Free Republic

Labor: Union bosses have contended for some time that a secret ballot isn't needed to unionize a workplace. All that's needed, they said, was employees' signatures on cards. But Chattanooga proved them wrong. For months the United Auto Workers have said a majority of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee had signed cards expressing their interest in unionizing. Why bother with a secret ballot when the workers had already spoken through the "card check" approval process? Before a much-anticipated and widely followed union-representation vote held last week, the AP reported that Gary Casteel, Tennessee-based regional director for the UAW,...

HARRISONBURG, Va. - Sculptor Gary Casteel has suggested the Upper Shenandoah Valley as a good location for a national Civil War memorial.Casteel pitched the memorial as a tourism draw as well of a place of reverence during a meeting recently with the Civil War subcommittee of the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance, a nonprofit group working to revitalize Harrisonburg's city center."It was sort of a surprise for me and the group," said Eddie Bumbaugh, executive director of the organization.The subcommittee had been focusing on a series of signs providing information on the downtown's Civil War history, he said. Bumbaugh also said Casteel's...