Verizon Workers Go On Strike -- Object to Paying Anything for Healthcare

They couldn't have picked a worse time to strike.  One hang up by the unions seems to be over healthcare:

... Verizon said its wireline business has been in decline for more than a decade, and that it is asking for changes in the contract to strengthen the unit. The company said union employees contribute nothing to their health care premiums.

Union employees of Verizon are contributing nothing to their health care premiums while many of us are paying hundreds of dollars a month for healthcare -- over $400 if you have the Federal Employee Blue Cross/Blue Shield family plan.  How did the unions ever pull it off that they would not have to contribute to their own healthcare?  The attitude that we are all owed health insurance without having to pay is a socialistic attitude with unrealistic expectations in today's world.  Nothing like health insurance is free as someone has to pay in the end.  In most cases, it is the consumer as the companies raise the price of the goods and services.

When unions were formed it was a safety issue but now it seems to be all about how much they can rip off a company through threats of strike and now a strike.  Take a look at Boeing workers in Seattle who go on strike every three to four years or the ones in Chicago striking the Congress Plaza Hotel for eight years. The union pay to workers when they strike in a lot of cases is slightly less than what they get paid when they work.  They have no incentive to settle anything.  Now the unions object to paying more for health benefits when some have paid zero.

Verizon has made contingency plans using non-union workers who make up the majority of their company.  Maybe they will discover they don't need so many union members or any at all.  Going on strike in today's economy is short sighted but since Obama took office the unions have been getting bolder and think with the DOJ behind them, they can do whatever.  They may be in for a shock one of these days when more states go Right to Work and the union leaders who call the shots have taken them down the wrong path. 

Verizon Workers On Strike Over Contract

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR 08/ 7/11 12:58 AM ET

NEW YORK -- Tens of thousands of unionized Verizon Communications Inc. workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., went on strike early Sunday after they failed to agree on a new labor contract with the telecommunications company. 

The Communications Workers of America said negotiations in Philadelphia and New York stalled Saturday night after Verizon continued to demand more than 100 concessions from workers and the unions refused to budge. 

Mark C. Reed, Verizon's executive vice president of human resources, called the outcome of the unions' actions "regrettable" for customers and employees. 

"We will continue to do our part to reach a new contract that reflects today's economic realities in our wireline business and addresses the needs of all parties," he said in a statement. 

The contract that expired midnight Saturday covers 45,000 workers, including 10,000 represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who serve as telephone and repair technicians, customer service representatives, operators and more. 

"Even at the 11th hour, as contracts were set to expire, Verizon continued to seek to strip away 50 years of collective bargaining gains for middle class workers and their families," CWA said in a statement Sunday. 

Verizon, the nation's largest wireless carrier, has 196,000 workers; 135,000 are non-union.
At the center of the contract negotiations, which began June 22, are the costs of health care, pensions and work rules. 

The CWA said the concessions are unjustified and harsh, given that Verizon is highly profitable – the company's revenue rose 2.8 percent to $27.5 billion in the second quarter. Its growth was largely attributed to its wireless business. 

Excerpt:  Read More at Huffington Post AOL 

Boeing Case: How Unions are discouraging companies to set-up business in America

It is hard for most of us to understand why the Obama Administration thinks their hardline attack on Boeing through the NLRB is going to create jobs in this Country.   Boeing has spent millions of dollars to get the plant in South Carolina ready to operate full time and along comes Obama and his union thugs through the NLRB filing a complaint against Boeing.  Maybe Boeing should have opened their plant out of the Country so not to have to deal with the union thugs.  After striking Boeing for three years, why would Boeing ever want to do business having to use those thugs?
This article details what is going to continue to happen if the NLRB gets their way -- jobs will fly out of the Country so the companies don't have to worry about  work stoppage.  Like so many of the Obama Administration groups, the NLRB is out of control this time in favor of the unions who fund the democrat campaigns. 

Boeing Case: How Unions are discouraging companies to set-up business in America

by CampaignsReport

There is no point in coming back to the chronology of the IAM-NLRB-Boeing case nor to the underlying interests of some stakeholders in the SEIU – Sodexo case anymore than we already did. What we would like to do in this article is to open the debate on the consequences of these events on the American business.

Entrepreneurs (both Americans and foreign ones) know that our American principles have been based on two pillars: free enterprise and a free country. Recent events in our country could change this perception. In the IAM-Boeing case, the NLRB filled a complaint against the airplane manufacturer on the basis that the company’s decision to locate its second production line had not been made on rational arguments (e.g.: diversifying its production centers) but had been a retaliation against past strikes led by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at Boeing’s plant in Everett, WA. Following the fuss made by the complaint, the NLRB felt obliged to explain that it did not order Boeing to relocate the second production line to Washington – yet this explanation was hardly convincing. A state agency that tells a company where and what to manufacture was the model adopted by some countries but had never been in place in America until now. 

The NLRB and the unions do not think on a long-term basis. The impact of the IAM-Boeing case is huge. If a company cannot choose where to locate its production in the US, the question will be raised whether to locate it abroad. Boeing could have chosen to locate the second production line in Mexico but they picked up South Carolina, creating 1,000 jobs by the way. 

In the SEIU-Sodexo case, the union has been going after the company to become the representative union of its 120,000 employees (which means collecting the 120,000 annual memberships). To do so, the union has tried to tarnish the company reputation, to make it lose contracts and put it under increasing pressure. What they do not tell is that when a client decides to terminate its contract with Sodexo, employees’ contracts are also terminated or they are put under a probationary period as this is going to be the case for all non-managerial employees of Sodexo at the Western Washington University in the coming weeks. In the end, the SEIU is weakening American workers, putting them at risk of losing their jobs. 

In both cases, American jobs are being jeopardized at a time when the economic crisis is not over yet and unemployment rate is still high. We should rather fight for our jobs instead of destroying them and our economy as unions are doing, for their short-term profits. 

Find more at CampaignsReport!

Labor panel wants union officials in corporate boardrooms

The last paragraph from the Washington Examiner says it all about what is happening. If this latest power grab by the NLRB on the behalf of the unions doesn't sound communist, nothing does:

Soviet Communist Party theoretician Leon Trotsky wrote this in 1931: "The workers need control not for platonic purposes, but in order to exert practical influence upon the production and commercial operations of the employers. ... In a developed form, workers' control thus implies a sort of economic dual power in the factory." Were Trotsky still around, he would no doubt cheer Obama's NLRB.

Unions in many states like Michigan and Ohio have driven jobs to other states and countries with their unreasonable demands and strikes. Grew up with factories striking in the Dayton area for little or no reason. Don't know how many times the unions would decide to strike near the beginning of hunting season over the smallest items or while retooling for the new model year, they would lay off people and senior people took the layoffs to go hunting in the fall of the year. Not sure my Uncle ever worked through the start of hunting season.

What I thought the strangest was he worked for GM and could have bought a GM vehicle at a discount but he always bought Fords. When I asked him why, he said he wouldn't want to buy anything the people around him were making. That was an indictment on the GM union workers in Dayton. In fact Dayton union workers also drove out Frigidaire, NCR, and who knows what other companies. Most unreliable group of union people who would walk out over any dispute.

Now that same mentality wants to run business. As union workers, they have done a good job of running business into the ground and now they want to tell business where to locate and how to run themselves? Is this Department of Labor and the NLRB crazy? We think it is and why the sooner they are all out of jobs the better. America cannot afford four more years of what we have been seeing.

We have noted that most of the Right to Work states are Red States. Oklahoma was added to the rolls in the early part of this century with an overwhelming vote to become a Right to Work state against a ton of money from outside the state plus union thugs. Was a poll watcher to make sure that the election was legitimate as trucks with union workers were going from poll to poll but never saw anything here.

As you can see on the current map of Right to Work states that most are in the south and middle America:

Labor panel wants union officials in corporate boardrooms
By: Examiner Editorial 05/17/11 8:05 PM

The National Labor Relations Board sued Boeing for opening a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. 

Why has private-sector unionization fallen from 35 percent of the work force during World War II to less than 7 percent today? The main reason is that unions raise a firm's labor costs, leaving fewer resources for things like job creation, capital improvements, and research and development. Unions also make it much harder for owners and executives to make practical business decisions. 

A memo leaked from the National Labor Relations Board makes clear that President Obama and the radical labor advocates he put on it are embarked on a calculated campaign to make unionized firms even harder to manage. The NLRB's recent suit against Boeing Aircraft Co. is merely the first step. 

The board sued Boeing for opening a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. Boeing's main plant is in Washington, a state where employees have no choice but to join unions. It's also where the International Association of Machinists has struck Boeing five times in 30 years, most recently in 2008. That strike cost Boeing $2 billion and prompted longtime customers like Virgin Airways chief Richard Branson to make plans to take his business elsewhere. With the new plant, 1,000 jobs were created in South Carolina, but no union jobs in Washington were lost. 

Obama's NLRB doesn't give a hoot what the Supreme Court ruled. Not only is the NLRB standing firm in its Boeing suit, but the leaked memo, which was obtained by the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky and James Sherk, also shows that the board seeks to elevate union officials to equal partners with executives in corporate boardrooms of all unionized firms.

The memo instructs NLRB regional operatives to flag all cases in which unionized firms made relocation decisions without submitting detailed economic justifications to their unions. The board plans "case-by-case" reviews, followed by prosecutions of selected cases. The intended consequence is that all major business decisions will become subject to approval by unions.

....

Read more at the Washington Examiner

While researching to do this article, we ran across the latest on the NLRB action against Boeing as a Freedom of Information request has now been filed:

FOIA Request Filed to Disclose Political Motives Behind NLRB’s Attack on Boeing 

May 16th 2011 

Washington, DC May 16, 2011 – The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act FOIA disclosure request with the National Labor Relations Board NLRB on the heels of the agency’s recent announcement that it will prosecute airline manufacturer Boeing Corp. 

If International Association of Machinists IAM union officials and the NLRB are successful, over 1,000 Boeing employees in South Carolina would be out of work as Boeing will be forced to relocate the aircraft assembly jobs to Washington State which lacks Right to Work protections for employees.

The NLRB’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, issued the complaint against Boeing late last month at the behest of IAM union bosses. In 2009, Boeing opened the new plant to produce 787 Dreamliner airplanes in South Carolina, largely because South Carolina is a Right to Work state that protects workers from being required to join or pay dues to a union just to get or keep a job. 

Foundation President Mark Mix submitted the FOIA inquiry on Monday.
In the request, Mix asks that the agency produce all the documentation regarding communications between NLRB officials and third parties, including communications with Obama administration officials; officials from the offices of the Governors of Washington and Oregon; and any other federal, state, or local government agency personnel regarding Boeing or the IAM union, the opening of the company’s facility in South Carolina, and about the NLRB’s complaint against Boeing itself. 

Source:  LaborUnionReport.com

We want to know why a company doesn't have a right to put their factory wherever they want in the United States without the NLRB becoming involved.  Boeing has a history of problems with their unions in Seattle so if you want to blame anyone for Boeing building a plant in South Carolina, lay it at the feet of the Union Members and their bosses who think nothing of striking Boeing.  The NLRB and Unions are showing their true colors now with Obama in the White House.  Union membership has fallen drastically and if the occupant of the White House thinks this thuggish action is a way to get more members, think again.

All we have seen out of unions in recent years led by SEIU is thuggish activity toward anyone who doesn't agree with them along with voter fraud.  They will attack people and property as we recently witnessed in Wisconsin and don't think anything of the cost to the taxpayers of Wisconsin for their actions:

Protests at the state Capitol over public workers' collective bargaining powers cost more than $7.8 million for police, and damage to the Capitol will cost about $270,000 to repair, a state official said.

Now the taxpayers of Wisconsin have a $7.8M bill for the union protests including repairs to the Capitol.  Typical example of union members from the SEIU.  It is shocking to watch the SEIU public service union operate at the state and local level.  Having been around the Air Force Materiel Command most of my adult life, I find it strange that the state and local unions even have bargaining rights and can strike.  Check out the federal unions and you discover they are not allowed to strike.  We saw President Reagan fire the air traffic controllers when they went on strike.  In Air Force Materiel Command we saw the Commander tell the union at Tinker if you strike, you are fired.  The only reason I can think of for federal unions is for donations to the Democrat political machine as there are grievance procedures in the Federal Government.

If I had one thing to say to states whose economies have been put on their backs because of companies leaving due to union problems, pass Right to Work!