Labor

The top legislative priority of House Democrats in the new Congress will be card-check, a bill that, if signed into law, would end the secret ballot for union organizing.

This afternoon, House Democrats, in a secret ballot, decided to toss Rep. John Dingell (Mich.), whose more than 50 years of service to the Congress apparently wasn’t worth anything, from his chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. His replacement? Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.), a well-known left-wing ideologue. Read more...

When Speaker Pelosi announced Democrats' intentions of bailing out the auto industry, this signaled a significant direction for the Obama era. They have every intention of bailing out an automobile industry that has been less fuel-efficient, lower quality, less inspiring and more expensive than the automobiles of foreign-owned competitors.

During the primary campaign, Mitt Romney said that if he became president, these lost automobile jobs would return to Michigan within six months. McCain said that these jobs are not coming back to Michigan and displaced employees need to retrain and retool. Without giving specifics, Obama gave these unemployed workers HOPE that the jobs were going to return when he became president. Read more...

Step aside Isaac Newton for "The Law of Quality" which states that "What goes down KEEPS going down".

Look no further than just about every product and service we're offered these days. They're inferior.

Of course they are, because corporate leaders in every sector, from food, to communication, to media are desperately scrambling to overcome their previous disastrous decisions and keep profits obscene... their own personal compensation disgracefully high.

They pretend they are simply creating efficiencies. Instead of cutting corner, what they are really doing is shamelessly gutting large chunks of the structured that allowed them to deliver some semblance of decent product. Read more...

The Blue-Green is fraying. Republicans need to focus their energy on wooing the blue and forgetting the green.

Blue means the blue-collar voters who used to be called the Reagan Democrats.

Green means the rich elites who love to espouse environmental policy as they board their luxurious private jets. Read more...

When it comes to their future direction, unions are sending contradictory signals. Their economic actions indicate a new appreciation for the realities confronting them as they face the challenges of a global economy. Their political direction, however, indicates “business as usual” as they align themselves with groups and politicians that favor an enormous expansion of federal spending and government power. Read more...

You call that a strike!!?? Two days? The United Auto Workers didn't strike. It held a little pep rally. Now the workers can go back to their jobs, until layoffs force them out of work, and management can continue with its short-sighted policies. Things sure ain't what they used to be. Read more...

How quaint. The United Auto Workers are striking General Motors. Talk about a blast from the past. A past when the UAW and GM weren't hollow shells.

Back in the '70s — now those were the days. The union (remember labor unions?) had a million and a half members. Now it's a relic with just over a third of that.

General Motors is quite the relic too. It used to be a colossus in the U.S. automobile industry. Now the manufacturing plants in this country are owned increasingly by the likes of Honda and Toyota. So many Chevrolets, meanwhile, are made elsewhere these days that Chevy's "This Is Our Country" ad campaign would be laughable if it weren't so transparently pathetic. That's what this walkout is about, but it's a battle that's already over. Read more...

There were so many great things about "The Sopranos," from how their family problems mirrored the problems facing many American families to how the Mob controlled many union work sites. In many ways, it was more than just fiction.

When the Mob controls union work sites, the guys who get the short end of the stick are the union workers. That means they have to work twice as hard to make up for the mobster no-shows. When the Mob pilfers a union fund, the union workers get screwed, because they lose the money. Labor corruption hurts all of us, but it especially hurts the workingmen and -women who are part of the union movement.  Read more...

By now it's common knowledge that major unions such as the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union have withheld their endorsements of candidates as they pore over their records and solicit views on a variety of issues. One specific candidate in question has been Hillary Clinton, due to her questionable record of having outsourced to India for campaign contributions. Read more...

It’s official: The parade has been canceled. That’s right, Big Labor can’t seem to organize a parade for, of all things, Labor Day. Or if it did, no one would show up, save a handful of politicians eager to show solidarity — so reports the New York Daily News in its Aug. 16 edition:

“The parade usually draws a flock of politicians eager to be seen supporting labor in the news, but barely any spectators.”  Read more...