White House official: Organized labor just flushed $10 million...down the toilet

In a stunning blow to organized labor, Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln narrowly survived Tuesday's primary runoff against Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter.  The estimable Michael Barone summed up his perspective on that contest and others in a late-night post at The Washington Examiner (via Lucianne.com):

Blanche Lincoln’s (narrow) victory leaves the unions’ strategy in ruins. They can’t credibly threaten any Democratic incumbent who opposes card check with political defeat. Some, in states less anti-union than Arkansas, might be vulnerable to a challenge like Halter’s; but others won’t. And in some states or districts there won’t be an opportunistic challenger like Halter willing to go along with the strategy and well enough established to be a serious primary challenger. Give the unions credit for daring, and for putting their money (or the money of their members) on the line. They’re playing for high stakes—for the ability to plunder the private sector for dues money as they have successfully plundered the public sector (i.e., taxpayers) for dues money in states with strong public employee unions like New York, New Jersey and California. They just came up a little bit short.

Obviously this is a case of a divergence of interest between the unions (which want to deter any Democrat from opposing card check) and the Obama administration political strategists (who want to maximize the number of Democrats elected no matter what their position on substantive issues). Which brings to mind the old saying about honor among thieves. When you’re trying, in different ways, to plunder a once productive private sector economy, you won’t always agree on how to do so. As you watch the videotape of Blanche Lincoln’s rather shrewd victory speech, you might want to keep that in mind.

Ben Smith at Politico got this unsolicited scoop from the White House:

A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas.

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

Democrats plan union pension bailout

President Obama declared that there would be no more government bailouts, so his congressional minions had to think of a clever disguise for the next big boondoggle coming your way.  Try this misnomer:  "Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act."  Sponsored by Pennsylvania Democratic Senator Bob Casey, it's a bailout of union-run pension plans. Period.  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Mr. Casey is gathering support for his curiously named "Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act," a bailout for union-run retirement plans. Similar to House legislation from North Dakota Democrat Earl Pomeroy and Ohio Republican Patrick Tiberi, the bill would transfer tens of billions of dollars worth of retiree liabilities to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, i.e., to taxpayers.

At issue are multi-employer pension plans, in which companies across an industry pay into a single pension pool. The plans are predominately run by unions and for years have distinguished themselves by poor management. The Labor Department in 2008 listed 230 multi-employer plans that were either endangered (less than 80% funded), or critical (less than 65% funded), or that had applied to government for funding relief. By 2009 that number had soared to 640.

The financial crash is partly to blame, but even before 2006 only about 6% of multi-employer plans were fully funded, compared to about 31% of single-employer plans. The real problem is that multi-employer plans have become a sort of pension Ponzi scheme.

Unions love multi-employer plans because they let workers keep their retirement benefits even if they switch jobs to another participating company. This encourages lifelong union membership. Unions are less enthusiastic about paying the bills. The negotiating priority of union leaders is to get hefty wage increases and benefits for current workers, leaving the scraps to the pensions of retirees who no longer vote in union elections.

When a company in an industry goes out of business, meanwhile, the remaining firms are still on the hook for all costs of the multi-employer plan. This explains why the trucking industry is backing Mr. Casey's bill, and why Mr. Casey announced his legislation at a Pennsylvania facility of YRC Worldwide, a Kansas trucking outfit. Someone has to pay for years of the industry agreeing to Teamster demands.

Mr. Casey's bill would cordon off "orphaned" pensions—those for which an employer has stopped contributing or withdrawn from a multi-employer fund—and put them into a separate account. Surviving companies would pay benefits to these orphans for five years, after which they'd get kicked to the PBGC, which would shoulder the benefits until the last retiree or beneficiary dies. The remaining multi-employer plan would be back in the black, free to start the negative-feedback loop of underpayments and overpromises again.

Senator Casey claims his bailout scheme will cost "only" $8 billion, but in a September 2009 report, Moody's estimated that multi-employer plans were $165 billion underfunded. In a March post, Jeff Dunetz at RedState listed 103 union pension plans that were rated endangered or critical.  The Journal describes this bailout as a "consolation prize" to the unions to compensate for the failure to get "card check" legislation passed.  Andrew Langer at The Washington Times thinks it amounts to a big union payout for a relatively small $400 million bet:

At this point, it would be unfair to say definitively that part of the $165 billion going to unions to help their struggling pension funds will go toward the millions they plan to spend to retain incumbent Democrats in Congress. However, considering that unions gave nearly $400 million to Mr. Obama and the Democrats in 2008 for campaign contributions, as well as millions more for in-kind contributions, it is fair to suspect that the bailout is political payback for support during the election.

All of this begs an interesting question: If the unions had $400 million to give to Mr. Obama to help him get elected, why didn't they use that money to prop up their own pension funds? Granted, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in the $165 billion they'll be getting from the taxpayers, but it would have made a slight one. The answer: because it's a calculated bet. They chose to invest that $400 million in a situation that would garner them a larger payoff in the future once the bailout occurred.

This should infuriate taxpayers forced to pay for this kind of gamble and the rank-and-file union members who pay their dues only to have their promised pension money used in some sort of twisted version of Vegas blackjack. Is the intent to use some of the bailout money to ensure that those rank-and-file union members - many of whom are out of work along with their non-union brethren - will vote the right way during the November election? After all, there would be no better way to ensure incumbency protection than by convincing the local voters that the party of the big bailout is the one that has their backs in November.

SEIU crossed the line with a police escort

When the Montgomery County (MD) Police responded to 911 calls to the home of Bank of America exec Gary Baer Sunday, they discovered that D.C. Metropolitan Police officers were already there.  What?  From Big Journalism:

The family of Greg Baer, Bank of America executive, is located in a jurisdiction protected by the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD), which responded promptly to a disturbance call from his neighborhood last weekend.

According to Corporal Dan Friz, an MCPD spokesperson in Rockville, Maryland, the department received a disturbance call from one of Baer’s neighbors at 4:10 pm last Sunday. Four MCPD units arrived at Baer’s Greenville Rd. address at 4:15 pm. At least two Metropolitan Police Department units from the nearby District of Columbia were already at the scene when they arrived.

Why? Because police cars attached to the Washington MPD’s Civil Disturbance Unit had escorted the SEIU protesters’ buses to Baer’s home. Such cross-jurisdictional escort activity is not uncommon for both departments according to Friz and Metro Police Department spokesperson Officer Eric Frost. Still, the District police did not inform their colleagues of what was about to happen in one of their Maryland neighborhoods.

Like birds of a feather, I guess D.C. unions stick together.

John Fund has an interesting comparison of media scrutiny of the Tea Parties and Unions at The Wall Street Journal.

Obama's big labor payback

President Obama made 15 recess appointments on Saturday, bypassing the Congress during its Easter recess.  The most controversial of these is Craig Becker whom the President placed on the National Labor Relations Board after his nomination was scotched by the Senate in a failed 52-33 cloture vote last month.  Becker is a leading lawyer for the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union, has a long and very public history of holding extreme pro-union positions.  The Wall Street Journal claims that Becker's appointment will have a devastating effect on workers rights:

Mr. Becker has written extensively about the National Labor Relations Act, the law that the NLRB interprets and enforces. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, he said that the "core defect in union election law . . . is the employer's status as a party to labor representation proceedings" and that "employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees' election of representatives." In other words, employers should be barred from telling their employees they shouldn't unionize.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Becker tried to walk back this and other oft-expressed views, including a prior assertion that union-election rules can be rewritten by the NLRB without the consent of Congress. Now he says he'll defer to Congress if appointed, but the modern union movement is bloody-minded about the will to power and Mr. Becker is one of its fiercest partisans.

Time is running out—it has until Election Day—for Big Labor to get a vote in Congress to rig labor laws in its favor. Mr. Becker would give unions a majority at the NLRB and is their political Plan B. Recess appointments are the President's prerogative, but overriding the bipartisan Senate opposition to Mr. Becker would show once again that this White House dances to the tune of the left.

The National Right to Work Committee blogged about Becker before the appointment:

In other words, you can forget about employees getting truthful and non-coercive information about the downsides of unionization.

But there's more. Becker has publicly argued union goons should have the privilege to repeatedly harass workers at home until the workers sign "card check" union authorization cards; advocated allowing government arbiters impose contracts on workers without even allowing the workers to vote on the contract; and has even compared union organizing elections to US Congressional elections, stating that the only question decided in such elections should be which union gets monopoly control over workers, not whether they wish to remain independent and union free.

Mr. Becker's appointment is only part of Obama's payback to Big Labor that was essential to his election.  The Washington Times reminds us of an executive order the President signed last year:

Worse, Mr. Becker's appointment would not mark the end of the payback. An executive order Mr. Obama signed last year will go into effect soon, requiring federal contractors to have project labor agreements that effectively shut out the 85 percent of construction workers who are nonunionized and requiring contractors to make contributions to union pension funds. In other words, Big Labor will cash in while taxpayers are stuck with bills some 20 percent higher.

Rick Moran sums up the President's strategy succinctly at American Thinker:

Do we detect a pattern here? Obama can't get cap and trade through the senate so he tasks the EPA with doing the dirty work. Now that it looks like card check is stalled, Obama is "reaching out" to the NLRB to fulfill his dream of the Unionized States of America.

Oh, by the way - if Mr. Becker isn't radical enough for ya, how about Lesbian activist Chai Feldblum for EEOC commissioner who has promised never - repeat never - to rule in favor of religious liberty when opposed to sexual liberty.

Welcome to the new Mainstream.

This is unsettling announcement is unlikely to get any traction.  In addition to the fact that it was made under the news radar on a Saturday, it was made the day before the President took a surprise trip to Afghanistan.

Brilliant.

Union bosses target 86-year-old volunteer crossing guard

Liberty Chick at Big Government (via Peter List at LaborUnionreport.com) shines a light on the shameful efforts of union leaders in Wassau, Wisconsin to fire an 86-year-old volunteer crossing guard:

First, they came for the Babysitter. Then, they came for the Eagle Scout. Now, they’ve come for the Crossing Guard.

Warren Eschenbach, an 86-year-old a retired Wausau Water Works employee volunteers his time as a crossing guard at the Riverview Elementary School in Wausau, Wisconsin. After the Wausau School District built an area just outside an intersection at the school’s location for parents to pickup their kids from the school, the intersection became busier than usual for a short time every day. So, Eschenbach did a noble thing. He went over to the school and spoke with parents, kids and administrators, and he volunteered to patrol the area at pickup time to make sure kids got to their parents’ cars and that others crossed the streets safely. After all, he worked for five years as a crossing guard at the Franklin Elementary School up until three years ago. He lives two doors down and it’s for a half hour every day. Who could take issue with that?

Well, apparently union bosses can.

John Spiegelhoff, a local union rep for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1287 (AFSCME) wants to know if the 86-year-old retiree has undergone a background check. And if he has liability insurance. AFSCME insists that Eschenbach is “undermining the union” and has demanded that the city get rid of him and replace him with a paid union worker at $12.65 an hour. The city has been cutting back crossing guard hours from 15 hours a week to 10 a week. Of course, the elderly volunteer isn’t a volunteer with the city, he volunteers with the school. Since the pickup location is newly restructured, there hadn’t ever been the need to have a crossing guard there. There was no prior job this gentleman has taken away from the union. Really, the guy just lives right there and thought he’d help out.

Local news video can be viewed here.

Michelle Malkin covered a story in September where the same union, AFSCME, and SEIU tried to force the unionization of in-home caregivers of people with developmental disabilities.  Often those caregivers were family members of the disabled.

So much for candidate Obama's call to public service.