CURRENT LABOR UNION TOPICS

The following is a description of what a union is and how they are created. Unions have become very important to the American Taxpayer in that they are largely responsible for the election of Barack Obama. Unions contributed upwards of $600,000,000 to his campaign! Ironically, most of it came from your pocket. I will explain how that happened after we explore the nuts and bolts of unions.

My qualifications are as follows: I was Management Representative in three UAW campaigns to organize our work force. Our group consisted of 186 potential union members. I worked closely with an outstanding labor attorney. He was very pro management and understood unions and how they worked. We were aggressive in defending our right to be union free and believed it was in the best interests of our workforce to remain union free. We won the first two campaign votes outright and ultimately won the third – even though we lost the last election by 4 votes. The workforce came to agree with us after several months operating under the contract negotiated with the UAW.  The workers lost benefits and many had reduced paychecks. Work rules were very restrictive and violations resulted in harsh punishment. The Bargaining Unit voted the union out as soon as they could legally do so. A simple explanation of union organizing follows.

Question: What is a Union?

Answer: A Union is a business, not a fraternal organization. The product is a contract made between an employer and the Union. The contract establishes work rules for the Bargaining Unit.

Question: What is a Bargaining Unit?

Answer: The non-supervisory group of people who perform the everyday tasks of a business.

Question: How is a union formed?

Answer: Unhappy employees may contact an organizer or an organizer may solicit employees as they enter the workplace or leave the workplace. The organizer collects names of supporters and may present the employer with a listing demanding an election be held, at the employer’s expense, to certify the organizers allegations. If an election is held and the union wins a simple majority the results are presented to the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and the NLRB with the Union/Organizer as the agent certifies a Bargaining Unit.  Contract negotiations are set to establish the working relationship between the parties. Once a contract has been agreed upon by the two parties (Union and Employer) it is presented to the Bargaining Unit by the organizer and voted upon by the Bargaining Unit.  If accepted the effective date for implementation of the contract is set and an arms length relationship between the employer and the Bargaining Unit goes into effect. The contract remains in effect for the term specified in the contract. At the completion of the contract term a new contract is negotiated unless the Bargaining Unit chooses to de-certify it’s relationship with the Union.

Question: What’s the incentive for the Union to incur the expense of organizing?

Answer: Money. Lots of it. The typical Bargaining Unit member pays the union 2 hours wages each week. If the Bargaining Unit member earns $15/hr. that means the union gets $30/week per Bargaining Unit member. If there are 100 members, that computes to $3000/week. Extending to 1 year you get $156,000.  To secure that money, the union has very little direct costs. A union with millions of members generates a lot of cash. The most important issue for the union is to acquire “dues checkoff”. This is a procedure whereby workers agree to ask the company to automatically deduct their dues from their paycheck and pay the union with one check. Without “dues checkoff “ the union would have to collect dues from each individual.

          I think labor unions are just fine in the private sector. Businesses can bargain hard and keep their costs down or they can get fat and lazy and wind up like GM, Chrysler and Ford. Businesses who treat their employees badly can expect to see the organizer visiting their employees. The more enlightened companies treat their employees well and consequently their employees see no need for a union.  The employee relationship with the business changes when a union is involved. The employees work for the union and are governed by the contract. The company and the union, not the employee and their supervisor, handle employee disputes.

          Unions are always seeking to make more money. Since the union gets money from member dues they seek ways to increase their take from dues. The two most common ways they do this is to bargain for higher wages and increase the number of workers in the bargaining unit. The union wants to make restrictive work rules in order to cause additional workers to be hired. For example, a hydraulic tech cannot remove sheet metal panels from an airplane even though a screwdriver is all that is needed to do the job.  So, the hydraulic tech stands by while the sheet metal tech removes the panel. Then the sheet metal guy stands by while the hydraulic tech does his job. Then the sheet metal guy can button up the panel and the airplane can go fly. In non union shops the hydraulic tech would remove the panel and do his work.

          A long standing rule for unions was that no government workers could belong to a labor union. The reasons were obvious – a strike by government workers could have devastating effects on our economy and the incentive to bargain hard in order to keep costs down just isn’t there in tax supported organizations. Jimmy Carter’s administration altered the Labor laws to allow government workers to join a union provided they gave up the right to strike. Recall the air controllers strike that occurred in the early part of Ronald Regan’s presidency? The union decided to flex its muscles for better pay and working conditions, even though law forbade them to strike. The unions took on the wrong guy and all the air traffic controllers got fired! However, they did get the right to organize federal workers.  A small price to pay for such a large plum!

          Earlier in this paper I mentioned that a very large part of the $600,000,000 contributed to Obama by the unions came from your pocket. This is true because it comes from tax dollars whereas private sector dues come from the services/merchandise sold by the employer. The costs of a private sector union are lumped in with the costs of doing business – adding to the cost of doing business. Not so in the public sector. Those dues are paid from tax dollars in that every thin dime spent by the government comes from taxpayers.  My definition of a taxpayer does not include those on tax-supported payrolls.  Yes, they “pay taxes” but in reality they are just returning a part of their pay to the treasury from whence it came.

          Labor unions in the public sector are a disaster for private sector taxpayers. Federal employees earn much more than their private sector counterparts. In 2009 the average Federal worker earned about $28.64 /hr.  ($59,571 annually) and had a $32,115 (annual cost) benefit package. Compare this to the private sector worker who earns $18.27/hr  ($ 38,001 annually) and has a $9,882 benefit package. ¹ The dues gathered from the high paid government workers group are truly significant. All of these wonderful benefits came to be after the Carter years. The union bargained for and got all this in a relatively short period of time. So why didn’t the management in these bureaucracies bargain hard for the taxpayer? Most of them are ideologically sympathetic. However, I have heard high paid people in the government say that the way they get ahead is to spend their entire budget and then some. So where is their incentive? Currently, Obama is creating new agencies and staffing them with loyal SEIU members. This is a double whammy to the taxpayer. Not only do we get the burden of paying their high wages and benefits we also get slammed when the union dues are used to further the advance of the Obama progressive agenda.

          You can thank Congress and Jimmy Carter for the gift of unions for government workers. I think it is interesting that the map below showing States who have Right to Work laws are mostly Red States. The forced unionism states are mostly Blue States. It is also true that the SIX States that are “solvent” are all Red States while all the States that are bankrupt or near bankrupt are all Blue States.

          Click link for a map courtesy of: http://www.nrtwc.org/. I suggest that you visit this site if you are interested in keeping up with the governments union activities.

Oscar T. Unger/Tiger Team: Union Watchdogs

EXPOSED: Big Labor Announces “Secret Plan to Destroy the Right Forever”

In a surprising display of honesty about their true agenda, union bosses and Far Left activists participated on a panel at the Netroots Nation conference called “The Secret Plan to Destroy the American Right.”

What’s their “secret plan” to expand the power and size of government and raise taxes on hard-working Americans? It’s passage of the woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, more accurately called the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill.

Union bosses apparently see the billions of forced dues dollars that the bill would funnel into pushing Organized Labor’s radical political agenda as THE major selling point for the bill.

Unfortunately for the panelists and the Big Labor hierarchy, but fortunately for the American people, there’s nothing secret about the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill and how it would obliterate the rights of American workers. On the National Right to Work Foundation’s Freedom@Work blog, we’ve kept concerned citizens informed about this union boss power grab:

* Expert legal analysis explaining how the Card Check Bill would destroy the secret ballot in union certification elections;

* Workers in Albion, Indiana tell Fox News about the real life intimidation they felt during a card check organizing drive by the militant United Auto Workers (UAW) union;

* A former union president testifies before Congress about the dangers of card check organizing;

* Worker explains to Senate labor committee how union goons lied to him to get him to sign a card;

* National Right to Work president Mark Mix discusses card check and union intimidation on a nationally syndicated radio program;

* At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Mix demonstrates why union bosses love card check;

* Far Left icon George McGovern writes in the Wall Street Journal about another disturbing feature of the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill: mandatory binding arbitration.

Check out our full archive on card check.