A business owner in Southeastern Michigan was shot last week after confronting a man carving “SCAB” into his car. John King, the shooting victim, owns King Electrical Services, the largest non-union electrical contractor in the area. Last Wednesday, King reportedly awoke at night to find someone in his driveway vandalizing his car. When King stepped outside, the man shot him in the arm and fled. King has been forced to endure other incidents of harassment by labor unions, the Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle reports: Labor unions have attempted, unsuccessfully, to …
A New Jersey Superior Court issued an injunction against a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers, which is one of the two unions currently on strike against Verizon Communications, and represents about 10,000 of the 45,000 striking employees. The injunction prohibits a range of activities, some of which have reportedly been employed by various union picketers in efforts to obstruct or harass the company or its workers since the strike began more than a week ago. Among the practices specifically forbidden under the court’s ruling: the throwing …
State governments across the nation are looking for ways to tighten their belts in the face of declining tax revenues and growing budget shortfalls. In Pennsylvania, legislators have offered a measure that would, they claim, dramatically reduce the state’s construction costs on public works projects by bringing contractors’ wages in line with the prevailing market rates. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania Assembly’s Labor and Industry Committee debated a measure offered by Rep. Ron Miller (R) that would bring the prevailing wage – or the wage contractors must pay workers when working …
Strikes continued Thursday against Verizon Communications by 45,000 members of the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers unions. Tensions continue to run high, and yet more reports of potentially illegal activity have emerged – beyond the sabotage Verizon alleges it has endured. Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for a picketing union to prevent non-striking employees from entering company facilities. But in the last couple days, there have been numerous apparent instances of Verizon strikers doing just that. A judge in Allegheny County, …
Verizon employees went on strike this week in protest of the company’s proposed changes to its employee benefits. The company’s collective bargaining agreement expired at midnight on Saturday. By Sunday, Verizon was already alleging a dozen instances of sabotage, and illegal attempts by strikers to block managers from entering Verizon facilities. According to a Verizon press release, the company endured: Ten incidents of fiber-optic lines being deliberately cut in the Bronx, Pomona, Farmingdale and Guilderland in New York; two separate incidents in Tewksbury in Massachusetts; incidents in Bel Air in …
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a subpoena to the National Labor Relations Board on Sunday requesting documents that he said the board had failed to provide of its own accord. The documents involve the NLRB’s controversial suit against Boeing, which seeks to block the airline giant from opening a production facility in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, instead of Washington State. The NLRB claims the move constitutes retaliation against the International Association of Machinists union. Boeing insists that it is …
It’s hard to imagine Uncle Sam telling Walt Disney where to make movies or McDonald’s how many hamburgers to make, but if you take a look at the case of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) versus Boeing, you’ll see that the federal government is trying to do just that: dictate where and how private industry may do business. And it’s doing so to bolster one of President Barack Obama’s favorite special interests—labor unions. To catch you up on the story, Boeing Corporation decided to build a new assembly plant …
Should a union need the support of most workers at a company in order to represent them? Most people would say yes—but most people are not union bosses. Unions want to represent as many dues paying members as possible. Whether those workers want their services is beside the point. At the behest of union lobbyists, President Obama’s appointees to the National Mediation Board (NMB) rewrote the rules governing airline union elections. For the past 75 years, unions had to win the support of a majority of employees at an airline …
Indications are that the Progressive Movement is headed for a crushing defeat two weeks from now. Political analysts Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook both peg the number of competitive House races at around 100. Separately, both analysts are also predicting Democrats will lose between 45 and 60 seats (39 are needed to switch control of the House). Striking back against the electorate’s small government fervor, AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman penned a strategy memo last week claiming “Union Voters are the firewall for candidates that support working families.” And sure …
Michael Kinsley once observed that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” By that measure Michael Gittings, the treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 711, committed an enormous gaffe when he appeared in a recent Daily Show segment. Gittings’s Las Vegas–based union is protesting Wal-Mart for paying low wages and hiring non-union workers. As he put it, such behavior “comes down to greed.” Perhaps that is why his local outsources its protests of Wal-Mart to non-union workers and pays them the minimum wage. As Gittings …
