Labor unions file lawsuits challenging ‘right-to-work’

By Phil Kabler

June 27, 2016

Eleven state labor unions filed petitions in Kanawha Circuit Court Monday challenging the state’s new “right-to-work” law as an illegal taking of union property and resources.

“First and foremost, it’s unconstitutional because it’s an illegal taking of property without due process,” said Josh Sword, secretary treasurer of the West Virginia AFL-CIO, one of the 11 plaintiffs.

The lawsuit, and a motion for a preliminary injunction to block the law from going into effect July 1, contends that the Workplace Freedom Act (SB 1) is intended to discourage union membership by “enabling nonmembers of unions to get union services for free.”

Vetoed by Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, but enacted into law by override votes with no Democratic support in the Republican-controlled House of Delegates and Senate, the legislation allows employees in union shops to opt out of paying union dues.

The lawsuit contends that amounts to an illegal taking of unions’ property and resources, since state and federal labor laws require unions to negotiate contracts and provide representation to the non-union employees at “considerable cost” to the unions.

“Requiring unions to provide services to free riders while simultaneously prohibiting unions from charging for those services necessarily takes union funds and directs them to be expended on behalf of third parties,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit contends one intent of the law is to discourage employees from joining unions.

“Why, the employee would ask, should I pay for something that the law requires be made available to me for nothing,” the petition states. “Such a circumstance would — naturally and predictably — seriously burden a union’s ability to recruit and retain members.”

In April, a Wisconsin circuit court judge overturned that state’s right-to-work law in a case that similarly argued the law amounts to an unconstitutional taking of union property and resources. That ruling has been stayed, pending an appeal to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court.

“This is ultimately going to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, without question,” Sword said of the challenges to right-to-work laws. “The general question of whether it’s an illegal taking of property without due process will be ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The petitions filed in Kanawha Circuit Court also contend the right-to-work law “casts a blunderbuss shot at the plaintiffs’ ability to associate with employees to advance workers’ causes.”

It compares the right-to-work law with laws passed in Southern states in the 1950s as part of the massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation orders in Brown v. Board of Education, with legislation intended to discourage membership in the NAACP — laws that were ultimately overturned in court for violating 1st and 14th Amendment rights of free expression and association.

The petition also cites other issues with the right-to-work law, including a definitions section that seems to limit the law to public employee unions, and an error in the bill’s title that could render it unconstitutional.

“We’ve done our research and feel that we have a very strong argument on a number of different levels,” Sword said.

Although the 11 unions filed separate petitions, union attorneys Vincent Trivelli and Robert Batress also filed a motion to consolidate the petitions into a single lawsuit.

Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, which had strongly advocated for passage of right-to-work, said Monday he could not comment at length on the lawsuit, saying he and other chamber members have been preoccupied with flood relief efforts.

“It’s not unexpected. It’s a typical playbook thing to do,” he said of the lawsuit, adding, “When the bill was passed, the comment was: Lawsuit to follow.”

============================================

Too late at this juncture......................................................

It is clear the union leadership was asleep when the legislature were enacted this law.

Based on that the union leadership now is hemorrhaging membership dues at a wasteful errand - which irks the membership - reminder of the union leadership - Friedrich case is still pending.

Railroad Bureaucrats Do Unions’ Bidding With Proposed Staffing Regs

By Brian McNicoll

Jun 27, 2016 12:01 AM

Does it take two people to drive a freight train safely? The Federal Railroad Administration thinks so. What about a passenger train? Why, no.

That’s just one signal the Federal Railroad Administration is on the wrong track when it comes to a safety regulation it has proposed.

At the behest of unions, the agency proposed a rule earlier this year that essentially would require two crew members in the locomotive of any freight train unless a railroad goes through a lengthy approval process with the government.

But the rule does not require a second crew member to ride in the cab of a passenger train. The person who takes up your ticket qualifies as the second crew member.

Unions say the data backs up the need for two-person crews on freight trains, but this does not seem to be the case.

Crew size always has been subject to negotiations between railroads and unions, and the unions increasingly are losing the argument. As crew sizes have dwindled from five or six to three to two to now just one on some trains, railroading has gotten progressively safer.

According to data collected by the Federal Railroad Administration which is available on its website, accident rates have fallen 43 percent since 2000 and 79 percent since 1980. Railroads have lower injury rates than most other major industries, including trucking, inland water transportation, airlines, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.

Moreover, the industry is developing new technologies to be deployed across the network. It is in the process of installing a costly and complex system known as Positive Train Control – which overrides human error. Studies performed for the industry suggest one-person crews actually may be safer than two-person crews, particularly on track equipped with the new technology.

Research found single operators made fewer mistakes, paid closer attention, and took greater care when leaving the cab than two-person crews. If we’re going to encourage the new technologies and innovation that make railroads safe, we can’t force them to staff their trains like it’s 1999.

Why this regulation? And why now? Safety is not the issue. The agency has freely admitted it “cannot provide reliable or conclusive statistical data to suggest whether one-person crew operations are generally safer or less safe than multiple-person crew operations”

Since the Federal Railroad Administration has statutory authority to issue regulations that promote railroad safety, how then does the rule go forward?

Others have raised this question. The chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board told the agency to research whether two-person crews were safer before implementing the rule. But the agency said it could take years to rework forms and regulations to capture the crew size of trains involved in incidents. Really. Years to change a business form.

That was too much even for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which, upon reviewing the proposed rule, struck the claim that two-person crews are safer than single operators. And that wasn’t all the editing OIRA did.

In place after place, the regulatory overseer edited the railroad administration’s draft rule to delete claims that were implausible or overstated– such as the assertion that it would take years to start gathering data on whether trains were driven by one person or two. OIRA even forced the agency to acknowledge it has no proof of even a single accident that might have been avoided with a two-person crew.

You know it’s bad when one agency is overtly questioning the actions of its bureaucratic brethren. Or when the agency is declaring it doesn’t have nor want to consider safety data before implementing what would be a costly regulation that likely would deter technological and safety advances by railroads down the line.

The unions pushing this change say they have the overwhelming support of the American people and claim it’s obvious two-person crews are safer. But they admit they can’t prove it and indeed don’t even want to – and they push the measure only for trains that don’t carry people. To them, it’s regulate now; research at some vague point in the future – cost to the railroads in revenues, to employees in higher salaries, to all Americans in the form of foregone safety measures be damned.

If they’re right, they need to explain why this rule is necessary for the safe shipment of raw goods or consumer products, because it is not evident now. Otherwise, they need to acknowledge this is a bad idea, a sop from the candidates they work to put in office and an idea that should be abandoned.

Fact-checking Donald Trump's speech calling Hillary Clinton 'a world-class liar'

By Linda Qiu 

June 22nd, 2016

"Just look at her pathetic email server statements ..."

Trump is likely referring to Clinton’s defense of her use of a private email server. She’s repeatedly said the practice was "allowed."

We rated Clinton’s claim False. No one ever stopped Clinton from using a private serve exclusively, but that doesn’t mean it was allowed. On the contrary, the State Department said if she had asked, she wouldn’t have been allowed to use it.

"I started off in Brooklyn, N.Y., not so long ago, with a small loan and built a business that today is worth well over $10 billion."

While it’s difficult to pin down just how much Trump started off with and just how much he’s worth now, one thing is clear: Trump is no Horatio Alger.

The "small loan" was the $1 million from Trump’s father, Fred, to finance his Grand Hyatt hotel in 1978. (At this point, Donald was already president of his father’s real estate company.) But Fred Trump made out many other loans to Donald until his death in 1999, including a $70 million construction loan for the Grand Hyatt and a $3.5 million casino chip loan to bail out Trump’s struggling gaming empire, the Washington Post’s Fact-Checker reported.

"Now, because I have pointed out why it would be such a disastrous deal, she is pretending that she is against (the Trans-Pacific Partnership). She’s … deleted the entire record from her book."

One reference to TPP didn’t make it into the paperback edition of her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, which the publisher says was trimmed for size. Clinton said she worked to include Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile in TPP.

But that’s a description of negotiation efforts, not a ringing endorsement. The parts where she does praise TPP were left completely intact. Nothing was deleted from the two pages where she details her support for the deal. Furthermore, we found no evidence Trump influenced Clinton’s position on the deal.

We rated Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

The Benghazi victims were "left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed."

We rated this claim False. Clinton was not literally sleeping when the Benghazi attacks unfolded, as it was mid afternoon on a Tuesday in Washington. She worked late into the night, as is evidenced by an 11 p.m. email.

If we take Trump’s claim more broadly, that Clinton was inattentive throughout the hours in which the attacks occurred, none of the many congressional investigations into Benghazi have made that assertion.

"Ambassador (Chris) Stevens and his staff in Libya made hundreds and hundreds of requests for security. ...Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused them all."

While it’s true that the State Department was repeatedly asked to provide additional security, there’s no evidence that these reached Clinton directly, let alone that she personally denied the requests.

"I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and yes, even before the war ever started."

Trump often points to his early opposition to the Iraq war as evidence of his foresight, but this claim is still False. We could only find one example of Trump commenting on the Iraq War before the invasion where he seemed apprehensive but not vehemently opposed to the operation. In a more damning interview, Trump said he supported the invasion.

"But Hillary Clinton learned nothing from Iraq, because when she got into power, she couldn’t wait to rush us off to war in Libya."

While it’s true that Clinton advocated for intervention in Libya, Trump conveniently neglects to mention that he did as well.

"Now we should go in, we should stop this guy (Muammar Gaddafi), which would be very easy and very quick," Trump said in his 2011 video blog. "We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before."

There’s "no way to screen who they are, what they are, what they believe, where they come from."

We rated an earlier claim from Trump like this — there is "no system to vet" refugees — False. There are concerns about information gaps, but a way to screen refugees does exist and has existed since 1980.

It involves multiple federal intelligence and security agencies as well as the United Nations. Refugee-vetting typically takes one to two years and includes numerous rounds of security checks.

"Already, hundreds of recent immigrants and their children have been convicted of terrorist activity inside the U.S."

The most credible estimate we found is at least 139 immigrants and up to 184 children of immigrants implicated in jihad-inspired domestic terrorist activity.

Experts said it’s worth noting that the number of jihadist terrorism attacks pales in comparison to other violent acts. And there’s the fact that immigrants and children of immigrants make up a quarter of the U.S. population. Trump, himself, is a child of Scottish immigrant.

"Even though other people who have done similar things (as using a private email server), but much — at a much lower level, their lives have been destroyed."

Trump may have been referring to Scott Gration, the former ambassador to Kenya, who installed a commercial Internet connection in his embassy office bathroom and encouraged his staff to use their personal email.

Gration resigned from his post before a harsh State Department audit of him was released. But while the audit condemned Gration for his email practices, he had many other faults and ranked at or near the absolute bottom among other ambassadors.

In short, Gration’s life wasn’t "destroyed" solely because of his Clinton-like email practices.

"She’s pledged to grant mass amnesty and in her first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders in the United States."

This is False. Clinton has pledged to act on immigration reform within the first 100 days and supports a path to equal citizenship. But she also supported a 2013 bill that would have invested billions in border security and her plan also calls for protecting the border and targeting deportation to criminal and security threats. To say that this would lead to "open borders" is a huge distortion.

"For the amount of money Hillary Clinton would like to spend on refugees, we could rebuild every inner city in America."

Clinton hasn’t said how much she would spend, but the Obama administration requested a bit under $2.2 billion for 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2017. Clinton has said she would take in about 55,00 more Syrians so scaling up the cost, that’s roughly $3 to $4 billion.

Barely scratching the surface of the needs of America’s cities, we would need $225 billion for substandard housing and infrastructure. So refugee admissions would be a tiny fraction of the price tag for rebuilding America’s inner cities.

We rated Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

"We’ll pass massive tax reform (that will) lower taxes for everyone."

While everyone would be paying less under Trump’s tax plan, the cuts are disproportionate across income strata. In fact, the top 0.1 percent would get more tax relief than the bottom 60 percent combined. What’s more, multiple analyses have shown that his plan would bloat the deficit by at least $10 trillion in the next decade.

"We are, by the way, highest taxed nation in the world. Please remember that."

We’ve given Trump three False ratings for this claim. Whether you’re looking at tax burden as a percentage of GDP or per capita or specifying corporate tax revenue, the United States is nowhere near the top. Please remember that.

"Our military" has been "totally depleted."

While military spending has decreased, the United States’ defense budget is larger than the next seven to eight countries combined.

And while the number of ground troops and Navy ships have shrunk, size is no guarantee of military might. In fact, experts say the Army and Navy of today are much more capable than they were decades ago.

=========================================

Hmmmmm................................................................

Who is ‘a world-class liar’ now?

Hartford's Unions Say They'll Negotiate Together for Health Benefits

By JEFF COHEN

June 23, 2016

Leaders of most of Hartford's municipal unions say they want to work together to negotiate their health benefits. This comes as the city is trying to get more than $15 million in concessions from its workers. 

Representatives of six unions said at a press conference that they want to bargain as a group with the goal of saving the city money and preserving benefits. 

"It will help save the city on administrative fees as well as costs," said Rich Holton is the president of Hartford's police union.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has said the city's financial situation is dire, with structural deficits that only grow in the years to come. The city's budget that begins July 1 proposes $15.5 million in savings from union negotiations. City unions have said they could come up with somewhere between $8 million to $12 million, but Holton scoffed at the idea of over $15 million.

"We’ll do the best that we can," Holton said.  "We can't strip our members of every benefit they have just to appease the mayor in some arbitrary number he throws out in his budget."

Bronin said the announcement was a positive step -- one he asked the unions to take months ago.

“It makes a lot more sense for a city to be able to rationalize its health plans and negotiate with all the unions together for one health care plan design and I’m glad that they decided to bargain as a coalition," Bronin said.

Now, the job will be to negotiate a plan that actually saves money. Bronin hoped to come up with savings before July 1, but that now seems unlikely and the city will begin the year not knowing how it will close its $15.5 million budget hole.

Supreme Court Delivers Bad News For Union Hoping To Bag Illegals

By Connor D. Wolf

06/23/2016

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against an executive order granting citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants Thursday in what is likely a major blow to union membership.

Labor unions have been suffering a sharp decline in membership for decades. President Barack Obama signed a 2014 executive order opening the door to millions of new potential union members. The Supreme Court promptly closed that door by ruling that the president overstepped his authority. Union bosses claim their fight is about helping immigrants get the rights they deserve.

“[The] ruling is a setback for all those who have fought for more humane and rational enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “We continue to urge the administration to use its discretion to protect those courageous immigrant workers who are exercising their workplace and civil rights.”

Unions have already started to pave the road to get the millions of illegal immigrants into their ranks. They have set up training, workshop and recruitment programs all specifically aimed at the illegal immigrants that may be eligible for amnesty under the executive order. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leadership also condemned the ruling.

“This movement will not stop until every member of our community can live with dignity and without fear of deportation,” SEIU told membership in an email. “[They] had an opportunity to provide millions of immigrant families with the peace of mind that comes from knowing your life will not be torn apart.”

Union membership continues to go down year after year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data is available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2014 however, the union membership rate was just 11.1 percent.

The Supreme Court came to a split decision which defaults the ruling to whatever the lower court decided. The executive order would have expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents programs to include millions more immigrants currently in the country illegally.

The AFL-CIO and SEIU did not respond to a request for comment by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Two maritime unions pull longtime support for Young, endorse challenger

By Alex DeMarban 

June 23, 2016

The two maritime unions that criticized Rep. Don Young over his silence on campaign contributor Edison Chouest Offshore's likely assumption of tanker escort duties in Prince William Sound rescinded their longtime support for him and on Thursday announced they were endorsing his main challenger in the race.

Representatives with the Seattle-based Inlandboatmen's Union and the Maryland-based International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots on announced their support for Democrat Steve Lindbeck at a press event at his campaign headquarters on Thursday.

The unions each have about 5,000 members living around the country. For decades, the groups have found an ally in Young, a former tugboat operator on the Yukon River. But they say they've been angered by his decision not to speak out over the awarding of a valuable private contract to Louisiana tugboat company Edison Chouest for spill-prevention and ship-escort duties in Prince William Sound. Edison Chouest was one of the companies faulted by the federal government for errors that led to the grounding of Shell's Kulluk drilling rig off Kodiak in 2012.

[Rep. Young's challenger says his receipt of contributions by a maritime company amounts to 'legalized bribery']

Edison Chouest employees and related companies have given close to $300,000 to Young's campaigns and legal defense funds since 2007. Union members and Lindbeck have asserted the donations bought Young's silence on a public matter involving a critical waterway that supports fishing.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., manager of the spill-response contract on behalf of its owners — primarily BP, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips — says Edison Chouest is poised to take over the 10-year contract from Crowley Marine, a union company from Florida.

Young's press secretary has said it's not appropriate to weigh in on a private contractual matter.

But Edison Chouest has described several agencies and public entities as "stakeholders" in the contract, including the U.S. Coast Guard, the state Department of Environmental Conservation and a citizen watchdog group and fishermen.

Ganim threatens layoffs if unions reject austerity measures

By Cedar Attanasio

June 22, 2016

BRIDGEPORT — Mayor Joe Ganim's administration took negotiations with city employees public on Tuesday, calling on union officials to accept concessions or face layoffs.

“We have been in negotiations with organized labor for months, but time is growing short to close our current fiscal year deficit,” said Bridgeport Chief Administrative Officer John Gomes, in a statement. “We are willing to be as flexible as possible but the bottom line is we need more savings.”

The administration says that if city employee unions accept $4 million worth of cuts by July 1, the administration can avoid the “last resort” decision to lay off more workers.

Ganim inherited a $20 million budget gap when he took office on Dec. 1, according to Bridgeport Director of Communications Av Harris. The city has already laid off around 100 workers and incentivized another 51 into early retirement.

Those early retirements and unpaid furlough days represent significant concessions by city employees, argued Bridgeport Supervisor Association counsel Edward J. Gavin.

“This administration fails to recognize the sacrifices the Union members have and are continuing to make to support the City,” Gavin said by email. “Unions such as the Bridgeport City Supervisors Association have, in the past, gone years without raises to meet the fiscal needs of the Administration. It is reckless and dangerous to layoff dedicated employees who serve the citizens of Bridgeport.”

Gavin offered no additional concessions and predicted that the city would start cutting positions.

“We anticipate new layoffs will be announced on Friday,” he said.