Moe Lane

I just deleted a eight paragraph post on this account of what will be a doomed attempt to organize fast food workers in Detroit (yeah, I know: the timing was perfect, huh?).  As you might guess, I was not impressed with their chances for success; alas, I was also boring, so I just deleted the whole dang thing.  Bottom line: there are reasons why Big Labor hasn’t been able to organize fast food employees before*.

Moe Lane

PS: I suppose that I should note that I own a few shares of McDonald’s stock.  God only knows where they are at this point.

*Not least of which is: any half-smart franchise willing to contemplate letting the unions in would absolutely insist on mandatory drug testing.  It’d be the only way to get useless workers fired under that scenario**.

**I spent seven years at the Scotsman as a spatula serf.  Who was smoking weed, back then?  God love you, man: who wasn’t smoking weed?  From the store manager on down.  NTIWKAAT, of course.

Yeah, I think that maybe we don’t need this much unionization.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales has taken the unprecedented step of trying to break up the city’s police commanding officers’ union.

“Managers should be clear they are managers,” Hales said Thursday. “It just doesn’t make sense to have people who are in management positions be in a union.”

Of course, you’d expect that attitude from me; after all, my dad was union, and he would have said the same thing.  Workers are workers. Management is management.  You need that clear line of division between the two if you ever expect to get a fair deal.  You lack that division, your deals can appear tainted.  And over the long term, tainted union deals are generally more trouble than they’re worth.

Moe Lane

(Via @laborunionrpt)

We still have a Commerce Secretary?  What the hell has the last one been doing for the past five years? Playing tiddlywinks?

Making official what many Democrats have expected for weeks, President Obama plans to nominate Chicago business executive Penny Pritzker, a longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser, as his new Commerce secretary this morning.

Pritzker’s nomination could prove controversial. She is on the board of Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her wealthy family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.

(more…)

I was born a Democrat; grew up in a labor union household; and generally raised in an atmosphere with, ah, colorful language. And if I had ever used this kind of language my father the union organizer would have backhanded me for it:

Standing in front of the Education Department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Miami-Dade County teacher Ceresta Smith referred to former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee—founder and CEO of the advocacy group StudentsFirst—as an “Asian b[*]tch.”

He’d have been right to, too.  Democrat or no, that sh*t just ain’t right.  But I’m willing to bet that the Democrats will tolerate it being said about Ms. Rhee… (more…)

Scenes from the lack-of-class struggle in Lansing, Michigan: first off, the destruction of the Americans for Prosperity tent by union goons.  Apparently merely existing was too much of a provocation.

Reportedly, two of the people in that tent when it was torn down were in wheelchairs.  I assume that I don’t have to explain why going after people in wheelchairs is close to the very definition of “barbarian?” (more…)

Very possibly.  Background here and here: the short version is that Hostess Foods is in horrible financial shape; it’s in the process of trying to stave off bankruptcy via drastically renegotiated emergency union contracts with the Teamsters and bakers’ unions; the Teamsters took a look at the books, blanched, swallowed hard, and took the deal; the bakers’ unions did not, and decided to go on strike; and Hostess basically told the strikers that if they didn’t stop striking by end of business today that the company would just go ahead and shut down.  The end of business came and went; and now we’re going to see whether Hostess will go through with their promise/threat.

And how serious is this threat? This serious:

The Teamsters meanwhile are urging the smaller union to hold a secret ballot on whether to continue striking. Citing its financial experts who had access to the company’s books, the Teamsters say that Hostess’ warning of liquidation is “not an empty threat or a negotiating tactic” but a certain outcome if workers continue striking.

(more…)

…at least, the ones that actually produce things.  My colleague has already written up the President’s threat to veto a payroll tax cut extension if the Republicans dare… attach a go-ahead on the critically important Keystone ethical oil pipeline; but I have a question for the rank-and-file construction/petroleum union workers who might like to, you know, get some work.

Not to be obnoxious or anything about this – I myself am the son of a proud union man and Truman Democrat – but have you guys considered that maybe your union leadership is using your dues money to promote candidates and causes that aren’t actually in your class interest?  I mean, the Republicans want you folks to work.  We’re trying to get you guys to work.  In an ideal world, you’d all be working right now on this pipeline.  It’s the Democrats who are giving some of you miserable Christmases.  Not us.

Just… think about it, OK?

Alternative title: Dick Trumka’s ego writes checks the AFL/CIO can’t cash. To summarize, the Hill article reports that Trumka is kind-of, sort-of threatening that if the Democratic party doesn’t pay more attention to Big Labor, then Big Labor will start thinking about going politically shopping elsewhere. This is an… interesting proposition, to be sure – given that Trumka does not exactly say where Big Labor was planning to go politically shopping.

I mean, obviously it’s not going to be the GOP. Our party loathes the public sector union leadership cadre that has been raiding the public treasury for decades; besides, those people are more reliably Democratic voters than even dead people are. As for private sector unions… well. There’s a sharp dividing line* there anyway. People below that line are actually not particularly going to lockstep their votes for the Democrats anyway; and people above it are bluffing. More to the point: everybody knows it.

So I suggest that Dick Trumka stop wasting his betters’ valuable time by making empty threats. His faction is a fully-owned subsidiary of the Democratic party’s rich, idle elite… and the Republican party doesn’t need any of his particular brand of sycophancy anyway. God knows we have enough of our own to suppress, and to keep suppressed, so why should we get involved in what is essentially a temper tantrum by the Democratic party’s subordinates?

Via @laborunionrpt. (more…)

That’s the Wisconsin Supreme Court race that was supposed to be a stunning repudiation of Governor Scott Walker’s (R) reforms, right up to the moment that David Prosser won.

Anyway, they’re down to recounting one county – which Prosser won, handily – and the number hasn’t remotely changed enough to justify Kloppenburg continuing on with the recount.  Then again, it’s not Kloppenburg’s money – just the Wisconsin taxpayers’ – so expect her to keep letting the Democratic party erode away her respectability, dignity, and good name for the benefit of Big Labor.

I’d feel bad, except it’s not like anybody threatened her or anything.  Labor unions reserve that sort of thing for teenagers trapped in their houses.

Much like similar laws passed in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, the legislation will go after public sector union abuse of collective bargaining over health care.  Let me refresh people about why that’s important: it’s important because the public perception of benefits packages has traditionally been that they are somehow fundamentally different than wages; this despite the fact that a person who used to have, say, $5,000/year’s worth of health care but now has $10,000/year has effectively gotten a $5,000 raise.  But since it’s not seen as a raise, many public sector unions have had free rein in effectively bargaining for more and more benefits every  year, in lieu of technical raises.  Which is what this legislation addresses:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

[snip]

Under the legislation, mayors and other local officials would be given unfettered authority to set copayments and deductibles for their employees, after the 30-day discussion period with unions. Only the share of premiums paid by employees would remain on the health care bargaining table.

(more…)

The International Association of Fire Fighters’ Big Labor bosses have decided to, ah, reallocate their resources in advance of 2012:

As newly elected Republican state legislatures aggressively push a slew of anti-union measures, the International Association of Fire Fighters is freezing its federal political spending and shifting all resources toward its beleaguered state and local colleagues.

It’s kind of a shame that they’re not going to urinate away another fifteen million in the next national election – although possibly the ordinary, decent fire fighters who get stuck with the bill being run up on the Democrats’ behalf might find this to be a distinction without a difference.  For my own part, I’d rather have whatever electoral wars that are going to take place next year take place in the state legislature, and not Congress.  Aside from everything else, it shows who’s actually winning in the first place.

Moe Lane

It takes a national union to build a Potemkin Village.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.]

Ben Smith reports that “the Service Employees International Union plans to use its giant political operation to try to build a grass-roots movement of public protest and organization” – which is pretty much all that you have to read of that article, frankly.  This is not a slam on Ben; Politico probably doesn’t look kindly on one-sentence articles, and writers need to eat.  If your employer wants multiple paragraphs, you give your employer multiple paragraphs.

Still, the use of the phrase “plans to use” and “try to build” gives the whole game away.  The tacit admission here is that the SEIU (and the rest of Big Labor) doesn’t actually have the populist support that the Left routinely [claims] to have; something that was glaringly put on display in the last few months in Wisconsin.  While groups like these do have the ability to dump large numbers of its members into various anti-reform demonstrations (and near-riots), the results were neither successful in accomplishing any sort of meaningful change, nor in becoming self-perpetuating.  For an example of the failures in the first category, note the Prosser/Kloppenburg election – particularly, the interesting fact that Kloppenburg received both less outside money than Prosser did, but more big-donor outside money in proportion.  For an example of the latter, note the drastically-reduced protester footprint in Madison, now that they are no longer being artificially stimulated. (more…)