Free Republic

We have had Live Threads here at Freerepublic for the count for the last three Australian Federal elections - in 2004 which ended in conservative victory, then again in 2007 which ended in defeat for the conservatives and a Labor government, and then again in 2010 which gave us a hung Parliament, where Labor continued governing with the support of the Greens and independents. This is the live thread for 2013 - polls close and the count begins in about 10 minutes. Polls and exit polls indicate a victory for the conservative coalition under Tony Abbott is highly likely. A...

Is the debate about giving citizenships to millions of illegal immigrants becoming irrelevant as technology begins to replace the need for today’s human labor required in planting and picking field crops?

"De Soto, Holder of Twenty-nine World Records, builds a new aero-dynamic car at popular prices ... This year De Soto does the unexpected again ... introduces not one new car ... but two! ... We can't describe the new Airflow model. You will have to see it yourself to know how truly beautiful it is." Go to a public library or a used-books-and-periodicals store sometime, select at random an American magazine from decades ago, flip through the pages at your leisure. What may strike you is not the now-forgotten news stories, but the energy and effort expended, the enthusiasm displayed,...

Unions are frustrated the Obama administration hasn’t responded to their calls for changes to ObamaCare. Labor has watched with growing annoyance as the White House has backed ObamaCare changes in response to concerns from business groups, religious organizations and even lawmakers and their staffs. They say they don’t understand why their concerns so far have fallen of deaf ears. “We are disappointed that the non-profit health plans offered by unions have not been given the same consideration as the Catholic Church, big business and Capitol Hill staffers,” Unite Here President D. Taylor told The Hill. It's an issue that Obama...

Today, America celebrates the 100 anniversary of the first federal Labor Day holiday. In honor of the day, and in honor of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, Richard Trumka takes the opportunity to address the workers of America: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for solidarity in the history of our nation.  Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beckoning light of hope...

LABOR won power in 2007 on a Ruddslide, but looks like losing power in 2013 in a Ruddbath. The popularity of Kevin Rudd, which won Labor a swathe of seats in Queensland, is turning into voter retribution that has the ALP facing a worse result on Saturday than Paul Keating's loss to John Howard in 1996. The "unelectable" Tony Abbott is now preferred prime minister, and the great campaigning "comeback kid" Prime Minister is more unpopular than he ever has been. With a primary vote of just 33 per cent in the last week of the election campaign, the legitimate...

America's Truck Driver ShortageBy Kate O'ConnellThe Innovation Trail's Kate O'Connell talks to truckers, industry reps, and analysts about America's trucker shortage. America’s trucking industry’s been experiencing a chronic shortage of drivers for at least 20 years. Conservative estimates put the number of vacancies upward of 20,000, and some say it goes into the hundreds of thousands. But, there are mixed views on the causes and solutions for this challenge to the industry. Kevin Dugan has a college degree in heating and air conditioning, but after graduating he had a similar experience to many young grads. Employers were reluctant to...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Should the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) compel employers to provide union organizers with the phone numbers and email addresses of employees they want to solicit for votes for a union?...

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—Will today's 20- and 30-somethings continue to be required to join a union or pay union dues to a union to represent them even if they do not want to join? Well, not if some people get their way. There is a movement called Right-to-Work (RTW) that wants to change this. Indeed, some...

This sort of thing ought to be left to the Westboro Baptist Church. The Washington Free Beacon reports that a Chicago judge has intervened on behalf of SCI Illinois Services, Inc., a national funeral-home chain, and ordered the local Teamsters chapter to suspend picketing at 16 funeral homes in the area. What prompted the legal action? The company testified in its filing that union members blocked grieving family members from leaving its parking lot, used bullhorns to shout obscenities at workers and mourners, and unleashed a German Shepard on a dead woman’s daughter and husband. The funeral home was eventually...

Roughly 200 so-called "worker centers" across the country are representing employees who work in everything from the fast-food industry to the taxi business. But some key Republican lawmakers are asking if those centers are actually acting more like labor unions. The concern is that the rise of these groups has become a way around the rules that govern bona-fide unions -- like requirements to submit financial filings to the feds every year. House education committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., and Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., sent a letter this week to newly confirmed Labor Secretary Thomas Perez requesting that he clarify...

The Labor Department is sponsoring a "Smart Phone App contest" to allow customers to report businesses that do not treat "their workers fairly and lawfully." No word on whether a company has to be unionized in order to treat its workers "fairly and lawfully," in the eyes of the Labor Dept.

As the Department of Labor (DOL) celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act this year, the department is sponsoring a Smartphone app contest to help consumers identify businesses who treat "their workers fairly and lawfully." The DOL requests [emphasis added] that contestants: develop a smartphone application that will transform the way the public is able to use departmental enforcement data. By providing consumers with information at their fingertips about which businesses have treated their workers fairly and lawfully, the creator of this application will help empower consumers to make informed choices about where to bring their business....

Imagine you’ve finished a long, trying day at work. You’ve picked up your two toddlers from childcare, and stop at your local Walmart store on the way home to pick up some groceries. After successfully managing your shopping cart and two squirming little ones you finally reach the checkout aisle, sighing with relief as you realize that your day is almost done. But once there, you find that Big Labor protesters, most of whom don’t even work at Walmart, have taken over the store. They are chanting loudly and yelling directly at cashiers because they are not currently union members...

MADISON – While labor unions grouse about public sector pay, a state government job is a good gig if you can get it, according to the latest income data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Wisconsin, state employees earned on average $53,552 in 2012, nearly $12,000 more than their fellow workers in the private sector, based on BLS data tracked by Stateline, the news service of The Pew Charitable Trusts. The salary data was drawn from BLS’ Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages, through the fourth quarter of 2012. While Wisconsin state employees are coming off a two-year...

(Reuters) - Supporters of a U.S. immigration reform bill are launching a push for the legislation this week that includes phone calls to lawmakers from Catholic bishops, visits to Capitol Hill from high-tech lobbyists and an ad blitz sponsored by organized labor. The lobbying frenzy is aimed at overcoming resistance among many Republicans in the House of Representatives to the biggest overhaul of U.S. immigration laws in nearly 30 years. Immigration reform, President Barack Obama's top domestic priority, passed the Democratic-led Senate with bipartisan support but its prospects in the Republican-led House are bleak. While House votes could still be...

John Schoch has no regrets about dumping the five-day workweek in exchange for three 12-hour shifts, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and getting the equivalent of 40 hours of pay. Schoch, an employee of Milwaukee-based Oldenburg Group, spent 40 years on rotating shifts — days, afternoons, nights — at a paper mill before he found his sweet spot of working 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. That gives him four days off a week to go fishing, ride his motorcycle or tinker in the 20-by-58-foot garage he made from an old church building. "I can't find any downside to it,...

Cablevision has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) about complaints involving 22 former workers that were allegedly wrongfully terminated. This battle between the media giant and the Communications Workers of America is hardly new information as they have been fighting for the past year, but this most recent move is telling specifically because of what it implies about the authority of the NLRB. A different case, National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, a court is considering the idea that the NLRB’s members, or at least 3 of them,...

KEVIN Rudd has been sworn in as the nation's 28th Prime Minister, alongside Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and new Treasurer Chris Bowen. Governor-General Quentin Bryce confirmed the Labor caucus' decision last night to reinstall Mr Rudd in the post it removed him from just over three years ago. Mr Rudd’s wife Therese Rein, daughter Jessica and granddaughter Josephine were at Government House for the ceremony. Mr Albanese’s wife, former NSW deputy premier Carmel Tebutt, accompanied her husband. Mr Rudd will make a statement to parliament at noon, asserting his authority as Prime Minister and challenging Tony Abbott to bring...

JULIA Gillard has called for a Labor leadership ballot to be held at 7pm tonight. ''Anyone who believes they should be Labor leader should put themselves forward for this ballot,'' the Prime Minister said. She said anyone who entered the ballot should commit, in the interests of the party, to resigning from parliament if they lost. The move forces the Rudd camp to bring forward their preferred timetable for a challenge. They had hoped to engineer a special caucus meeting tomorrow and a challenge on Friday. “I am asking my political party to endorse me as a leader and Prime...