Showing posts with label David Martosko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Martosko. Show all posts

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Your unions at work on Long Island during a disaster


Amid Sandy’s devastation, Long Island union sent written demand to Florida utilities: Pay dues or stay home

10:05 PM 11/03/2012
David Martosko
Executive Editor

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In a two-page Oct. 29 contract, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) local 1049 demanded union dues, pay hikes and benefit contributions from Florida electric utilities before its workers would be permitted to help reconnect power to Long Island communities. The demand came as Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the Northeastern United States, stranding tens of millions without electricity.
The “Letter of Assent,” which The Daily Caller obtained from the Florida Municipal Electric Association, demanded 11 separate financial commitments from municipal power companies and electrical cooperatives in the Sunshine State. The agreement, for any utility that decided to sign it, would have been in force from Oct. 29 to Nov. 29.
Barry Moline, the association’s executive director, told TheDC that by Nov. 1 the union, based in the central Long Island town of Hauppauge, had relented and stopped insisting that nonunion crews pay dues and other union fees.
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“The union director” himself placed a phone call to withdraw the letter, Moline said during a telephone interview Saturday. But that came only after Moline had notified a national trade group, the American Public Power Association, which turned outrage into action.
The Florida Municipal Electric Association is a statewide trade group that represents 34 separate utility companies. The letter, Moline said, was sent to Florida’s nonunion power companies.
“We had crews ready to go on Monday when the storm hit,” he told TheDC.  ”We had dozens of line workers ready to go. There have been hundreds of line workers who have been told, ‘We don’t want you unless you’re part of the union.’ And as a result, people in New York and New Jersey are having the power turned on slower than everywhere else.”
“The word we were getting all week was that New York was short by hundreds of [electric] linemen,” he told TheDC. “Well, okay. We’ve got them. Florida is two days away, so you need a head start.”
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Of those workers who were ready to drive north, he said, “probably about 25 stayed put” because of the Long Island IBEW local’s demands. “Another 35 were delayed by five days.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Friday that he wouldn’t permit discrimination against nonunion crews eager to help reconnect consumers who have gone without power for days. He threatened to invoke his office’s emergency powers if necessary. (RELATED: Christie threatens “Disaster Control Act” order to guarantee nonunion utility workers can help restore NJ power)
But in New York, no government official has stepped in to ensure that utility crews from other states won’t have to show their union membership cards before going to work — even though their own employers are paying for them to repair power lines in the Empire State.
Eventually, Moline said, his state’s crews “went everywhere else” affected by Sandy, “but it was only in New York where the union had to give their blessing.”
“It just made me sick that you’ve got people who have no power,” he said, “and you hear about a lot of people dying.”


http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/03/amid-sandys-devastation-long-island-union-sent-written-demand-to-florida-utilities-pay-dues-or-stay-home/
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Monday, August 20, 2012

Book: El Presidente's sodomized medicine law designed to unionize 21 million health care workers



Published: 11:32 PM 08/19/2012
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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 20: Health care workers begin a drive to make 100,000 calls to Congress urging law makers to pass a reform bill to make health care coverage more affordable for the American public on October 20, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. With the upcoming holidays, Democrats in the House and Senate have only about eight weeks to deliver a healthcare reform bill to President Barack Obama by the end of this year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed optimism and hope that they will have a bill by Thanksgiving. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
In a book set for publication Tuesday, a politics and government professor at The Citadel claims President Obama’s 2009 health care reform law was, in part, a union-driven effort to organize 21 million health care workers.
In ”Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind,” Mallory Factor describes a December 9, 2008 memo from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare president Dennis Rivera to the Obama-Biden transition team.
That memo outlined a legislative proposal calling for “increasing the capacity of the health care workforce” as part of a larger health care reform initiative.
The SEIU and the Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Factor writes, later coordinated with other public-sector unions to spend “literally hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Obamacare.”
The Daily Caller requested comments for this article from the SEIU, AFSCME and a White House spokesman. None of them responded.
A booklet published by SEIU during the 2008 election season called for “building a new American health care system,” in part by “organizing workers.” The publication argued for outcomes nearly identical to those later adopted in the Obamacare legislation.
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“We … will not stop until every man, woman and child has quality, affordable care they can count on,” it read. “The time to fix health care is now.”
And in an April 9, 2011 memo, the United Healthcare Workers — a union affiliated with the SEIU —articulated its future vision, including “an ambitious plan to fight for our future by organizing healthcare workers.”
In 2010 the SEIU elected Mary Key Henry as its new International President. Henry’s background was in health care organizing. She led efforts to unionize workers at Beverly nursing homes, Catholic Health Care West, Tenet Healthcare Corporation and HCA Healthcare.
Factor, who is also a Forbes columnist and senior editor of money and politics for The Street.com, recounts emails from former federal Office of Labor-Management Standards staffer Don Loos, now a senior adviser to the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
“It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees,” Loos told Factor. That, he said, would make them eligible for involuntary unionization through public-sector unions like AFSCME and the SEIU.
“Obamacare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net,’” Loos claimed, “designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers.” New health care jobs created by Obamacare, he said, will eventually be filled by “federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees.”
The Obamacare law, once fully implemented, will dramatically increase the number of health care workers receiving payment for their services through government programs, including Medicaid and so-called “public option” government-run insurance plans.
“The government employee unions can then enlist pro-union state governments to treat these health care workers as ‘government employees,’” Factor told The Daily Caller, “and unionize them just like they unionized the care providers” themselves.
“For every million additional health care workers unionized in the 27 non-right-to-work states,” he told TheDC, “the unions stand to earn $1 billion in dues.”
Factor writes in “Shadowbosses” that Canada’s national health care system has provided an apt example. Heritage Foundation labor economist James Sherk told him that “60 percent of Canadian health care workers and a stunning 80 percent of nurses belong to unions — more than quadruple the levels in America.”
Only 10 percent of them were union members before the advent of socialized medicine in Canada, Factor said.
The SEIU’s designs on health care reform surfaced in a meeting at the union’s headquarters held in November 2007, during the early days of the 2008 presidential election season. During one session, former Clinton senior health care policy adviser Chris Jennings made a presentation titled ’”Rx for Successful SEIU Strategy for Health Care.”
Making comprehensive health care reform a key issue during the election, Jennings’ PowerPoint presentation indicates he told an audience of mostly SEIU policymakers and executives, would be good union policy because it “creates demand for SEIU-provided services.”

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