Category Archives: Public Service Unions

Change comes to Illinois

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…but will it succeed?

Bruce_Rauner_August_2014

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner

Newly elected Illinois ‘Pub Governor, Bruce Rauner, is preparing to engage one of Illinois’ largest political machines. Yes, one even larger that Richard Daley’s Chicago machine at its heyday. He preparing to battle Illinois’ public service unions and the SEIU. Rauner wants to bring Right-to-Work to Illinois.

I can hear the screams and howls already.

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner Primed for a Showdown with Unions

By: Jake (Diary)  |  January 28th, 2015 at 06:00 PM

Up in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker has shown it’s possible to take on unions, including government unions, and live to tell the tale, and in large part because of his courage, he is now being considered as a Presidential candidate. It looks like his neighboring governor to the south, Bruce Rauner of Illinois, wants to follow in his footsteps. Rauner is one of the many Republican success stories of the 2014 election, and it looks like he isn’t going to be one to waste his mandate. In a recent appearance in Decatur, Illinois, he announced his intentions to take on the government union bosses. Northern Public Radio quoted him as saying:

“The taxpayers on the outside. It’s a conflict of interest. It’s a closed loop. This is what’s going on. Big problem. And it’s driving up our bureaucracy and jobs are leaving. It’s that closed loop up that; it’s what going on: the unions that contract with the state. I think it’s the number one conflict of interest in our state today.”

As their article also notes, he is blaming prevailing wage and Project Labor agreements for playing a role in driving up costs. He did not stop there. The major goal of his Decatur speech was to push one of his major policy goals: the establishment of “right to work zones” in the state. According to one of the local CBS stations, here is what he said specifically:

“The states that are already growing don’t force unionization into their economy,” Rauner told an audience at Richland Community College in Decatur, a city he said could benefit from such a plan.

“I’m not advocating Illinois becoming a right-to-work state, but I do advocate (for) local governments being allowed to decide whether they’re right-to-work zones,” he said.

As Scott Walker proved up in Wisconsin, it is possible to take on the unions and live, but it is by no means an easy task. I hope Gov. Rauner has the spine his neighbor to the north does. It will be very interesting to follow him over the next few years. He could be the next big star for the Republican Party if he is successful in his endeavors. The articles I linked here make it clear that the unions are not happy with the Illinois governor’s remarks, so we should expect a battle that could be just as intense and drawn out as the one that happened in Wisconsin. We need to make sure Governor Rauner knows he has our support, especially if you live in Illinois.

Rauner is also proposing to lower Illinois’ minimum wage to the federal standard to make Illinois more competitive to its neighboring states. That, too, is an anathema to Illinois unions.

Right-to-Work is returning to Missouri’s legislature this year as well. There have been a number of Right-to-Work bills already filed for the 2015 legislative session, House Bills 47, 48, and 116 as well as Senate Bill 127 and 129. In all, nearly 20 labor related bills have been filed.

The unions had and still have massive clout in Jeff City. One of the leading union shills in the Missouri Legislature, Jeff Roorda, lost his election in November. He was in the news today when he engaged in a scuffle with a St Louis Alderman.

It is time to pass Right-to-Work in Missouri and Illinois.

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Many of us would like to see the EPA abolished. If that agency ever had a real, useful purpose, that purpose could just as easily be performed by the states. In fact every state has an EPA equivalent so the transition or responsibilities would be minimal.

Another federal agency whose time may have come to fade away, or at least be constrained, is the FCC. The FCC, or the Federal Communications Commission, is a child of the 1930s, a product of FDR’s New Deal. Its creation was a merging of the older FRC, or Federal Radio Commission, that regulated radio stations and wireless communications with telephonic communication of wired telephone and telegraphic operations by the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission.

In the early days of wired and wireless communication, some oversight was needed. Before federal intervention, multiple radio stations used the same transmitting frequency, or frequencies so close to one another that they created mutual interference. The result was a race to acquire the most powerful transmitter. The stronger signal received the most listeners. The FRC was created to insure no two stations used the same frequency within a given geographic area and to insure stations on adjacent frequencies had sufficient separation to prevent mutual interference. The FRC issued regulations that governed transmitter power. signal bandwidth and standards for signal purity.

Early wired telephonic and telegraphic communications was a patchwork of carriers across the country. There was little to no interoperability and many companies openly competed, sometime violently, for the same territory. As wired technology increased, standards were required to insure seamless communication across the country and with our neighbors, north and south, who used different national standards. British standards in the case of Canada.

Unfortunately, the FCC, especially under recent liberal administrations and commissioners, has wandered far astray from its original purpose. No longer is the Commission primarily concerned with technology and interoperability, but has shifted focus to content, and that is where the conflict between the FCC and Congress rests.

FCC Under Scrutiny as GOP Senators Try to Head Off More Internet Regs

Republican measure would limit the commission’s regulatory authority while many Dems want to treat Net like public utility.

by Rob Longley, January 28, 2015 – 10:45 pm

A Senate hearing last Wednesday took aim at a controversy that has vexed Congress, federal regulators and the telecommunications industry for the better part of a decade: How best to regulate the Internet — and how large a role the Federal Communications Commission should play.

The hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee focused on a Republican proposal to maintain so-called “net neutrality” — the idea that all Internet content should be open to the public and treated equally.

The GOP bill, crafted by the committee’s chairman, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), and his counterpart on the House panel, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), is an effort to head off the FCC’s own plan to preserve net neutrality. Most analysts expect the FCC to push for greater regulatory control over the web and the Internet service providers that deliver it to consumers. The FCC has sought greater control in the past, but the federal courts have struck down its efforts, saying the commission lacked congressional authority to take such action. The commission is set to announce its latest plan next month.

The Republican measure would allow the FCC to impose tough new limits on ISPs, especially with respect to how they manage their networks. But it also would limit the commission’s regulatory authority, and would fall well short of the solution touted by many Democrats and consumer groups: Turn the Internet into a veritable public utility like water and electricity, a move that would give the FCC broad powers to control service providers and, in effect, oversee their operation.

Such a scenario does not sit well with Thune.

“There is a well-founded fear that regulating the Internet like a public utility monopoly will harm its entrepreneurial nature [and] chill investment,” the senator said in his opening statement Wednesday.

Meredith Atwell Baker, president and CEO of industry trade group CTIA — The Wireless Association, agreed. She was one of five witnesses to testify at Wednesday’s hearing. Baker said the FCC’s expected plan, which would include a decades-old set of regulations known as Title II, would force “1930s-era wired rules” onto wireless broadband services. That, in turn, she said, would stunt growth and innovation, and in the end, lead to higher costs and diminished services for the public.

“It would harm consumers and our economy,” Baker said.

But Democrats fear that weakening the FCC’s bite would lead to a less-than-open Internet, a development that could also harm consumers, said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. Consumer groups fear that service providers would use “loopholes” in the GOP plan to set up a two-tiered Internet by charging companies a kind of information-superhighway toll to boost their websites’ visibility and access, an option known as paid prioritization. By necessity, that means companies who refuse to pay the toll have less visibility — a situation that goes against the principles of an open Internet.

“[The public] does not want their access to websites and services blocked,” Nelson said Wednesday. “They’re worried about their broadband provider picking winners and losers on the Internet by relegating those content companies who refuse to pay a toll to a slow lane of service.”

You can read the entire article at the PJ Media website.

Some of the same groups fear an impotent FCC as well. No one disagrees that the FCC was done a great job and provided a needed service—in the past. However, its current focus on content is negating that accumulated good will from the public. The FCC needs to be reined in and returned to its focus of maintaining the nation’s lead in communications and cease its efforts to enforce a liberal political agenda. For be broken up into a less oppressive organization.

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SCOTUS Strikes Again

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The Supreme Court released two decisions this morning, both of them decided along liberal/conservative lines, 5 to 4.  The first decision, from Illinois health care workers against SEIU, sided against the union. It wasn’t unanimous but it was a rebuke to unions planning to expand at the expense of the public. On a 5-4 decisions, SCOTUS says that public service unions like SEIU cannot force non-members to pay dues.

Court: Public union can’t make nonmembers pay fees

By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court dealt a blow to public sector unions Monday, ruling that thousands of home health care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay fees that help cover the union’s costs of collective bargaining.

In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, the justices said the practice violates the First Amendment rights of nonmembers who disagree with the positions that unions take.

The ruling is a setback for labor unions that have bolstered their ranks – and bank accounts – in Illinois and other states by signing up hundreds of thousands of in-home care workers. It could lead to an exodus of members who will have little incentive to pay dues if nonmembers don’t have to share the burden of union costs.

But the ruling was limited to this particular segment of workers – not private sector unions – and it stopped short of overturning decades of practice that has generally allowed public sector unions to pass through their representation costs to nonmembers.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said home care workers are different from other types of government employees because they work primarily for their disabled or elderly customers and do not have most of the rights and benefits of state employees.

You can read the entire article here.

A lawyer friend of mine explained that the defense, the Illinois health care litigators, argued for an exception. Therefore, SCOTUS could only grant that exception. If the grounds of the argument had been wider or on other grounds, the decision could have been different—knocking down all union extortion of dues from non-members…or siding with the union. In any case it was a step in the right direction even it it does apply only to public sector unions.

The second decision announced today is one the religious and 1st Amendment advocates have been waiting for. It is the famous Hobby-Lobby, Mardel and Conestoga suit against HHS that would force these companies to provide contraception insurance against the company owner’s religious views.

Hobby Lobby Wins Contraceptive Ruling in Supreme Court

Jun 30, 2014, 10:25 AM ET

Companies are not required to pay for employees’ contraceptives for women if they have religious objections, the Supreme Court ruled today.

The justices’ decision came in a 5-4 ruling in the much anticipated case.

The court holds: “As applied to closely held corporations the HHS regulations imposing the contraceptive mandate violate RFRA”

Alito wrote that “RFRA applies to regulations that govern the activities of closely held for profit corporations like Conestoga and Hobby Lobby” and the “The HHS contraceptive mandate substantially burdens the exercise of religion.”

“The Government has failed to show that the contraceptive mandate is the least restrict means of furthering that interest,” according to the majority opinion.

Alito wrote that the onwers of Hobby Lobby believe that the coverage required of the health care law “is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage … HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] has not shown that it lacks other means of achieving its desired goal without imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion by the objecting parties in these cases.”

“Protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those FRFR companies,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

The rest of the article can be read here.

Justice Ginsberg called Alito’s written decision, ‘radical’. She thinks the 1st Amendment is radical, too. She has said before that she believes the Constitution is not a good example for other countries.

It was not a good day for Obama and his union sycophants. It was a good day for the rest of us. Missouri HB 1617 was passed in this last legislative session and will be put before the voters in the November general election. HB 1617, also known as ‘Paycheck Protection’ will require public service unions in Missouri to acquire written permission to deduct dues and from state employee’s paychecks. The unions will no longer force the state to arbitrarily act as the union’s agent to collect union dues.

As a friend of mine says, “It’s a good day for Liberty!”

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Amazing!

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Did you know there is a mayor of an American city who is winning the battle against public service unions? No, it’s not Chris Christie nor Scott Walker.

This mayor “has been carrying out a program of privatizing city jobs, laying off unionized municipal employees and contracting out the work to vendors, who hire nonunion people to do the jobs of a few dollars an hour less than the city employees earned.” This mayor, “pushes around poorly paid members on not just any union, but the very SEIU itself, and the general public hears nothing about it.”

A xxxxxxx neighborhood publication, Our Urban Times, tells the story, using the case of more than fifty recently laid-off library janitors who complete [the Mayor’s] privatization drive in the xxxxxxx’s Department of Fleet and Facility Management (2FM). There is no doubt that the janitors are ideal candidates to be characterized as victims of a heartless and ruthless rich politician. The new working arrangements push several union buttons:

Their rates to the employee tend to be at least four dollars under the $11.90 to $15.90 workers are currently being paid. Further more [sic] they hire people on a part time basis and do not have to provide benefits, according to [Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU Local 73 Matt] Brandon.

There heart-rending stories of suffering by minorities during the holiday waiting for the MSNBC cameras, if only they would come:

“We took furlough days when they asked us to. That cost me $4,000 over three years. Our contract says we are to get a 90-day notice for termination. We got one day. I’m very concerned.  I don’t know what I am going to do and Ihave bills to pay,” said Glenda Thomas, a 17-year employee.

Do you know who the mayor is? And the city?  It’s Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago.

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Speaking of Rahm Emanuel, he just made this comment about the newly released movie, Lincoln.

(CNSNews.com) — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama,  likened Obama’s values and “ability to see a clear road where everybody just sees fog” to President Abraham Lincoln as depicted in the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie “Lincoln.” — CNS News.

The dems and academia continue to push the myth that democrats supported African-Americans while  vilifying Republicans. Recently this came out of the White House, “Obama Aide: With These Republicans, ‘There’d Still be Slavery’ Today.”

Contrary to what is being taught today, the Republican Party was created by the spin-off of the Abolitionist faction within the Whig Party.

The United States Republican Party is the second oldest currently existing political party in the US after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas Nebraska Act which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. It had almost no presence in the South, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.

With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and its success in guiding the Union to victory and abolishing slavery, it came to dominate the national scene until 1932. The Republican Party was based on northern white Protestants, businessmen, professionals, factory workers, farmers, and African-Americans. It was pro-business, supporting banks, the gold standard, railroads, and tariffs to protect industrial workers and industry. — Wiki.

The Democrat Party dominated the South and pushed through bills of Secession through the Southern Statehouses. The Democrat Party created the Confederate States to preserve slavery.

Those democrat political agendas continued well into the Twentieth Century. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, not due to the democrats who opposed it, but due to the Republican Party. It was Republican Senators Everett Dirksen (R-IL) and Thomas Kuchel (R-CA) with the support of some northern democrats who finally broke the democrat filibuster and sent the bill to Johnson to be signed.

So the next time you come across some mouthy democrat saying the ‘Pubs want to return to slavery, just remember who ended slavery and passed the civil rights acts of the 1960s. It wasn’t the democrats.

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