Free Republic

Democrats like to argue that Republicans have attained power through the undemocratic quirks of our system (meaning constitutonal republican features like the electoral college), gerrymandering, and worse‚—racism, misogyny, nefarious Koch brothers plots, the talismanic properties of Citizens United, etc. I Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific news story about one very interesting fact of the shifting political landscape over the last 25 years: America’s Factory Towns, Once Solidly Blue, Are Now a GOP Haven By Bob Davis and Dante Chinni WASHINGTON—The Republican Party has become the party of blue-collar America. After the 1992 election, 15 of the...

The recent Supreme Court ruling in Janus vs AFSCME ended a practice of abuse of public sector employees by their unions. The decision prevents unions from forcing the payment of dues by non-members and is a major victory for our civil servants. Now it is time to stop similar corrupt tactics used by unions to force private sector non-union employees to pay dues. Thanks to a hand-out by the Obama National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), unions can collect involuntary dues from former members who recently cancelled membership. In 2013, the NLRB overturned the 1962 Bethlehem Steel decision, which set the...

The National Education Association thinks Colin Kaepernick is an ideal role model. Many members, however, may take their loyalty elsewhere. And frankly, they should. On July 1, the NEA honored Kaepernick, along with several other persons and organizations, with a “Human and Civil Rights” award in recognition of the former pro-football star’s campaign “to fight racial oppression through education and social justice activism.” The born-again political revolutionary, who these last couple years has been peddling the idea that police are conducting a nationwide pogrom against innocent blacks, accepted the honor with predictable melodrama. “To me, this is bigger than football...

The National Right to Work Foundation (NRTWF) is demanding the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) refund up to $100 million in union fees to California state workers. The move follows the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision banning unions from automatically deducting fees from non-members’ paychecks. The NRTWF announced that the Janus decision strengthens its class-action suit, titled Hamidi et al. v. Service Employees Union International, Local 1000, filed on behalf of 40,000 California state employees. The lawsuit seeks refunds for non-union workers whose pay was seized by SEIU officials who have claimed since 2012 that only public workers who...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Janus v. AFSCME case has heartened conservatives throughout the nation, especially in non-right-to-work states such as California that require public employees to pay dues to their respective unions. Janus will, over time, reduce the power of these unions as they are forced to spend more time wooing members — and they will have less disposable cash to control state legislatures and city councils.

AFL‑CIO President Richard Trumka (UMWA) spoke at the Missouri AFL‑CIO’s 29th Biennial Convention yesterday, rallying a packed audience of local union leaders and working Missourians in the fight against Prop. A. He recalled the charge that President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered to Americans in the midst of the Great Depression: “True patriotism urges us to build an even more substantial America where the good things of life may be shared by more of us.” Working people in Missouri are speaking out and mobilizing their neighbors against a corporate-backed attack on our fundamental economic rights. As union leaders gather in St....

Hollywood’s unions are “steadfastly” opposing an amendment to a bill pending in Congress that would slash funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities by 15%. The coalition of 12 unions, representing half a million industry workers and artists, includes SAG-AFTRA, the DGA, IATSE, the American Federation of Musicians, Actors’ Equity and the WGA East. The opposition is being spearheaded by the Department of Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, through which many of the unions are affiliated. Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-WI) offered the amendment to next year’s Interior, Environment and Related Agencies appropriations bill. “The...

Unions evicted from federal offices, denied time to meet with employeesWASHINGTON – The American Federation of Government Employees is obligated under the law to represent all employees covered by our negotiated contracts, but the Social Security Administration is deliberately and illegally restricting the union’s ability to uphold this obligation, AFGE leaders say.“The agency is attempting to wipe all traces of our union from SSA offices and deny workers their legal rights to representation,” AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said.Read President Cox’s Full Statement Here On Monday, July 9, SSA management unilaterally implemented extensive changes to the contract that had...

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ: The United States Supreme Court on June 27 decided that public sector employees can no longer be required to pay mandatory fees to support unions to which they do not wish to belong. This landmark case, Janus v. AFSCME, involved Mark Janus, a child support specialist at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services in Springfield, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a public-sector union. Janus refused to join the union because he opposes many of its positions, including those taken in collective bargaining. Despite his opposition, for...

Trump Plans to Undo Obama Rule Letting Unions Skim Dues From Medicaid Payments The Trump administration is taking steps to prevent labor unions from withholding dues for home healthcare workers from their Medicaid payments, an Obama-era innovation that many observers believe is illegal. On Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed undoing a 2014 rule allowing states to skim public-sector union dues from Medicaid payments to independent home healthcare providers on the theory that those providers are de facto public employees — a privilege that has netted unions anywhere from $71 million (CMS’ estimate) to $200 million...

House Democratic candidates in town this week for training at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington got a visit from AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka for some tips on how they can win back working-class voters. “I don’t have to tell you that you can’t count on the D next to your name to gain our support,” Trumka told Democratic leadership and a room full of candidates on Red to Blue, the DCCC’s program for its strongest candidates. This is the first time the labor leader has spoken to DCCC candidates this cycle, though he has done so in...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The house. Food on the table. Survival. Those are some of the ways workers and retirees who demonstrated in Ohio’s capital Thursday described the pension payments they are fighting to protect. “It’s everything, mostly, because you worked all of them years,” said Duane Ross, 61, of Cadiz, who spent 30 years in the mines. Ross was among thousands of unionized coal miners, iron workers, teamsters, bakers, tobacco workers, millers and others who descended on the Ohio Statehouse to rally ahead of a congressional field hearing in Columbus. They brandished signs saying “Save Our Pensions” and wore...

While organized labor had a friend in former President Barack Obama, who stacked the National Labor Relations Board with career union labor lawyers, unions are now having a harder go at it under the Trump administration. In fact, unions accustomed to be provided free government office space to conduct their business are finding themselves with an option of either paying rent or being kicked to the curb.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is blistering at a proposed regulation that would prevent the union from siphoning fees from American workers’ Medicaid payments. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a proposed rule Tuesday that would require Medicaid payments to go directly to healthcare workers, ending a 2014 Obama-era rule that let third parties, such as unions and insurance companies, skim off a share of the paycheck before the worker saw any of it. The SEIU, one of the largest public-sector unions in the U.S., referred to the proposed rule “as part of the [Trump] administration’s broad,...

The Trump administration announced Tuesday it planned to end what it suggested was an illegal Obama-era rule allowing unions to Federal law generally prohibits states from skimming money from Medicaid payments bound for independent in-home personal care workers. But in 2014, the Obama administration created an exception, saying that states could divert some of that Medicaid money to unions, on the theory that these workers effectively were public-sector employees. Eleven left-leaning states have used that provision to raise more than $200 million a year for unions by taking it from health workers who often didn't even realize it, according to...

Justice is coming for unions that forced non-members to pay "non-political" agency fees that went to prop up Democratic candidates. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that forcing workers who disagree with a union to make these payments anyway violates the workers' First Amendment rights. Less than a week after that ruling, Janus v. Association of Federal, State, City, and Municipal Employees (FSCME), seven California teachers have filed a class-action lawsuit to recoup unjustly forced fees. "This lawsuit will enable teachers like me to recover the agency fees that we were wrongly forced to pay against our will," Scott Wilford,...

A group of Florida local teacher organizations and individual teachers — both members and non-members — joined the Florida Education Association on Monday in suing the state over changes in union certification law that took effect over the weekend. 'We're not feeling defeated. We're feeling angry and we're ready to do something about it. We're tired of being the target of legislators," said Melissa Rudd, Wakulla teacher organization president, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. The Wakulla Classroom Teachers Association is among a handful that faces the threat of not getting half of eligible teachers to join, as the...

Just curious, when I grew up (70’s) I remember one of our neighbors father was a union man. He had bumper stickers all over his vehicles in signs in front of his house to buy American products. What happened to that thought of we should look at American manufacturers before other countries. At that time, it was that everything we were importing was made in Japan. Where is the union out rage about not supporting American companies and buyIng American products?

Organized labor, already reeling from a potentially major financial hit thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last week that could result in millions of public-sector workers cutting off funding, could be subject to another blow from the justices: class-action suits from those workers seeking to get paid back from the unions. In a little-noticed action, the Supreme Court invalidated a ruling last week by the 7th Circuit Court denying class-action certification in a case called Riffey v. Rauner. The case involved nonunion state-subsidized Illinois home healthcare workers seeking to be repaid the funds that for years they were forced to...

There is really no way to parse this:It was a really bad week to be a Democrat. The Left’s outrage meter, which has been in the red zone for quite awhile, has snapped. No surprise, it’s been a rough week to be a Democrat. Sunday: we found out that Sarah Sanders et al were asked to leave a restaurant for the offense of eating while conservative. Monday: Mad Maxie, still smarting from being forced to ramp down from her “Peach foty-fi, peach foty-fi!?” chant, ordered mob-style hits on all Trump regulars, backups and casual fans. Some Dems knew intuitively that...