Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (40 page)

59
Vincent Vernuccio and Trey Kovacs, “Official Time: Government Workers Perform Union Duties on the Taxpayers’ Dime,”
Labor Watch
(blog), Capital Research Center, November 1, 2011,
https://www.capitalresearch.org/2011/11/official-time-government-workers-perform-union-duties-on-the-taxpayers%E2%80%99-dime/
, accessed March 2012.

60
Sylvester Petro, “Sovereignty and Compulsory Public-Sector Bargaining,”
Wake Forest Law Review
10 (1974): pp. 79–81.

61
Ibid., p. 47.

62
It’s already happening around the country. In Englewood, New Jersey, an arbitrator ruled in January 2012 that the borough would have to give raises to police officers—even though in order to do so, the borough would need to raise taxes.
Amanda Baskind, “Englewood Cliffs Appealing Arbitration Decision to Raise Police Salaries,”
NorthJersey.com
, January 5, 2012,
http://www.northjersey.com/news/136718013_Borough_appealing_arbitration_decision_to_raise_police_salaries__.html
, accessed January 2012. In Roscoe, Illinois, arbitrators have consistently favored unions. “Arbitrators are binding the village to long-term debt, and their attitude is that we can just raise property taxes to pay for it,” lamented village president Dave Krienke. “Well, guess what: A lot of families can’t afford any more taxes.” Between 2006 and 2010, arbitrators in Illinois ruled on 433 issues between unions and the state municipalities; they found for the municipalities 217 times and the unions 216 times. But from January to October 2011, arbitrators ruled on 83 contract issues—and ruled for the unions 73 percent of the time, and 80 percent of the time on wage disputes. Greg Stanley, “State Interest Arbitration Favoring Unions in 2011,”
Rockford Register Star
, October 22, 2011,
http://www.rrstar.com/news/x888174344/In-Sundays-paper-State-interest-arbitration-favoring-unions-in-2011
, accessed January 2012.

63
Charles W. Baird, “How Bad Can It Get?”
The Freeman
59, no. 1 (January/February 2009),
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/pursuit-of-happiness/how-bad-can-it-get/
, accessed January 2012.

64
To avoid arbitration altogether, government officials can sign so-called consent decrees with unions—essentially a settlement agreement. These decrees are used frequently by liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to lock in funding for, say, a certain number of beds in homeless shelters in a city, into the future. But government employee unions can also use consent decrees to preserve spending on government employees that they represent. For example, a teachers union or related pro-education group can sue a district to require a certain teacher-student ratio, say 1 to 12, to prevent “school overcrowding.” Once the city signs a consent decree over the matter, future mayors will be bound by the decree and can be brought to court if they don’t hire enough teachers to keep the agreed upon teacher-student ratio. In this way, teachers unions protect against future reform-minded mayors coming in and changing hiring practices that could adversely impact the union. These decrees are great for the union, but terrible for voters and the taxpayers. Because consent decrees are such an effective way to keep government spending high into the future, we can expect unions to make more and more use of them in the future.

65
PATCO president Robert Poli told this to
Businessweek
at the time of the PATCO strike in 1981. It was quoted in Richard Reeves,
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 63.

66
The Employee Rights Act, which was introduced in Congress in 2011 by Orrin Hatch in the Senate and Tim Scott in the House of Representatives, would give union members the right to vote before their union calls a strike. James Sherk, “Employee Rights Act Empowers Workers,” Backgrounder #2667, Heritage Foundation, March 19, 2012,
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/03/the-employee-rights-act-empowers-workers
#_ftnref19, accessed April 2012; see also the Employee Rights Act website,
http://employeerightsact.com/
.

67
Petro, p.80.

68
“Domestic Policy: Labor & Workplace,” Issues 2012, Heritage Foundation,
http://www.candidatebriefing.com/labor-workplace/
, accessed January 2012.

69
Jason Miller, “TSA Workers Granted Collective Bargaining Rights,”
FederalNewsRadio.com
, February 4, 2011,
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=697&sid=2259846
, accessed January 2012. Collective bargaining over agencies related to national security is generally prohibited under Section 16 of President Kennedy’s Executive Order No. 10,988, which provides: “The order (except section 14 [giving rights to employees prescribed by the Civil Service Commission]) shall not apply to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency, or to any office, bureau or entity within an agency, primarily performing intelligence, investigative, or security functions if the head of the agency determines that the provisions of this order cannot be applied in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations.” This order can be found at
https://www.flra.gov/webfm_send/563
.

70
States were granted permission to pass right-to-work laws by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which added this protection to the National Labor Relations Act, Section 14(b). Note that state right-to-work laws generally only protect
private sector
workers in those states from being forced to pay dues or fees to a union. In practice, though, most government workers are also protected against being forced to pay dues to a union in right-to-work states. The right-to-work laws of Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia explicitly cover state and local government employees in addition to private sector workers. The right-to-work laws of Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota have been interpreted by state courts to also cover government employees. The right-to-work laws of Georgia, Indiana, and North Carolina explicitly exclude government employees from their coverage. Both Georgia and North Carolina ban public sector monopoly bargaining, so there is no forced-dues issue in those states. But in Indiana, the nation’s newest right-to-work state, state troopers, public college employees, and non-teacher public school employees can be forced to pay union dues and fees. The right-to-work laws of Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming have been construed by courts or the attorney general not to cover public employees. But of these states, only Tennessee has any type of monopoly bargaining laws for some public employees, and so some limited forced-dues issues may arise there. The right-to-work law of Mississippi is silent on whether it covers government employees, and no court has ruled on it.

The right-to-work states are mostly found in the South and West, and are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. In addition, the U.S. territory of Guam and federal workers have right-to-work
protections. Some states have right-to-work protections granted under their state constitutions instead of their laws.

Chapter 2. The Union Fist

1
U.S. v. Larson, et al., May 2007 Grand Jury Superseding Indictment,
http://www.nrtw.org/files/nrtw/IUOE17INDICTMENT.pdf
; see also U.S. v. Larson, 07-CR-304S, NYLJ 1202511598699, at *1 (WDNY, Decided August 10, 2011); Carl Horowitz, “Buffalo Local Members Arrested for Conducting Reign of Terror,” National Legal and Policy Center, April 21, 2008,
http://nlpc.org/stories/2008/04/21/buffalo-local-members-arrested-conducting-reign-terror
, accessed March 2012.

2
U.S. v. Larson, et al., May 2007 Grand Jury Superseding Indictment; Alan Farnham, “How Nasty Can Union Violence Get and Still Be Legal?,”
ABC News
, September 22, 2011,
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/nasty-union-violence-legal/story?id=14572790#.Txyfg6VPssY
, accessed January 2012; NRTW Committee Staff, “Hobbs Act Loophole Legitimizes Union Violence,”
National Right to Work Committee
(blog), February 14, 2012,
http://www.nrtwc.org/hobbs-act-loophole-legitimizes-union-violence/
, accessed March 2012.

3
U.S. v. Larson, et al., May 2007 Grand Jury Superseding Indictment, pp. 37-38; Horowitz, “Buffalo Local Members Arrested.”

4
Gerald Friedman, “Labor Unions in the United States,”
EH.Net
Encyclopedia
, ed. Robert Whaples, February 1, 2010,
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/friedman.unions.us
, accessed January 2012.

5
Samuel Gompers, Address to the American Federation of Labor Convention, 1924, quoted in National Institute for Labor Relations Research,
Coercive Union Power in Union Officials’ Own Words
(1985), on file with the authors. Gompers said further, “The rules and regulations of trade unionism should not be extended so that the action of a majority could force a minority to vote for or give financial support to any political candidate or party to whom they are opposed.” Note that the American Federation of Labor later joined with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to become the powerful AFL-CIO.

6
American Federationist
, February 1913, quoted in Samuel Gompers,
Labor and the Employer
, ed. Hayes Robbins (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), p. 267.

7
Burton Folsom,
New Deal or Raw Deal?
paperback ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), p. 121.

8
Steven Greenhouse, “Labor Board Drops Suit Against Boeing After Union Reaches Accord,”
New York Times
, December 9, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/business/labor-board-drops-case-against-boeing.html
, accessed May 2012.

9
FDR and his allies criticized the 1930s Supreme Court decisions overturning New Deal policies. Historians hold differing opinions over whether Justice Owen Roberts’s sudden change to supporting New Deal policies starting in March 1937 was the result of intimidation. This was the fabled “switch in time, saved nine” because it ended FDR’s efforts to add additional Justices to the
Supreme Court in order to get a Court that would uphold his New Deal legislation. For a brief, even-handed account of the ongoing controversy, see Christopher Shea, “Supreme Switch: Did FDR’s Threat to ‘Pack’ the Court in 1937 Really Change the Course of Constitutional History?”
Boston Globe
, December 4, 2005,
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/04/supreme_switch/
, accessed January 2012.

10
Amity Shlaes,
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
, paperback ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), especially p. 310.

11
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Employment and Earnings, United States, 1909–75
, (Washington, D.C., Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1976). From 1937 to 1938, the unemployment rate skyrocketed from 14.3 to 19.0 percent. Manufacturing dropped by 37 percent; industrial production plummeted 30 percent.

12
Sean J. Savage,
Roosevelt: The Party Leader 1932–1945
(Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), pp. 89–90. In 1936, 10.2 percent of the Democratic National Committee’s campaign cash came from labor unions; by 1940, it came to 16 percent. And this is just recorded cash. “Throughout Roosevelt’s presidency,” writes Savage, “organized labor steadily strengthened its position as a major source of Democratic campaign funds and thus strengthened its position in national Party affairs, solidifying the Party’s commitment to social welfare and labor reform legislation favored by labor unions.”

13
Federal Times
, April 2, 1979, quoted in
Coercive Union Power in Union Officials’ Own Words
.

14
William W. Winpisinger, president, International Association of Machinists,
Richmond (Va.) News Leader
, September 4, 1978, quoted in
Coercive Union Power in Union Officials’ Own Words
.

15
On August 16, 1937, President Roosevelt wrote to the National Federation of Federal Employees, a labor union that later joined the International Association of Machinists. In his letter, he supported the rights of federal employees to unionize, but clarified that collective bargaining and strikes are impermissible in the government sector. “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service… The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress… Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.” See Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter on the Resolution
of Federation of Federal Employees Against Strikes in Federal Service,” The American Presidency Project, August 16, 1937,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15445#axzz1igz8J9XP
, accessed January 2012.

16
Executive Order No. 10,988, available at the Federal Labor Relations Authority website,
https://www.flra.gov/webfm_send/563, accessed January 2012
.

17
Ibid.