Looking For The Union Label
June 23, 2011 by Ben Crystal
Big Labor has dug its tentacles so deeply into the Administration of Barack Obama that it has a firm grip on the President’s rather pliable spinal column. If AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka spent any more time at the White House, he would have his own closet in the Lincoln Bedroom. And we have all enjoyed watching Obama deploy Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and teachers’ union storm troopers against the taxpayers and children of Wisconsin.
However, as Big Labor has exploited its relationship with the Democratic Party, not all its slithering has been as easy to spot as a gang of thugs swooping down on anti-Obamacare senior citizens. While violent thugs have rushed out of the Democrats’ front gate, less violent (albeit more dangerous) thugs have snuck through the back.
Witness the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as it punishes the people of South Carolina for daring to live in a state that doesn’t require its citizens to sell their souls to the AFL-CIO just to hold down a steady job. The NLRB has stuck with its plan to try to force Boeing to abandon its 787 Dreamliner plant in North Charleston, S.C., because Obama’s union backers are about as excited about a non-union Boeing shop as they are about Federal grand juries.
In an America struggling to escape the gravity of the economic black hole created by Obama’s Keynesian bumbling, there’s little that worries me more than an active effort by the President and his Big Labor accomplices to keep thousands of Americans unemployed — unless it’s an active effort by the President and his Big Labor accomplices to keep thousands of Americans unemployed because they refuse to work with Big Labor’s boot on their necks.
South Carolina is a right-to-work state. That means, in essence, that the people of the Palmetto State are free to pursue life, liberty and a decent 9-to-5 job without having to deal with a protection racket engineered by the manicured K-Street parasites who control the unions from their plush offices and West Wing confabs. Boeing is pressing forward with a facility that would impact the South Carolina economy by nearly $10 billion. The NLRB, led by Lafe Solomon and Craig Becker (both of whom are union thugs in designer suits), is trying to force Boeing to abandon the project and instead take the whole operation back to the company’s home state of Washington, where the union thugs have made Boeing’s business extraordinarily difficult.
Although the NLRB is supposed to be an independent organization, its own website touts its devotion to promoting union control of American manufacturing over the rights of Americans to simply work. Becker, who has served as general counsel to both the AFL-CIO and the SEIU (and was a member of Obama’s Presidential transition team), is so radically opposed to workers’ rights that Obama had to recess appoint him to the NLRB after even some Democratic Senators expressed misgivings over Becker’s agenda.
In the most recent development, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers filed a complaint that Senator Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) is trying to intimidate the NLRB into dropping its union-backing action. I suppose I might buy Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) showing the union thugs his teeth, but Lindsay Graham? The NLRB is trying to back an Obama play to force money back into his union thug benefactors’ pockets, and they’re claiming Lindsay Graham pushed them around? I’m trying to think of a less-intimidating Senator (much less Republican Senator) — no fair naming Senator Harry “Deputy Droop-a-long” Reid.
Choosing between union kickbacks and job creation would take me less time than choosing between an hour of MSNBC and an hour of anything short of a root canal (unless the dentist looks like Heidi Klum in a lab coat). Obama earns praise from the unions for keeping his distance from the NLRB’s war on South Carolina workers. But with Becker at the head of the NLRB column, not only is Obama leading by proxy, he’s essentially leading in person.
You can opt-out at any time. We protect your information like a mother hen. We will not sell or rent your email address to anyone for any reason.
