Recent polls indicate Americans are fed up with Big Labor’s schoolyard bully tactics and utilization of taxpayer money to support political candidates and liberal agendas. Additionally, Americans are tired of government deficits driven by public sector pay, overblown benefits, and restrictive work rules. Americans, including union rank and file members, are tired of Big Labor’s...
Union Bosses Win, Ohio Workers Get Fired By Jason Hart, December 6, 2011, Big Government One month ago Ohio voted with its heart against reforms portrayed as an attack on public workers. Ohio, DC, and New York union bosses spent more than $30 million drenching the airwaves in images of sad firefighters, sad police officers,...
The Union Zee Bridge: Cuomo wants to raid state pension funds for political purposes Editorial, November 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal Andrew Cuomo has a bridge to sell you, and we wish that was the set-up to a punch line. The New York Governor and government unions are hatching a plan to use the state’s...
Desperation is setting in at the White House and the white knight attempting to rescue Obama from himself is the NLRB, guided by a pair of Obama recess appointees Craig Becker and Mark Pierce (see National Labor Relations Board or NBLR – National Big Labor Resuscitation). Becker and Pierce are taking steps to achieve Big...
Labor unions try to have it both ways in San Jose pension crisis By Daniel Borenstein, November 20, 2011, Contra Costa Times Labor unions try to have it both ways. They fight statewide reform of public employee pension systems by insisting that change must be bargained at the local level. But, as we see in...
Does the Constitution Protect Public Employee Pensions? By George Skelton, November 14, 2011, Los Angeles Times In Philadelphia, 224 years ago, some men tucked these words into the nation’s new Constitution: “No state shall … pass any … law impairing the obligation of contracts…” Those words, squeezed into a very long sentence in Article 1,...
To say that the unions have undue influence in the California Legislature, as many critics allege, is to understate the problem. The unions – and the public sector ones in particular – don’t just control the Legislature. They are the Legislature. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, previously worked as an attorney for a...
This week’s defeat of Ohio Senate Bill 5 is just a preview of what can be expected during the 2012 elections as the Ohio Voters Rejected Public-Union Limits. Big labor, realizing that it had to protect its public unions, showed its solidarity, as it spent over $30 Million dollars, and filled the streets with foot soldiers...
California unions oppose even modest pension reforms Editorial, November 7, 2011, Wall Street Journal Philosopher-Governor Jerry Brown finally unveiled a pension reform plan in late October, and it looks like he based it on his self-coined canoe school of politics. According to the theory, paddling a little to the right and then a little to...
Gov. Brown’s pension fixes have to get past California’s employee unions Editorial, October 30, 2011, Orange County Register We applaud Gov. Jerry Brown for his 12-point pension reform, but not too loudly. It features many obviously long-overdue fixes to the state’s broken public workers’ retirement system. But why have these blatantly obvious remedies taken so...
The SEIU’s Persuasion of Power appears to be wearing thin even within its own membership. Over the last several months, SEIU members have been asking questions about SEIU policies with respect to use of membership dues for politics, excessive executive compensation, member intimidation, misleading propaganda and election irregularities. A recent article, NLRB Quickie Election Fact Check,...
President Obama and VP Biden Ignore Public Sector Hiring Boom By Steve Malanga, October 24, 2011, Public Sector Inc. The rhetoric has been heating up in Washington over additional stimulus for state and local government ever since the President’s latest jobs bill failed. The President suggested last week that parents were going to have to...
It is not often I side with economic professors. However, a proposal by Lanny Ebenstein to kill public union collective bargaining in California makes me stand up and salute. Please consider Benefit buster Lanny Ebenstein Lanny Ebenstein wants you to vote to kneecap the state’s public workers unions by banning their right to collective bargaining....
Government Unions and Public Sector Compensation By Josh Rauh, October 16, 2011, Kellogg School of Finance Last week I attended an engrossing two-day conference hosted by the Searle Center at Northwestern Law School on Government Unions in the United States. Scholars from economics, finance, law, and political science presented their research on an number of...