The Golden Gate

A match made in liberal heaven. Bill Nienhuis over at the The Pundit Guy has a great post picking apart the lastest NYT hit piece on Wal-Mart:

NYT Lobs Another Airball at Wal-Mart.

Here’s a sample:

The New York Times doesn’t like Wal-Mart, and over the years, the Old Gray Lady has taken shots at America’s Store in hopes of crippling it’s leadership and slowing its success. Goaded by the labor unions, the NYT goes to great lengths to splatter mud on Wal-Mart’s corporate practices.

They demonize Wal-Mart and characterize its management as dictators controlling an evil empire from the bridge of the death star in Bentonville, Arkansas. Why? It’s simple really. The New York Times is run by liberals living in a bubble who oppose good old fashioned capitalism. They don’t believe in an American Dream that enables a family owned business to build itself up to become the worlds largest retailer, employing 1.6 MILLION people in 3,800 stores in the US alone.

The liberals at the NYT and their ACLU brethren truly believe that Wal-Mart’s goal is to victimize and enslave their workforce. In a nutshell, they believe a Wal-Mart store is no different than a sweatshop in a third world country, and they must be stopped.

Be sure to read all of it.

I am not officially sick to fucking death of this President. Jesus H fucking Christ on a Crutch!!!, as my dear old dad used to say.

Here we are again, talking about wonderful Government UNIONS, once more.

When will we as a body politic ever LEARN? Geez. I mean, we make some progress, things seem to get moving in a positive direction, and then something like this smacks us square in the face.

In a nutshell, San Francisco Public School “Service Workers” (janitors, cafeteria workers and the like) are threatening to hold the School District hostage, going on strike for more pay even as the start of the school year approaches. San Francisco Teachers are threatening to join the strike, delaying the start of school for tens of thousands of San Francisco schoolchildren.

Now, in order to pay for these raises for the janitors and cafeteria workers, the San Francisco School Board is seriously considering raiding a special fund, approved by voters, which gave $13 million to the schools for things like sports, arts college and career counselling and other “enrichment activites” for kids.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the SFUSD fire any and all “service workers” who walk out. Period. Immediately hire replacements for all staff thus terminated.

Remember, it’s “all about the children.”

The public watchdog group SFSOS has it right:

School support staff threaten strike; teachers may join in

If you suffer through as many School Board meetings as we do, you’ll often hear politicos drone on about their pet project and claim that it’s good for the children, and, after all, “It’s all about the children.” Sometimes, like today, it’s becomes crystal clear who’s looking out for the children, and who’s looking out for the adults.

As the handful of families who remain in San Francisco are just weeks from the start of school, the teachers union is threatening to join SEIU’s service workers in a strike that would shut down K-12 education for 58,000 public school children. Threatening our children’s education unless we get pay raises. Who’s for the children here?

Despite the well-known financial struggles the School District has been enduring — the layoffs, the program cuts, the school closures — SEIU Local 790, which represents school support staff such as custodians and cafeteria workers, is demanding more money. Should they strike (they’ll vote on that in early September), the teachers themselves are likely to join. This might be the first strike ever sponsored by the Marin County Realtors Association.

To further undermine the confidence in our schools, and for that matter our confidence in our government as a whole, there is talk that a $13 million advance the City has provided the School District could go to pay for these raises. That $13 million is Prop H money. Remember Prop H? The crux of Prop H money — what voters endorsed — was funding for school enrichment programs. One-third was to go to sports, arts and libraries. One-third was to go to preschool and related programs. The final one-third was to be allocated to “…gifted and talented programs, magnet programs, literacy programs, dual-language immersion programs, special education, employee compensation, career and college centers at high schools, teacher mentoring or master teacher programs, or other instructional purposes.”

Now, while that tiny little reference to “employee compensation” among all those important programs certainly allows the Prop. H money to be used to pay salaries, absolutely everyone who supported Prop. H (like SOS and so many of our members) knew that all of the Prop. H money was supposed to be for more programs. The whole point was that taxpayers wanted the School District to have additional enrichment programs for the children, not additional enrichment for the adults already in the same programs. Voters weren’t asked to increase funding for the status quo. They passed Prop H to get more, not to get more of the same.

And, in an interesting contrast (that we’re so used to seeing), Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and Board of Ed President Eric Mar vary greatly on their respective approach to the strike. Ackerman is the negotiating diplomat: “If there is any way I can support [Local 790's] issues without putting the district in any kind of fiscal jeopardy, I will do that,” the Examiner quoted her as saying. Mar, on the other hand — the president who should be leading a balanced dialogue toward a fiscally responsible end, is instead flying the extremist solidarity flag and sending out emails rallying protesters to mobilize on behalf of Local 790. Gee, is that “All About the Children” or “All About Mar’s 2008 District 1 Supervisor Campaign”? We think Richmond District parents will remember that Mar’s slogan as Board President has been “It’s all about my endorsements.”

Police and firefighters are prohibited by law from striking due to the threat to life that such a strike would cause. Teachers striking ought to take a close second on such a severity scale. But since it is not illegal, public outrage is all that protects us from such an irresponsible and damaging action. Your outrage should be doubled since the teacher’s union isn’t even involved in the financial negotiations. They’re threatening to strike just because it’s called for under their “you scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours” union boss solidarity pact.”

Please write a letter to the Board of Education, urging them to denounce the potential strike by the SEIU Local 790 and by the teachers’ union

Eric Christen, executive director of the statewide Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, wonderful piece in the Sunday _Chronicle_ on the big walkout from the AFL-CIO, that’s now gotten even bigger, with more and more Unions choosing to split from the big national labor federation

As I’ve said before, let’s hope it spells the end of destructive “Unionism” as we’ve known it:

With the collapse of socialism and the rise of the information-and- technology age, along with the dynamic, interconnected world economy it represents, leftists like Sweeney (a card-carrying member of the American Socialist Party) have determined that the only way for unionism to survive at all is for two things to occur: force non-union workers to join unions, while making them pay for the pleasure; and encourage huge government growth, thereby creating more union jobs. To accomplish this, Sweeney has hitched his horse to the Democrat Party in no uncertain terms.

Sadly, this trend has come at the expense of the very workers the union claims to represent. For instance, despite the fact that the unions give so heavily to the Democrat Party, 43 percent of union workers themselves voted for President Bush in 2004, according to exit poll data. Though the National Labor Relations Act empowers unions to provide on-the-job representation for workers in terms of wages, benefits and working conditions, the union bosses of today prefer instead to serve as mouthpieces for an activist, radical political agenda.

It’s not a long piece, but it makes some other excellent points, so be sure to check out the whole thing.

We’ve made the point around here before — there’s nothing inherently wrong (and in fact there is quite a bit right, in principle) with workers organizing into Unions. But such organizations — like all organizations — can become corrupt and self-serving and coercive and anti-democratic and basically counterproductive. And it seems fairly clear that there is a lot wrong with the way Unions currently work in our political and economic system today.

Perhaps with the breakup of the AFL-CIO and (hopefully) the passage later this year of California’s “Paycheck Protection” Union reform measure, organized labor is (slowly, contentiously) turning a corner and evolving into a more positive, moderate force.

If organized labor doesn’t evolve, Christen says, it may not survive, “and rightly so.”

Amen.

California Conservative offers some thoughts on the SEIU and Teamsters Unions splitting off from the big AFL-CIO labor organization. This means that the the AFL-CIO has lost 3.2 million of its previous 13 million or so members.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement. Two of the largest and more successful unions, the Service Employees International and the Teamsters, are rebelling against the leadership of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. The irony is that it wasn’t all that long ago, in 1995, that Mr. Sweeney won his job with his own coup against Lane Kirkland, the Cold War hero and more moderate labor voice.

In the wake of the GOP takeover of Congress the year before, Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left–environmental groups, culturally liberal outfits–and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5% from 12.9% in 2003. In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Yes, and if you take a close look at the curves on the chart above, you’ll see that a much greater percentage of all Government workers — approximately 35% — are Unionized than are workers in the “real world” private sector (8%). One might conclude that it’s the Government Unions that are keeping the labor “movement” alive, to the extent that it IS still alive.

And, of course, those Government Unions are supported with our tax dollars.

The Wall Street Journal piece says it clearly:

The tragedy is that neither [union] faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Precisely. And as far as serving the taxpayers and businesses of our nation is concerned, it must be asked: are Government Unions helping or harming the cause of more efficient and effective Governenmental operations? Are we getting “bang for our bucks?” And, really, is this the best we can do for workers? Government Unions — extorting from the public they ostensibly “serve?”

The recent BART transit strike brinksmanship is an object lesson, and quite fresh in our collective memory.

I suggest that perhaps it’s time to move beyond the old adversarial class-warfare Union-versus-management model. Surely we can do better than what we’ve got, now. And I think it’s clear, we’re going to have to. The old style Union model is dying out.

Well, as I write this, the 12:01 “Strike Deadline” set by the BART workers’ unions has come and gone. The negotiations have continued through the night to this point, and according to the report I just heard on KGO News Radio 810, right now they’re taking a “time out” from negotiations. The report said that talks will resume some time after 12:30. Presumably the management and union reps will either reach an agreement tonight or the unions will walk off the job. Right now, we’re all just waiting.

The reporter on KGO seemed to think that things looked promising that an agreement would be reached at some point tonight, averting a strike.

As you know, we’ve been watching this situation real closely as things have come to a head over the past week or so. (Our other reports are here, here and here.) And one thing has become all too clear: even if a BART strike is averted this time around, the train system’s pay and benefits are way out of whack — and that goes for some of the management as well as the union workers. If BART can’t get it’s finances together (and they’re projected to run a $24 million deficit this year), it could be really dire times for the system — and local taxpayers.

And, make no mistake: BARTs unions are clearly to blame for this latest round of commuter nailbiting. They set this deadline. Their shortsighted and utterly selfish attempt to extort yet another gluttonous increase of 30% a mere three years plus after getting a 24% pay raise borders on the criminal. Naturally, the extreme pro-union elements of the left are saying it’s all the management’s fault (of course). But not a soul outside of union member/activist circles is buying that load of rubbish.

In fact, I get the very real sense that there’s a widespread and growing desire to see unions — and especially public employee unions — reformed and restrained. It seems pretty clear that people are tired of having a gun held to their head by the very folks that, supposedly, work for “all the people” and who are paid with our hard-earned tax dollars. Jason posted a bit about the harm that unions do to the overall economy in general. And, when public employee unions act as irresponsibly as the BART unions are, people get more and more fed up, which increases the chances that broad public employee union reform and restraint measures can pass — even in the “pro union” Bay Area.

I mean, strike or no strike (this time around) — enough is more than enough. The public is getting tired of being blackmailed. We need broad reforms of public employee unions in San Francisco and at the regional and state level as well.

Stay tuned for updates on “Black Wednesday” — and further developments in the public employees union reform movement.

UPDATE: Wed. 7/6/05 6:52 AM — Well, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the two sides reached a tentative agreement at about 3:00 am this morning. No specifics have been released yet, and union rank-and-file still need to ratify it, but there won’t be any BART strike today, thank goodness.

The Ludwig von Mises institute has a good post on Unions and a NYT article.

The Mises piece begins:

The New York Times has proved once again that it is a reliable font of economic ignorance. This time, it’s through an op-ed piece titled “A More Perfect Union,” by a lady named Ruth Milkman, whose credentials in economics are that she is a “sociologist” and “director of U.C.L.A.’s Institute of Industrial Relations and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.”

And later on:

Whenever a union succeeds in obtaining above market wage rates for its members, it also reduces  the number of workers who can be employed in its field. This is because of the operation of one of the best established principles of economics: Namely, the higher the price of anything, including the wage of any kind of labor, the smaller is the quantity demanded of that good or labor service.

Thus, workers who could have been employed in the lines controlled by labor unions are instead displaced and forced to seek work elsewhere. The added competition of these workers in other lines then serves either to depress wage rates in those other lines, thereby resulting in an arbitrary, union-imposed inequality in wage rates, or, if those other lines are also unionized or are forced to pay union wages in order to avoid becoming unionized (which is often the case), to cause still other workers to be displaced. It should be clear that to the extent that the effect of union activity is to depress wage rates in other fields, the union slogan “Liver Better, Work Union” turns out to mean “Live Better by Forcing Other Workers to Live Worse.”

Go read it all.