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Curbing The Reach Of Unions: More States Pushing Anti-Union Bills

Lawmakers in New Hampshire and Missouri are advancing so-called right-to-work bills that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of joining unions, the latest such efforts to curb labor unions in the legislative season that in many states is now entering the home stretch.

The measures, if successful, would mark the first expansion in a decade of right-to-work laws, which are on the books in 22 states.

Lawmakers in New Hampshire, where Republicans took control of both chambers last fall, passed a right-to-work measure last week. Its success will hinge on whether the state House of Representatives has enough votes to override a promised veto by Democratic Gov. John Lynch. If the bill passes, New Hampshire would become the first right-to-work state in the Northeast, historically a union stronghold.

In Missouri, the sponsor of a state Senate right-to-work bill is trying to shape a compromise in the final days of the legislative session.

Right-to-work measures were proposed in 18 states this year, an unusually high number that labor experts attribute to state budget and economic woes, GOP gains in November and influence by tea-party groups that oppose unions’ political clout. Ohio and Wisconsin didn’t pass specific right-to-work legislation but did adopt laws allowing public-sector employees to opt out of paying dues. The laws generally are backed by business groups and Republicans, opposed by Democrats and denounced by labor.

Most of the bills proposed this year likely are not far enough along to pass before legislative sessions end. Others died during negotiations. In Indiana, for instance, where Democrats fled the state in part to protest such a measure, House Republicans abandoned the idea to get them back to the table.

Still, the large number of proposals demonstrate the growing momentum of the idea. Legislators in many states say they will take up similar measures next year.

Right-to-work legislation is typically among the most contentious. A key contributor to the states’ red ink, advocates say, is public-employee benefits and pensions set by generous union contracts. Additionally, advocates say, the slow economy and a desire to create jobs has revived the issue.

“The political equation has changed in a lot of states,” said Michael Eastman, executive director of labor policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Measures that may not have been possible two and four and six years ago now may be.”

But unions view such measures as a political attack, aimed at curbing their influence. The laws threaten unions because they permit workers to opt out of joining or paying dues in unionized workplaces. Dues are a key source of funds for political efforts, and higher numbers of workers give unions more clout during contract talks. Without right-to-work laws, workers covered by union contracts can be required to pay union dues.

The goal of right-to-work measures is to “weaken the labor movement in key states around the country,” said Mark MacKenzie, president of the AFL-CIO’s state federation in New Hampshire. “If you look at the map, it has nothing to do with protecting workers rights but taking over key areas of the country” for the 2012 presidential election.

Right-to-work laws were set by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. They have largely been enacted by states on the Great Plains and in the South. Those states, including Texas and North Carolina, tend to have the lowest unionization rates.

In March, right-to-work states had both the nation’s lowest U.S. unemployment rate, at 3.6% in North Dakota, and the highest, at 13.2% in Nevada, which still has a relatively large percentage of union members.

In Missouri, 9.9% of all workers belong to a union, and in New Hampshire 10.2% of workers do, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Missouri Sen. Luann Ridgeway, who sponsored that state’s right-to-work measure, said schemes to attract jobs with tax breaks haven’t worked. The bill has stalled in the Senate, but Ms. Ridgeway, a Republican, said she and her colleagues were weighing compromises, such as a voter referendum.

In New Hampshire, unions are lobbying the House, where Republicans have a 294-102 majority. The Senate passed the bill with a two-thirds majority needed to override the veto, but the House vote fell short of that mark.

Unions say they are uncertain about their chances. “I would say that we don’t have the votes right now,” said Dennis Caza, political coordinator for International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 633, in Manchester, N.H., which represents workers at United Parcel Service Inc. and Anheuser-Busch Cos., among other companies.

By: Kris Majer and Amy Merrick, The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2011

May 9, 2011 Posted by | Businesses, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Economy, Elections, GOP, Government, Governors, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Tea Party, Union Busting, Unions | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Wisconsin Recalls Are Heating Up

Recent protests at WI capitol

Recall elections loom on the horizon as petitions against nine Wisconsin state senators were recently submitted to the Government Accountability Board (GAB). Each successful petition must include 25 percent of the total number of votes cast in that senate district in the last election.

The recall efforts of Republican senators who supported Gov. Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill, and the Democratic senators who left the state to delay voting on the bill, are a result of the political firestorm that quickly flared up over the bill that sought to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for public workers.

Currently, the Republican senators who are facing a recall election are Alberta Darling, Robert Cowles, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Randy Hopper and Dan Kapanke. Democrats are facing recall efforts are — Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that there have also been petitions that didn’t have enough signatures on them to spark a recall. Democratic senators Lena Taylor and Spencer Coggs (both from Milwaukee), Senate Minority Mark Miller (Monona) and Fred Risser (Madison) all have all survived the recall attempts against them. Recall efforts against Republicans Glenn Grothman (West Bend) and Mary Lazich (New Berlin) also failed to garner sufficient support.

Circulators hired by the state Republican Party have submitted “hundreds if not thousands of invalid signatures” in recall drives targeting three Democratic state senators. Volunteers have been working overtime to enter each name into a data base and cross-check it with the phone book and other record. One man who signed a recall petition was Bill Pocan, the deceased father of State Representative Marc Pocan. The Wisconsin Democratic Party (DPW) is formally challenging  all three of the recall petitions filed against Democrat senators.

Republicans have filed challenges against “all petitions targeting GOP senators. In addition to their individual signature challenges, they claim the GAB should throw out the petitions because the recall organizers did not properly register with the state.” The elections for recalled legislators with completed petitions will likely be held July 12, 2011.

By: Jennifer Page, Center for Media and Democracy, May 6, 2011

May 6, 2011 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Elections, Gov Scott Walker, Politics, Public Employees, State Legislatures, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Continuing The Fight: Wisconsinites Get Revved Up For Worker’s Rights

Hundreds of Wisconsinites lined Madison’s Capitol Square, Saturday, to welcome bikers from all over the Midwest and to protest Scott Walker’s attack on Wisconsin unions.

Just when Governor Scott Walker thought he memorized all the chants and signs, Wisconsinites revved it up a notch. Every kind of bike from Harley-Davidsons to Huffys descended onto the Square from Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and South Hamilton St.

Eric Hartz, the organizer of the event, complemented the thunderous entrance with songs from the Raging Grannies, a social justice organization made up of older women. Other speakers included Sen. John Erpenbach, Sen. Mark Miller, Rep. Cory Mason, Rep. Peter Barca, Milwaukee Public School Teachers and the City of Middleton Fire Fighters.

Throughout the speeches you could hear the low rumbling from motorcycles surrounding the capitol building. “The sound from the engines and the crowd was overwhelming,” said Miriam Kopelow, a teacher at Wringra Middle School. “I could feel the chants of the people and the rumbling of the bikes.”

According to Rep. Cory Mason, motorcycles and collective bargaining rights have a special place in Wisconsin’s history. “There are two great things that were invented here in the state of Wisconsin,” said Mason. “One is public sector collective bargaining rights and the other one is Harley Davidson and no governor in their right mind would try to get rid of any of those fine institutions.”

Most of the bikers participating were veterans supporting the unions. Dave Boetcher, a member of the State Veterans Board, rode in support of public workers, but also talked about the privatization of the new veteran’s home in Chippewa Falls after private nursing home owners lobbied Gov. Walker.

“We are first and foremost a compassionate state,” said Sen. John Erpenback. However, Gov. Walker’s budget wants to “cut a third from the vocational colleges… a billion dollars from K12…turn back 20 years of
recycling” and ultimately wants “to destroy clean and open government in Wisconsin,” said Rep. Peter Barca.

Another Wisconsin invention Rep. Cory Mason pointed out, that will prove to be important in the coming months, is the right to recall elected officials. “We will continue this fight until we finally prevail, until we bring back our proud Wisconsin tradition that stands up for working people,” said Barca.

By: Summer Abdoh, Center for Media and Democracy, May 1, 2011

May 1, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Education, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Lawmakers, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, Teachers, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Christian Economics” Meets The Anti-Union Movement

Gary North was nearly impossible to track down. He did not return multiple e-mails, and when finally reached by phone, he refused to talk and hung up.

But if you know where to look, he is everywhere.

Mr. North, a onetime aide to Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is the leading proponent of “Christian economics,” which applies biblical principles to economic issues and the free market.

Largely unknown to the broader public, Mr. North is an influential figure on the American far right. He has written dozens of books, blogs prolifically and is on the curriculum of Christian home-schoolers across America.

He may even have turned up among the antiunion protesters in Madison, Wis., this year.

Not literally, of course (and who would have recognized him if he had been there?). But Christian conservatism and free-market conservatism meet in Mr. North’s writings. A small but vigorous part of the conservative movement has absorbed his view that the Bible is opposed to organized labor, and especially to organized public employees.

“Not only do Reconstructionists believe that public employees should not have the right to organize, they believe that almost all of them should not be public employees,” writes Julie Ingersoll, of the University of North Florida, in the Web magazine Religion Dispatches. “Most of the tasks performed by those protesting the Wisconsin state budget would, in the biblical economics of North,” be privatized.

These “Reconstructionists” are believers in Christian Reconstructionism, the philosophy of R. J. Rushdoony, who died in 2001. According to Reconstructionism, a Christian theocracy under Old Testament law is the best form of government, and a radically libertarian one. Biblical law, they believe, presupposes total government decentralization, with the family and church providing order. Until that day comes, Reconstructionists believe the rights to home-school and to worship freely at least provide the barest conditions of liberty.

Mr. North, who is Mr. Rushdoony’s son-in-law but was not on speaking terms with him from 1981 until Mr. Rushdoony’s death, focuses on how that biblical libertarianism applies to economics. He concluded that the Bible forbids any welfare programs, is opposed to all inflation, and requires a gold-coin standard for money.

“God has cursed the earth,” Mr. North writes, alluding to the Book of Genesis in his 1973 book “Introduction to Christian Economics.” “This is the starting point for all economic analysis. The earth no longer gives up her fruits automatically. Man must sweat to eat.” Mr. North writes that no form of government assistance “will escape the ethical limits” of the Apostle Paul’s dictum, in II Thessalonians, that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

And evidence that God would prefer gold money to paper can be found throughout the Old Testament, according to Mr. North. There are more than 350 references to gold in Strong’s famous Bible concordance, he writes. Gold is used in worship, godly wisdom is compared to gold and the Hebrew prophets used the debasement of metals as a metaphor for immorality.

Home-schoolers can download Mr. North’s economics textbook free from his Web site. And his thinking may have influenced Representative Paul, who briefly employed Mr. North as a speechwriter, working on monetary policy, in 1976.

Michael J. McVicar, who teaches at Ohio State and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Mr. Rushdoony, said Mr. North discovered Mr. Rushdoony’s writing as a young man in Southern California, shortly after he became, along with his parents, an evangelical Christian.

“He corresponded with Rushdoony and made this his livelihood: to generate some synthesis between biblical law and libertarian economics,” Mr. McVicar said. “Eventually Rushdoony took him under his wing and became a sort of surrogate father for North, who married one of Rushdoony’s daughters.”

The two men’s “spectacular break,” as Mr. McVicar calls it, split Reconstructionism into two camps. The break was partly over the kind of theological minutiae that would impress even a rabbinical scholar. In fact, one issue might pique the interest of real rabbinical scholars.

“It was about North’s interpretation of, of all things, Passover and the Israelites’ marking the doorposts with the blood of the lamb,” Mr. McVicar said. “North made this argument, that because of the doorpost’s structure, that this was an indication of hymenal blood from the marriage bed, and tied it into what Rushdoony called this ‘fertility cult’ mentality. And Rushdoony took a much more common-sense approach to the blood.

“The subtext is, it’s a father-son spat,” Mr. McVicar concluded.

The deeper one looks into the obsessions of Mr. North — who was born in 1942 and who as of 2007 lived in Horn Lake, Miss. — the harder it is to spot his influence in Wisconsin. The main themes of the Wisconsin budget battles were union influence, the distribution of wealth and the public fisc; Mr. North, by contrast, is associated with his own brand of far-right Presbyterianism, gun-owners’ rights, home-schooling and the gold standard for money.

Mr. McVicar believes that Professor Ingersoll’s attempted connection between Christian economics and the rallies in Madison is a bit tenuous. “Her insight has to be in my mind so heavily qualified as to make it almost nothing,” he said. But he concedes that it “has the most basic essence of truth,” given how widely Mr. North’s teachings have been disseminated on the Christian right.

Professor Ingersoll concedes it is difficult to prove direct connections between Mr. North’s writings and Wisconsin antiunion conservatism. On the other hand, Mr. North might like to think he has influenced the Wisconsin debate, and he has written in vociferous support of Gov. Scott Walker.

And, as Professor Ingersoll cautions, influence does not always announce itself:

“I like to say, ‘How many Christians know who is Augustine is, and how he influenced them?’ ”

By: Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, April 29, 2011

May 1, 2011 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Liberatarians, Politics, Religion, Right Wing, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Martial Law Now A Reality In Michigan:The Voter’s Voice Doesn’t Really Matter Anymore

Last week saw the layoff of every public school teacher in Detroit, and the initial fruition of the highly-contested bill that allows emergency financial managers to have unconditional control over a city in a financial emergency. The city of Benton Harbor, Michigan, declared to be in a financial emergency by Governor Rick Snyder, now knows that, according to Snyder, the voter’s voice doesn’t really matter anymore.
 
Joseph Harris, the city’s new Emergency Financial Manager (EFM), dismantled the entire government, only allowing city boards and commissions to call a meeting to order, approve of meeting minutes and adjourn a meeting.
 
The law that allows Harris to “exercise any power or authority of any office, employee, department, board, commission, or similar entity of the City, whether elected or appointed,” was passed in March after the urging of Gov. Snyder, and despite thousands of protesters who came to the Lansing capitol throughout February and March.
 
Michigan AFL-CIO released a press release in response to Benton Harbor: “This is sad news for democracy in Michigan. It comes after the announcement of Robert Bobb in Detroit ordering layoff of every single public school teacher in the Detroit Public School system,” says Mark Gaffney, President of Michigan AFL-CIO. “With the stripping of all power of duly elected officials in Benton harbor and the attack on Detroit school teachers, we can now see the true nature of the Emergency Manager system.”
 
Earlier in the week, TMP Muckraker reported that the Detroit Public Schools’ EFM, Robert Bobb, sent 5,466 unionized teachers layoff notices “in anticipation of a workforce reduction to match the district’s declining student enrollment.” The notices are a part of the Detroit Teachers Federation collective-bargaining contract. TPM also reported that “Non-Renewal notices have also been sent to 248 administrators, and the layoffs would go into effect by July 29.”

By: Jennifer Page, Center for Media and Democracy, April 18, 2011

April 18, 2011 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Education, Elections, GOP, Government, Governors, Ideology, Jobs, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Voters | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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