Right to Work Blog

As we celebrate Independence Day, let us take time to reflect on the importance of the individual liberties that our forefathers and generations have fought for and died to protect. Those liberties are continuously threatened. One of those threats comes in the form of forced unionism.

The National Right to Work Committee, by mobilizing millions of pro-Right to Work citizens and informing them about candidates’ positions on forced unionism, seeks to shine a spotlight on Big Labor’s scheme to grab total control of Congress.

America’s future should be determined by its freedom-loving citizens, not power-grasping union bosses who build their empires on the backs of workers.

An item in the latest National Legal and Policy Center’s Union Corruption Update made me shake my head and wonder just what qualifications voters are looking for in their candidates these days. See what you think.

For four years, said federal prosecutors, Donald Dougherty paid off the business manager of the 4,000-member IBEW Local 98, John Dougherty, an old friend from his South Philadelphia days. He performed $115,600 worth of renovations on the latter’s city residence, and secured a $24,000 price discount on his North Wildwood, N.J. beach condo. In return, John Dougherty looked the other way, allowing Donald Dougherty to pay workers in cash, thus avoiding more than $1.6 million in federal, state and local taxes and another $869,000 in required contributions to union benefit plans. The Taft-Hartley Act prohibits an employer from offering cash or other things of value to an officer of a labor organization that represents the employer’s workers. The employer may engage in financial transactions with such persons only if the transaction is “at prevailing market price in the regular course of business.” Any number of local members in fact did work for Dougherty Electric.

Gus Dougherty faces a prison sentence of 41 to 51 months. His friend thus far has been luckier. Though federal agents searched his house and continue to hold him under suspicion, he has not been charged with any offense. John Dougherty has more than a union officer’s job at stake. He’s running for the Pennsylvania State Senate, and according to recent polls, he’s the favorite to replace the retiring Democratic incumbent, Vince Fumo, himself indicted by a federal grand jury in February 2007 on unrelated charges. Dougherty insists he was unaware of his contractor friend’s intentions. “I wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. It wasn’t my position to pay attention,” he remarked. George Bochetto, a lawyer for Local 98, notes that the union’s health and welfare fund is a “completely separate entity” from the union itself. That’s true, of course, but the feds are prepared to win, and they’ve got witnesses, wiretaps and an undercover agent to back them up. (Philly.com, 4/2/08; US Fed News, 5/19/08).

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has a new video.

In the latest update to Right to Work’s YouTube channel, Daniel Locke, lead plaintiff in the Foundation’s Locke v. Karass Supreme Court case, discusses why he felt the need to file suit against Maine State Employees Association union officials.

Also in the video, Foundation president Mark Mix explains what is at stake in the case, and another Maine state employee, Mark Turek, discusses his decision to quit his job rather than be forced to pay union dues to a union he disagreed with.

The Republican Party of West Virginia has added a Right to Work plank to their party’s platform. Congratulations to Right to Work activists in the state who are breaking Big Labor’s stranglehold on jobs and growth. Well done.

Release of new economic data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis has provided an opportunity to confirm that Right to Work states perform better that forced-unionism states, and a blog called Willisms has done just that.

After crunching numbers to see what impact labor laws have on economic growth, Willisms discovered that:

[F]rom 2004-2007, no Right To Work state grew less than 5.1%, while fifteen Forced Unionization state[s] grew below that level.

Meanwhile, while America’s GDP growth 2004-2007 . . . [was] 8.4%, Right To Work states grew by 10% on average, while Forced Unionization states grew by only 6.2% on average. The median Right To Work growth rate was 9.2%, compared to the median Forced Unionization rate of 4.9% (the national median for all states was 7.3%).”

Study after study confirms that not only is Right to Work the right moral policy it is a correct economic policy for the American people.

Readers of this blog are aware that the AFL-CIO alone will spend over $53 million over the next few months to elect candidates who will vote to eliminate workplace elections.

In fact, when you add its member-unions spending total, the AFL-CIO plans on spending over $200 million to buy Congress in the next few months. This is still just the tip of the iceberg given that we have already reported on over $400 million already in the political pipeline. It is easy to see that reports of Big Labor spending up to ONE BILLION DOLLARS between 2006 and November 2008 to buy a forced-unionism Congress are easy to believe. The bosses give us a peek at what is in store.

From the Washington Post:

. . . AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman sketched out the plans of the labor coalition, which is expected to announce its official endorsement of Obama in the next few days. The coalition has budgeted $53.4 million for the 2008 campaign — more than the $48 million it spent in 2004 — and it expects its 56 member unions to spend more than $200 million overall on electing Obama and congressional Democrats. It will deploy 250,000 volunteers to reach a total of 13 million union members and their families, she said, and use more sophisticated micro-targeting tools than it has in the past.

The top targets for the AFL-CIO’s presidential campaign efforts will be in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — the swing states where it has the most members. All except Ohio voted Democratic in 2004, which may make the effort seem defensive in nature, but at the same time, Obama’s prospects for picking up a few new states elsewhere mean that he could be in good shape if he, and the unions, can hold the Rust Belt steady for him. In Ohio alone, the coalition says, it expects more than two million voters to be members of AFL households, or of households that belong to Working America, an organization the AFL has created for people who cannot join unions at their workplaces.

The AFL will also spend a lot on congressional races, aware that Obama’s chances of enacting its priorities — such as “card check” legislation making it easier to organize workplaces — would be much higher with large congressional majorities. It will be involved in every “viable” Senate race in the country, including the races in Alaska (where union membership is actually relatively high), Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia; and 60 House races. While union membership is much lower in the South, Ackerman argues that the AFL had an impact in helping the Democrats win recent special elections in Louisiana and Mississippi by turning out what members there are in those districts.

Of course, the AFL also invested heavily in 2004, with disappointing results (although exit polls showed John Kerry faring better with voters in union households than with white working-class voters as a whole.) The difference this year, Ackerman said, is that the AFL has an earlier, more aggressive effort underway to frame the opposition in a negative light. The upside of not knowing until this month who the Democratic nominee would be, she said, was that it left the AFL free to focus its attention on defining McCain. Since early March, the coalition says it has distributed 1.5 million leaflets at work sites and knocked on the doors of 60,000 union swing voters with information about McCain’s stances on card-check legislation, health care, and trade policy. The coalition takes credit for some of the recent poll numbers showing McCain trailing Obama among union voters and voters worried about the economy.

Flush with cash coerced from workers, the AFL-CIO and the SEIU have announced they have “raised” and will spend over $100 million to elect Democrats to Congress and the White House this Fall.

There is an old saying in politics that personnel translates into policy, and in the case of Barack Obama its clear Big Labor will dominate both ends of the equation:

Barack Obama tapped a new political director for his presidential campaign, naming Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the powerful Service Employees International Union.

Prior to joining the Obama campaign, Gaspard was the Executive Vice President of Politics and Legislation for Local 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest local union in the United States. In that job, he helped coordinate political activity and government relations . . . in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington DC.

Read on.

In 2006, pro-Big Labor Republicans were stabbed in the back by the AFL-CIO, who decided it was more important to elect a Democrat Congress than a handful of pro-Big Labor Republicans. We are now seeing that same mindset in the U.S. Senate.

Roll Call reports that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) has lost the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, who chose to back Democrat Senate candidate Mark Begich.

Alaska AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami said the union endorsed Stevens in all of his re-election campaigns in recent memory, though Stevens had either a minimal or token challenger in many of those campaigns.

“My sense, having been a 20-year resident of the state, is that he’s not been not endorsed for decades,” Beltrami said. “So this is a significant departure.”

Beltrami lauded Begich’s support for the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill. This bill is the most significant pro-forced union legislation in decades.

The United States Supreme Court has overturned a 9th Circuit Court ruling that tried to legitimize a massive Big Labor forced-unionism scheme.

As reported by Tony Mouro of the First Amendment Center:

By a 7-2 vote, the Court ruled that federal labor law prevents California from restricting the ability of employers to speak out against union organizing.

The state law, according to the Court, violated “Congress’ express protection of free debate” concerning unionization, and congressional desire to avoid regulation within “a zone protected and reserved for market freedom.” . . .

The California law, similar to statutes on the books or under debate in 20 other states, said that any employer receiving state funds through grants or contracts cannot use those funds — even when commingled with other money — to “assist, promote or deter union organizing.” The law also established what the Court said was a “formidable enforcement scheme” that required employers to maintain records that would establish whether state funds they received were used for purposes related to union organizing. . . .

“The law was nothing more than an underhanded attempt by union officials to use public funds to corral California workers into their forced dues-paying ranks, and the high court was correct to find that the law is pre-empted by federal labor law,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which advocates measures that prevent employees in unionized workplaces from being coerced to join unions.

Steven Law, chief legal officer and general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the decision as well. “Today the Supreme Court declared that it’s unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act for a state to muzzle employers’ speech rights.”