Unions Are Obstructive (And P.O.S. Too)
Aug 8, 2009 Political
Well, the unions feel that they are going to get back some membership, now that they have installed Barama the Acquiescent in the White House. In return for their thuggish prescence at the Town Hall meetings, where they can intimidate people with their prescence, Hussein can and will push through laws that unlawfully favor labor unions, and force people to join.
The first and most evident proposed law is the Card Check Act, where a union thug with no forehead and a continuous sub- orbital ridge can hover over you while “asking” you to sign a card that would require the company you work for to hold union elections- and the threshold percentage of people required to initiate the election would be 30%. When was 30% a Majority in anyone’s world?
Apparently, in Hussein’s world, 30% is a majority- no wonder they are having problems with budgets and TARP, and stimulus, and cash for clunkers- they cannot work with numbers, apparently.
So now, the other unions, besides SEIU, want in on the action, and they are not afraid to use strong-arm tactics to do this.
In an increasingly bitter Washington battle between the nation’s two largest shipping companies, some unionized UPS workers say they are being forced to write letters to their lawmakers in support of more stringent labor rules for arch rival FedEx.
Officials with UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents 240,000 UPS drivers, acknowledge that the company has paid for workers’ time to pen many of the letters and has supplied the envelopes, paper and stamps needed to mail thousands of them to Congress. UPS spokesman Malcolm Berkley said the effort was “totally voluntary, and any allegations to the contrary are ridiculous.”
But Internet sites dedicated to UPS-related discussions feature dozens of accounts from anonymous employees who in recent weeks have said they were forced to write the letters or felt they would be punished for not doing so. Such tactics could run afoul of both labor laws and lobbying disclosure requirements, according to legal experts.
washingtonpost.com
FedEx is not truly a rival of UPS- one ships mainly by ground transport, and the other, FedEx, ships by air, but the union wants to control FedEx, and could, if successful, cause work disruptions easier, thus forcing wage concessions easier, which of course would mean more money for the leaders of these unions. It’s all about greed with these unions, nothing else.
The letter-writing campaign is part of a costly and often fierce legislative fight between UPS and FedEx, which together have spent nearly $10 million on federal lobbying in the first half of the year. The feud captures the prominence of mass mailings, Internet campaigns and other grass-roots efforts to catch the attention of Congress in high stakes disputes, even when they involve relatively arcane regulations.
The focus of the UPS-FedEx conflict is House legislation passed earlier this year that would make it easier to unionize FedEx’s lucrative express-air operation, which is currently treated as an airline under labor rules that limit strikes and require unions to organize nationally rather than locally. UPS, by contrast, is treated as a trucking firm, allowing for easier union organizing.
UPS and the union are now concentrating on convincing the Senate to adopt the provision.
“We hope at the end of the day the Senate will see this as a simple issue of fairness,” said Ken Hall, head of the Teamsters’ package division.
FedEx has responded with an aggressive public-relations campaign of its own that includes a Web site, http://www.brownbailout.com, that mocks UPS as another wealthy corporation seeking a federal rescue. FedEx founder and chief executive Frederick W. Smith, who was mentioned last year as a potential Cabinet nominee by GOP presidential candidate John McCain (Ariz.), says the legislation would cripple his company by leaving it open to disruptive strikes.
“FedEx Express remains committed to putting our customers first and making sure Congress doesn’t change the legal framework that is the basis on which FedEx Express created the air express industry,” said company spokesman Maury Lane.
washingtonpost.com
So the union thuggery continues unabated- its not just SEIU brutes beating a Black man at a St. Louis Town Hall meeting, but AFL-CIO thugs browbeating union employees to get them to “write” letters to their Congressmen to advance a special interest on the part of the union.
The legislative fight between the companies captured headlines in Washington last month when Politico’s Web site released a letter from the American Conservative Union offering FedEx its political support, including an “aggressive grass-roots campaign to stop the legislation in the Senate,” in exchange for payments of at least $2.1 million. After FedEx refused, ACU Chairman David Keene signed on to a letter with other conservative leaders accusing FedEx of mounting a “disinformation campaign” against UPS.
The pro-UPS correspondence was also signed by ACU board member Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, which has received $200,000 worth of grants from the UPS Foundation since 2005. A Norquist spokesman said his group had taken no position on the legislation and does not intend to do so.
Now FedEx officials are bristling at the UPS letter-writing campaign, pointing to complaints from Scott and other UPS workers. “They are forcing us to write letters at our UPS center,” one employee wrote on BrownCafe.com, a Web site independent of UPS. Another user wrote: “My System Manager told us ‘this is not an optional activity.’ I wrote the letters and still feel dirty.”
One veteran UPS worker from New Mexico, who requested anonymity to speak about his employer, told The Washington Post that he favors a law change for Fedex but objects to UPS tactics.
“Employees were first told that they were required to write these letters and that if they chose not to then they were to write a letter to the district manager explaining why not,” the employee said. Supervisors backed down in the face of complaints, he added, only to repeat the demand again a day later and threaten to “write up” those who refused.
Most workers complied to get the extra pay, which was marked down as training time, he said.
washingtonpost.com
How nice- “training time”, huh? Just call it bribery, with just a whiff of coercion and extortion thrown in. So the union lies- gee, we didn’t see that one coming, did we? You are telling me that Unions lie and deceive, and cheat to advance their cause? Say it aint so, Joe. This is just yet another move on the part of the unions, with the complicit aid of the Hussein Administration and members of Congress, to increase reliance on unions for work, and the government for everything else. This is not right.
FedEx should be able to chart its own way in the business world, as should everything and everyone else. Unions used to have a legitimate use and function, but no more. They are the Neanderthals in the business world, and for everyone’s sake, they need to go extinct ASAP.
If, on their own, employees of FedEx chose to unionize, that would be fair, but coercion never turns out well, and the unions only end up looking like, well, cartoons of unions, demonstrating their brute side for all the world to see, and its not pretty.
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Tags: brownmail, coercion, neanderthals, thugs, unions