Free Republic

More than 1,000 people are deported every day. It is predicted that in April, the Obama administration will have deported 2 million people during its tenure. Amid congressional inaction, President Barack Obama and his administration need to hear from working families that we can't wait any longer for action. The president can take concrete, bold and necessary actions today to stop senseless deportations that tear families apart from each other. Today, groups are holding events across the country to say: 2Million2Many! Not One More Deportation!Find a #2Million2Many April 5 event near you. If you take pictures and share on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, don't...

A powerful labor union backed a Democratic candidate in a special election last year but never disclosed the amount of money it spent on the effort. The AFL-CIO backed Elizabeth Coppola, a Democrat, in the Assembly District 21 special election last November. Running phone banks out of their office and offering the services of a political coordinator, the union campaigned for Coppola’s election. But not once did the AFL-CIO disclose its political spending backing Coppola. Nor did the Coppola campaign report any AFL-CIO spending as an in-kind campaign contribution. State campaign finance regulations require labor unions and other groups to...

A group of five U.S. senators have joined the growing chorus of influential voices, telling the Kellogg Co. to end its nearly five-month lockout of more than 220 workers at its Memphis, Tenn., cereal production facility.The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 252G members who make Frosted Flakes®, Froot Loops® and other breakfast favorites were locked out as part of the drive by the company to replace steady, middle-class, full-time jobs with casual part-time employees who would make significantly lower wages and substandard benefits.In a letter to Kellogg’s CEO John Bryant, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Robert Casey Jr....

When the UAW failed miserably in Chattanooga and was not able to unionize the Volkswagen plant, even with a staked deck, it started a chain reaction and the next domino has fallen. The news that the AFL-CIO has decided to keep its money and not even try to save three Southern Democrat Senators comes as no real shock. The powerful union reviewed the polls and the political climate in North Carolina, Louisiana and Arkansas and decided backing the Democrats in these states would be throwing good money after bad. The decision left Democrat Senators Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Mary Landrieu...

HOUSTON, TX – The nation’s leading labor union will plan to spend $300 million in 2014 trying to unseat Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and four other Republican Governors. More: AFL-CIO to Target Walker, Other Governors People’s World reported that the AFL-CIO announced on Thursday morning during a press conference in Houston that they would spend money trying to unseat Governor Walker. Other Governors that the labor organization is targeting are John Kasich (R-Ohio), Tom Corbett (R-Pennsylvania), Rick Snyder (R-Michigan), and Rick Scott (R-Florida). The American Federation of Teachers backed the AFL-CIO’s plan. President Randi Weingarten said: “In many ways it...

After unprecedented interference from politicians and out-of-state extremists like Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers, workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn., plant voted 712–626 against representation by the UAW that would have led to the establishment of a works council, the first such model of labor-management relations in the United States.AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the workers stood up to “enormous odds to try to form their own union and to create an historic new model of workplace governance.” He adds:Unconscionably, what should have been a local workplace decision by workers and management was turned into an experiment in new forms...

The nation’s leading environmental groups are digging their heels in the sand by rejecting President Obama’s “all-of-the above” domestic energy strategy—which calls for pursuing renewable energy sources like wind and solar, but simultaneously expanding oil and gas production. But it appears the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, won’t be taking environmentalists’ side in this fight, despite moves toward labor-environmentalist cooperation in recent years. On a recent conference call with reporters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed two initiatives reviled by green groups: the Keystone XL pipeline and new natural gas export terminals. “There’s no environmental reason that [the pipeline] can’t...

Congress has itself to blame for its low ratings among the American people. Policymaking is all about choices; it is the calculus of weighing costs and benefits and the distribution of those costs and benefits. In theory, there are lots of policies that can make everyone better off, but they can only be accomplished by redistributing the gains of the policy.

The National Labor College, an education venture for working adults supported by the AFL-CIO, will close next year because of financial difficulties school officials attribute in part to the construction of a conference center several years ago on the Silver Spring campus. The college, with 599 online students this fall, announced Wednesday that its board of trustees voted this week to accept a closure plan. Word of the impending shutdown had been circulating since at least mid-November. “We’re all very, very sad,” said Paula E. Peinovich, the college’s president. The college will offer courses through the spring semester and have...

Backers of the movement for higher pay point to studies saying that the average age of fast-food workers is 29 and that more than one-fourth are parents raising children. Simon Rojas, who earns $8.07 an hour working at a McDonald’s in South Central Los Angeles, said he would join Thursday’s one-day strike. “It’s very difficult to live off $8.07 an hour,” said Mr. Rojas, 23, noting that he is often assigned just 20 or 25 hours of work a week. “I have to live with my parents. I would like to be able to afford a car and an apartment.”...

The Obama administration has found a way to give unions relief from an Obamacare tax nearly three weeks after Republicans rejected a Democratic push to include the labor carve-out in the latest budget deal.The Department of Health and Human Services quietly released a final rule last week that includes an intention to exempt some union insurance plans from a substantial new tax known as the reinsurance fee.As part of Obamacare, the tax was supposed to be levied against all insurance plans to share the risk for insurers taking on the sickest patients next year.But unions, which were among the strongest...

In a shot across the bow of political moderates, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka threatened Monday to use Big Labor's resources to unseat any Democrat who supports entitlement reform. Trumka made the comments in a speech at the annual meeting International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans in Las Vegas. He was reacting to reports that lawmakers may pursue some type of restraint in the ever-rising costs of programs like Social Security and Medicare. "Let me just say this one for the record. No politician — I don’t care the political party — will get away with cutting Social Security, Medicare or...

In prepared remarks given in advance to the Huffington Post, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warns Democrats against accepting any budget deal that includes cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, and even goes so far as to threaten to end the career of any politician who fails to heed his call. “No politician … I don’t care the political party … will get away with cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. Don’t try it,” Trumka says, according to the Huffington Post. “This warning goes double for Democrats,” he continues. “We will never forget. We will never forgive. And we...

A looming federal government shutdown is slated to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released the following statement on the House Republicans' hostage taking: As of today, it is clear that the Republican Party and the Tea Party have become one and the same when it comes to federal fiscal policy. House Republicans have decided that they will shut down critical public services, stiff public servants, hold America’s credit rating hostage and kill off jobs because they are upset that President Obama decisively defeated Mitt Romney last November. That some Republicans are participating in this fiasco...

In six weeks there will be a little-followed election that could help determine the path for education reform in the United States for a long time to come. At issue is whether a local school board has the authority to tell the government employee union—you know, the forces of darkness that are preventing commonsense education reform in our schools? -- to take a hike. In July 2012, that’s exactly what Douglas County, Colorado school board decided. After months of negotiations the school board reached an impasse with the union as their contract expired. Previously the union has demanded that the...

The AFL-CIO has demonstrated again its penchant for forcing its members to support social causes...This time ...sex-change surgery and therapy. As The Washington Times notes, last week’s vote could result in mandated employee insurance coverage for such things as hormone therapy and sex-change surgery. ...creates a dilemma for the majority of the union's members, forcing them "to endorse a delusion." “Nobody is advocating that people who suffer from gender confusion be discriminated against ...but ...people who recognize biological reality should not be compelled to entertain an irrefutable biological delusion.” “Even Johns-Hopkins University, which was kind of at the forefront of...

With immigration legislation stalled in Congress, advocates are intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to act unilaterally to stop deportations or grant legal status to some of the 11 million people now living in the U.S. illegally. Activists are stepping up acts of civil disobedience like one last month in Phoenix, where they blocked a bus full of immigrant detainees. And labor leaders plan to press the issue with a top White House official in an upcoming meeting. … “If Congress doesn’t move, the president has a duty to act,” said Ana Avendano, director of immigration and community action at...

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says he hopes the White House will act within a week to address the growing concerns that labor unions have over the new health care law. … Unions want members to be eligible for the same federal subsidies available to low-income workers in the new health exchanges. …

The AFL-CIO needs to stick with representing workers and stop trying to take on social causes for the far left, said the union head for the International Association of Fire Fighters. Harold Schaitberger, who presides over the IAFF, said there is “great value” in aligning with political groups — but only as a secondary mission, he told The Hill. And the AFL-CIO’s recent push to bring in environmental groups and progressive-minded organizations to the union cause is leading the IAFF to express concerns about politics becoming the priority, over the representation of members. “To say that we are going to...

labor’s renewed anger over Mr. Obama’s health care law and decisions surrounding it, especially the postponement of an employer mandate to ensure coverage for workers and the potential effects of the coming health insurance exchanges on existing plans. “If the Affordable Care Act is not fixed and it destroys the health and welfare funds that we have fought for and stand for, then I believe it needs to be repealed,” said Terence M. O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “We don’t want it to be repealed. We want it to be fixed, fixed, fixed. “We’ve had...