Free Republic

Think the IRA has stepped off the world stage? Their role is closer to that of ringleader. One of America’s most influential terrorist enemies traces its lineage back some thirty years — and it isn’t a Muslim organization.In splinter groups like the Continuity IRA and more recently the Real IRA, Irish terrorists have positioned themselves at the center of a network connecting revolutionary FARC rebels in Colombia, Hezbollah in the Middle East, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Taliban forces in Afghanistan currently fighting and killing American troops. The IRA and PFLP have trained together and coordinated attacks, weapons smuggling, and other...

Two major public sector unions lost nearly 210,000 agency fee payers combined in 2018, according to recently filed reports showing the impact of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that prohibits forcing nonmembers to pay for collective bargaining and other nonpolitical expenses. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees saw a 98 percent drop from the prior year, leaving 2,200 agency fee payers. The Service Employees International Union lost 94 percent of their agency fee payers, reducing the number of agency fee payers to 5,800. The disclosure reports filed with the Labor Department last week provide an early snapshot...

Reading aloud a letter addressed to her supervisors about retaliation she faced after reporting sexual misconduct within SEIU, Njoki Woods, a 42-year-old African American single mother of 4, begins to cry. Prior to joining the staff at SEIU United Healthcare West in 2015, Woods had spent a decade organizing her fellow co-workers as a certified nursing assistant and unit secretary at Riverside Community Hospital in Southern California. After leading a successful effort as a rank and file member to organize residual workers at nearby St. Mary’s hospital, Woods was offered a staff job in May of 2015. “I was excited....

The government releases statistics each year showing how many workers are members of unions, and the trend is undeniable: Big Labor continues to lose importance in the American workforce. This year’s results from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) follow the long-term trend. In the private sector, union density—the labor-nerd term for the proportion of the workforce who are union members—tied an all-time low of 6.4 percent. Meanwhile, the overall union density fell to an all-time low of 10.5 percent, with public-sector union density falling by 0.5 percent—a possible harbinger of consequences from the Janus v. AFSCME decision which ended...

Three Pennsylvania state employees based in Greensburg are suing their union after trying unsuccessfully to resign their membership last year. The employees, all three of whom work for the state Department of Labor & Industry, say they have U.S. Supreme Court precedent on their side, including last year’s controversial 5-4 decision, Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31. “Janus does have a significant impact on this case in that we believe a lot of people trying to resign from unions are trying to exercise their Janus rights,” said Nathan McGrath, vice president and director of litigation for the Fairness Center. The Harrisburg-based...

I am President of AFGE Local 2463 representing all the Smithsonian Museums, Research Centers, National Zoo as well as the Kennedy Center. My membership is faced with a government shutdown while the political games continue between the Republicans and the Democrats.The Democratic Party has forgotten its roots and which groups actually built the Democratic Party. They have taken for granted the union members, the working poor and the African American Community who have marched to the polls and pulled the lever for the Democrats.Construction sites used to be filled with high paying Union members building housing for Americans. Now you...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Victoria Guida on politico.com on January 9, 2019. As US federal workers face the prospect of missed paycheques during the partial government shutdown, their financial reality is rippling out into the broader economy. The roughly 800,000 government employees who are either furloughed or working without pay will be forced to start slashing their consumer spending when paycheques don’t appear this week. Private-sector contractors and other workers tied to the government are already seeing damage from lost business. And a hit to the nation’s financial standing...

A group of Service Employees International Union members who work for the Taylor school district is being sued by their union local over the ownership of a banquet hall. The lawsuit comes after the members petitioned to dissolve a decade-old merger between the SEIU’s Taylor and Lansing affiliates. The lawsuit asks for control of a banquet hall the Taylor union local owned before the 2005 merger. Because of the merger, SEIU Local 517M of Lansing is technically suing seven of its own members for ownership of the property. The Taylor hall was built using money collected from fundraisers, not union...

The Service Employees International Union Local 521 on Thursday put the Fresno County Superior Court on notice of its plan to strike beginning Tuesday over labor negotiations. SEIU sent a letter to Sheran Morton, court executive officer, making the court aware of the planned “Unfair Labor Practice strike.” SEIU couldn’t immediately be reached for comment late Thursday.

President Trump should rescind EO 10988, decertify the federal employee unions, and drain more swamp. ... While any federal workplace reform is appreciated, President Trump missed an opportunity (“Fresh Air in the Swamp,” Review & Outlook, June 1.) He could have, and should have, simply rescinded President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 that recognizes the right of federal workers to bargain collectively. A strong case for its revocation can be made to the American public. Why should 2.2 million federal workers enjoy both robust civil-service job protection and union representation? No wonder why, according to the CBO, federal salaries are 16%...

Labor unions are collecting dues from public employees without their “affirmative consent” in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that state laws requiring nonunion government workers to make such payments are unconstitutional, a new lawsuit alleges. The Freedom Foundation, a free market think tank based in Washington state, joined with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to sue on behalf of 10 government employees in Oregon who argue that union dues or fees should not be deducted from their paychecks after they officially resigned from their union. “This is one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever witnessed from...

Govt. healthcare employees in Penn. & Conn. allege coercive payments. A pair of healthcare workers in the Northeast have filed lawsuits alleging that labor leaders have blocked them from resigning even after the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory public sector membership is unconstitutional. William Neely, a Pennsylvania-based psychiatric aide, has accused American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 13 of refusing to honor his resignation. Neely was a dues paying member of the organization for 15 years before requesting to cut ties in July, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that government agencies could no longer require paying...

In California, new lawsuits aim to make unions respect the Supreme Court's authority. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision from June in Janus v. the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was clear: Public employees no longer are required to pay union dues, even for collective-bargaining purposes. This was no technical or ambiguous point. The court declared it an infringement of the First Amendment when the government forces workers to financially support organizations that they don't want to support. Case settled, right? Not entirely. Public-sector unions, especially in California, aren't used to finding themselves on the losing end of...

Voters in California turned down a union-backed ballot initiative by a majority on Nov. 6 that would have restricted profits of dialysis providers operating in the state. With all precincts reporting, 4,278,882 voters, or 61.6%, had voted against Proposition 8, and 2,671,513 voters, or 38.4%, had approved the measure, according to results released from the California Secretary of State.

One of the nation's most powerful labor unions is rallying supporters to oppose Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. On Friday, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began circulating a petition online for its allies to send to their home state lawmakers. The union letter calls Kavanaugh a "narrow-minded extremist" and accuses the D.C. Circuit Court judge of undermining workers' rights and opposing abortion. "Kavanaugh is a narrow-minded extremist who will chip away at our rights in the workplace, the doctor's office and the ballot box," the letter says. "If Kavanaugh is confirmed he...

Organizers of a union-backed initiative to limit dialysis provider profits in Ohio have submitted additional signatures that should get the measure on the Nov. 6 election ballot. . . . . The Ohio initiative is similar in intent to one that is set for the November ballot in California. Both proposals, backed by the SEIU, call for limiting profits of dialysis providers to no more than 115% of their costs for patient care. Additional profits would be returned, in the form of rebates, by the dialysis providers to commercial health plans who have patients being treated in dialysis clinics.

The National Right to Work Foundation (NRTWF) is demanding the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) refund up to $100 million in union fees to California state workers. The move follows the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision banning unions from automatically deducting fees from non-members’ paychecks. The NRTWF announced that the Janus decision strengthens its class-action suit, titled Hamidi et al. v. Service Employees Union International, Local 1000, filed on behalf of 40,000 California state employees. The lawsuit seeks refunds for non-union workers whose pay was seized by SEIU officials who have claimed since 2012 that only public workers who...

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is blistering at a proposed regulation that would prevent the union from siphoning fees from American workers’ Medicaid payments. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a proposed rule Tuesday that would require Medicaid payments to go directly to healthcare workers, ending a 2014 Obama-era rule that let third parties, such as unions and insurance companies, skim off a share of the paycheck before the worker saw any of it. The SEIU, one of the largest public-sector unions in the U.S., referred to the proposed rule “as part of the [Trump] administration’s broad,...

Organized labor, already reeling from a potentially major financial hit thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last week that could result in millions of public-sector workers cutting off funding, could be subject to another blow from the justices: class-action suits from those workers seeking to get paid back from the unions. In a little-noticed action, the Supreme Court invalidated a ruling last week by the 7th Circuit Court denying class-action certification in a case called Riffey v. Rauner. The case involved nonunion state-subsidized Illinois home healthcare workers seeking to be repaid the funds that for years they were forced to...

AFGE’s statement for the record calls reorganization ‘a thinly veiled attempt to devolve federal involvement’WASHINGTON – Today, the American Federation of Government Employees submitted a statement for the record before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s hearing, “Examining the Administration’s Reorganization Plan.”The hearing follows the Trump administration’s June 21 announcement of a “Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations,” that was immediately rejected by the nation’s largest federal union as a “scheme to gut federal services.”In the statement for the record from AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. (available at www.afge.org/ReorgHearing), Cox said, “AFGE objects to many recommendations of this...