Free Republic

There’s been a significant policy change at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and it’s one that’s been in the works for a while. In the future, when workers grow dissatisfied with their union at their place of employment, the employer, within ninety days of the end of a contract, will be able to suspend bargaining and announce that the union will be ousted at the end of their current contract. The rights of the workers to unionize will still be recognized, but a new election will need to be held to reestablish the union or bring in a different...

State Rep. Arnold Mooney, R-Indian Springs, announced Monday his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate. Mooney is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Doug Jones. “Alabamians want a Constitutional Conservative who can beat Doug Jones and who will take on the Establishment in Washington. That’s why I’m running,” Mooney said in a statement. Mooney is a State Representative from north Shelby County. “I am not a career politician,” Mooney writes on his website. “I’m a conservative and an outsider. But I look around and see a rising tide of socialism on the Left...

LAS VEGAS — Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris called for the federal ban on so-called "right-to-work" laws in the United States during her Saturday morning remarks at the National Forum on Wages and Working People. "Banning right-to-work laws" would be one of the first initiatives Harris would take up in office, she told the audience of labor members and organizers at The Enclave in Las Vegas, Nevada. Republican governors and legislators throughout the country have been pushing through laws that allow individuals to join a company or firm without being obligated to pay or join a labor union. Some right-to-work laws...

<p>New Mexico is prohibiting local governments from enacting right-to-work ordinances that prevent employees from being required to join a union or pay union fees.</p> <p>Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday signed legislation that asserts the state’s exclusive jurisdiction over union security agreements.</p>

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A circuit judge has struck down key components of West Virginia’s 2016 right-to-work legislation. Kanawha Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey issued the opinion Wednesday, three years after the Legislature first passed the law. “The new law will require unions and union officials to work, to supply their valuable expertise and to provide expensive services for nothing,” Bailey wrote in her 46-page ruling. “That is, in a word, arbitrary.” The overriding issue is whether employees who join a workplace represented by a union have to pay some form of dues, whether they embrace union representation or not. The unions...

According to the latest available U.S. Commerce Department data, the number of Michiganders employed in the auto and auto parts manufacturing industry is about half what it was at the turn of the millennium. United Auto Workers (UAW) union bosses, who for decades have wielded their government-granted monopoly-bargaining power to foist counterproductive work rules and inefficient benefit plans on unionized autoworkers and automakers, bear a large part of the responsibility. Of the roughly 170,000 remaining Michigan auto manufacturing employees, it’s likely that more than 100,000 are subject to UAW officials’ monopoly-bargaining power. In order to keep their jobs, employees must...

As long as I can remember, unions have attacked as “scabs” those willing to accept work for wages and conditions those unions reject, even if it involves crossing union picket lines. In fact, that usage goes back centuries, from English slang for a mean, low, “scurvy” rascal or scoundrel. As Stephanie Smith put it in Household Words: From blemish…to strikebreaker, the history of the word scab…shows a displacement of meaning from the visceral or physical to the moral register…Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor. Those union attacks have included...

Because the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) empowers union bosses to represent workers who don’t want a union, Big Labor apologists contend, it must also empower union bosses to force unwilling workers to pay union dues or fees. Otherwise, the workers who wish to remain union-free will get a so-called “free ride.” Ever since the Right to Work challenge to compulsory union membership, dues and fees emerged during the early 1940’s, this thin broth has been the mainstay argument of union officials and other opponents of voluntary unionism. One simple and obvious response to Big Labor complaints about the purported...

Few people would deny that, as a rule, parents want what is best for their children and keep their children’s needs, including their material needs, in mind when they make important decisions for their families. If this eminently plausible supposition is correct, then there is clear evidence that government-authorized forced unionism makes it more difficult for parents to provide their children with a comfortable standard of living and good prospects for the future. At this time, 22 states have yet to adopt Right to Work laws protecting employees from being forced to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union...

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....

Early last year, Kentucky and Missouri respectively became the 27th and 28th states to adopt Right to Work laws. But what they have experienced since with regard to labor policy is not at all the same. The Bluegrass State Right to Work law took effect in January 2017 and has remained in effect ever since. A union boss-instigated lawsuit to overturn the statute was dismissed this January; union lawyers’ appeal has at this writing yet to be heard by the Kentucky Supreme Court. The Show-Me State Right to Work law, in contrast, has yet to take effect. Union bosses were...

Educators in ActionWorker Rights June 27, 2018 • 10:23AM Supreme Court Ruling in ‘Janus’ Deals Blow to Working Families By John Rosales The collective voice of American workers was undermined today by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in ​Janus v. American Federation of County, State Municipal Employees. In a 5-to-4 decision, which casts aside decades of precedents and laws, the court has eliminated a public-sector union’s ability to collect “fair share” or “agency” fees from workers who choose not to join as union members but are still protected by union agreements. The ruling undermines the ability of educators to come...

Melinda Gates says she will preference women and non-whites over men and white people, specifically for these immutable characteristics that have nothing inherently to do with business success. Melinda Gates has decided to enter the venture capital world by sending her money to people based at least partly on their sex and skin color, she said in a recent Fortune interview. Disparate Outcomes Can Signal Broader Possibilities In the Fortune interview, Gates says “I think real change can occur when the VC community starts to demand that the people it invests in have diversity, the right values, and the right...

A drawn-out dispute over the terms of the PLA — the project labor agreement — covering the construction of a new terminal at the Kansas City International Airport is now threatening to delay the planned demolition of the airport’s current Terminal A this fall and the subsequent construction work scheduled to begin in 2019. On one side of the impasse are Missouri construction union bosses. They are demanding that every single frontline job on the KCI project be unionized, and that all workers be forced to pay union dues or fees in order to participate. This big labor demand is...

Well, this is certainly interesting. A group of Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have filed legislation designed to essentially gut the ability of individual states to pass right-to-work laws and hand back iron-fisted control of the workplace environment to labor unions. The fact that Democrats oppose right-to-work laws is nothing new, nor is the reality that labor unions fund a large part of their election efforts. But do you notice anything that those names I listed have in common? Every one of them has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible 2020 presidential candidate....

The liquidation of labor unions threatens to further weaken the entire system of protection of labor rights in the Russian Federation. On January 10, 2018, by decision of the St. Petersburg City Court, one of the strongest Russian trade unions was liquidated - the Interstate Trade Union Workers Association ( MPRA ). The union was accused of receiving foreign financing with simultaneous participation in political activities. The MPRA appealed the decision of the court and is awaiting further hearings. The judgment on the MPRA is not just a neutralization of the protest mechanisms before the elections. The extension of the...

Organized labor took off the gloves Monday, warning the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court that freeing public employees from mandatory union dues would lead to strikes and union violence. It was ugly. The Court heard oral arguments challenging laws in 22 states and the District of Columbia that force public employees to pay unions to represent them, even if they disagree with the union's demands and politics. Mark Janus, a child support specialist and public employee in Illinois, claims his First Amendment free speech rights are being violated when he is forced to pay money to a union --...

The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in the case of Mark Janus, a child support specialist from Illinois, who is suing AFSCME because he has no interest in financially supporting the union’s political activities. Since Janus is not a member of the union, he doesn’t pay the same amount in dues as union members. But thanks to a Supreme Court decision in 1977, he is forced to pay the union “agency fees,” feeding the coffers of an organization he wants nothing to do with. The high court will determine whether these agency fees are unconstitutional. Since freedom of association is...

Canadian negotiators are demanding the United States roll back so-called "right to work" laws – accused of gutting unions in some U.S. states by starving them of money – as part of the renegotiation of the North American free-trade agreement. The request is part of a push by Ottawa to get the U.S. and Mexico to adopt higher labour standards under the deal

One group of negotiators spent all day Sunday working on the labour file, according to a schedule of the talks obtained by The Globe and Mail. One source familiar with the discussions said Canada wants the United States to pass a federal law stopping state governments from enacting right-to-work legislation; the source said the United States has not agreed to such a request. Canada believes that lower labour standards in the United States and Mexico, including right to work, give those countries an unfair advantage in attracting jobs.