Free Republic

MELVINDALE, Mich. (WJBK) -- It's a video seen all over the world. An attack on a Fox News contributing reporter at the right to work protest in Lansing earlier this week was caught on video. Now, one of the union members seen in the footage is speaking out to FOX 2. By now, almost everybody knows who he is, reporter Steven Crowder, the guy who got sucker-punched outside a pitch tent where the pro-right to work crowd had gathered. (See the video above in the upper right corner) "I'm under rested and overworked right now and still tough enough to...

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike By STEPHANIE BANCHERO The Chicago public school teachers strike entered its second week after the teachers union declined Sunday to call off a week-long walkout that has catapulted the city into the national debate over teacher evaluations and job security. Only hours earlier, Chicago Teachers Union officials had trumpeted new concessions they said they had extracted from Mayor Rahm Emanuel during talks to settle the strike that started last Monday and has canceled classes for 350,000 students in the nation's third largest district. The vote to continue the strike came Sunday night by the...

Madison - Paperwork to recall Gov. Scott Walker has been filed with state elections officials. The state Government Accountability Board said the request was filed Friday, the first possible date of the recall. To succeed in forcing a recall election of the Republican governor, organizers must gather 540,000 signatures in 60 days. The petition was filed by David Brandt of Muskego in Waukesha County and the "Close Friends to Recall Walker" committee. Brandt said in the government filing that he was registering a recall committee to "fulfill my friend's last request." The state Democratic Party is starting its recall Walker...

Wisconsin's largest teachers union has a problem. A union problem. This week, National Support Organization, which bills itself as the world's largest union of union staffers, posted an online notice discouraging its members from seeking work with the Wisconsin Education Association Council. "Don't apply for WEAC vacancies!" screams the headline. The reason for the boycott? Chuck Agerstrand, president of the National Support Organization, is accusing WEAC officials of "breaching staff contracts and destroying any working relationship with its employees." "WEAC management is taking a page out of Gov. (Scott) Walker's playbook and making up new employment rules not in the...

Sarah Palin with her husband Todd spoke to a tea party crowd Monday in New Hampshire. From her Facebook page: In my speech on Saturday in Iowa, I said: “Between bailouts for Wall Street cronies and stimulus projects for union bosses’ security and ‘green energy’ giveaways, [Barack Obama] took care of his friends. And now they’re on course to raise a billion dollars for his re-election bid so that they can do it all over again.” This was shamefully on display yesterday at President Obama’s taxpayer-funded campaign rally in Detroit. In introducing the President, Teamsters President James Hoffa represented precisely...

The opposition is called "son of a bitches" at one Labor rally and "barbarians" at another rally. Here's an angry Joe Biden at the AFL-CIO rally in Cincinnati just a short time ago.

Thug. (TPM) — Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday. Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress “sons of bitches” and said union workers are ready to “go to war” with the tea party next year and “take out” Republicans at the ballot box. Hoffa said he’d say the exact same words all over again. “I would because I believe it,” he said. “They’ve declared war on us. We didn’t declare war...

Outgoing National Labor Relations Board chairwoman Wilma Liebman thinks critics of the NLRB’s recent policies have blown their complaints “grossly out of proportion to what has happened and what has been done.” “We knew we were going to have a boxing match, but we didn’t expect our opponents to come in with a baseball bat,” Liebman, a Democrat, told The New York Times. The NLRB has come under fire during President Obama’s administration for favoring unions. The Board has traditionally swung with political tides, but critics say this time around it’s different. The NLRB has plowed forward with unprecedented cases,...

Reading from prepared scripts and calling at predesignated times, retirees of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) are the newest recruits in the union’s strike against Verizon Communications, asked to flood service centers with complaints and questions to — in the words of one leader — “tie them up.” The scripted calls are going to fiber-solution outlets, repair shops, maintenance and testing centers, and fiber-optic and digital subscriber line (DSL) centers to “keep them busy,” said Pat Welsh, president of the CWA Retired Members Council for District 1, which covers New York, New Jersey and New England. He described the...

No vandalism. No violence. No Harassment. No Obstruction. No intimidating. No threatening. No Blocking. No Trespassing. Those were just a few of the restrictions placed on members of the local 827 IBEW bargaining unit, their dependents, minors, households and relatives in an injunction signed by NJ Superior Court Justice Mary Beth Rogers last week. Rogers also set restrictions on picketing, allowing no more than six picketers at the entrance to any Verizon owned property at any one time. Picketers were also advise that no more than two picketers may picket a private residence of a Verizon employee and must stay...

Madison President Barack Obama’s political arm at the Democratic National Committee is getting involved in the Wisconsin state Senate recall elections. Obama’s Organizing for America is pulling together volunteers in Madison this weekend to knock on doors and make phone calls in support of Democrats in eight recall elections. The group sent an email Thursday night to supporters soliciting volunteers. The group’s Wisconsin field director says Organizing for America will be providing support to volunteers working on the recall elections. Six Republicans and two Democrats face recall elections next month. Obama’s group was also involved with helping to organize protests...

According to Vincent Vernuccio in the Washington Times, it’s over 70 pages and details how "outside pressure can involve jeopardizing relationships between the employer and lenders, investors, stockholders, customers, clients, patients, tenants, politicians, or others on whom the employer depends for funds." "It" is a new intimidation manual uncovered during a lawsuit against the SEIU*, one of the nation’s largest unions. In it, Vernuccio says, the SEIU’s dirty tactics are explained, including bullying employers by targeting them economically and advocating for breaking the law.

GREEN BAY - With a publication in the Wisconsin State Journal, the state's collective bargaining law is set to take effect on Wednesday. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Governor Scott Walker says he should have done more to prepare the public for eliminating most collective bargaining for most state employees. He admits he was just focused on completing the legislation. Walker says his office "had not built enough of the case." He goes on to say what he "should have done, from a political standpoint, was build that case sooner." “The proposals he has been making have...

[Madison] - The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a verified complaint with the Government Accountability Board today against Shelly Moore for knowingly violating state law by using taxpayer funded resources for political activity. Moore, a public school teacher and WEAC union leader, is challenging incumbent candidate Sheila Harsdorf in the 10th senate district recall election. Several overtly political emails were turned over to the Republican Party of Wisconsin following an open records request into Moore’s official Ellsworth School District email account. Moore explicitly states in one exchange: “We’re not supposed to use school email, but since all of our rights...

MINNEAPOLIS — To the liberal activists gathered for the annual Netroots Nation conference, Wisconsin is the center of the political universe. Several panels on the first day of the annual progressive gathering focused on what’s happening in neighboring Wisconsin: lessons from the push by Gov. Scott Walker to curtail collective bargaining, the takeaways from the failure to unseat a conservative state Supreme Court justice and the upcoming recall elections. The Republican wave that gave the GOP control of the House and state capitols around the country has galvanized thousands of activists. “Wisconsin is Ground Zero right now,” said Adam Green,...

Really ugly.

With lawmakers gearing up for a vote on the state budget, a “Walkerville” camp similar to the one that sprang up during the protests at the state Capitol earlier this year may be returning this weekend — this time to the terraces of Mifflin and Carroll streets. We Are Wisconsin, an alliance of community groups, labor unions and others, has asked the city for a permit to set up the camp across from the Capitol to provide information about Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposals and efforts to recall Republican legislators who voted to eliminate bargaining rights for most public employees.

Unionized phone company employees say they were beaten or threatened after they accused their labor bosses of looting their coffers through various scams. One member of Communications Workers of America Local 1101 said that after he reported a time-sheet padding scheme, a thug beat him so badly his spine was injured. * * * "This was union greed and that's worse than corporate greed," said Kevin Condy, a reform movement leader of the 6,700-member local that represents mostly Verizon workers in Manhattan and the Bronx. "These guys acted like they felt they were entitled."

While University of Missouri – Kansas City Professor Judy Ancel has yet to explain her false and misleading defense of classroom statements suggesting violence is an acceptable tactic with an appropriate place in advancing the labor movement, new video reveals Ancel giving students insight into how to put non-union companies out of business. The tactic Ancel recommends to students is based upon deception and designed to burden a non-union company with a costly labor action under false pretenses.

States are $1.26 trillion in the hole when it comes to their pension and retiree health obligations, according to a report released Tuesday. And taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for this shortfall, which soared 26% in one year. The Great Recession has wreaked havoc on states' pension and retiree health systems, the Pew Center on the States found. The report covers fiscal year 2009, which began July 1, 2008 in most states. States are largely responsible for this predicament. As tax revenues plummeted, many skipped part or all of their annual retiree benefits contributions as they struggled to...