Today the Michigan legislature and governor are expected to turn Michigan into the nation’s 24th right-to-work state. The state’s new law does not change collective bargaining rights, but it does give workers the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to join a union or not. It also gives them control over their own money, by banning unions from skimming the paychecks of even non-union workers. Michigan’s reform is more modest than that which passed in Wisconsin, but it gets at a fundamental American right: The right to work without anyone forcing a worker to join a union, and the right to determine how one spends or keeps their own hard-earned money.
Big Labor is responding in the way it usually does, with threats and coercion, shut-downs and protests. Two Michigan school districts have shut down today, due to the high number of teachers who have sent in falsified sick notes so they could go to Lansing to protest the new law.
In most jobs, if you are caught lying to your employer regarding your failure to report to work, you are fired. But unionized teachers are all but impossible to fire. The two school districts are not even requiring the absent teachers to use their own personal time to attend the protests. The school districts, in Warren and Taylor, are treating the shut-down days as snow days. This is not fair to the students or to the taxpayers who pay those dishonest union teachers’ salaries.
In addition to shutting down schools, Big Labor is shipping protesters in from neighboring states. Many are coming in from Wisconsin, which went through its own turmoil when Gov. Scott Walker and the legislature enacted union reforms.
President Obama weighed in against the right-to-work law Monday, in the process mischaracterizing the new law entirely to demonize it. The fact is, a majority of Michigan’s citizens support the right-to-work law. President Obama never enjoyed majority support for his health care law, but he tried selling it as settled law that was passed with “strong majorities.” In his dishonest remarks regarding Michigan’s right-to-work law, Obama revealed that he is only pro-choice when it comes to abortion and government and unions having the power to choose for citizens. He does not believe that workers should have the right to choose whether to join a union, just as he believes Americans do not deserve the right to make their own health care choices.
Today’s passage of right-to-work could be Waterloo for Big Labor. That is why it is staging the raging protests. Union membership has dropped sharply in Michigan and around the rest of the nation in recent decades. Younger workers tend to avoid union membership. States like Texas prove that right-to-work works better for workers and the businesses that employ them, and for taxpayers. Unions made a poor choice when they became the fundraising engine of the Democratic Party, alienating Republican workers within their own ranks. In the 2012 election, government worker union AFSCME spent more than $100 million supporting leftist Democratic candidates, including about $20 million that went to supporting Obama’s re-election. That is taxpayer money being skimmed from worker paychecks and used to support partisan politics. SEIU, the union whose agenda Obama promised to carry into power, was close behind AFSMCE, spending $74 million supporting Obama and the Democrats. Unions spend almost exclusively supporting Democrats, despite the fact that about 40% of their members are Republicans.
Where right-to-work laws are in place, businesses tend to be healthier and unemployment tends to be lower. Michigan’s unemployment stands at 9.3% officially, more than a full point higher than the national average. Right-to-work could change that and bring business back to a state that has been driving business away.
And again, the people of Michigan elected their legislature and governor, and a majority of the state’s citizens support the right-to-work law. Big Labor has every right to protest peacefully, but the majority have the right to enact sensible laws that take politics and brute force out of workplaces, and may help bring business back to their state.
Update: Michigan’s Democrats are threatening blood in the wake of right-to-work becoming law in Michigan.
“We are going to undo 100 years of labor relations. And there will be blood. We will relive the Battle of the Overpass.” -Geiss #SaveMI
— MI House Democrats (@MIHouseDems) December 11, 2012
That violent tweet quotes Michigan House Democrat Douglas Geiss, and is on the official Michigan House Democrats’ Twitter feed. Geiss is from Taylor, the same city whose school board shut down the schools allowing teachers to protest the right-to-work law and is treating the shut-down as snow days.
Update: The MI Dems have apparently deleted the threatening tweet. But the Internet is indelible, and their violent “blood” threat stands as long as they fail to account for and apologize for it.
Update: The MI House has passed the right-to-work law, 58-51.
he two school districts are not even requiring the absent teachers to use their own personal time to attend the protests. The school districts, in Warren and Taylor, are treating the shut-down days as snow days. This is not fair to the students or to the taxpayers who pay those dishonest union teachers’ salaries.
Time for a change in the school board and superintendents of those two districts in my opinion.
If they aren’t taking disciplinary action against teachers skipping out, and not making them use personal time, they are not doing their jobs.
Time for change in administration.
“In most jobs, if you are caught lying to your employer regarding your failure to report to work, you are fired. But unionized teachers are all but impossible to fire.”
It is a myth that it is almost impossible to fire unionized teachers or other unionized public employees. It is relatively simple to fire a public employee – if you know what you’re doing – and only a little more difficult fire a unionized teacher because they get two bites at the apple; they can contest their firing through the contractual grievance and arbitration process and if they don’t get the desired result can also contest it in court under the tenure laws of the state and, unlike other labor arbitration, the courts owe no deference to the arbitration decision.
The real issue with firing unionized teachers is that in the union states – and a lot of non-union states too – the NEA or AFT own the School Board and get to vett every management hire. In a unionized district, you will NOT be the Superintendent, a district manager, or a school principal without the approval of the NEA or AFT. So, it isn’t that it is impossible to fire a union teacher, it is impossible to find somebody in management that WANTS to fire a union teacher.
College these days is all about “fitting in.” If you demonstrate that you fit in, you get the credential. So, Ed School grads will have already demonstrated that they fit in with the very leftist Ed School culture. Then the teacher hiring process in most places causes the “aspiring” teacher to have to work for some time as a Teacher’s Aide/Teacher’s Assistant to show that they “fit in” with the school. If they demonstrate that they fit in, they get hired as a Teacher but have to wait three to five years to become tenured. During that three to five years if they do anything to demonstrate that they don’t fit in, they are not retained and they have very limited rights of appeal of that non-retention. The teachers and the unions don’t want people who don’t fit in, so the unions rarely contest non-retention.
The period before tenure is the only time that teachers get any meaningful supervision. A teacher is never really subject to the kind of direct supervision that even other public employees get but they do get some observation, even correction and evaluation, during their non-tenured period. Once a teacher becomes tenured, they are never meaningfully supervised again unless they foolishly do something that doesn’t fit in. Then the caring and sharing teachers, like all the other caring and sharing types, become astoundingly vicious. The non-conforming teacher – or social worker type – becomes the sick chicken who is pecked to death by the other chickens. So, while management can never get rid of a non-performing teacher, in fact goes out of its way to not even know whether a teacher is performing, the other teachers can get rid of one at will if the teacher sins against the other teachers.
You say that what I wrote is a “myth,” then spend a couple hundred words explaining how the “myth” is in fact the truth. Interesting.
No, Bryan, it is not impossible or even difficult technically to discipline or dismiss a public employee; I’ve done it hundreds of times, including a few teachers – a few only because we only employed a few. I even have some union steward scalps and one union business agent’s scalp on my wall. It has somehow become a “known fact” in the conservative world that somehow or another public employees and especially unionized employees have special legal or administrative protections that make them “almost impossible” to fire; they don’t. What they have going for them is the fact that most places that are union are also Democrat and the Democrats usually don’t care how or whether the employees perform so long as they don’t do anything to make the administration look bad.
What is difficult, or even “almost impossible,” is to find a manager who is willing to fire one because it means your career in many cases. In my career I went through four governors and five transitions. In every one of those elections there was some Democrat loudly proclaiming that he was going to serve my and my co-workers heads on a platter to the unions. They never actually collected but they made us miserable enough in one Democrat term that we all found hidey-holes either out in the operating departments or in my case in the Legislature. Those SDs in Michigan are closing down because they know that it means the jobs of any principal, superintendent, or Board member who tried to dismiss those lying teachers. Generally, lying to your employer, even a public employer will get you at least serious discipline if not outright dismissal.
It is the politics of unionization, not the unionization itself. Even in a union-owned Democrat administration, if somebody gets cross-threaded with the administration the union will either just refuse to represent the employee or do a charade arbitration where the arbitrator does the dirty work.
The mythology that unionized public employees are untouchable is corrosive to Republican governance in those rare events when a Republican can get elected in a unionized state. When I was Alaska’s head of labor relations I and Swartznegger’s guy were the only Republican appointive heads of a state’s LR function in the Country. How many times have I been told by a newly minted Republican appointee that “I don’t want any grievances or troubles with the unions!” They’re afraid of them and they shouldn’t be. When I quit and played kiss and tell on a Democrat administration and went to work for the Republican Legislature, one of the administration’s cabinet officers publicly proclaimed that he’d see that I never worked in Alaska again. Hell, three years later I was back working under that administration hired specifically to clean up they mess that they’d made in dealing with their union “friends.” The unions promised all out war if Murkowski appointed me director. They took a few shots, I shot back, and they spent the next three and a half years quietly under contract and leaving us alone. So, my point is that unions are powerful for being thought powerful. Sure they own Democrats, at least up to a point, but they live rent-free in the heads of Republicans and it really interferes with Republican governance to be afraid of them.
Hmmm ….
Public schools in Michigan, especially Detroit, shutting down because the teachers union is organizing walkouts.
Isn’t this in fact a good thing?
It would be like having to move your parents from the nursing home/bedsore factory because the workers there are on strike.
Yes! One less day of communist indoctrination for the kids. Yay!
While Big Labor seems to be losing on one front, it will be winning on another when GOP caves on higher marginal rates. This is a boon to big labor because it stifles small businesses that see no value on using union workers, and will discourage them from ever growing to a point where they may need to employ a “class” of laborer, e.g., machinists, electricians, etc.
My one experience with a union shop was long ago as a graduate student at the University of … Michigan. I was selected to be a Teaching Assistant for two undergraduate courses. My compensation was around $2,500 plus tuition. But I had to pay into the union, whether I elected to be a member or not. (I elected not to.) Tomorrow’s TA’s will at least have the option to pay into the union or spend the money on college essentials – books, pizza, or whatever.
As a TA, you probably weren’t even an employee as that term has legal meaning in most bargaining laws. That means you were just given to the union by the administration for purposes of collecting dues and transmitting those dues to Democrats.
Done.
The union movement in America just died today. Good riddance to the thugs who extorted hundreds of billions from small businesses and large corporations over the years and who single-handedly destroyed manufacturing in America, only to line their own pockets and the pockets of corrupt Democrat fascists.
We’re throwing you out of Michigan. You’re done. You are enemies of hard-working Americans everywhere. In ten years, unions will not exist.
And you will not be missed.
I’ve worked in unions for 32 of my 34 post-high school years, and nothing about the $600/year dues irks me more than the buying of the Democratic party, with the possible exception of the fact that there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
nice web site.but holland/zeeland is not in aellgan county.check out florence hunn’s work in saugatuck area 1930s-1950s see my book Raising the Roof. The Buildings and Architecture of the Saugatuck-Douglas Area’2nd revised edition, 2006, also including, the Ship’n'Shore botel and Jean Goldsmith’s house at 546 Butler.