Editorial: Union payback
Harry Reid rewards Labor by pushing a public safety bargaining bill that would be ruinous to local communities
The Detroit News
November 24, 2010
Having survived a near-death experience on Election Day thanks largely to massive donations from labor unions, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is paying back his benefactors. The Democrat from Nevada says that during Congress’ lame duck session he will try to once again force through a measure giving police and fire unions the upper hand in dealing with local communities.
Reid will seek a cloture vote on the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which despite its name has little to do with cooperation. Rather, the bill would be a federal clone of Michigan’s disastrous Public Act 312, which is blamed with ruining the finances of scores of communities, including Detroit, and pushing many to the brink of bankruptcy — that’s you, Hamtramck.
The bill would make it easier for police and firefighters to organize labor unions and force all officers to join, even in right-to-work states. That’s a brazen usurpation of state authority, and very likely unconstitutional.
In Michigan, where most major police and firefighters are already unionized, the largest impact would be in rural areas, since the law would also likely apply to volunteer fire departments. That would put most of those volunteer outfits out of business, and destroy an important grass-roots community protection network. These volunteers are often highly trained individuals who provide the only defense for their neighbors’ homes and property.
Read more @ The Detroit News.
LIES, LIES, LIES, This bill forces no one to join a Union and will do nothing to volunteer fire departments. I know you right-wing facist / Nazis hate the truth, but do not spread LIES!
Why bother with the bill at all, if it doesn’t force public safety workers into unions?
BTW: You seem to be confusing the label of fascism, as this sounds more like Reid, Obama and Pelosi:
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it.
Twit.