Posted on 04/22/2009 1:56:19 PM PDT by neverdem
It has been three hard months of political exile for those on the right, a time for them to count their grievances and dress their outrage in the trappings of centuries past. Some have donned colonial outfits to stage tea parties. Others have found the 1860s more to their taste, reviving the fiery language of secession fever.
But they can all take heart from one development in the nation's capital. Good old K Street, where the big tea party never stopped, has all but halted organized labor's effort to make it easier for workers to unionize.
After massive lobbying both by labor and by business, it appears that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which, as it now stands, would allow workers to organize in many cases merely by signing cards instead of holding elections, will not have the 60 votes required to get past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
Now, to be pro-labor is to resign yourself to years of failures and defeats, with few tea parties along the way for consolation. Even so, the setback on EFCA has to be a bitter one. Union members worked hard to elect Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress, as they did to put Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the White House. And now, just as in those previous two periods of Democratic governance, labor's friends are having trouble enacting basic labor-law reforms.
To understand why we need new rules governing unionization, look no further than yesterday's New York Times, where Steven Greenhouse told the story of a Louisville, Ky., hospital whose nurses tried to form a union but failed after they were reportedly threatened with losing their benefits among other things.
Such practices are commonplace and well-documented by Human Rights Watch and others. But labor's case never...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I’ll believe it when it happens.
Good old K Street, where the big tea party never stopped, has all but halted organized labor's effort to make it easier for Union thugs to force workers to unionize.
There, fixed it.
Of course democrats only care about labor’s money!! DUH!
Card Check is not dead yet. Some states are getting ready to impose it for crying out loud. watch out for the back door.
Take the union money but don’t do the union’s bidding? I’ll drink to that.
I agree.
I have no idea how this Thomas Frank guy got a job at the Journal. Brett Stephens, Anastasia O’Grady and Dorothy Rabinowitz are top-flight columnists but this clown doesn’t seem to do much research into his subjects; he just regurgitates what he reads in the NYTimes.
Frank=braindead...per usual.
More important question..why on God’s green earth is the WSJ printing this crapola?
Obama doesn’t have to do a thing for union support, he even threatened to bankrupt the coal industry and Pennsylvania voted for him in a landslide.
If it fails this time, big labor will be back in 2011. The rats will likely have a filibuster proof majority. The rats do not want to vote on card check this time. Many rats are getting nervous about close ties to big labor before the 2010 elections.
If some states impose it, it will be a good thing for the states that don’t. I live in a state that won’t.
I’ll believe it when the next conservative administration comes in.
If ever.
Some states might do that, but they are cutting their own throats. The reason the unions want a national law card check is that without it, businesses can move from states that have it to states that don’t. Legislators in a state such as, say, Michigan, might be so beholden to big labor that they pass such legislation, despite the fact that it would deep-six their state economy and leave a state on the economic ropes, a shadow of its former self, a fiscal basket case. Stranger things have been known to happen. My reading of this situation now is that it is circling the drain, for this go-round at least. That doesn’t mean it won’t come back.
Thomas Frank is the WSJ's token lib. IIRC, he wrote What's the matter with Kansas. It was a screed about why do social conservatives refuse economic handouts from the rats and vote for the GOP instead of rats.
“More important question..why on God’s green earth is the WSJ printing this crapola?”
The WSJ has been printing his tripe for about a year now. I guess he is supposed to be balance. He is a far leftist who thinks he has a duty to lie to advance the socialist cause. A pox on him.
First – Full Disclosure – My parents were both impacted by the Depression, and each had a strong bias against Unions. But I had to learn my own lesson.
I had an Uncle who was a full time foreman at a local cannery that processed Tomatoes. Most of the workers were hired for the season and many of my older cousins got summer jobs. I learned that each of them had a nickname at the cannery – “Nephew!”
The summer I turned 18, I stood outside the personnel office with several hundred others waiting to be hired. One day about six of us were selected. Our job was to stack tomato lugs back onto pallets after that came out of a dumping machine. The first 2 days went well.
The third day, upon arrival, I found I had no time card. A Union Rep directed me to an office. There I learned that the cannery was a ‘closed shop’, meaning the union had secured from management the right that only union members could work there. If you wanted to punch in that day for work, I had to agree to join the union.
Later that day, the operator of the tomato dumping machine was having all kinds of problems. Tomato boxes were jamming up inside and being shredded to pieces. He had some of us that were stacking the boxes come up and tear out the damaged boxes so he could get it working again.
On one of those occasions, the operator asked me to stay to help clear out the next jam. I began to watch the machinery, and saw how it worked. I also began to see what he was not seeing that caused the jams. I began to predict to myself when a jam would occur.
Finally the operator got so frustrated he walked off of the job. The foreman came around and asked, “Anyone here know how to work this thing?” I replied “Yes”. He challenged me to show him, and soon I had it going again. Then I noticed the crowbar that was in the work station.
Using the crowbar, I began to fix and align some of the pallet loads from the field. I had noticed that when a box was off of alignment, or missing a cleat, things didn’t line up well and havoc occurred.
Soon I had the rig running so well, I got the warning light from inside meaning they had so many tomatoes, it was time to stop for awhile. Everyone got a break, I was a hero.
I also learned that I had replaced a person who had a 12 hour shift, instead of the 8 hour shift I had been on. I also got the wage that went with the operator position. Every day at 6 am and 6 pm, I traded places with the other operator. Life was good.
One day I looked up and there was my Uncle. He gave me an odd look and asked how long I had been working there. I told him about 3 weeks. He would have known of how well I had been doing, since it was his Ketchup line that we were feeding the tomatoes to. He just did not know that I was the one behind the success. I was never called “Nephew”.
Then one day, as I showed up for work, I was met by another guy who basically said “Scram kid, this is my job!” I soon had a lesson on union seniority and the bidding process. If he had been nice and asked for some pointers, I’m sure I would have shared my experience to add to his success. But this union “know-it-all” sent me back to the 8 hour shift and the lower wage.
Very predictably, the line began to move at a crawl because he did not know what he was doing. Hundreds of workers were waiting inside for the tomatoes to arrive but Mr. Know-it-all could not deliver. Meanwhile, a bunch of us sat around while he called maintenance to come fix his machine. He was a good union man. Repair was not in his craft.
I worked a few more days, but gave notice as classes were about to start at college.
The lesson I learned is that Unions can really hurt a business. They stifle the individual’s desire to strive for excellence. Seniority is rewarded, not competence. And with seniority comes an arrogance that hurts the business.
I never held a union job after that summer.
This is the ultimate union myth - that they are pro-labor.
Union wages, work rules, licensing and permitting work to depress labor, reduce employment and hurt workers.
I'll give you a hint, D!psh!t. ALL DEMOCRATS ONLY CARE ABOUT MONEY.
Targeted, of course, at the author, not neverdem.
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