Free Republic

<p>ST. LOUIS - Michigan saw the nation's most outbound migration in 2008, with 67.1 percent of interstate moves heading out, according to a migration study released Wednesday.</p> <p>It marked the third straight year that Michigan, hard hit by the economy and layoffs in the auto industry, has seen the highest percentage of outbound migration.</p>

Organized labor helped elect Barack Obama and now eagerly awaits his promised support for its top priority—a bill that would make it easier to set up union locals. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow unions to create local bargaining units without winning the vote of a majority of workers in a secret ballot. The local unit would be certified if a majority of workers endorsed it by signing an authorization card handed out by union organizers. Fair enough? Not really. The so-called card-check bill would not protect workers and it would not be "free choice." It would strip away...

Regarding Dr. John David's commentary, "Make it Easier to Unionize Workplace": Labor unions certainly have their place in a contemporary American economy, but not at the expense of employee free choice and economic security. Indeed, the Employee Free Choice Act would severely erode the freedom enjoyed by employees for nearly 75 years to make a private, fully-informed decision about whether or not they want a union to represent them. Too often, the losing party in a union election - the company or the union - blames its loss on the opposing party's "coercive and underhanded" tactics. In reality though, the...

Alright so this auto bailout bill is in a holding pattern. But just remember that it doesn't mean it is dead. So here are some facts that should keep you seething ... The Big Three currently pay 85% of union benefits to UAW members ... who aren't even working. Yep. Remember how I told you about the Job Banks for union workers? If a union worker is employed at a plant that closes, the auto makers still pay 85% of their union benefits. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, says that his company must reduce operating costs ... but his...

“You just sit and you worry,” said Pat Weber, a construction administrator in Fennville who was laid off more than a year ago. “In the last year, I’ve put in for more than 100 jobs. I stopped counting after 110. It’s just so defeating.” All around Fennville and its neighbors here in southwest Michigan, front lawns are peppered with for-sale signs and merchants complain about slow days. But while this remains a beautiful place with none of the obvious blight of Detroit on the other side of the state, residents say the hardship beneath the surface is very real. It...

The New Plan? Cripple Honda! Save Detroit with Card Check! Eliminating the secret ballot and making it easier to organize U.S. Honda and Toyota workers (and imposing contract terms via binding arbitration) would "level the playing field," says Dem. Congressman Tim Ryan. ... Then when Honda and Toyota responded by importing more cars from abroad, we could have import quotas! Eventually the whole automotive sector could be planned by Congress in conjunction with existing business and labor interest groups. Red State has seen the future and it is corporatist. ...12:21 P.M.

Unions are to blame for the Big Three automakers’ problems, according to a television ad meant to stoke public opposition to organized labor’s number one legislative priority. “Steel, auto, airlines. What do these industries all have in common?” asks the ad sponsored by the business-backed Employee Freedom Action Committee, which was active in several hotly contested Senate races this year. “Hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and union bosses that helped put them out of business.” The advertisement urges people to fight the Employee Free Choice Act, which unions hope will be taken up quickly by the Democratic Congress and...

President-elect Barack Obama, who co-sponsored the misleadingly titled Employee Free Choice Act in the Senate in 2007, has vowed that the measure, called “Card Check,” will be the law of the land once he’s in office. Given the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, if Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss loses Georgia’s runoff election on Dec. 2, Card Check probably will become law—and that would be terrible news for Americans who want to keep their jobs. Card Check would do away with the present secret ballot process used by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) when employees vote on whether to...

Obama does have an astounding eloquence, and an ability to put a position across, but that eloquence has been reserved largely for anti-war and good-government positions. His stance against the war may resonate (though that will depend on whether McCain's qualification as commander-in-chief trumps his unpopular stance on the war). But where McCain is most vulnerable and where voters are most likely to smile on a Democrat--on everyday economic issues--Obama's heart doesn't appear to be in it. These difficulties were clear before Obama spoke in San Francisco, but they're much more glaring now. In the speech, Obama appeared to say...

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It is fascinating watching politicians say how they are going to rescue the "rust belt" regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are either shutting down or moving elsewhere. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being blamed for the jobs going elsewhere. Barack Obama blames the Clinton administration for NAFTA, and that includes Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama says that he is for free trade, provided it is "fair trade." That is election year rhetoric at its cleverest. Since "fair" is one of those words that can mean virtually anything to anybody, what this amounts to is that politicians...

ALIQUIPPA, Pa. (AP) — Amid the bleak, run-down brick buildings, drug dealers drive around in shiny SUVs, Cadillacs and convertibles, the sun glinting off their chrome-plated spinning hubs. Drugs and money are exchanged on street corners. Addicts crash in crack houses, some of them right downtown. Gunfights erupt between drug dealers jealously guarding their territory. Rival gangs — the L's and the G's — deal the crack that flows into this riverfront town from New Jersey, New York, Detroit and Washington. In Rust Belt cities like Aliquippa, drugs moved in after steel moved out. In 10 of 14 Rust Belt...

In his latest attack on the free market and what appears to be a calculated political move to appeal to Michigan voters, John McCain wants to create a new welfare program for manufacturing workers. According to the Detroit Free Press, Senator McCain announced yesterday a plan to use federal dollars to make up the salary difference for workers who lose manufacturing jobs and are forced to accept lower-paying jobs until they find new careers. This is exactly the kind of plan you expect to hear from the Democratic candidates, not an alleged economic conservative, The government should not be in...

The drumbeat of bad economic news out of Michigan keeps pounding. The Great Lakes State has lost jobs for six consecutive years, Michigan’s longest run of workplace shrinkages since the Great Depression. Automakers are laying off tens of thousands. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is closing up shop in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo. The state ranks among the top three in the country for home foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies. Analysts at Comerica Bank, which is moving its headquarters from Detroit to Dallas, say Michigan is stuck in a “one-state recession.”

ALBANY - Thousands of people left New York for other parts of the country last year, making it one of only three states that failed to grow since 2005, according to census estimates released Friday. New York's estimated population on July 1 was 19.3 million, a drop of 9,538 from a year earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. That drop is minuscule - 0.0005 percent - and based on estimates rather than an actual count. But census demographers say it shows New York's population remained virtually unchanged over the year. New York and other Northeast states have suffered for years...

Cook County lost more people between 2000 and 2005 than any county in the nation, according to Census Bureau estimates released Thursday that also show continued gains in suburban and exurban counties across the region and portions of the nation. The new figures--based on administrative records and estimates for births, deaths and net migration--show the county lost more than 73,000 people, or 1.4 percent, since the last official count in April 2000. The largest-loser designation can partly be attributed to Cook County's massive size, because raw numbers were used for the rankings. Still, among the nation's 10 largest counties, Cook,...

The current U.S. expansion has lifted the fortunes of nearly every state in the country, with the notable exception of Michigan, which is busy reclaiming its 1970s's title as home of the rust belt. Sad to say, politicians in both parties are only making things worse. Amid the decline of the Big Three auto companies, Michigan ranked last in income growth last year and was the only state not hit by a hurricane to have lost jobs. United Van Lines reports that more people moved out of Michigan last year than in any year since 1982, when the state jobless...

The current U.S. expansion has lifted the fortunes of nearly every state in the country, with the notable exception of Michigan, which is busy reclaiming its 1970s's title as home of the rust belt. Sad to say, politicians in both parties are only making things worse. Amid the decline of the Big Three auto companies, Michigan ranked last in income growth last year and was the only state not hit by a hurricane to have lost jobs. United Van Lines reports that more people moved out of Michigan last year than in any year since 1982, when the state jobless...

NEW YORK — U.S. Mid-Atlantic factory activity plunged this month to its lowest level in nearly two years, a regional central bank said Thursday, the latest sign of softer economic growth. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve (search) said its business activity index skidded lower to 7.3 in May from 25.3 in April, the largest one-month drop since January 2001 and sharply below Wall Street forecasts of a milder drop to 19.0. A measure above zero denotes growth in the sector. The report confirmed that May was a tough month for East Coast manufacturers. The New York Fed (search) issued a report...

A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County finds that these "inner suburbs," which boomed after World War II, are now struggling with stagnation and decline, increasing poverty and deteriorating infrastructure as jobs and younger, more-affluent families have tended to migrate to the outer suburbs over the past 25 years. The study, by UMBC's Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, calls for greater public and private reinvestment in these aging communities to stem the loss of open land and increasing traffic congestion as the region's suburbs keep spreading outward. Analyzing census data from 1980 through...