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-By Warner Todd Huston

Unions have been decrying outsourcing for years. The word “outsourcing” has been used as a boogieman to blame declining union jobs upon for the last decade. Unions, for their part, claim to desire to stand up against outsourcing — especially that of outsourcing jobs overseas — and wish to push the home grown alternatives to outsourcing jobs, namely keeping them in the country and under the control of the union.

Yet what have we discovered here on the blog? Why that the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has outsourced the design of one of their own web pages to someone in Slovakia, that’s what.

We’ve waited to report this story because the webpage in question presented a time sensitive situation. The SEIU was trying to create what they were calling the “Take Back the Economy Day” and that day was to be July 17th. The SEIU hoped to spur people to “take aim at the special perks and tax loopholes that buyout firms depend on to get rich,” and get people involved to protest the success of “buyout firms” such as Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts.

Well, July 17th has passed us by and we here on the blog are not in danger of accidentally advertising their event in time to assist anyone in joining their July 17th effort.

Continue reading “Union Outsourcing it’s Own Web Design to Eastern Europe?”

-By Warner Todd Huston

A fellow named Will Franklin over at Willisms.com has done some number crunching and he has discovered that states that support a right to work policy grow at a much higher rate than states that are awash in forced unionization.

From 2004-2007, no Right To Work state grew less than 5.1%, while fifteen Forced Unionization state grew below that level.

Meanwhile, while America’s GDP growth from 2004-2007 by 8.4%, Right To Work states grew by 10% on average, while Forced Unionization states grew by only 6.2% on average. The median Right To Work growth rate was 9.2%, compared to the median Forced Unionization rate of 4.9% (the national median for all states was 7.3%).

As expected, it appears that unionism is an albatross, a mill stone around the necks of the workers limiting the success and growth of a state.

Of course, this will not sit well with the “two Americas” types on the left in this country. As Will points out, the side that they are on is the side of failure and a stifled economy. So, good luck with that concept, there.

Continue reading “Right to Work States See Higher Growth Than Forced Unionization States”

-By Warner Todd Huston

The last order of business for the Service Employee International Union ended with the election of the next slate of SEIU leaders. Andy Stern did not expect any “democracy” to take place in this election, though. You see, no ballots were prepared for the membership to vote upon.

It seems that the ballots prepared ahead of time only had Andy Stern’s nominees on them. Yet, when the floor was opened for nominations from the actual membership, 13 other members were nominated to run for one position or another. 13 members that Andy Stern did not have in his back pocket.

And, then everything bogged down to a crawl as Stern’s minions ran about trying to figure out how to print ballots with the nominees that Stern didn’t approve of printed thereupon. It is even reported by Maya Morris that Stern’s toadies were heard to say that they “weren’t prepared to print ballots” showing that Andy Stern didn’t expect to have any other members running for office. Obviously Stern imagined that he had his iron fist successfully beating down any other opinions. To heck with democracy.

As Maya said:

But when confronted with real democratic processes, Stern’s team was woefully unprepared. SEIU scheduled elections for its International Executive Board and its International Vice Presidents as the last agenda item on the last day of the convention. After five days of misinformation and disinformation, Stern’s management team apparently felt so confident that the Stern-approved slate of candidates would run unopposed that they did not even bother to plan a process to prepare ballots.

Nothing highlights the arrogance we’ve witnessed here at the convention more than this moment. Our message is that the union is about members; their message is that leadership rules. This election process proves our point.

Like I’ve said before, if Andy Stern is determined to eliminate democracy even among his own membership, what the heck do you think he’s going to try with the rest of us and with his influence in our government? This is a man that despises the American way of democratic participation. He believes solidly in autocratic, tyrannical rule of the elite over the rabble… and, in case you missed it, Stern thinks you and I represent the rabble.

Stern wants to do to us what he has done to his own people. Beat them down, ruin their relations with others, and destroy their reputations so that he can get his despotic will enforced.

This is the lesson of the SEIU convention. My fellow Americans, I urge you to understand that now that Andy Stern has eliminated his internal dissension inside his union, you and I are his next targets.

-By Warner Todd Huston

More happenings at the SEIU convention today…

It looks like Andy Stern is steamrolling the internal SEIU dissenters in San Juan this week as his rubber stamp convention has thus far easily passed his extreme agenda.

For instance, his plan to bleed the Strike and Defense fund to pay for his inaptly named “Justice for all” program was easily approved. This takes money from being used to help the members with strikes, etc., and diverts it to Stern’s pet project.

An amendment was also offered to firmly assert that the SEIU is against the Federal government instituting any guest worker programs now or in the future, changing language that allowed for guest worker programs in the past. As Michael Rivera reports in his convention notes today, “SEIU also rejects initiatives that expand or create guest-worker programs.” This amendment also adds to the meddling that the SEIU intends to continue on the National immigration issues.

Once again, we see Andy Stern’s capacity for taking his business far beyond where he belongs. Why one would expect a labor union to be making pronouncements on Federal immigration policy, or to decide to meddle in that field is definitely a question. Stern and his cohorts seem to imagine THEY have been elected not just to offices inside the labor union, but to Congress as well.

At about 10:30 or so, Barack Obama spoke to the convention via video conferencing, too. The SEIU has announced that they are lining up behind the most leftist Senator in the country, to be sure.

And to recap what happened to the folks in the UHW branch of the union… well, they’ve been sliced, diced, and cooked by Stern’s culinary arts. The insurgent UHWers are very unhappy that their democratic rights have been summarily eliminated.

UHW member Anita Wiltz has expressed her bitter disappointment over the whole thing.

Delegates to the convention voted to split me and 65,000 other California nursing home workers and homecare workers away from our local union. This will divide us from our brothers and sisters that work in hospitals and clinics, and put us into a different local union in California. That’s going to make us weaker, not stronger.

Sadly, the UHW members had no say in the matter.

Splitting us up will make us weaker, and that will make it harder to win the justice we’re all fighting for. That doesn’t seem to me like “justice for all.”

Standing in the way of the Stern juggernaut certainly explains why your union has been sliced and diced, Mrs. Wiltz. Keep that in mind next time you go thinking that there is such a thing as democracy in the SEIU!

Continue reading “Stern’s Rubber Stamp Continues”