The UAW says it will spend $40 million in new funds to support the organizing of workers in nonunion auto plants and battery facilities, Jessica j. Trivino. Detroit Free Press.
Visits: 15
Just my two cents. Why the UAW has no choice but to try and Unionize other auto and battery plants. What choice does the union management have?
We all have seen the numbers. The auto plants when they switch over to all electric, will be half the size of what they are now. Management knows that but they don’t care because they will keep their jobs.
If non union auto workers ask the tough questions, there’s no way that they will vote to unionize. So how will this be done?
The UAW says it will spend $40 million in new funds to support the organizing of workers in nonunion auto plants and battery facilities, “particularly in the South,” through 2026.
‘Dear Joe…’ Border Patrol Union Unleashes on Biden in Short But Hard-Hitting Open Letter
By Laura Wellington forThe Western Journal
Biden to blame. Tenor.com Gif.
Sometimes less says more. The Border Patrol Union proved it Monday with a social media post on X.
The union shared a very concise letter to President Joe Biden.
Fewer than 50 words, the message was short but sweet and to the point.
“Dear Joe, You OWN this catastrophic disaster at the border – lock, stock and barrel,” the union wrote on the National Border Patrol Council account. “You created it. You nursed it along. You encouraged it. You facilitated it. It’s all yours. Don’t run from it now like a coward. Signed, The BP agents you’ve thrown under the bus.”
I guess there is no arguing who owns this issue in the eyes of the Border Patrol agents. It can’t be passed off as former President Donald Trump’s by the current administration anymore.
Nor should it be. The Biden administration unleashed the kraken on the United States, with almost 9 million illegal immigrants infiltrating this nation since Biden’s inauguration.
Biden has welcomed the invasion with open arms, fanning the flames every step of the way. He’s done everything he could to assist in drowning our nation under the weight of this invasion. Illegals are receiving free everything while Americans look on in disgust. The evidence is clear.
Illegals are receiving free food, free healthcare, free lodgings, free medical care, free diapers, free relocation travel, and free money. The list continues. Whatever they need, it all comes free. He’s forced Americans to pay for all of it while they are barely getting by. And then those same illegal immigrants threaten Americans with words of pure hatred, warning us of what is to come. It worsens by the day.
And now that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has refused to allow the invasion to continue in his neck of the woods, the cartels have figured out how to carry on smuggling illegal immigrants through southern California and Arizona. The influx is simply changing course but not lessening.
According to a Fox News report from Feb. 1, over 71 percent of illegal entries are now happening through California and Arizona rather than Texas.
Where the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, which covers part of the Texas border with Mexico (including hard-hit Eagle Pass), was averaging 3,000-4,000 illegal migrants invading our nation at their border per day in December, that number has reduced to 200, Fox reported.
It shows that effective policing of the border can provide huge results. But as the cartels are not only persistent but also rather well-versed in the best possible ways to get around these impediments, they are coming up with their own solutions.
It’s like watching water find its way through the cracks. This water, however, is tainted with violence, crime, perversion, and death.
More than 8.9 million illegal immigrants have arrived into the United States since Biden took office. This number is larger than the population of Arizona.
The fact that the Border Patrol Union stood up and called Biden out is a very good sign for the United States in the face of this atrocity. It’s a sign of how strong resistance remains to the Biden administration’s rampant lawlessness.
The union — which endorsed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 — has locked horns with Biden many times over the course of his benighted administration. In 2021 it was blasting Biden’s approach to border security as a crisis, and that was when the invasion was in its infancy.
That was the same year the Border Patrol was the subject of an attack that included Biden himself over a hoax story about agents on horseback using whips against illegal immigrants from Haiti.
Now, with the 2024 election approaching, it seems that Border Patrol agents are drawing their own line in the sand, sending a powerful message that they stand on the right side of the Constitution. They see how wrong and corrupt the current president and his administration is.
I liken it to them saying, “Don’t count on us to be complicit without speaking our truth. That ship has sailed.” It is a wake-up call to anyone who might have had any doubt left in his head of how intentional Biden’s actions have been.
The Border Patrol agents are required to do a job but that doesn’t mean that they agree with what is happening.
Frankly, we don’t know what will come of this situation after the fact — so much depends on American voters righting the country’s course when November’s elections roll around.
At a minimum, however, it emphasized which side the Border Patrol union and agents are on.
It’s the side of the law, of history and of the American people. And the country can’t ask for more than that.+
Dementia Joe can’t even read the 4K jumbotron-sized teleprompter; he only knows what the devils(s) whisper in his ear. — TPR
If I had one bill, one page. Prevailing wage. Page 2. I would propose a bill that would do away with prevailing wage. Prevailing wage is a law that pays workers the region’s standards for hourly wages, benefits, and overtime, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Labor and Ohio Department of Commerce.
The overtime would stay, but companies would not be forced to pay a set high standard and would not be forced to be union. Example if a Union company is paying on average say $35.00 an hour, and a non Union company is paying $ 20.00 an hour, you go with the non union company.
The law would read. Any local or state that uses prevailing wage, undocumented workers or states the job needs to be done by union workers would be denied federal funds for that project.
Field service employees at the National Education Association, which represents teachers, voted Monday to authorize a strike.
The NEA, the nation’s largest union, usually stokes strikes across the country, but Axios noted that the NEA is dealing with its own internal troubles among its 48 employees.
Despite the small staff, the union represents around 3 million education professionals from preschool to graduate school. It has been without a contract since May.
LaToya Johnson, the staff union’s bargaining chair, told Axios that NEA staffers are asking for the same kinds of benefits that they are fighting to get for teachers.
“The NEA is going to have to step up and honor the values of the organization,” Johnson said.
The union is asking for a raise in line with inflation. Unless both sides reach a deal this week, a two-day strike will begin Friday with a picket line at an NEA conference in Atlanta.
The staff rebellion comes amid a year of labor-movement resurgence, typified by the United Auto Workers strikes that have shut down dozens of plants as workers seek higher wages, better benefits, and new protections.
Even within those strikes, divisions have begun to surface. UAW members at some Ford and General Motors plants in Kentucky and Michigan rejected a tentative agreement between the car unions and companies.
Teachers’ strikes also are heating up, notably in Portland, Oregon, where the public school district just offered a significant salary increase. However, local unions rejected the proposal.
“When it comes to class sizes and caseloads, there was no improvement,” said Portland Association of Teachers President Angela Bonilla.
“For planning time, it’s the status quo for a majority of our members and less planning time for a portion of our educators. When it comes to a cost-of-living increase, there was no movement beyond a small one-time cash bonus.”
Mel Melcon/Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Visits: 21
How funny is this? Los Angeles Hotels Replacing Union Workers with Border Crossers. So the hotels will now be rolling in the doe. Less workers, and workers who will work eight hours a day for a third of the pay.
It is sad that the hotels aren’t hiring the American workers, but odds are the starting pay may be only minimum wage.
Since more than 15,000 workers began intermittent strikes at about 60 Southern California hotels in early July, employers have been replacing those union members with managers and temporary workers recruited through apps, such as Instawork, staffing agencies and by other means. Vargas is among those from Skid Row’s migrant population who have been recruited in recent weeks to work at unionized hotels in Santa Monica and near Los Angeles International Airport where workers have gone on strike. [Emphasis added].
“If there are violations of the law, there will be severe consequences for this. We want to make sure that our community understands there will be no tolerance for the exploitation of refugees,” Gascón said, citing reporting by The Times on the issue.
Union workers at Volvo Group-owned Mack Trucks overwhelmingly rejected a proposed five-year contract deal and will go on strike at 7 a.m. Monday, the United Auto Workers said late on Sunday.
About 73% of workers voted against the deal covering 4,000 workers, the UAW said.
From the start of 2022 through August of this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked 42 work stoppages of 1,000 or more strikers. Its count shows 33% of those strikes were in the health care industry. That’s up from 24% of major strikes in 2019, the year before the pandemic.The increased number of health care strikes have happened despite health care workers making up only about 9% of private sector union members nationwide.
With the Biden administration controlling the NLRB, maybe the folks think that they have someone on their side.
In rejecting the bill, Newsom noted that the state’s unemployment trust fund is already nearing $20 billion in debt.
“Now is not the time to increase costs or incur this sizable debt,” he wrote in a message explaining his veto.
The Democratic-majority legislature passed the bill in September amid several high-profile strikes. Hollywood writers ended their nearly five-month walkout 12 days later but Hollywood actors remain out on the picket lines. Southern California hotel workers are also on strike.
The bill would have made workers out on strike for at least two weeks eligible for unemployment checks. The vast majority of states, with the exception of New York and New Jersey, do not offer unemployment benefits to striking workers.
An excavator operates at the Quito Village Development Project in Saratoga on Apr. 13, 2023. Photo by Martin do Nascimento, CalMatters
Visits: 8
This editorial board routinely decries the failure of state lawmakers to address some of the biggest issues that confront California, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the state’s continuing commitment to loosen the encrusted housing-construction rules that create years-long delays to build important new projects.
The latest two governors have signed dozens of housing-related bills — the most significant of which reduce housing regulations and zoning requirements. One of the earliest ones is 2017’s Senate Bill 35 by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. Although we generally disagree with his politics, we can’t deny that Wiener has been a force of nature on the housing front.
SB 35 created a template for housing reform. It gives developers have a right to build their properties without going through the long and subjective local approval process provided the projects meet some basic standards.
For instance, the streamlined projects must be multi-family projects located on an urban infill site and conform to general zoning and design standards. The projects also must contain certain levels of affordability and conform to a long list of other standards. Developers also were required to pay their workers union-level wages.
Obviously, we prefer a wider loosening of standards, but negotiating any serious reform that might actually pass in the state Capitol means confronting the vested interests that hold sway. SB 35 passes our test of offering far more good than bad, even if we have to hold our collective noses at the bad.
Prominent research already has detailed the specific ways that SB 35 has helped cities build affordable-housing and homeless-related projects. However, SB 35 will sunset in 2026 and Wiener has introduced a new bill, Senate Bill 423, to make its provisions permanent.
The legislative sausage-making process never is pleasant, but it’s dismaying to see major unions throw a wrench in that process to achieve self-interested provisions. The bill would eliminate certain union-only hiring regulations because, as CalMatters explained, “there aren’t enough unionized construction workers to build all the new housing California requires.”
Two major unions have admirably backed the bill even though some of the more politically powerful construction unions oppose it, the article adds. Former Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez — author of disastrous Assembly Bill 5, which largely banned independent contracting — attacked the proposed change in her usual class-warfare manner.
Unfortunately, local governments also opposed the law’s extension. Transparently slow-growth efforts by cities such as Huntington Beach to stymie housing construction, however, only reinforce the need for state regulatory pre-emptions. Regarding union opposition, construction trades already enjoy many government-granted privileges. Trade unions tout the benefits that they offer builders in terms of training and apprenticeship programs. So union workers will naturally grab the lion’s share of new construction jobs, but they want to use the government to grab it all.
“We say, represent and raise all workers up,” Northern California Carpenters Regional Council executive secretary Jay Bradshaw told CalMatters. “It’s an organizing opportunity and we’ll produce housing at all income levels.” We wholeheartedly agree.
Housing streamlining rules such as SB 423 will help the state meet its desperate housing needs – and help all workers in the process. They help cities, too.
It would be a shame if narrow interests derail one of the rare areas where the state has the right idea.
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