FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘unions’ Category

The Herald-News reports Talks fail – Illinois construction strike drags on

Monday’s negotiations failed to produce a settlement between striking union laborers and operating engineers and their employers.

Jim Sweeney, president and business manager of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, said he was ” … tremendously disappointed at the employers’ lack of urgency.”

Mish Translation: Local 150 wants employers to quickly cave into obscene union demands

“We are asking the employers to share the burden with us,” Sweeney said.

Mish Translation:

This is what sharing the burden really looks like.

A press release issued Monday night by MARBA said the unions “… have been unwilling to come to the table with a proposal that is in line with the state of the industry and the economy.”

The strike has stopped a wide variety of projects in nine Chicagoland area counties. Will County projects affected by the strike include the new Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, 159th Street work in Lockport and the Route 59 widening through Shorewood, Joliet and Plainfield.

What’s MARBA?

Inquiring minds are reading About MARBA.

Formed in 1971, the Mid-America Regional Bargaining Association (MARBA) is a multi-employer association focused on collective bargaining in the construction industry. It brings together various contractor associations in the Metropolitan Chicago region for the purpose of unified labor relations.

MARBA recruits industry experts to serve in the leadership roles during negotiations. These individuals are usually one of the leading employers in the particular craft for which MARBA is negotiating. MARBA stabilizes the construction industry by unifying contractors and providing them with a strong, single voice to handle union relations.

Negotiating twenty-one separate collective bargaining agreements with ten unions is just one aspect of MARBA’s services to its members.

MARBA Press Release

I happen to have a copy of a document from MARBA that shows who is really holding up contract negotiations. Here goes.

A Sense of Urgency

The union accuses employers of having “no sense of urgency”. The Collective Bargaining Association points out why.

• Unions are asking for a 4.55% raise per year for 3 years
• The Operating Engineers’ medical plan covers 100% of most medical expenses with no deductible or co-payment and the maximum deductible for anything is $300.
• The Laborers’ plan covers 100% of the first $10,000. After that, members are responsible for a mere $200 per calendar year deductible per person ($400 per family).

Tom Nordeen, Chairman of MARBA says “These are the kind of benefits many would envy”

I think that is quite an understatement, don’t you? Yet greedy unions are holding out for obscene pay hikes on top of those benefits.

Gall of Jim Sweeney, President of Local 150

Jim Sweeney, president and business manager of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 has the gall to talk about “Shared Sacrifice”.

What You Can Do About It

If you are in Chicago, stuck in construction-zone traffic, looking for where to place the blame, please blame the unions.

Better yet, if you want to do something about this, do not vote for any candidate who wins a union endorsement. In general that means boot Governor Quinn out of office and his Democrat cronies right along with him.

Not in Illinois?

No problem, just do the same thing in your state: Do not vote for any candidate beholden to public unions and do not vote for any candidate who thinks raising taxes is the solution to the problem of union arrogance and greed.

By the way ….
Want to know one reason medical costs are soaring?

Look how union employees have absolutely no incentive to hold down costs. They do not care what medication costs or how many tests are done. Those with high deductibles are less prone to do needless tests and more prone to use generics. Taxpayers foot the bill for this extravagance twice, once in insane salaries and pensions, the second in rising health care costs.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

By Andrew J. Coulson

Teachers unions, the Obama administration, and most Democrats in Congress want to spend another $23 billion that we don’t have to shore up public school employment. If we don’t go along, they tell us, it’ll be a “catastrophe” for American education. With fewer teachers our kids will supposedly learn less, further crippling our already wounded economy.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Over the past forty years, public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment (see chart). There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees. To prove that rolling back this relentless hiring spree by a few years would hurt student achievement, you’d have to show that all those new employees raised achievement in the first place. That would be hard to do… because it never happened.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for as long as we’ve been keeping track—all the way back to 1970. But we did get something in return for all that hiring: a great, big, fat, BILL.

If you graduated from high school in 1980, your entire k-12 education cost your fellow taxpayers about $75,000, in 2009 dollars. But the graduating class of 2009 had roughly twice that amount lavished on their public school careers. The extra $75,000 we’re now spending has done wonders for public school employee union membership, dues revenue, and political clout. It’s done a whole lotta nothin’ for student learning (see chart).

But, some readers may ask: were all those new employees teachers? About two thirds of public school employment growth has been teachers (41 percent) or teachers’ aides (23 percent). The remaining third was comprised almost entirely of support staff in schools and district offices.

So, yes, a bit of public schooling’s employment bloat can be put down to a swelling bureaucracy. But given that adding a couple of million new instructional jobs did nothing to improve achievement at the end of high school, there’s no reason to expect that shedding a few hundred thousand of them would hurt it.

Ed. sec. Arne Duncan and friends are thus mistaken if they really expect a negative academic or economic impact from reversing some of our costly and ineffectual public school employment growth. In fact, they actually have it backwards.

In the private sector, jobs are created and retained only if they are believed to add value to the enterprise—if their salary and benefit costs are outweighed by the revenue they generate. By contrast, we know that the millions of new government school positions added over the past four decades have not added measurably to student knowledge or skills at the end of high school. So instead of boosting the U.S. economy, these jobs have actually been a drain on it. Returning to the staff-to-student ratio we had in 1980 would save taxpayers about $142 billion every year.

Losing a job is a terrible experience, but the school hiring binge of the past four decades has been entirely disconnected from enrollment levels and unaccompanied by educational improvement. Foolish public officials and self-serving, empire building teachers’ unions have created millions of unproductive jobs that were never justified in the first place and that have been a terrible drain on the U.S. economy.  With the nation $13 trillion in debt and many state governments looking at red ink for years to come, we just can’t afford to perpetuate their mistake any longer.

Throwing billions more at the system would only worsen the problem and delay the solution, which is to help ease the transition of these workers from their current unproductive employment back into the productive sector of the economy.

Big Government

Click Images to Enlarge

The Daily Bail

Private citizens have had enough of overpaid, underworked, public employees with benefits most private workers can only dream about.

Unfortunately, President Obama has not gotten the message (and likely won’t until he is kicked out of office). Time and time again, president Obama has proven that he is beholden to public unions no matter how unjustified the cost.

Now President Obama is asking for $50 billion more taxpayer dollars, your dollars, to dole out to the states, in an effort to buy votes or simply because he is economically illiterate. Most likely, it is a combination of both.

Please consider this letter from Obama to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Senate leaders of both parties.

The president whines about losing 84,000 government jobs at the state and local level. I consider that a 5% down payment on what needs to happen.

Obama Begs for More of Your Money

The Washington Post sums up the situation nicely in Obama pleads for $50 billion in state, local aid

President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

Democrats, particularly in the House, have voted for politically costly initiatives at Obama’s insistence, most notably health-care and climate change legislation. But faced with an electorate widely viewed as angry and hostile to incumbents, many are increasingly reluctant to take politically unpopular positions.

The House last month stripped Obama’s request for $24 billion in state aid from a bill that would extend emergency benefits for jobless workers. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to restore that funding but with debate in that chamber set to resume this week, he acknowledges that he has yet to assemble the votes for final passage. Obama’s request for $23 billion to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers has not won support in either chamber.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), called the letter full of “contradictions.”

“He’s calling on Congress to pass a [jobless] bill that will add about $80 billion to the deficit, but then calls for fiscal discipline; he says these measures need to be targeted and temporary, but then calls for extending programs passed in the stimulus more than a year ago,” Stewart said in an e-mail.

Overpaid Unions Workers Need To Share The pain

If President Obama has any sense of fiscal responsibility he would be calling on public unions to share the pain. Government works almost entirely escaped the pain most in the private sector have gone through.

We lost 8 million private sector jobs in the recession, and a few hundred thousand public sector jobs are now at stake. Instead of asking overpaid, underworked public union workers to share in the pain, Obama want to tax to death everyone else to pay for it.

Send a Message

It is time to send a message and the way to do it is to vote against any incumbent from either party who just cannot say no to this fiscal madness.

What You Can Do

Please call your legislative representative and tell them the problem is too much government spending, unions are wrecking the country, and if they vote for more taxpayer sponsored bailouts of public union workers or more state aid, then you will vote them out of office.

Tell your representatives you are against spending $50 billion more on states and that it is long overdue for government workers share the pain and that it’s time for states to fix their budget messes without more Federal handouts and taxpayer dollars.

Here is a directory sorted by state of all the Senators of the 111th Congress.

You can also look up the phone numbers in the Online Directory For The 111th Congress

Bear in mind, not a single job is really at stake. All the unions have to do to keep every jobs is lower pay scales or reduce benefits. Instead, they want everyone else to pitch in to pay for their bloated salaries and their bloated pensions.

Enough is enough.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Left Lane News reporting on the UAW and Ron Gettlefinger:

UAW Chief: Workers Can’t Afford Own Products

By Andrew Ganz

 

United Auto Workers union chief Ron Gettelfinger indicated yesterday that the $14 per hour base wage earned by an entry-level worker building Chrysler, Ford and General Motors products isn’t enough to buy a new car.

The argument comes nearly 90 years after Henry Ford began paying workers $5 per day in hopes that the workers would be able to afford one of their own products, a Ford Model T.

Gettelfinger said that it’s a “fair question” whether or not auto workers can afford the products they’re assembling. An economist for Comerica, Dana Johnson, confirmed Gettelfinger’s comments by saying that a single income UAW worker making $14 per hour probably can’t afford a new car.

But a dual income family? “Then they could clearly afford a new car,” Johnson told the Detroit News.

The UAW negotiated the $14 hourly rate in 2007 and, despite his concern that workers can’t live up to the standard promised by Henry Ford, Gettelfinger nonetheless defended the concessions. More tenured workers earn more than double the $14 hourly rate.

We did what we had to do to get to tomorrow,” Gettelfinger said.

Awwww…..I feel so sorry for them.  Well, guess what?  The REST of us can’t afford your products either and it isn’t OUR fault they’re so expensive.  Ironically, it is the UAW’s fault.  The $14.00/hour for an ENTRY-level position on the line is the SAME wage that my husband, a carpenter with 25-years of experience makes when working for one of the big national builders.  It is just slightly lower than the $17.00/hour he can make with some smaller companies or on his own right now.   Also, it is MORE than my husband is currently making employed in the IT department for Hewlett-Packard. 

That being said, it is the UAW themselves that have played no small part in the precipitous increase in the cost of automobiles that has far surpassed any increase in wages.  However, none of us non-union workers in the private sector can just hog-tie entire industries and force them to cave into our demands, nor can we go cry to Congress and mandate a bailout of our respective industries.

So, to Mr. Gettelfinger I say, it’s just too ironic that the UAW has priced themselves right out of being able to purchase the cars they manufacture.  Welcome to our world.  Those of us out here trying to earn a living without government subsidies and favors and without holding our employers hostage to our demands can’t afford your cars either.  Wonder what happens when the price of cars gets to be so out of whack with incomes that no one can afford them?  The UAW will probably demand more money.  That’s what.