If you ever wondered why the unions have such overwhelming support for Barack Obama, take a look at what he is promising to do for them.
Jason Riley has the details. First there is the Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act which actually would remove all choice in whether a company will unionize.
- Mr. Obama is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would eliminate the secret ballot in union organizing elections. Unions would be certified to negotiate pay, benefits and work rules simply by collecting signed "union authorization cards" from a majority of employees at a work site. The law passed the House in 2007 but didn't come up for a Senate vote.
Under current law, union organizers and management both have the opportunity to present the pros and cons of forming a union. A secret employee vote is then held. Under Mr. Obama's proposal, unions would be the sole provider of information to the employee, and the worker's decision whether to organize would no longer be private.
Also under this Act, disputes between management and business which aren't settled in four months would go to a mandatory mediation. Labor would have all the incentives to delay negotiations and hope that a mediation would get them more of what they want.
The Democrat also wants to bar companies from replacing striking workers -- a right that management has held for some 70 years. Unions made a similar push in the early 1990s, and a bill passed the House but was blocked in the Senate. Mr. Clinton issued an executive order that would have ended the provision for federal contractors. It was struck down in federal court. Mr. Clinton then tried to get the NLRB to make it more difficult to replace striking workers. The courts overturned that too. Mr. Obama says he will "work to ban the provision," but hasn't provided specifics.
- Mr. Obama supports the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act and has said he'd push for its enactment as president. The bill, which passed the House last year and already has 60 votes in the Senate, would force state and local governments to recognize union leaders as the exclusive bargaining agent for police, firefighters and other first responders. More than half of the states would have to change their laws. Thousands of public safety officers would no longer be able to negotiate directly with their employers on their own behalf.
WIth a Democratic Congress including a big majority in the Senate, the strongest pro-labor provisions since the New Deal would be enacted. Labor unions have been losing members for a long time now, so the solution seems to be to pump money and get-out-the-vote efforts to Democratic candidates and then let government do what they can't seem to be able to get done on their own. And just look what the effect has been on the auto industry in Michigan. If you want the entire economy to resemble Michigan's, then go ahead and put Democrats in charge of the entire government and sit back and watch them repay the unions for all the help they have gotten to win elections.
5 comments:
That is one of the scariest things about Obama, and I have a plethora of things to choose from. Why stop with just unionizing shops? How about teachers? Should we make our political views public as well in the interest of fairness?
Sheesh
vegas art guy, you have no idea how much political crap is being taught in public schools already! I worked in several small districts, and can tell you first hand that most teachers are good, hardworking people who do their jobs and go home to their families. A few, though - usually the union officers and their immediate circle of friends - are hard core liberals who buy the Democrat/NEA line and find ways to interject it into their teaching. For example, I once evaluated a high school student who was upset because he was being tested on the "differences between US and Russian ICBM throw weights" by the union president. In addition to things like that, the textbooks teachers use are often written by leftist college profs, and local school boards who choose the texts have no idea they are biased.
In short, it's a real mess and most parents don't even know it.
And it will continue to get worse if Obama is elected....his liberal illuminati views on unions will continue to take over...
What Obama's good friend and "education expert", Bill Ayers, thinks about what public education should accomplish-
"The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC."
I supervise unionized employees. I talked with one today about Jim McDermott's plans to consume his 401K, his union pension, his wife's IRA, and revive the 1994 plan to eliminate the spousal estate exclusion. Obama has not voiced opposition to any of these.
CW/chsw
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