Posted on 03/12/2011 6:52:13 PM PST by jazusamo
March 10, 2011
Mr. Tom Ellis, PresidentMarshall & Ilsley Corporation770 N. Water StreetMilwaukee, WI 53202
SENT VIA FASCIMILE AND REGULAR MAIL
Dear Mr. Ellis:
As you undoubtedly know, Governor Walker recently proposed a "budget adjustment bill" to eviscerate public employees' right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin.
As you also know, Scott Walker did not campaign on this issue when he ran for office. If he had, we are confident that you would not be listed among his largest contributors. As such, we are contacting you now to request your support.
The undersigned groups would like your company to publicly oppose Governor Walker's efforts to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. While we appreciate that you may need some time to consider this request, we ask for your response by March 17. In the event that you do not respond to this request by that date, we will assume that you stand with Governor Walker and against the teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other dedicated public employees who serve our communities.
In the event that you cannot support this effort to save collective bargaining, please be advised that the undersigned will publicly and formally boycott the goods and services provided by your company. However, if you join us, we will do everything in our power to publicly celebrate your partnership in the fight to preserve the right of public employees to be heard at the bargaining table.
Wisconsin's public employee unions serve to protect and promote equality and fairness in the workplace. We hope you will stand with us and publicly share that ideal.
In the event you would like to discuss this matter further, please contact the executive Director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, Jim Palmer, at 608.273.3840.
Thank you in advance for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
James L. Palmer, Executive DirectorWisconsin Professional Police Association
Mahlon Mitchell,PresidentProfessional Professional Fire Fighters
Jim Conway, PresidentInternational Association of Fire Fighters Local 311
John Matthews, Execuctive DirectorMadison Teachers, Inc.
Keith Patt, Executive DirectorGreen Bay Education Association
Bob Richardson, PresidentDane County Deputy Sheriffs Association
Dan Frei, PrersidentMadison Professional Police Officers Association
This bill limits the right to collectively bargain for all employees who are not public safety employees (general employees) to the subject of base wages.
Not if those supporting the pubs step up and do business with those that won’t bow to the stinkin union rats.
Professional Professional Fire Fighters
Sounds like something from Fletch.
This is criminal in my opinion. Law Enforcement requires that you act differently. As I said while talking with some friends, You just can’t act like your buddies at the bowling alley. And this means you cannot write a letter demanding that a business do what you want them to do or else you would boycott them.
This is using your position of authority to gain special treatment or favors. In Michigan this would be a 10 year felony.
On the flip side; Any current or former employee has a free get out of jail card for everything except major crime. This letter provides the perfect backdrop for a defense for traffic tickets and even minor criminal investigations. I know that I would play this card if I were the company.
I am not the only LEO who thinks this way. Unfornately, too many think that this action was appropriate. There are too many in law enforcement that should not be there.
The only appropriate response: “Thanks for the list.”
Excellent example why card check is against everything our founding fathers envisioned for the country.
Perhaps, but he purports to speak for police officers, who then become guilty by association unless they demand his resignation.
Agreed. The unions who signed this letter have become anarchists.
They intend either to cause crippling financial problems for the state government or to bleed the taxpayers white. Either result threatens the state’s capitalist economy and thus, its political structure.
It seems to me the bank has legal recourse when it is informed that members of the police and fire departments, subdivisions of the state, plan to boycott the bank for its failure to support their political agenda.
The bank now has grounds to reasonably conclude it will suffer a lack of police protection and lack of timely response from the local fire department.
The threat of withholding such fundamental government services is clearly an act of terror.
The communists are back bigger and more bold than ever before, with a complicit media and milquetoast GOP “leaders” too terrified of being accused of mccarthyism to even bring the subject up.
Labor in Cold War: McCarthyism & Red Scare
Looking at the Past Through the Lens of Labor
The CP and The CIO
Communists represented a small, but significant, minority within the burgeoning labor movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s, especially within the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which arose after 1935 to rival the older and more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). Communists believed, as a matter of ideological conviction, that anti-capitalist revolution must begin with the working class; therefore, they threw themselves into the task of organizing workers into industrial unions with great enthusiasm.
Communists never comprised more than a tiny proportion of America’s trade unionists, even within the CIO. But Communists did have a disproportionate impact. Several of the CIO’s most militant and—for a time—successful unions had outright Communist leadership. These included the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). Many other CIO unions, including some of the largest unions in the country—the United Auto Workers (UAW), United Steelworkers (USW), and United Mine Workers (UMW)—had non-Communist leaders but employed effective Communist organizers at lower levels within their organizations.
The CIO was never, as its critics frequently alleged, a mere front for Communist Party agitation. But the CIO did, for a long time, tolerate the presence of Communists within its ranks and benefit from Communists’ commitment and organizing prowess.
Rise and Fall of the House of Labor
Through the end of World War II, the CIO’s model of Red-tolerant trade unionism was relatively successful. Between 1935 and 1945, millions and millions of American workers joined unions for the first time—both in the CIO and in the AFL, which began organizing aggressively to counter competition from the CIO. Unions raised wages, reduced work hours, and won improvements in working conditions. By 1945, more than 35% of the American workforce was unionized, and labor leaders hoped for a future in which unions shaped not only workplace conditions but also public policy and even business decision-making. (In 1946, the UAW attempted to introduce into its negotiations with General Motors not only an agreement on wages but also on the price GM would charge for cars.)
In retrospect, we can now see that the end of World War II marked not the beginning of a golden age for American labor but instead the beginning of the end. The proportion of American workers who belong to unions began to fall in 1946 and hasn’t stopped; today, fewer than 12% of all workers—and fewer than 8% in the private sector—are union members.
Taft-Hartley
The collapse of American labor began with the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act, a piece of legislation that can only be understood in the context of the Cold War. Taft-Hartley, passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman’s veto in 1947, used the threat of Communist subversion to justify rolling back many of the advantages labor had gained in the 1935 Wagner Act. Most of the bill’s provisions—banning closed shops, secondary strikes, and the spending of dues for political purposes, while allowing states to pass union-busting “right to work” laws—had no Cold War purpose. They represented a long-stymied pro-business Republican agenda that had suffered under FDR’s New Deal administration.
But these anti-labor provisions, which caused labor leaders and even Truman himself to denounce Taft-Hartley as a “slave-labor bill,” were sold by Republicans as necessary to the national defense under the new conditions of the Cold War. The Communists tolerated within many unions were no longer mere radical agitators, but potential fifth columnists in the service of our new mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Taft-Hartley targeted Communists within the labor movement by requiring union officers to sign affidavits affirming they were not members of the Communist Party. Any union that failed to sign the affidavits lost its right to a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board, and thus effectively lost any protection under federal law.
Splitting the CIO
Taft-Hartley’s anticommunist affidavits made it impossible for American unions to avoid a direct reckoning with the Communist problem, and that reckoning shattered the CIO. Several of the CIO’s left-leaning unions, which rejected anticommunism as an illegitimate labor-splitting tactic, refused to sign the affidavits, threatening to undermine the CIO’s legal status. In 1949 and 1950, the CIO responded by purging its Communists from its ranks, firing left-wing officials and expelling twelve unions that refused to abandon their Communist-tolerant ways.
That's how they spell it in Tuscon...
As a Wisconsin-based company, M&I has done a lot of good for local communities. But like all Wisconsin businesses, they struggled with the Jim Doyle/Obama double whammy assault on the economy.
If I recall, they have recently been sold to a large Canadian Bank. The fate of many M&I jobs in the Milwaukee area is still unknown. However, I’m sure they will all be more than willing to do what they can to help line poor Jim Palmer’s pockets (/s!)
That’s for sure. I think refusal to enforce the law is grounds for impeachment.
About 25 years ago I remember getting a letter with a similar tone from a pro-abort group (whose name I no longer recall) after I made a donation to a pro-life group.
I responded immediately stating that if they did anything remotely similar to what they threatened to do I would be on their ass like white on rice. I listed every legal action I could think of to do.
Guess what? I never heard from them again.
It’s a real word. It means fascist telecopy.
“Isnt this considered blackmail?”
I think it is considered freedom. They have a right to spend or not spend their dollars as they see fit and to let a business know about it. Would you have it any other way? You dont take away rights because you oppose somebodys political position. Next time it will be your rights that are restricted.
Welcome to the Thugocracy.
Like this? Give them everything they want. You’ll get more of it.
This goes to show how our devoted public peace and safety employees have assumed they have control/dictates over the general public,tantamount to being storm troopers. I am fast losing faith in these people to be working for my group the majority of citizens. This makes the case for publicly adopted laws that such emloyees are not to be such when they act to deny their services or use the duties of their employment as influences against another citizens rights/freedoms. The moan that they do life saving work for my benefit loses credibility when their union thugs step out of line of duty.
This goes to show how our devoted public peace and safety employees have assumed they have control/dictates over the general public,tantamount to being storm troopers. I am fast losing faith in these people to be working for my group the majority of citizens. This makes the case for publicly adopted laws that such emloyees are not to be such when they act to deny their services or use the duties of their employment as influences against another citizens rights/freedoms. The moan that they do life saving work for my benefit loses credibility when their union thugs step out of line of duty.
There is no such thing as the right to collective bargaining - in the Constitution, the Bible or anywhere else (unless it’s written in the union leaders’ maifesto posted on the wall of their posh country club). It sure is profitable for them (until they die and go to Hell).
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