Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (18 page)
Read Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Online
Authors: Mallory Factor
Tags: #Political Science, #Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations, #Labor & Industrial Relations
It can’t be just that the unions wanted to help make President Obama’s vision of a national health-care system a reality. There seems to be a more direct reason why unions supported health-care reform. Don Loos, former Labor Department official in the Office of Labor-Management Standards, suggests, “It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees” who could then be subject to forced unionization.
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He explains that the SEIU sent a memo to the Obama transition team pointing out that there were 17.6 million health-care jobs currently, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
had projected that the nation would need 3.5 million more health-care workers over the following years. The SEIU memo proposes that stimulus spending be used for training of new health-care professionals with the involvement of unions like the SEIU, and promises the SEIU’s involvement in reforming health care in 2009.
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Loos explains that the SEIU and other unions were involved in health-care reform to pave the way for greater unionization of health-care workers. He notes, “ObamaCare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net’ designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers as all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees.”
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By having the government take over health care, the SEIU plans to get a greater hold over our nation’s health-care workers. With Obamacare, most health-care workers would receive government funding and be subject to greater government regulation. As a result, more health-care workers could potentially be treated as “government employees” and be unionized.
Looking to our neighbor to the north, Canada shows us that national health care yields more unionized health-care workers. Canada has national health care, and “as a result 60 percent of Canadian health care workers and a stunning 80 percent of nurses belong to unions—more than quadruple the levels in America,” notes labor economist James Sherk.
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Unions support national health care in America because, quite simply, it is good business for them. Unionizing all the health-care workers involved in implementing Obamacare could generate as much as $19 billion per year in forced union dues, but even unionizing a portion of these workers would significantly improve the unions’ bottom line.
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Obamacare could allow unions to potentially earn more in additional dues income than the gross domestic product of whole countries, like Paraguay, Iceland, and Jamaica!
This was the unions’ agenda all along. The SEIU made a grab for organizing all health-care workers as early as 2007 when it consolidated all its over 1 million health-care members into SEIU Health Care, and claimed that its union would “guarantee a voice at work” for all health-care workers nationwide—not just its members. Its 2008 brochure shares its plan: “SEIU’s health care profile—and power—will only continue to
grow. And after we elect a pro-worker president and stronger pro-worker majorities in Congress, we will take all our energy, ideas, organizing strength, grassroots lobbying and political muscle, and make it happen.”
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SEIU also publically admitted its goals for national health care, which included creating “demand for SEIU-provided services” and crafting a health care “crisis” to convince Americans that we needed Obamacare.
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Once the other unions bought in to these goals themselves, Obamacare became nearly inevitable.
In Obamacare, the government employee unions got exactly what they were looking for: massive growth of the federal and state bureaucracies, creating millions of potential new union members. But they still had a problem. What about their own members, whose Cadillac health-care plans would now be taxed? That is what the meeting of the Shadowbosses at the beginning of this book was all about—the unions bringing their demands to the President as a condition for their support for Obamacare.
In Obamacare, the government employee unions got exactly what they were looking for: massive growth of the federal and state bureaucracies, creating millions of potential new union members. But they still had a problem. What about their own members, whose Cadillac health-care plans would now be taxed?
Faced with Shadowboss resistance to Obamacare, Obama acceded to union demands. He delayed a tax on Cadillac plans until 2018, giving the unions more time to find a legislative solution to the problem.
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Obama also granted “lucky golden ticket recipients” waivers from the most onerous provisions of Obamacare, according to columnist Michelle Malkin.
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Over half of the Obamacare waiver beneficiaries were union members—way out of proportion, considering just 13 percent of American workers are represented by unions. But the unions weren’t the only ones getting special treatment—nearly 20 percent of all waivers took place in the home district of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
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There were extra goodies for Obama’s union pals in the Obamacare legislation. A quiet Obamacare program called the Early Retiree
Reinsurance Program grants $5 billion to employers to provide “gap” health insurance to cover employees who retire before their Medicare coverage begins. An
Investor’s Business Daily
editorial explained, “The little-noticed ObamaCare program was supposed to encourage companies to continue offering this benefit until 2014—when ObamaCare fully kicks in and will solve everything—by reimbursing companies for a chunk of their retiree health costs.”
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What happened? Well, the unions were at the front of the line to apply for that federal cash. Pretty soon, the government had to shut down applications to the program because unions were flooding them. In the end, “10 of the top 12 recipients are either unions or public employee groups.”
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Investor’s Business Daily
concluded that “this ObamaCare money is really being used mainly to pay off unions and governments that would have provided these benefits anyway.” The UAW Retiree Medical Trust alone netted over $220 million from this program, and several other unions got their piece as well before the program was closed to new applicants. The fire hose of cash from government to unions is hooked up, and the fire hydrant has been left wide open.
In addition to receiving specific paybacks in the stimulus and Obamacare legislation, government employee unions have given President Obama a far broader directive. It is to help the unions to increase their control over America’s national security employees. Take, for example, the unionization of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) undertaken by the Obama Administration.
The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act explicitly bars monopoly bargaining over CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and Secret Service employees; subsequent Executive Orders have extended this prohibition to many national-security-related federal agencies. George W. Bush used his discretion under the 2003 Homeland Security Act to ban union monopoly bargaining over federal airport baggage screeners employed by the TSA. In February 2011, however, President Obama’s TSA Administrator John Pistole gave the unions collective bargaining power over airport screeners. At the same time, Obama moved to end a
successful program that had allowed airports to privatize airport screening using strict federal security standards with substantial training and oversight, thus requiring more government, unionized screeners.
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What was Pistole’s justification for this extension of union power over our airport security? Pistole explained that giving unions collective bargaining power over TSA workers would “ensure that a union’s role would help to reinforce consistency and accountability across security operations at all airports.”
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Perhaps he was thinking about the fact that unionizing TSA would immediately bring up to $18 million in dues into union coffers annually.
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The two unions vying to unionize TSA, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and National Treasury Employees
Union (NTEU), already represent around 63,000 Homeland Security employees, many of whom work in very sensitive and critical areas.
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AFGE represents employees at Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Protections and Programs Directorate (NPPD), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (border patrol agents), and the Coast Guard.
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And NTEU represents 24,000 other Customs and Border Protection employees.
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After a close election and a runoff at TSA in 2011, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) edged out the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) to become the exclusive representative for 44,000 TSA employees.
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This single election significantly increased the number of Homeland Security employees represented by unions, and also represents another step toward unionizing all types of federal workers, no matter how critical their job function is to our national security.
What about some of the most important national security employees of all—the U.S. military? Could Obama actually unionize them? The law seems pretty clear on the point. Active duty military are forbidden from joining military labor organizations by a federal statute passed in 1978.
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The law actually states that it is the policy of the United States that unionizing our fighting force “would undermine the role, authority, and position of the commander, and would impair the morale and readiness of the armed forces.” It would take an act of Congress to unionize them. So is our military the one large government organization that the unions haven’t been able to penetrate? Not quite. More than one-third of our full-time military employees are civilian employees, many of them ex-servicemen hired back into service in similar jobs as civilians. And 60 percent of those civilian employees are unionized. Of the 700,000 civilians employed by the Department of Defense in 2010, 450,000 are unionized—and they are represented by 45 separate unions.
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So while the 1.4 million active duty troops cannot be unionized under current law, the entire military (not including reservists) is already more than 20% unionized without most people realizing that it could be possible.
Government employee unions hold collective bargaining power over almost 1.2 million federal workers on many employment matters, but not over federal wages or benefits.
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This limitation on collective bargaining over wages and benefits—believe it or not—was put in place by Jimmy Carter in 1978. “Even Carter Democrats understood the difference between being in electoral debt to the unions, and being outright owned by them,” Kimberley Strassel wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
.
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So at least there are some government workplace issues that the unions just don’t have a say in, right? Well not quite. Thanks to President Obama, the unions representing federal employees suddenly have a lot more say in all workplace issues. Early in his term, President Obama issued an Executive Order which requires federal offices and agencies to consult with unions representing federal workers in “all workplace matters to the fullest extent practicable” before reaching a decision. Government agencies are required to consult the unions even on workplace matters that unions cannot bargain over by law. The order used an intentionally confusing term for this—“pre-decisional involvement,”
which seems to mean that no decision about the federal workplace can be made anymore without consulting the Shadowbosses.
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By requiring pre-decisional conferencing on all workplace matters, President Obama has given the unions representing federal workers an unprecedented (and almost unbelievable) voice in federal workplace matters, including military workplaces. It is almost hard to imagine what he could do to further augment their authority over the federal workplace during a second term, but we’re sure that the unions have some ideas.
Throughout his administration, President Obama has handed over new swaths of the economy to government employee unions. But the most egregious example may be the auto bailouts, where the Obama Administration not only handed partial ownership of the U.S. auto industry to the unions, but also circumvented our bankruptcy laws to do so.
Under the bankruptcy rules, parties owed money by a bankrupt company are paid out of any company assets in a certain order—first, the secured creditors such as bondholders are paid; then unsecured creditors like company employees are paid. But when the Obama Administration spearheaded the Chrysler bankruptcy in 2009, the Administration sidestepped these priority rules to give a better deal to the United Auto Workers (UAW), a hybrid private worker/government worker union that represented Chrysler’s auto workers.
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The Administration forced a sale of Chrysler’s assets to a new Chrysler corporation instead of letting the bankruptcy proceed. Investors who held Chrysler bonds were forced to take only 29 cents for each dollar of bonds that they held.
Meanwhile, the UAW retirement health-care trust received a 55 percent stake in the new Chrysler corporation in exchange for labor contract concessions. “Among the cost-cutting measures that the UAW leaders have accepted are a suspension of cost-of-living adjustments and new limits on overtime pay,” reported the
Wall Street Journal
. “Workers will only be paid for overtime after they have worked at least 40 hours in a week. Chrysler workers will also lose their Easter Monday holiday in 2010
and 2011, according to the union summary.”
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The unions won yet again, even though the unions themselves virtually bankrupted Chrysler.