pandemic-imposed cleaning requirements from state law — drawing a bright-red line through 18 names on the union’s endorsement scorecard.
California legislators seek corruption law exemptions for unions, developers
May 7, 2024 // In California, the three largest donor types by sector are organized labor, including public sector unions representing state and local government employees, real estate, including developers seeking permits or regulatory changes, and healthcare, which includes healthcare providers and healthcare worker unions with lucrative government contracts. By exempting unions and most real estate, the new bill would allow unions representing government employees or workers with government contracts to donate to candidates who will support paying them more, and developers to more transparently donate to politicians who will approve their projects; while businesses and unions typically oppose each other on legislation, their shared interest in maintaining political access have created an unusual alliance.
Commentary: Biden pursues organized labor’s agenda through regulation
March 14, 2024 // The OSHA “walkaround” rule flies in the face of a regulation that stipulates that people who accompany an OSHA inspector must be employed by the company under inspection. Under the proposed rule, OSHA representatives would have to simply state that a union official was “reasonably necessary” to the inspection to bring that individual to the site. The walk-around rule presents an opportunity for union organizers to collect information or otherwise infiltrate nonunion workplaces, a clear attempt by OSHA to give unions a leg up in organizing drives. Another example is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s universal proxy rule, which forces companies to include management and dissident shareholder nominees on a single proxy card in contested elections. The rule enabled a coalition of our nation’s largest and most militant unions to extract new concessions from Starbucks by threatening to mount a hostile takeover attempt of the coffee company’s board. Unions will continue to exploit the universal proxy rule to bring other publicly traded companies to the table with threats of a hostile takeover.
Op-ed: The Price of Bent Unions Is Red Unions
March 2, 2024 // It’s important to point out that the lesson of this pattern isn’t that corrupt unions are somehow “better” than their ideologically fanatical alternative. Every political activist, no matter how wrong on policy, deserves to have money that he or she voluntarily contributes to advocacy groups be used for the purposes for which it was contributed, rather than lining the leaders’ pockets. (Inclination to this sin does not distinguish by party or ideology, it must be said.)