Free Republic

Wonder bread is back almost a year after it vanished from shelves. Flowers Foods Inc., which bought Wonder from the now-defunct Hostess Brands, said the bread started returning to supermarket shelves Monday. The company, which also makes Tastykake and Nature’s Own bread, snapped up five bread brands after Hostess went out of business late last year. The $355 million deal included Butternut, Home Pride and Merita, which are all returning to shelves along with Wonder. … Flowers said Wonder bread is being made at that company’s existing plants. The 20 Hostess plants the company acquired as part of the deal...

Scranton's police and fire unions have received a judgment against the city for the overdue $21 million that the city owes the unions from a landmark arbitration ruling. The money was due July 2, but the city has not yet paid and is still seeking borrowing or selling an asset to honor the bill, Mayor Chris Doherty said. But the judgment means the unions now can seize city assets and sell them to collect what is owed, said city solicitor Paul Kelly and the unions' attorney, Thomas Jennings. "Whenever a judgment is granted, you can go to the sheriff and...

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. …

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...

Union activists and big labor supporters who were upset that people were gathering in Vancouver, Wash., to talk about worker freedom resorted to violence and intimidation Thursday night, which resulted in a Mackinac Center for Public Policy employee getting spat upon. F. Vincent Vernuccio, labor policy director at the Mackinac Center, was invited by The Freedom Foundation in Washington and the Cascade Policy Institute in Oregon to speak about the benefits of worker freedom. However, he didn't even get out of his car before he was confronted by protesters. A protester with bullhorn disrupts a meeting about the policy implications...

California’s minimum wage would rise to $10 an hour within three years under a bill passed Thursday by the state Legislature, making it one of the highest rates in the nation. Washington state currently has the top minimum wage at $9.19 an hour, an amount that is pegged to rise with inflation. Some cities, including San Francisco, have slightly higher minimum wages. The state Senate approved AB10 on a 26-11 vote and the Assembly followed hours later on a 51-25 vote, both largely along party lines. Gov. Jerry Brown indicated earlier this week that he would sign the bill, calling...

In a long-awaited opinion, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin today rejected yet another attack on Act 10 brought by public sector labor unions. The case, Laborers Local 236, AFL-CIO v. Walker, was filed shortly after WEAC v. Walker was filed in the same court, raising some claims not brought in the WEAC case. In the WEAC case, the court held Act 10 unconstitutional in March of 2012, but was reversed the following January by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Act 10 against all of the unions’ challenges. We have been awaiting a...

The Service Employees International Union is teaming with the Department of Health and Human Services to encourage health care coverage through a new marketplace. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday welcomed SEIU's help at a news conference at Allegheny General Hospital. The SEIU will focus on Pennsylvania and 13 other states where there are concentrations of people without health care coverage to get them enrolled starting Oct. 1. SEIU members will help convince the uninsured to enroll in the health care marketplace, called an exchange.

Here’s a bit of Labor Day irony. The man who led the historic 2005 bus and subway strike—which forced millions of commuters to squeeze into packed cabs, pedal bicycles they hadn’t used for years and hike to work like intrepid Boy Scouts—is now a licensed cab driver. Roger Toussaint, the fiery former president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, got his permit in December to drive a taxi in Cobb County, Ga., where he now lives, records show. “Driving a cab is a dignified profession,” Toussaint, 55, said during a telephone interview last week. …

Walmart associates in 15 cities will walk off the job Thursday in the latest in a series of actions against the nonunion retail giant organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers union through the activist group its backs, OUR Walmart.The group claimed that "thousands" would walk out."Walmart workers and their supporters today announced the largest mobilization since Black Friday, set for Thursday, September 5. The announcement comes as Walmart has failed to meet a Labor Day deadline to reinstate illegally fired and disciplined workers, publicly commit to improve jobs and end the company’s aggressive violations of workers’ rights," OUR...

One day before Mayor Bob Filner begins a self-imposed, two-week behavioral rehab, his list of supporters has shrunk to just one major group — organized labor and its allies. Filner was swept into office last year largely thanks to efforts by the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, which contributed more than $2 million as well as shoe leather, phone banks and related efforts to get the city’s first Democratic mayor in two decades into office.

An increasing number of police officers are forming motorcycle clubs, but gang investigators fear such groups can hurt the credibility of law enforcement.

Educators boogie to 'When it's over you ain't gon need ya vibrator' (WARNING: This story includes a video and rap song lyrics of a sexually explicit nature and may offend some readers.) At its 2013 national convention in Atlanta last week, the National Education Association encouraged teachers to dance to a sexually explicit rap song that featured the “N”-word and declared, “When it’s over you ain’t gon need ya vibrator.” The NEA, a nationwide labor union that represents public school teachers, played the song titled, “Wobble,” by V.I.C. at its “Raise Your Hand” conference – which was publicized as an...

Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis was hospitalized on Sunday night after an attack by unknown men, said to be local authority employees, outside the extraordinary conference of the Central Association of Greek Municipalities (KEDE). Kaminis sustained injuries after exiting the building where the conference took place, while outside it there was a rally against the government's mobility scheme for the broader public sector that also concerns local authorities. On his way out he was followed by a number of men, according to reports, who abused him, punched him and inflicted damage on his car. Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou and Interior Minister...

In a remarkable turn, the growing investigation of a powerful local union is turning up evidence of likely financial abuse by the labor group's top staffers during last year's attempted recall of Gov. Scott Walker. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998 — which represents bus drivers in Milwaukee County and elsewhere — is the subject of a sweeping investigation by the parent union and the U.S. Department of Labor. Already, the Washington, D.C.-based ATU ousted Alan Simonis as president of the local and Patrick Clemens as its secretary-treasurer for "financial malfeasance and nonfeasance while in office." The two can appeal...

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,...

Cooper tires is becoming another victim of President Obama’s much too cozy relationship with the union machine. Cooper Tires was bought by an Indian company. After President Obama sent a thank you to the Steelworkers Union and slapped an absolutely brain-dead punitive tariff of tires coming from China, a few things happened: Imports of low-cost tires did not stop. They came from other countries, at tariffs even lower than the old ones on Chinese tires. Not a single new job was created in America, but more than a few jobs at tire importers were destroyed. Americans paid more for tires....

In the fall of 2011 the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service following an announcement that the administration was investigating homebuilders in an attempt to bolster union membership at the expense of housing sector jobs. “In a letter [from the Labor Department] cited by The [Wall Street] Journal,” wrote Crain’s Detroit at the time “homebuilders were asked to immediately turn over the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, pay rates and hours worked for all employees over the past two years. The letter from the Labor...

1. Lenin: Trade Unions are a School of Communism The "card-check" debates in the US Congress reminded me of my own experiences with trade unions in the USSR, where organized labor was part of the official establishment and union membership was universal and mandatory. It also reminded me of how that system's seemingly magnanimous goals - fairness, economic equality, and social justice - in real life brought forth a rigged game of wholesale corruption, forced inequality, and grotesque injustice. Years later, the same Orwellian misnomers are catching up with me in America. One of them is called "Employee Free Choice...

The IRS? It’s about a union: the National Treasury Employees Union. The NTEU. A left-wing union representing 150,000 employees in 31 separate government agencies, including the IRS. A union that not only endorsed President Obama for election and re-election, but a union whose current president, Colleen Kelly, was a 14-year IRS agent and now is both union president and Obama administration appointee (of which more in a moment). It’s about 94% of NTEU union contributions going to Democrats in the Senate and House in 2012 — candidates who campaigned as vociferous opponents of the Tea Party. And the recently released...