Posts tagged unconstitutional
This Week’s Teachers Union Report Card: NEA-Alaska Sues to Kill Correspondence Study Program
May 7, 2024 // Anchorage Superior Court judge Adolf Zeman ruled in April that the state-funded correspondence programs used by over 22,000 students are unconstitutional. Unless the Alaska legislature drafts a new correspondence study program law, students will lose access to the popular educational option. The union is celebrating shutting down opportunities for thousands of students. Union president Tom Klaameyer described the lawsuit’s outcome as “a big win.” When filing the complaint last year, the NEA-Alaska leader declared, “We want to make sure all of the public money that is rightfully allocated to the public school system stays within the public school system.”
Opinion: Major US corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’
March 11, 2024 // Roger King, a longtime management-side lawyer who is senior labor counsel for the HR Policy Association, said “it will be a lose-lose” if the federal courts overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act, which has governed labor relations since Franklin Roosevelt was president. “We’ll have the law of the jungle, the law of the streets,” King said. “It will be who has the most power. It’s potential for chaos.”
Amazon becomes latest company to argue US labor board is unconstitutional
February 20, 2024 // Amazon has become the latest company to argue that the structure of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) violates the U.S. Constitution, following the lead of SpaceX and Trader Joe’s. The e-commerce giant claimed in a recent filing that the labor board’s case, which accuses the company of illegally retaliating against unionizing workers, should be dismissed because the board itself is unconstitutional. Amazon argued that the NLRB’s structure “violates the separation of powers” because administrative law judges and board members are largely insulated from presidential oversight and removal, “impeding the executive power” provided in Article II of the Constitution.
Texas Starbucks Employee Challenges Federal Labor Board Structure as Unconstitutional in New Federal Lawsuit
January 24, 2024 // Busler submitted his union decertification petition on November 16, 2023. The petition contained signatures from enough of his coworkers to trigger a vote to remove the union under NLRB rules. However, the NLRB Regional Director still blocked the vote based on unfair labor practice charges SBWU union officials filed against Starbucks, despite there being no proven connection between those allegations and Busler’s decertification petition. The NLRB’s refusal to hold a union decertification vote means that Busler and his coworkers are still trapped under the “representation” of the SBWU union, despite numerous reports of SBWU agents’ combative and abrasive behavior at the store. In other filings in the NLRB case, Busler and his colleagues reported that SBWU officials ordered a divisive strike in which “[union] supporters outside the store were loud, boisterous, and were screaming at customers” and “would sometimes yell at other employees or tell partners that if they did not support Workers United they would be personally ostracized by other partners.” “Moreover, I believe the other employees who signed my decertification petition did not do so because they were coerced or duped by anything Starbucks allegedly did wrong, but because the Union was a divisive force in our store and has now ignored our location for several months,” Busler stated in an NLRB filing.
SpaceX Claims National Labor Board Is Unconstitutional In New Suit
January 8, 2024 // SpaceX is responding with a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas Brownsville Division, arguing that the NLRB, which has its own judges that oversee complaints by NLRB prosecutors, is an “unconstitutionally structured agency” without oversight, and that the complaint against it should be put on hold.
Janus had a large impact on union membership, five years later
November 22, 2023 //
FREEDOM FOUNDATION DEMAND LETTER FREES ANOTHER CALIFORNIA PUBLIC EMPLOYEE
November 15, 2023 // Mr. Purciel sent a letter to AFSCME Council 57 exercising his constitutional right to leave the union. The union ignored him. Mr. Purciel also contacted the payroll officer for the County of El Dorado and requested that they stop making deductions from his lawfully earned wages and providing his money to the union. The government payroll department told Mr. Purciel that they would not end the deductions without the direction of the union. This is an unfortunate consequence of the statutory scheme operating under California Government Code Section 1157.12, which forces public employees to direct requests that “cancel or change deductions for employee organizations to the employee organization, rather than to the public employer.”
Labor union challenges constitutionality of debt limit law
May 10, 2023 // The union’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, says the debt limit statute allows the president to cancel government spending that’s been approved by Congress, and that violates the separation of powers. The lawsuit states that the union does not seek to challenge the “controversial proposition” that Congress can limit the country’s debt. But it contends that “Congress may not do so without at least setting the order and priority of payments once that limit is reached, instead of leaving it to the President to do so.” “Nothing in the Constitution or any judicial decision interpreting the Constitution allows Congress to leave unchecked discretion to the President to exercise the spending power vested in the legislative branch by canceling, suspending, or refusing to carry out spending already approved by Congress,” the lawsuit states.
Know your Janus rights: Government employees still can’t be forced to pay unions in Michigan
March 31, 2023 // “Passing bills that are currently unconstitutional can mislead employees into believing that the law has changed and that they must now pay a union,” said Steve Delie, director of labor policy at Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “Public sector employees across the country have a First Amendment right to not pay a union thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision. Repealing right-to-work does nothing for public sector employees except cause confusion.”
Puerto Rico was ruined by public unions | Opinion
March 7, 2023 // He writes that public employee unions are, in fact, unconstitutional. “The operating machinery of American democracy is now in the grips of public unions. Voters elect officials who have been disempowered by union controls.” This, he writes, violates the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits elected officials delegating, giving away (in this case to unions) sovereign powers to govern. My short career as a “union leader” led me to the conclusion that the Puerto Rico government and the Puerto Rico economy have deteriorated so badly primarily because of the huge mistake of giving enormous power to public employee unions.