Free Republic

Labor union trusts that provide a variety of benefits for workers must disclose detailed financial information under new federal rules designed to root out corruption, officials said Monday. In announcing the requirement, the U.S. Labor Department cited several cases in recent years of union officers stealing from trusts established for retirement funds, job training and disaster relief. It was not immediately clear how the rules might apply to a Service Employees International Union local in Los Angeles, whose spending practices are the subject of a criminal investigation. The United Long-Term Care Workers has a related health trust and worker-training charity...

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- You just knew that when Joe O'Connell, former head of the local AFL-CIO, got on stage here with John McCain and Sarah Palin things were not going smoothly for the Obama campaign among union voters. "I am a lifelong Democrat, an intelligent Democrat, who is supporting John McCain," O'Connell said last week as a crowd of 7,000 waved "Another Democrat for John McCain" signs and roared its approval. O'Connell assured the energized crowd that "organized labor will have a seat at the table when John McCain becomes president." It's the kind of statement that Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President...

A growing financial scandal in the 2-million-member Service Employees International Union has prompted a federal criminal investigation into the labor organization's largest California local, sources familiar with the probe say. U.S. Labor Department authorities are examining payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars by the union and a related charity to firms owned by relatives of the Los Angeles local's president and expenditures of similar sums on a golf tournament, restaurants, a cigar lounge and entertainment companies, according to people with knowledge of the investigation. The investigators are also looking into allegations that some union staff members faced retaliation last...

I recently said that America "would become France" if a certain bill now in Congress -- which would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized -- ever became law. Deceptively named the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would in most cases take away an employee's right to a secret ballot in a union election and give unions the option to have federal arbitrators set the wages, benefits, hours and all other terms and conditions of employment. Countries other than France have suffered the consequences of bad labor laws. When I was CEO of Handy Dan, the precursor to Home...

Even as the economy slumps and unemployment rises, strong demand for power plants, oil refineries and export goods has many manufacturers and construction contractors scrambling to find enough skilled workers to plug current and future holes. With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure out how to attract more young people to those fields. Their challenge: overcoming the perception that blue-collar trades offer less status, money and chance for advancement than white-collar jobs, and that college...

The federal minimum wage rose by 70 cents yesterday to $6.55 per hour, and left-wing advocates are celebrating the increase as a boon for the so-called working poor. Not to be party poopers, but the reality is that most poor people in the U.S. already earn more than the minimum wage, and most workers who do earn the minimum wage aren't poor. The wage hike is the second of three annual increases mandated by a 2007 law. Next year the federal wage floor will rise to $7.25. This year's increase will touch some 1.5 million workers, in a workforce numbering...

Border Security Blues by: Ben Giles, July 09, 2008 According to the 2007 census, the United States experienced net immigration of 1.25 million persons. Illegal or legal, Mark Krikorian fears the effects drastic immigration rates are having, both on legal citizens and the immigrants themselves. “The implicit assumption is that very high levels of legal immigration would be okay,” said Krikorian. “That illegality is the problem. The answer to that is no.” “High levels of immigration are incompatible with [the] goals and characteristics of modern society.” At an American Enterprise Institute panel for his new book, The New Case Against...

Over at The Nation's political blog, John Nichols reports on efforts by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka to get steelworkers and other union members to throw their support behind a black presidential candidate: Trumka knew that the steelworkers had backed John Edwards for this year's Democratic presidential nomination -- and that the union had only endorsed Obama when Edwards finally came around. He understood that a part of his job was to get a union that is especially strong in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania excited about a candidate who must win those states. Trumka knew, as well, that...

The nation's largest immigration law firm is under federal scrutiny over whether it helped major U.S. corporations disqualify American job applicants and give thousands of high-paying positions to immigrants. The unprecedented Labor Department inquiry centers on Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy -- a New York firm at the forefront of a political effort to ease hiring of skilled foreign workers. The Labor Department is auditing all pending applications for legal immigrant workers the firm has filed on behalf of its corporate clients. Fragomen's prestigious client roster includes General Electric Co., IBM Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Bank...

The Denver Post ran a column by Al Lewis that questioned the need to enact a Right to Work law in Colorado and the reaction has been visceral. Dozens of citizens have taken it upon themselves to teach Mr. Lewis a thing or two about the unfairness of forced unionism. A sample of the reaction: * . . . I am 72 years old and had been in the work force for 50 years prior to my employment with the City of Boulder and this is the FIRST time that I have ever been in a union. $10.00 a month...

iGate isn't only 'villain' hiring foreign high-tech workers By Mark Houser TRIBUNE-REVIEW A local high-tech company has put a Pittsburgh face on a national debate about hiring foreign workers. Computer consulting firm iGate Corp. of Findlay paid the Justice Department $45,000 in April to settle charges it discriminated against U.S. workers by posting online job ads seeking foreigners with special visas. The fine for favoring holders of H-1B visas, which go primarily to computer and engineering specialists, is the highest yet, said Justice Department spokeswoman Jamie Hais. Critics say cases such as iGate's are not the only problem with the...

Honduran president Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales and representatives from El Salvador and Guatemala met with California farmers Saturday to hash out a plan that will train laborers from those countries to work in the Western U.S. The plan is set to start with about 300 workers from Mexico and Central America. It will operate under existing U.S. guest worker laws and take at least a year to implement, said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League, a group that represents hundreds of agriculture businesses in California, Washington, Oregon and Arizona. Growers plan to work with Latin American countries...

Due mainly to a slump in the construction industry, the unemployment rate for Hispanics in the U.S. rose to 6.5% in the first quarter of 2008, well above the 4.7% rate for all non-Hispanics. As recently as the end of 2006, the gap between those two rates had shrunk to an historic low of 0.5 percentage points--4.9% for Latinos compared with 4.4% for non-Latinos, on a seasonally adjusted basis. The spike in Hispanic unemployment has hit immigrants especially hard. Their unemployment rate was 7.5% in the first quarter of this year,2 marking the first time since 2003 that a higher...

“Whaddaya gotta do to get fired in this town?” It’s a great question, asked by a co-worker of mine (emphasis on “worker”) shaking his head over the latest Department of Public Works story in the Herald. This time it was five city workers hanging out at the Northern Avenue Bridge, watching satellite TV and throwing steaks on the hibachi. After opening the swing bridge once a day, they’ve got nothing to do, all day to do it and the taxpayer’s dime to do it on. My buddy, like every taxpayer reading that Herald story, knows that despite the obvious waste...

Few arenas can match the business office for its combination of humdrummery and world-shaping influence. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, “Whatever history they have had is a history without events.” The history of office technology seems especially uninspiring: the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, calculators, and spreadsheets are unlikely material for a captivating History Channel feature, to be sure. Yet the importance of the business office and its techniques is undeniable. Max Weber saw the office’s methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering...

Following consultations late Tuesday night, Defense Minister Ehud Barak is seriously considering presenting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with an ultimatum on Wednesday: Either the premier resign, or Barak will pull Labor out of the coalition, thus forcing new elections. Channel 1 first reported on the matter late on Tuesday, saying that Barak made his decision after consulting with advisers at his house. However, the Labor chairman issued a statement soon after which denied that such consultations took place at his home, and that only after holding a meeting with Labor ministers and MKs early Wednesday morning would he actually make...

CREWE, England: Voters in this old railway town in Britain's industrial Midlands sent a powerful message to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the governing Labor Party on Thursday, electing a Conservative candidate by a wide margin in a parliamentary constituency that had been a Labor bastion for decades. Overturning a Labor majority that had been more than 7,000 votes at the general election in 2005, the Conservative candidate, Edward Timpson, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Labor candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody. In the results of the by-election, which were announced in the early hours of Friday, the Conservative majority over Labor...

Peter Scheer, who heads the California First Amendment Coalition, has a novel idea: End the secrecy surrounding local government labor contract negotiations. You can understand the logic and the urgency behind his idea when you consider the situation in Vallejo. That city is filing for bankruptcy. Why? Local officials approved salary and benefits costs for current employees and retirees that are more than the city can afford. Scheer's point is that California law allows local government officials "to avoid public discussion of the true cost and fiscal impact of the pay deals that they have approved." By the time the...

Sagging pickup truck and sport utility vehicle sales have forced General Motors Corp. to shut down one shift each at four North American factories and lay off about 3,500 workers. The world's largest automaker by sales said Monday that the cuts, to take effect starting this summer, were brought on by weak demand due to high gasoline prices and an economic downturn. The cuts will affect pickup factories in Pontiac and Flint, Mich., and Oshawa, Ontario, as well as the full-size SUV plant in Janesville, Wis. The layoffs represent just over 4 percent of GM's hourly manufacturing work force of...

The unions representing Oswego County employees supports the proposed weapons ban that would prohibit bringing firearms into county buildings. Legislature Chairman Barry Leemann said Tuesday that he had recently met with the representatives and that they are in support of some kind of ban on weapons. The legislature’s Government and Strategic Planning Committee is expected to address the matter at Monday’s meeting. The proposed ban has been the most controversial issue legislators have faced this year. At the April 10 meeting of the full legislature, several residents spoke in opposition of the plan that would have banned guns, jackknives, and...

The United Farm Workers union has signed an agreement with a Mexican state to help recruit guest workers to labor on U.S. farms legally – and under union contract. "If this is something that's going to be utilized more in the future, then we've got to get in on it," UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said of the H-2A guest worker program. "We're looking for enlightened employers who are willing to sit down and do this with us." The agreement was signed in early April in the western state of Michoacan, which has a long history of migration to California and...

Production of General Motors Corp.'s popular crossover sports utility vehicles ground to a stop Thursday after workers at one of the automaker's Michigan factories went on strike. GM is already suffering from the loss of pickup and truck-based sports utility vehicle production because of a nearly two-month long strike at a key supplier, former subsidiary American Axle and Manufacturing Holding Inc. Thursday's strike by workers at GM's Delta Township plant was the latest salvo in a spreading battle between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors and its suppliers. "It's just crazy," one GM official who did not want...

Charlton Heston played one of his most effective cameo roles in Idaho - and it wasn't in a film. Heston...was a critical figure in Idaho's Right to Work law, approved by voters in 1986 after the most expensive ballot-measure campaign in state history. Heston's TV ad in support of (the) law...ran for five months. "It really did get people's attention," said Lorna Auld, co-chairwoman of the campaign. "His voice was so memorable and for him to stand there like Moses and say, 'This is what I believe,' was good for us and good for Idaho." ...Gary Glenn, who ran the...

Charlton Heston in a TV ad supporting voter approval of a state Right to Work law on Idaho's 1986 general election ballot: "I've played men like Tom Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, all of them heroes defending American freedom. There are Americans still carrying on that fight in Idaho, where citizens want the Right to Work without being forced to join a union. Now, as a former union president, I believe Americans should be free to choose. We're all watching, Idaho. Strike a blow for freedom. Vote YES on Referendum One."

A fight between NFL owners and players was simmering already, but it flared into the open not long ago when the federal judge who has presided over 15 years of labor peace invited union officials into his private chambers for coffee and conversation and left NFL owners and their lawyers waiting in the courtroom. It happened 30 minutes before the judge, David Doty of Minneapolis, began a hearing on Nov. 30 to determine whether to allow disgraced NFL quarterback Michael Vick to keep his bonuses. In papers filed in court after Doty ruled in Vick's favor, the NFL and its...

Striding onto a Seattle-area work site with a white hard hat, Jimmy Matta converses in Spanish with Latino laborers who carry paintbrushes, power drills or spackling tools. How much are you getting paid? How many hours are you working? Matta gives them his business card, promises his help and drives off to the next site. A decade of organizing Latino construction workers is paying off for Matta, 32, who recently became the first Latino organizing director of the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters. Born in Idaho to illegal migrant farmworkers, Matta spent much of his early childhood in the...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Monday decried anti-immigrant perceptions in the United States and argued that Mexican immigrants complement American workers. On his first trip to the U.S. as Mexico's president, Calderon said he is working to combat anti-Americanism in Mexico and to improve job prospects there to reduce migration. He said he hopes that Americans resist anti-Mexican sentiments. "The worst thing that happened in this country is this anti-Mexican or anti-immigrant perception of people. We need to contain this," Calderon said after a speech at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "I need to change...

Decision in Valley Park, Missouri, Case will have Far-Reaching Consequences Predicts the Immigration Reform Law Institute WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In an unambiguous 57-page decision handed down on January 31, U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber ruled that local governments have a right to take action against illegal immigration by suspending or denying business licenses to employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Judge Webber granted the City of Valley Park, Missouris, request for summary judgment in dismissing a case seeking to prevent the city from implementing local ordinances meant to crack down on businesses that employ illegal aliens. His...

Farmer to call 'guest workers' By RAELYNN RICARTE News staff writer January 30, 2008 Fifty-three percent of agricultural workers that recently responded to a confidential federal survey admitted to being in the U.S. illegally — but officials believe the true number is about 30 points higher. Pine Grove orchardist Gary Willis took a look at the new statistic and began to worry about a major picker shortage during the 2008 harvest season. He based that concern on new immigration enforcement measures that, tied to the high rate of illegal aliens, could keep the majority of workers in Mexico. “If we...

Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen let loose with a rant on the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement last week. It didn’t get a lot of attention nationally, but it raised eyebrows in league circles. Bowlen admitted in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News that every team in the league, even his large-market club, is feeling the sting of the labor agreement that was signed before the 2006 season. “Cash is an issue in the National Football League,” Bowlen told the paper. “I think it’s pretty common knowledge our last labor agreement is not our smartest move, and that we’re way beyond, and I’m...

Ferdinand Piëch, the former head of Volkswagen who is known as the patriarch of the German motor industry, denied knowledge yesterday of a company slush fund to pay for prostitutes and mistresses of company workers, in a trial that has called into question the national system of labour relations. Mr Piëch, who is at the heart of Porsche’s current takeover of Volkswagen, said that no one had reported to him the tales of sex and sleaze haunting Europe’s largest car manufacturer. The 70-year-old entrepreneur was testifying at the trial of two senior employees accused of defrauding the German company. The...

I just excerpted the portion on BLS statistics: "For many months now, there had been plenty of warning that recession was lurking out there in the tall grass. ...economy was tanking, led by manufacturing, which was supposed be enjoying a boomlet thanks to the debased dollar and demand from abroad, and retailing, which presumably could always count, in fair weather or foul, on consumers to consume. Alas, it ain't necessarily so. Came Friday and with it the crusher in the form of an exceptionally ugly report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on jobs -- or more precisely, the lack...

NEW YORK - Advantage, David Letterman. Five of television's late-night funnymen return to the air Wednesday after two months, and while Letterman has his writing staff back, Jay Leno doesn't. NBC's Leno and Conan O'Brien and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel all said they were coming back reluctantly with the writers strike still on, and will be putting on shows unlike any they've done before. Letterman's production company worked out a separate deal with writers for his CBS "Late Show" and Craig Ferguson's "Late Late Show." Letterman's first-night booking was comic Robin Williams, with Bill Maher and Donald Trump due the next...

EVERY Australian with an internet connection could soon have their web content automatically censored. The restrictions are planned by the Federal Government to give greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites. Under the plan, all internet service providers will have to provide a "clean" feed to households and schools, free of pornography and other "inappropriate" material. Australians who want uncensored access to the web will have to contact their internet service provider and "opt out" of the service. Online civil libertarians yesterday warned the freedom of the internet was at stake, while internet providers were concerned the...

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - A clash between Christmas vacations and the U.S. election calendar has left presidential campaigns in Iowa struggling with a shortage of student volunteers to call voters, distribute pamphlets and drive people to the polls. The first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses are on January 3, the earliest ever, meaning that many students have gone home for the holidays just as candidates seek to ramp up their vote drive in the final days before the crucial contest. That hasn't stopped campaigns, which rely heavily on students' enthusiasm and free labor, from trying to persuade many to drop their holiday...

In what may be the first break in the entertainment writers’ strike, David Letterman is pursuing a deal with the Writers Guild of America that would allow his late-night show on CBS to return to the air in early January with the usual complement of material from his writers, even if the strike is still continuing. Executives from Mr. Letterman’s production company said Saturday that they were hopeful they would have an interim agreement in place with the guild as early as this week. That could potentially put Mr. Letterman at an enormous advantage over most of his late-night colleagues....

LOS ANGELES - Producers of Hollywood's annual self-congratulation rites have more to fear this year than boring, drawn-out acceptance speeches. Picket lines could block the red carpet. Fiery, pro-union talk could spew from the podium. Hosts and presenters could unravel without the benefit of a polished script. Or the most frightening, if unlikely, prospect: Nobody shows up. While awards shows would hardly be the most sympathetic casualty of the writer's strike, now in its sixth week, they'd be perhaps the most visible. Studios depend on the season's buzz to boost box office for specialty films, actors ride recognition into ever-bigger...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - An unfair labor practices complaint filed against Hollywood studios is a bid to force them back to the negotiating table with striking writers, guild leaders said. But a studio alliance responded with disdain to the claim it illegally broke off talks, as alleged in Thursday's filing by the Writers Guild of America with the National Labor Relations Board. The "baseless, desperate NLRB complaint is just the latest indication that the WGA's negotiating strategy has achieved nothing for working writers," the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement. Negotiations in the six-week strike...

Labor union officials enjoy many extraordinary powers and immunities created by legislatures and the courts, including the powers to shake down workers for forced dues payments and even to wage campaigns of violent retaliation against nonunion employees. Sadly, union violence is protected by judicial decree under the federal Hobbs Act. Meanwhile, many states similarly restrict the authority of law enforcement to enforce laws during strikes. As a result, thousands of incidents of violent assaults by union militants have gone unpunished. A prime example today -- the Indianapolis Business Journal (http://cms.ibj.com/ASPXPages/6iframes/FrontEndArticlesDetailPage.aspx?ArticleID=08329&NoFrame=1) chronicled union violence directed at nonunion workers a Hilton construction...

I’ve been in the WGA for nearly 40 years. That means that during the first two decades of my TV writing career, I was on strike just about every three years. But the last time we struck was in 1988. That one lasted almost six months. It hurt the TV networks because they lost viewers they never got back. It hurt writers because most of us aren’t wealthy, and it’s difficult to go that long without earning a living. It even harmed people who aren’t in show business, but whose livelihoods depend on those who are...

Tomorrow night I will dining at a soup kitchen in Hollywood. Well, not exactly a soup kitchen. The venue will, in fact, be Campanile, one of LA's fancier restaurants, located in Charlie Chaplin's old office complex. Under normal circumstances, Campanile is so excruciatingly, don't-even-look-at-the-prices expensive that it charges for olive oil by the ounce. But for striking writers (and those with friends with Writers Guild of America cards), it will be offering a “soup kitchen” special, in the form of an $18 prix fixe menu. Yes, there are some strange upsides to this strangest of strikes, the result of a...

NEW MIGRANT JOBS MADNESSEmployers will break race relations laws if they refuse to consider foreigners for jobs, even if the candidates do not speak English, the Home Office warned yesterday. And any job applicant, including British candidates, will be treated as a potential illegal immigrant and have to prove they have a right to work in the UK. The warnings came as ministers announced that employers who hire illegal immigrants will face £10,000 fines for every unauthorised worker. Critics fear that the penalties will hit small firms and families who employ nannies and do not have the experience to spot...

Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers union reached a tentative agreement on a new contract after more than 40 hours of marathon negotiations over the past two days. The new four-year pact, reached at 3:20 a.m. Saturday, followed the pattern of deals ratified by workers at General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC in that it will allow Ford to offload billions in retiree health-care obligations off its books to a union-run trust fund, known as a voluntary employees' beneficiary association, or VEBA, Ford said. Ford's retiree health-care obligation is believed to be about $23 billion. The VEBA would...

When unions can’t win collective bargaining agreements at home, they look to U.N. agencies abroad. The AFL-CIO has a preferred legal venue—the International Labor Organization (ILO)—when Congress and the courts don’t see it their way...... Organized labor won last November’s electoral lottery. The unions officially spent $105 million and received in return a promise from the new Democratic majority to push labor’s redistributionist economic agenda. They are desperate to convince politicians to give them what they cannot win in the marketplace. The impact on domestic public policy is clear. Already the House approved a minimum wage hike as part of...

Organized Labor has a long history with extortion and the mob. Federal prosecutors have put most of those mob bosses behind bars, but unions haven’t renounced using blackmail to get what they want. They simply use more sophisticated methods to do the same thing. Take the way unions exploit environmental concerns through Project Labor Agreements. Under PLAs, businesses promise to hire only union members — or else. Why would businesses sign such agreements? Because unions threaten to use environmental regulations to shut them down unless they sign the PLA.< >So why the shift toward, well, green blackmail? Because competition is...

All three candidates supported by a powerful public employee union have lost their bids for positions on the board that governs the Public Employee Retirement Association pension fund. And a key union leader is none too happy about it. Carter Bundy, AFSCME political and legislative director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in New Mexico, on Friday blasted a PERA board lobbyist who was publicly critical of the union's high-dollar involvement before the election. "I think what Fabian Chavez did was unethical and inappropriate," Bundy said. Since 2004, when AFSCME spent a total of $52,000 on...

Last month, pundits on all sides of the aisle began hyperventilating when Labor reported a decline in non-farm employment for the first time in four years. The loss of 4,000 jobs signaled an oncoming recession, an end to growth, and disaster for the Republicans in 2008. Combined with the volatility of the bond markets, it seemed that the good times had crashed to an end. Today, however, Labor announced the new numbers for September -- and a little change in August's tallies (emphases mine): Employment rose in September, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 4.7 percent, the Bureau...

Spoof on Sponge Bob living in China: YouTube Link

When private equity firms buy up companies they expect to avoid shareholder pressure campaigns—especially those devised by labor unions. Or so they hope... Mention the names of certain large corporations, and many people start to think bad things. ExxonMobil reaps “windfall profits” as it “gouges” drivers with high gas prices. Wal-Mart “destroys” city downtowns by undercutting” mom-and-pop shops. Sound familiar? That’s precisely how organized labor and their allies want it. These companies have been targets of “corporate campaigns”—public relations onslaughts designed to damage a company’s reputation. When planning corporate campaigns, unions and activist groups research their target and identify its...

I Guess It’s Not Plagiarism for former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to recycle his old columns, but you’d think the Los Angeles Times would be disturbed to know that the Reich op-ed that it published yesterday, October 1, on the charitable tax deduction repeats word-for-word much of what he said in his American Prospect web article last December 20, which repeats what he said on NPR’s “Marketplace” commentary the same day. At least the American Prospect piece acknowledges that it’s a version of the NPR commentary. American Prospect, Dec. 20: “Not long ago, New York City’s Lincoln Center had a...