Public Sector Unions and Lessons as yet Unlearned
Daniel Howes asked an excellent question in the Detroit News yesterday: What will it take for public-sector labor — with no ties to private, for-profit employers — to understand that the steady gravy train of the past 50 years has ground to a halt? In autos and steel, the UAW and the Steelworkers finally learned brutal [more...]

Posted Fri, 19 Mar 2010 .

Accepting the inevitable, AFL-CIO will back health care bill
Richard Trumka’s one block sprint to the White House yesterday afternoon paid off. This just in, from Politico: “A union official says the nation’s largest labor federation is strongly endorsing the Obama administration’s health care overhaul bill and plans to push wavering lawmakers for support. A union official familiar with the proceedings says [more...]

Posted Thu, 18 Mar 2010 .

Memo to John Sweeney: Get a Better Pollster

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Union bosses have been cooking the books. As they attempt to end secret ballot elections for employees deciding whether to join a union, labor chiefs claim to have a groundswell of support. The real numbers tell a different story.

The AFL-CIO commissioned a study – which they won’t release – claiming that 60 million Americans want a union. But prestigious polls, including questions originally crafted on behalf of the AFL-CIO and recently commissioned by the Center for Union Facts – suggest most Americans don’t want to join a union and they don’t want union bosses stealing their right to a personal, private vote. Consider:

Fully 74% of non-union workers say they would not “personally like to be a member of a labor union.”
— Zogby International poll, August 2006

64% of workers say they would prefer their present job to be non-union.
— Opinion Research Corporation Poll, March 2007
78% of Americans prefer secret ballots for union organizing.
— Opinion Research Corporation Poll, March 2007
87% agree that “every worker should continue to have the right to a federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether to organize a union.”
— McLaughlin and Associates, January 2007