The Other McCain

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Unions File Suit Against Mitch Daniel’s Right-To-Work Law And His Hairstyle, But Mostly The Right-To-Work Law

Posted on | April 22, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Mitch Daniels came under attack from The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, who appear to have smoked a staggering amount of that new ‘Pelosi’ material circulating in Progressive circles. Emphasis mine:

The lawsuit argues that the “defendants have exacted compulsory service and/ or involuntary servitude from the Union through the combination of the passage of the Right to Work law and the existing federal requirement of the duty of fair representation” and that the union is “compelled to furnish services to all persons in bargaining units that it represents but it may not require payments for those services because of the Right to Work law.”
The union also claims the right-to-work law “requires dues-paying members to work alongside non-union personnel, and that is compulsory service within the meaning of the thirteenth amendment.”

Don’t I remember seeing this argument in a book once? (click to embiggen):
Why, yes: yes, I do.
But, if you believe that ObamaCare is Constitutional, you might have smoked enough Pelosi to become happy about it.

via Breitbart

More at Daily Pundit.

Update: in other Hoosier news, what’s with this upstart Mourdock nipping at Lugar’s heels?

Category: Indiana

Comments

20 Responses to “Unions File Suit Against Mitch Daniel’s Right-To-Work Law And His Hairstyle, But Mostly The Right-To-Work Law”

  1. Kent Atwater
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 8:37 am

    In other words, it’s just “Republicans want slavery again,” and “Eeeewwww!  Non-union worker cooties!”
     

  2. McGehee
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 1:13 pm

    Actually I don’t think it’s so much that the union members don’t want to have to work alongside non-members, so much as that they think non-union people should be prohibited from earning a living at all.

  3. M. Thompson
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 2:05 pm

    What the (sailor speak) are they talking about?

    It would be like volunteers demanding that draftees be put into separate units.

  4. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 2:43 pm

    They don’t mind so much non-unionists earning a living as long as they get the same cut as they get from their members.

  5. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 2:45 pm

    Well it isn’t as if we didn’t already know that we needed to abolish unions.

  6. Thomas L. Knapp
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 3:10 pm

    The second claim is really stupid.

    The first claim is absolutely true.

    “Right to work” laws eliminate freedom of contract between employers and unions, and require unions to represent non-union-members as if they were union members. They’re just as bad as the “closed shop” provisions of the National Labor Relations Act.

  7. smitty
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 3:34 pm

    In the title? That’s a hat tip to Ace of Spades, who uses that form, perhaps, to better effect.

  8. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 4:07 pm

    Right to work doesn’t stop employers from negotiating contracts with unions, common sense does.

  9. Thomas L. Knapp
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 4:26 pm

    No, not in the title. The two claims the union made in its suit. The “involuntary servitude” thing is just silly.

  10. Thomas L. Knapp
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 4:33 pm

    At the factory where I worked, it was the company which had insisted the workers choose a union (when the factory opened, long before I worked there).

    The company wanted one agent to bargain with, uniform rules, and low turnover. It got all three. And once NAFTA allowed its products to move across the Canadian and Mexican borders freely, it closed its non-union factories in those countries and put its production entirely in the union plant.

  11. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 5:10 pm

    If what unions claim to offer employers were true such as worker training and some restraint with wage and more importantly work rule demands unions could be attractive to some industries. I worked as a laborer and a carpenter (labor) and then as a foreman and finally site Superintendent (management) in merit shops in the DC area for 25 years. The construction unions gradually killed themselves George Hyman being the most compelling example.

  12. Thomas L. Knapp
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 5:33 pm

    The union I belonged to didn’t claim to offer worker training (I know that some, like IBEW, do that).

    Its main effect, so far as I could tell — and I had something of a “control” for the experiment with a nearby company of similar size, with similar products, and a similar pay scale for the express purpose of keeping themselves non-union — was huge turnover reduction in a work force where many of the jobs required weeks or months of training to become reasonably competent at.

    In any case, the point is this:

    There shouldn’t be laws that say “if x% of the workers vote for a union, the employer has to contract with the union, and must do so exclusively (‘closed shop’).”

    Nor should there be laws that say “employers are forbidden to contract exclusively with unions, and unions are required to represent non-members as if they were members (‘right to work’).”

    Both of those kinds of laws are BS with no place in a free society.

  13. Finrod Felagund
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 6:54 pm

    Next thing you know they’ll be demanding that they don’t have to work alongside all those other icky ethnic groups that they don’t like.

  14. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 6:56 pm

    All the construction unions except maybe the laborers have classes after work hours.
    What exactly is the in between of Right to work and closed shops?

  15. Thomas L. Knapp
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 6:59 pm

    “What exactly is the in between of Right to work and closed shops?”

    Freedom of contract.

  16. Pathfinder's wife
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 7:49 pm

    Heh, yeah.  This is my dad’s old union — they’ve been corrupt as hell since at least the 70s.
    The union bigshots are the ones drafting this; not the members (although, some of the jobs the rank and file do could certainly stand to have some sort of mediation in place with management…some dirty, dangerous jobs there…not that the union does a damn thing to improve the working conditions for the rank and file.  The stories I could tell).
    And that’s the problem: some jobs, the workers do need some sort of protection from the management (I’ve worked them — and non-union too — the stories I could tell there as well).  However, eventually every union becomes corrupt…then the workers probably need some sort of mediation between them and their damn union (been down that road too — the stories I could tell).
    And with this economy the way it is actual workers don’t stand a chance.

  17. Adobe_Walls
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 8:06 pm

    Who’s freedom of contract or not to sign a contract.
    In DC a non union member cannot work for a unionized company without joining the union. This doesn’t mean all subcontractors on any given site have to be union. In VA if a company has been unionized it only hires union workers, perhaps in theory one could sue such a company and force it to hire someone who’s not in the union but I’ve never heard of this happening.

  18. Pathfinder's wife
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 8:32 pm

    There is actually some truth in this, but not from any sort of bigotry:

    The non-union job I held was pretty bad in regards to hiring illegals — as long as they had a SS (stolen) and some form of ID (faked), they turned a blind eye.  The reasons were many — the company knew those guys were illegal (or had a pretty good guess…all of them had exactly 10 kids — one of them told me it had something to do with tax exemptions, welfare, and avoiding INS scrutiny; he was very pleasant and forthright about it too, right in front of our manager even — and questionably sketchy work histories); they used this unspoken knowledge to work the bejesus out of them.  Wasn’t as though those guys were going to go complaining about their work hours or conditions.

    This was an understandably sore point with the actual citizens working there — again, for a lot of reasons.

  19. tomg
    April 22nd, 2012 @ 11:39 pm

     “compelled to furnish services to all persons in bargaining units that
    it represents but it may not require payments for those services…”

    This is and exact description of how the federal civil service works.
    There is no requirement to join the union, but the union is required to
    represent any worker in the bargaining unit.  Does that mean the
    President is enslaving them?  Federal unions also do not have the right
    to collective bargaining when it comes to pay and benefits, only working
    conditions.  It was that mean Jimmy Carter who took that away.

  20. Wombat_socho
    April 23rd, 2012 @ 12:32 am

     “Okay, the n*****s and the Chinks can stay – but NO IRISH!”