Control. It is the most pressing priority for the leadership of Big Labor. They need to control the masses, and in order to do that they most control the terms of employment, and they must control the benefits of employment. For this reason, the Big Labor bosses oppose employee incentive raises. They create discord and jealousy, and thus, the union’s ability to control its membership. But such incentives also create ambition, initiative, and increased productivity. While important to the the employer, these traits are potentially damaging to the union. Complacency, mediocrity and sameness benefit the union, as the results are that it takes more employees to produce the end product, translating into more union members and more union dues, which is the ultimate objective.
As has been documented in previous blogs, unions have been on a steady decline since 1947 when Congress, following more than a decade of union corruption,passed the Taft-Hartley Act. Of the many important provisions of the Act, perhaps none was more so than the guarantee of the secret ballot election which, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Card Check! Since its peak, union membership has dropped from approximately 35-40% of the workforce to a low of 11.3% today. Per statistics gathered by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, included amongst this trending decrease is a drop of approximately 400,000 members in the last year alone.
It is no surprise then that the Big Labor bosses are opposed to any initiatives that would, in their minds, result in decreased membership and would eliminate traditional union “selling points.” Characterization of ambition and incentive has often been that such persons are “being taken advantage of” or “overworked,” and that such companies are “sweat shops.” These traditional arguments, however, do not necessarily reflect the truth of the modern work environment, and the protections of our modern laws. At one time unions served an important purpose in defending employee rights. However, Big Labor has fallen victim to the money, lifestyle and political power realized from increased union membership, and has lost their way and forgot their responsibility was to serve the membership and not vice-versa! Their greed, inability or resistance to compete in a free market society, and the advent of government agencies such as the NLRB, EEOC, and DOL unions in effect became obsolete.
Facing extinction, Big Labor’s Gasping Dinosaurs have yet to face reality and change its model to one that truly benefits productive employees and its membership in general. Instead they continue to attempt to impose their outdated and ineffective tactics of control, intimidation, coercion, and misinformation in a frantic effort to survive. Instead, they continue to wish to return to the days of Card Check where they force unionize employees then keep them under their thumbs by negotiating oppressive contracts that control employee rights instead of expanding them. They firmly believe this outdated approach is their only means of rebuilding their once vast empire!
Unfortunately for American employees, Big Labor does not realize time has passed them by; and that the United States is a republic not a socialistic country where people are controlled and herded like sheep. Hence Big Labor’s propensity to control and promote sameness at every juncture, and to prevent businesses from doing the right thing by rewarding productive employees through incentive programs, which drives American Exceptionalism by rewarding those who are the most productive, safe, innovative, and cost-effective team players. This philosophy is illustrated by Big Labor bosses like Andy Stern (see The Drama Queen is at it Again), who were never successful in the free market, because they lacked the exact attributes they strive to suppress. They admittedly only became successful when they became part of an environment where they could use the Persuasion of Power over employees and employers to achieve their goals. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumpka summed it up succinctly in a speech this past week when the bellicose mouthpiece of the AFL-CIO, confirmed the Big Labor survival doctrine: “forget the workers – focus on politics!” This statement tells you everything you need to know about Big Labor’s agenda and why we need Congress to pass laws to allow employers and government agencies restrained by outdated collective bargaining agreements to incentivize employees and reverse The Decline of American Exceptionalism!
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The AFL concentrated its political efforts during the last decades of the Gompers administration on securing freedom from state control of unions — in particular an end to the court’s use of labor injunctions to block the right to organize or strike and the application of the anti-trust laws to criminalize labor’s use of pickets , boycotts and strikes. The AFL thought that it had achieved the latter with the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 — which Gompers referred to as “Labor’s Magna Carta “. But in Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering , 254 U.S. 443 (1921), the United States Supreme Court narrowly read the Act and codified the federal courts’ existing power to issue injunctions rather than limit it. The court read the phrase “between an employer and employees” (contained in the first paragraph of the Act) to refer only to cases involving an employer and its own employees, leaving the courts free to punish unions for engaging in sympathy strikes or secondary boycotts.
The latest NLRB decision comes on the heels of another ruling siding with the miners. On November 2, the labor board said the Co-Op bosses must pay back wages to 47 miners amounting to some $400,000. In June the NLRB had ruled that the miners were illegally fired from their jobs Sept. 23, 2003, for union activity and ordered C.W. Mining to reinstate the workers.
What makes the timing of the OSHA interpretation so questionable is the fact that the President’s recent recess appointees to the NLRB have been found unconstitutional and all of their decisions over the past year have been placed on hold until constitutional appointees can be made and the decisions revisited (see National Labor Relations Board or NBLR – National Big Labor Resuscitation and Tip of the Iceberg ). These decisions were extremely pro-labor and designed to allow Big Labor to bypass Corporate Campaigns and achieve Card Check! Obviously, the President had to act swiftly in order to provide his Big Labor buddies with a new avenue to wage ruthless Death by a Thousand Cuts campaigns and utilize their Persuasion of Power to force unionize employees. Once again, it begs the question When Will the Main Stream Media Wake Up?
It was not at all unusual in those days for a boss to drink with his employees on the job, or for a worker to take a day off when he felt like it. By the second half of the century all that had changed, but the memory of a different labor situation survived. Workers in the big industrial factories knew that their grandfathers had enjoyed a looser, more relaxed climate at work. The conditions that came with the big factories were shockingly different. Workers had to be disciplined in order to keep the enterprise operating efficiently. No more drinking on the job. No more setting their own hours or pace of work. A say in how the work was done, a traditional prerogative of craftsmen, was reserved solely for the boss. Regimentation was not easy for Americans to swallow, but business owners considered it the key to productivity and profit in the industrial age. Working conditions were often brutal and dangerous. Mines caved in, workers breathed toxic dust or were mangled in machinery. Factory workers were rigidly controlled and often fined for making the least mistake. Even bathroom breaks required the boss’s permission. Outside the workplace, frequent financial panics left millions unemployed. In the face of all these problems, workers increasingly began to organize . Many skilled workers had already formed craft unions, which predated the industrial revolution. But faced with the rapidly growing scale of industry and power of employers after the Civil War , many workers felt they needed an organization that was national in scope and big enough to stand up to Big Business.