Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets

Seeking to increase pressure on McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants, organizers of a movement demanding a $15-an-hour wage for fast-food workers say they will sponsor one-day strikes in 100 cities on Thursday and protest activities in 100 additional cities.

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Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Protesters outside a Taco Bell in Michigan in July.

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• Life on $7.25 an Hour (December 1, 2013)

As the movement struggles to find pressure points in its quest for substantially higher wages for workers, organizers said strikes were planned for the first time in cities like Charleston, S.C.; Providence, R.I.; and Pittsburgh.

The protests have expanded greatly since November 2012, when 200 fast-food workers engaged in a one-day strike at more than 20 restaurants in New York City, the first such walkout in the history of the nation’s fast-food industry.

“There’s been pretty huge growth in one year,” said Kendall Fells, one of the movement’s main organizers. “People understand that a one-day strike is not going to get them there. They understand that this needs to continue to grow.”

The movement, which includes the groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, is part of a growing union-backed effort by low-paid workers — including many Walmart workers and workers for federal contractors — that seeks to focus attention on what the groups say are inadequate wages.

The fast-food effort is backed by the Service Employees International Union and is also demanding that restaurants allow workers to unionize without the threat of retaliation.

In states' latest battle with organized labor, Illinois public unions target Democratic lawmakers

The latest battle between organized labor and states trying to fix huge budget problems by cutting pension costs has surfaced in Illinois, where public union leaders are waging an all-out effort to stop the Democrat-led campaign.

Details of a plan reached last week appear to show state legislative leaders are attempting to solve Illinois' $100 billion pension crisis in part by changing workers' retirement age, reducing automatic pension increases and limiting their collective-bargaining privileges.

Union leaders argue the plan to help the under-funded pension plan, which appears to have bipartisan support, seems no different than the one the General Assembly rejected earlier this year.

“It’s an unfair, unconstitutional scheme that undermines retirement security,” the We Are One Illinois labor coalition said last week as details of the plan emerged. "It’s no compromise at all with those who earned and paid for their retirement benefits. In fact, reports suggest the leaders have repackaged Senate Bill 1 and barely bothered to disguise it.”

Rank-and-file state lawmakers were briefed on the plan Friday, and a vote could come as early as this week.

Via: Fox News

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MSNBC Guest: If Walmart paid workers more, taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize Walmart’s growth…

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry has been pounding on Walmart all morning, suggesting they Walmart employees aren’t paid enough and emphasizing these ‘grass roots’ protests at Walmarts on Black Friday. Problem is these protests are made up mostly of activists who simply want to unionize Walmart.

But what caught my attention was when former CNBC host Carmen Wong Ulrich argued that taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s growth because so many of their employees are on public assistance. In other words, if Walmart would stop being selfish with their bounty and simply pay their employees a living wage, taxpayers would save money:

One of the biggest ideas I hope that people can understand is that we are all subsidizing Walmart’s growth and income and money and we are supporting it because so many Walmart employees are on public assistance. How does America feel about the fact that we are paying or co-paying Walmart employees? I think we would like to not do that.

Look I’m going to bottom line this for you. When you accept a job at Walmart (or anywhere else for that matter), you agree to the salary that goes along with that job. If you don’t like the salary then don’t take the job. Find something else that pays better. It’s that simple.

As to the ridiculous claim by Ulrich that we are subsidizing Walmart (don’t you love how liberals think?), I’ll just say that if Walmart were forced to start paying this $25k/year ‘living wage’ to all their entry-level employees, there would be less entry-level employees and probably less Walmarts. Thus taxpayers would be paying more for people to live on public assistance.

Seriously, can’t we learn anything from Detroit?

Via: The Right Scoop
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AT THANKSGIVING, BIG GROCERY & BIG LABOR ATTACK COMPETITOR WAL-MART

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who will visit a Wal-Mart on the biggest shopping weekend of the year, don’t be surprised if you encounter protestors agitating for “workers’ rights.”

But you may be surprised how those protestors got there. They are not union organizers, per se, although many represent unions and other community organizing groups. They are associated with calls for wage increases and improved working conditions – even though 23,000 people just turned up for 600 positions at a Wal-Mart under construction in Washington, D.C. As Business Insider notes, it’s harder to get a job at this one Wal-Mart – only 2.6 percent of applicants are accepted – than it is to get into Harvard, where 6.1 percent get in.

The protestors are the Baptists in a Baptists-and-Bootleggers arrangement assembled by an outfit, Saint Consulting, where the goal, according to one company executive, “is always to kill Wal-Mart.”

And the reason the goal remains the same is because the bootlegger is not the labor movement but Wal-Mart’s competitors, who are spending millions of dollars to use these activists to throw sand into Wal-Mart’s corporate gears.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman reported, “Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway, and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart.”

Via: Human Events

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Critics: Walmart Protests Lack Actual Walmart Employees

Union front groups are planning more than 1,500 protests at Walmarts nationwide on Black Friday despite lacking significant support from actual employees, critics say.

The Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), a self-proclaimed subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers retail union (UFCW), says it will picket 1,500 stores the day after Thanksgiving, one of the largest shopping days of the year.

“Associates do stick together and look out for each other. We have to because Walmart and the Waltons seem to be fine with the financial struggles that we’re all facing,” Colorado Walmart employee Barbara Gertz said in an OUR Walmart release. “We’re are all in the same situation, one that Walmart creates by paying us poverty wages.”

Gertz appears to represent a small minority of Walmart’s 1.3 million employees. OUR Walmart’s 2012 Black Friday protest featured thousands of demonstrators, but less than 50 actual associates, according to the company. Labor watchdogs expect more of the same this year, especially because the worker center keeps focusing on the number of protests, rather than the number of employee dissidents.

“They’re not the type of grassroots worker-driven efforts that media portrays them to be,” Ryan Williams of Worker Center Watch said. “They’re protests held by professional protesters—oftentimes paid and given training—to cause a scene for publicity.”

Administration accused of giving unions 'special treatment' with exemption from ObamaCare fee

The Obama administration is being accused of giving labor groups "special treatment under the law" after formally proposing a change that could exempt union health plans from a pesky ObamaCare fee. 

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., who flagged the obscure rule change after it was filed in the Federal Register (see page 70), blasted the exemption as "crony capitalism at its worst." 

"Unions are now experiencing the ugly reality of this law, and they want out," he said in a statement. 

Indeed, the AFL-CIO has fought against what is known as the "reinsurance fee" in the Affordable Care Act. The temporary fee would kick in next year and is meant to raise $25 billion over three years, to help pay for the cost of people with pre-existing conditions signing up for coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges. 

The proposal filed Monday would exempt certain self-insured plans -- those that do not use a third-party administrator for core functions -- for 2015 and 2016. 

Republicans charge this is aimed at unions' so-called Taft-Hartley plans, though union officials had downplayed the change and suggested some of their plans wouldn't be eligible anyway. 

Via: Fox News

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Black Friday union strikes against Walmart likely to fizzle

The “widespread, massive strikes and protests” targeting Walmart on Black Friday will almost certainly fall flat, says one union watchdog closely monitoring the labor group planning the pickets.

OUR Walmart, a close affiliate of the massive United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), is threatening the big-box chain with crippling strikes and angry crowds during next week’s crucial Black Friday sale unless the company raises worker wages.

The planned strike, along with a series of smaller pickets preceding it, have been heavily hyped in the left-wing media. “We do expect [the protests] to be larger than last year because we have so many more members and so much more community support,” the head of a labor advocacy group told the Huffington Post on Thursday.

The Daily Caller

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Why Doesn’t The UAW Want A Secret-Ballot Election At VW?

It is a long-standing precedent that unions are legally allowed to lie to workers in order to get their support–and lie they do.

Take, for example, Carol Wilson, a Volkswagen employee in Chattanooga who was misled into signing a UAW authorization card.

“When I was approached to sign a card a year and a half ago, it was, ‘Oh, the card just means you want more information.‘”

Lying to workers in order to get them to sign union authorization cards is, unfortunately, a common tactic.

It is also one of the reasons unions like the idea of card-check–the process of unionization based on signatures, as opposed to secret-ballot elections.

In Chattanooga, where the UAW has claimed that it has gotten a majority of VW’s employees to support the union’s efforts, the does not want employees to vote by secret-ballot on unionization.

Why? Because, according to the UAW, it will lose.

“We’ve determined we definitely have a majority of employees who favor this representation,” Casteel told the Tennessean last month. “But we are not seeking a vote necessarily.”

Why not, if that is what the workers want?

“We know if we go for a traditional election where the outside organizations could campaign against us, we’d probably lose,” Casteel said. [Emphasis added.]

Via: Red State

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California: Brown’s “School Reform” Morphs into Union Payoff

In 2013, maybe more than ever, the key to figuring out how California works is understanding that by far the most powerful forces in state politics are the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers and the 500,000 people they represent and collect dues from.

So when a Los Angeles Unified teacher feeds semen to his students and has to be bribed to quit, instead of enacting rules to make it easier to fire classroom sexual predators, the Legislature passes a fake reform that would have actually increased protections for pervert teachers.

So when a judge says districts must follow a state law requiring student performance be part of teacher evaluations, instead of compliance, we see the state cancel the standardized tests whose results could have been used against bad teachers.

And now here is the latest example of teacher unions’ hegemony in California: A much-trumpeted education reform enacted earlier this year is being hijacked in brazen fashion, further propping up the teacher-favoring education status quo.

The reform I refer to is Gov. Jerry Brown’s seemingly successful push this summer to divert school funding specifically to English-language learners, foster children and disadvantaged children because of his concern that they will lead difficult lives unless they get more out of school, with grim implications for the state’s future workforce. Brown didn’t say it, but these students are the biggest victims of the CTA/CFT chokehold on public education. Instead of having a school system devoted to getting the best teachers to where they’re most needed, we have a system devoted above all to protecting veteran teachers’ compensation. If minority kids suffer, the establishment ultimately doesn’t care.

Via: California Political Review

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Do Teachers Really Know Best?

Teachers have been maligned, derided, put on a pedestal, ignored, followed, awarded, lionized, and sued by parents. Administrators choose their favorite teachers as educators of the year, star teachers, or outstanding faculty, lavishing praise and accolades on those they deem the best team players.

The unprepared teachers or those who cause embarrassment to the school district through their unscrupulous and immoral behavior are usually quietly transferred elsewhere with excellent recommendations unless there is a teacher’s union that prevents dismissal of such specimens of the teaching profession.

Do teachers really know best? Etymologically speaking, they “show, point out, guide, give instruction” to their charges but some of them go beyond their call of duty for better or for worse. Teachers are able to instruct to the extent of their level of education, actual comprehension and knowledge of the subject matter, and their level and type of ideological programming. As a student I’ve had some fantastic professors and some atrocious indoctrinators.

A teacher has the opportunity eight hours a day to mold a child’s mind, the proverbial brain “full of mush,” independently of their parents’ wishes. They have your child’s rapt attention. Young pupils believe their teachers to be the ultimate authority on everything and are never wrong.

People Magazine awarded their 2013 Teacher of the Year to eight teachers who work in challenging environments such as “underfunded schools, students with difficult home lives, andlanguage barriers.” The media and the public in general believe that throwing more money at education will resolve fundamental flaws.

Named “The supportive survivor,” Valencia Robinson from New Smyrna Beach Middle School in Florida is a yoga devotee. “I will not let my students eat junk food in my class.” Aside from the fact that students should not eat in class and eating healthy is a good idea, it is the parents’ role to choose their children’s diet; they have not abdicated that role once their children step into the classroom.

Via: Canada Free Press

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