Tag: unions

Interesting note about Jack Lew

Honestly, what does Barack Obama have against the working class in this Country? Quite a bit, it seems:

With President Obama poised to tap current chief of staff Jack Lew as his next treasury secretary, Republicans are already attacking Lew for supposed slights during budget talks. Some progressives may bring renewed scrutiny to his time at CitiGroup. But if history is any guide, there will be little talk about another line on Lew’s résumé: The key role he played in New York University’s campaign to rid itself of a graduate student workers’ union.

Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, joined NYU as chief operating officer and executive vice president in 2004. At the time, NYU was the only private university in the United States whose graduate students had a union contract. By the time Lew left two years later, NYU graduate students had lost their collective bargaining rights. In between, picketers hoisted “Wanted” posters with his face on them.

Reached over email, Andrew Ross, NYU professor of social and cultural analysis, charged that “the administration followed every page of the union-busting playbook, as instructed by the anti-union lawyers retained for that purpose.” Ross, a co-editor of the anthology “The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace,” wrote that despite broad faculty and community support for the union, “students on the picket line were threatened with expulsion. There was no indication that Lew, as a senior member of the team who executed this policy, disagreed with any of these practices. To all appearances, he was a willing, and loyal, executor of decisions that trampled all over the students’ democratic right to organize.”

When contacted for a response, White House spokesperson Eric Schultz emailed: “Jack Lew has been a strong supporter of the right of workers to organize – as has the President. And that support will not change in his new role as Treasury Secretary.” – via Jack Lew’s union-busting past – Salon.com.

I always said, since day one of the first election cycle of Barack Obama; that he was nothing more than a two-bit phony. I believe that in his second term, we are going to find out just how big of a two-bit phony that he can really be towards the unions and the working class. Would Hillary have been any better? I really do not know. But, when I hear a Democrat basically say, “I care about the high-tech jobs.” and not say anything about the unskilled laborers, like myself. I have to really wonder, just what kind of person is he really? We are about to find out, I think and I believe it is not going to be good for the unions and the working class in general —- not to mention most gun owners.

Update on hot dog stand owner

Needless to say, I feel like a chump. I trusted that those that I linked to, might be have actually telling the truth about this incident. Well, it turns out, they, of course, were lying about that as well. Go figure. Rolling Eyes

Anyhow, Chris Savage, much to his credit flushes out the spin and hype about this little lie told by the corporatist right. I hope like heck he does not mind me quoting him a bit, but here goes:

The right wingnut blogosphere is apoplectic that Lansing, Michigan’s iconic “Hot Dog Guy”, Clinton Tarver, was a victim of union thug violence at yesterday’s anti-Right to Work for Less rally. The reality is that Tarver is simply a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also happens to be married to the Michigan Republican Party’s Ethnic Caucus Vice-Chair — perhaps one of the loneliest leadership positions in the entire state.

[…]

This is a far cry from the all-caps-can-you-believe-what-these-union-thugs-did freak out by conservatives who would have you believe that Tarver lost his entire livelihood at the hands of union goons. Tarver was set up on some tables under the tent and did not even have his cart. He must have had a very slow day. Anyone who was at the rally and wandered by the two giant AFP tents will tell you that they were essentially empty all day. There were a few AFP folks standing out front, taunting union members and provoking confrontations, but there was not a lot of activity inside the tent where Tarver was.

[…]

….According the article, they have raised over $10,000 for him (UPDATE: MIRS News reports that it’s now over $16,000.) The total value of what he lost in the scuffle?

$500.

I wonder what they’ll do with the thousands of extra dollars not needed to buy more buns, hot dogs, ketchup, mustard and a couple of folding tables and coolers?

Certainly Clint Tarver didn’t deserve to be treated as shabbily as he was by the union folks there. His wife claims he was called a “nigger” and jeered for working for the enemy. If true, that’s reprehensible and inexcusable. But the off-the-charts poutrage from the right on this is an absolute joke. Some of the same people decrying the verbal taunts that Tarver experiencde are here on this very website calling union members all sorts of hideous names. So let’s keep it real, shall we?

One more thing: if you’d like to meet Clint Tarver in person, I’m hearing that he’ll be selling hot dogs outside Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s office tomorrow, capitalizing on his newfound political fame with Republicans. Stop by and buy a dog.

Adding… Let’s not kid ourselves about what “Tentgate” and “Hot Doggate” are all about:distracting the country from noticing that corporatist ideologues have turned the birthplace of American organized labor into a Right to Work for Less state.It’s a smokescreen, chaff to make sure the conversation is not about screwing union members and is, instead, about the AFP losing a couple of tents.

I can understand the spin, it is what happens in politics; but I will never understand the lying about what happens. Do these people even have any sort of conscience at all?!?! The real cute part is this; this Steven Crowder guy, claims to be a Christian — to the point of writing about how stinking Christian he was to not get his noodle wet until he was married. But yet, he lies like this? My question is this: which God and Jesus does he serve? Does this man know not what the Bible says about lying and liars in the Old and New Testaments? Hypnotized I really hated to bring religion into it, but good grief these people give  good and honest Christians a horribly bad name. Not talking

Now before anyone points it out; Yes, I have commented on the fact that I thought his stuff was funny. Yes, I did and I still think he is funny, as an comedian and an actor. However, when he started acting as shill for the corporatist right, and came out in support of this union busting crap by Governor Snyder; he lost me. When he was making his video himself, without people like AFP backing him up. I respected him. I no longer do as such. Because he is a corporate shill.  Which is a far cry from the small business owners that I happen to respect and want to be myself.

A possible way out of this “right to work” mess?

This could be some very good news, hopefully, the unions and the Democrats can pull this one off and quickly:

Today, Governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign “right to work” legislation in Michigan. Obviously, this will constitute a hard blow to organized labor, for a host of reasons, symbolic and practical alike.

But NBC’s Michael O’Brien reports that labor operatives believe they may have it on a new procedural way to force a vote on the legislation. If the major unions avail themselves of this option — and if it pans out legally — this means the Dem threats to turn this into an extended all-out war could come to pass.

Republicans have tried to protect the law from going before the voters by attaching an appropriation to it; spending bills can’t be overturned by legislative referendum in Michigan. But union operatives think there is another mechanism by which the law can be challenged. According to one good government group’s analysis of the state constitution, there exists the option of the “statutory initiative,” which would be forced by the collecting of signatures equal to at least eight percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

Will unions and Michigan Democrats avail themselves of this option? Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the labor-funded Workers’ Voice, which played a big role in the Ohio and Wisconsin labor wars, tells me it’s being seriously considered. “The Michigan Constitution allows two other ways to let the people decide this issue on the ballot, and whether it’s one of those options or the 2014 Governor’s election itself, Michiganders will be heard loud and clear,” Vale says. (There may also be another referendum option as well.)

via The Morning Plum: A way out for labor in Michigan?.

This a good thing and hopefully the Democrats use it and the Unions get behind it.

The best darned thing written so far about Detroit, The Labor Movement, and “Right to Work”

This is very good:

To understand why the impending transformation of Michigan into a right-to-work state is so mortifying to labor and its supporters—far worse, even, than what happened in Wisconsin and Ohio—one must consider the totemic status of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Although there are, despite all you have heard, many good reasons for public-sector workers to have the right to unionize, nobody ever made a movie or wrote a song about a public-sector worker; public-sector organizing campaigns are pretty tame affairs. But if someone were to write a book titled (with apologies to Vivian Gornick), The Romance of 20th Century American Unionism, it would likely be a dual case study. One story would be about the United Farm Workers of the 1960s and 1970s, courageously built from the grape and lettuce fields by migrant Latino laborers in California.

The other would span from the mid-1930s until about 1970 and tell the story of the United Auto Workers, the union that the Prospect’s Harold Meyerson correctly called the other day the “best” American union. Mass industrial workers, whom many believed were impossible to organize, spawned the UAW. These workers, the immigrant laborers of their time, shocked the nation with the imaginative militancy of their factory-floor sit-downs and “flying picket” lines at the legendary Flint, Michigan, strike in 1937. The union’s brilliant, incorruptible president, Walter Reuther—himself beaten and bloodied in organizing campaigns—sought, with the power of his union and his ideas, to leverage the United States into something resembling the social democracies of Western Europe. He had to settle for millions of working-class people ascending into the middle class in the 25 years following World War II, benefiting directly from UAW collective-bargaining agreements, or seeing their own wages and benefits tied to those of the UAW (and Steelworker’s union) standard.

Reuther, furthermore, supported both the nascent civil-rights movement (and fought hard to cleanse his own union of racism), the New Left, and even supported the beginning of modern environmentalism. The Port Huron statement—the founding, now canonical, document of Students for a Democratic Society—was written in 1962 at a UAW-owned campground for use by its members. You can see Reuther standing behind Dr. Martin Luther King during the “I Have a Dream” speech on the Mall in 1963, while George Meany’s AFL-CIO, from a mixture of racism and red baiting, shied away.

The UAW had enormous political clout, too. It couldn’t change the political economy of the country, but it was a powerful member of the Democratic Party coalition. Reuther had the ear, and vice versa, of every Democratic president and candidate of the postwar era. During this era, the presidential election campaign would begin for the Democratic candidate in—where else?—Cadillac Square in Detroit before a throng of union, mostly UAW, members. One can measure the changes in the Democratic Party, Michigan, and the country from, for example, reading the text of JFK’s 1960 Cadillac Square speech.

When Reuther died in a private plane crash in 1970, every auto plant in the country stopped its assembly lines for one minute in silent tribute—thus the “Big Three” car companies honored their remarkable adversary and the formidable institution he and his members built.

via This Is Not Wisconsin. It’s Worse – RICH YESELSON  – American Prospect

I could not have worded it better myself. This isn’t about “right to work”, this piece of legislation is simply about destroying the labor movement in Detroit. Which is what the Republicans in Michigan and in Washington DC have wanted to do for ages.  If the labor movement is smart, they will stand up to the weasel Snyder and not let this stand. Hopefully, they have the guts to do it.

Governor Rick Snyder starts to feel the heat for his idiocy

I find this to be very encouraging, perhaps Governor Snyder did not realize what he was getting into, or maybe he did.

The Story via Greg Sargent at Washington Post:

The “right to work” battle in Michigan may not be over quite yet.

Top Democrats in the Michigan Congressional delegation just wrapped up their meeting with Governor Rick Snyder, during which they urged him in no uncertain terms: If you go forward with “right to work” legislation, you’ll be consigning the state to years of discord and division. They urged him to consider vetoing the legislation or postponing it until the next session — or even agreeing to subject it to referendum.

According to Dems who were on the call, Snyder told them he would “seriously” take into account their objections — which they took as a genuine indication of possible willingness, for now, to reconsider.

“The Governor listened, and he told us he would seriously consider our concerns,” Senator Carl Levin said on a conference call with reporters.

The tenor of the meeting, which participants described as urgent and intense, underscores the gravity of the situation — not just for Democrats, but for the state itself. Dems told Snyder that forging ahead with “right to work” legislation risked undermining the progress in labor-management relations in the state and could create a situation similar to Wisconsin, where an ongoing battle over collective bargaining tore the state apart for over a year.

I do not trust the weasel myself, and here is why; This comes via Deadline Detroit, which I had some choice words for once, and which I retract those words too — granted, I have not always liked what I have seen there, but I was a bit harsh on them, they have the right to publish what they wish, just like I do…:

Signing right-to-work legislation will have serious, even dire consequences on the state, congressional Democrats told Gov. Rick Snyder this morning, according to Kathleen Gray in the Free Press.

In a private meeting in Detroit between seven members of Congress and Snyder, Sen. Carl Levin told reporters afterward they asked Snyder to either veto the legislation or remove the appropriation attached to the bill, which would allow a statewide vote on the issue.

“The labor environment has dramatically improved in the state,” Levin said. But with right to work, “instead of having a Michigan united, we’re going to have a Michigan divided.”

A couple of hours after meeting with the delegation, Snyder signaled his continuing support of the right-to-work bills when he tweeted, “Freedom to work is all about creating more and better jobs in Michigan.”

So, basically, this guy is nothing more than a lying snake. If I were the labor movement, I would not trust him at all. if anything at all; I would begin to mount a recall effort against this man and get him out of office as soon as they possibly could. Like others have noted, Governor Snyder has proven that he is nothing more than a lying stack of crap and will say and do anything to stay in power — including straight up lie to get elected, like he did to me and every other person who trusted him.

There is two things in this world that I have little or no use for — and that is thieves and liars; and this idiot Snyder is a lying piece of crap, if there ever was one to be behold.  As the Detroit Free Press rightly noted, Governor Rick Snyder knowingly lied to the people of Michigan, including disillusioned Democrats like myself, who come from Democratic Party voting families and who happen to care about this State and this Country and do not agree with the far socialist left agenda of President Barack Obama. This does not mean, however, that we think that unions ought be outlawed and busted up.

Again, as I wrote before on here, this was nothing more than a pander to the extremist wing of the Republican Party and by doing this; Governor Snyder will pay a terrible price.

 

 

 

Sorry, but this strikes me as incredibly dumb

Look, I am all for unions fighting for their right to organize; but this, is just plain stupid:

They looked jolly in red scarves and reindeer antler headbands, but the carolers outside of Troy’s Oakland Mall today were actually protestors conveying a serious message: No to right-to-work legislation in Michigan.

And they delivered their feelings about proposed bills and Gov. Rick Snyder through pointed, modified Christmas carols. Think “Frosty the Snowman.”

“Rick-y Snyder knew he couldn’t get his way — so he took the votes from the working folks so the wealthy get our pay,” they sang.

Shalaya Bryant, who works at a nursing home, said the group was trying to send the message that “right to work is not for Michigan.”

via Modified Christmas carols used to protest right-to-work legislation at Oakland Mall | Oakland County | Detroit Free Press

First of all, they are nowhere near the capital building in Lansing. Second of all, what a great way to show that Democrats and Unionists hate traditional Christian values, by butchering Christmas Carols. I mean, the left wants to be accepted by the rest of America; but yet, they pull stuff like this here. This is why the rest of America loathes the labor movement. Because they simply do not respect traditional values of America. Butchering Christmas carols makes the labor movement look selfish.

Thirdly, who told these people they could sing?!?! 😯 Egad. 🙄

 

 

Naturally, Fox News Channel sets out to union members look crazy

This is so typical of the propaganda wing of the Republican Party:

Michigan Republicans touched off a firestorm Thursday with an abrupt push to pass right-to-work legislation, in what would be a blow to organized labor in the home of the U.S. auto industry. 

Right-to-work legislation prohibits unions from forcing workers to pay union dues. Unions and their Democratic allies adamantly oppose these laws — but with little warning, Michigan Republicans on Thursday laid the groundwork to, in a matter of days, make their state the 24th with right-to-work legislation. 

“This is all about taking care of the hard-working workers in Michigan, being pro-worker and giving them freedom to make choices,” Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said. “The goal isn’t to divide Michigan, it is to bring Michigan together.” 

The votes Thursday, though, drew hundreds of union-tied protesters to the capital, some of whom were pepper-sprayed by police when they tried to storm the Senate chamber

via Michigan Republicans draw union ire with sudden votes on right-to-work legislation | Fox News.

I did notice for a while, after the Bush Administration that Fox News Channel had gotten away from the propagandizing for the Republican Party. However it seems that they are back to doing that once again.  For the record, the Union members are sticking up for their rights, given to them by the Government to collectively bargain and organize, if they should see fit to do so.

This is war, and I just picked my side. Republican corporatist assholes, you all want a war with organized labor? You just got yourselves one and you picked the wrong city to invade and try to bust up the unions. I might not be formally in a union, and I might not agree 100% with all the political stances involved with the unions. However, when you start invading my Father’s right to collectively bargain, or in layman’s terms, to keep what he rightfully earned, after working 31 years for the same company —- you and me are going to have a serious problem.  😡

To do what Fox News Channel and Network is doing is borderline Nazi Fascist or Soviet style propaganda, it is anti-american and President Obama needs to step up and ask the FCC to inquire whether Fox News is breaking any laws about disseminating any anti-American propaganda or not.

Again, this is about family and this….is war. 😡

I voted for a Governor, who promised to bring leadership to Michigan, after a Democratic Party Governor fails and what the hell does he do? He pulls some extremist crap like this here? I do not think so; this is war and I just decided that I no longer wish to be associated with his ilk any longer. I gave the Republicans and the Conservatives a chance, but they seem to be bound and determined to push people like me away. So, screw them, let them push me away. I will fight the good fight and they can go count their money.

I did not pick this fight, the Republicans in Michigan did, and I am simply defending my family.

Some encouraging news for my Dad

Some good news for my Dad.

(Reuters) – The proposed Michigan “right-to-work” law will not apply to existing union contracts, a leading sponsor of the proposal said on Friday, which may blunt its immediate impact on the huge auto industry in the state.

Michigan Republicans pushed through the state legislature on Thursday a law making the payment of union dues voluntary in the private sector. The state Senate also voted to apply this to the public sector except for police and fire unions.

Republican lawmakers, who hold majorities in both chambers of the legislature, could give final approval to the laws on Tuesday and Republican Governor Rick Snyder could immediately sign them, Amber McCann, spokeswoman for state Senate Majority Leader Richard Richardville, said on Friday.

“Right-to-work” could be signed into law within a week in the cradle of the U.S. auto industry, a stunning blow to organized labor in the United States.

The law would actually take effect at the end of March, Richardville said on Thursday.

But the legislation has a so-called “grandfather” clause exempting existing union contracts until they expire, said Republican state Senator Arlan Meekhoff, a sponsor of the plan.

[…]

“I don’t think this will hurt the UAW with the (Detroit automakers) as much as it will hurt unions trying to organize nonunion companies in Michigan,” Schwartz said.

via Michigan right-to-work law exempts existing union contracts | Reuters.

Just the same, the whole idea of Government essentially blocking Union organizing rights is asinine. Which is why I no longer will be supporting the Republican Party.