Union Bosses Have Too Much Control. It’s Time to Protect the Rights of American Workers

Rep. Phil Roe

For the past eight years, union bosses have held the upper hand over East Tennessee workers, as the previous administration tried to stack the deck in favor of unionization.

The National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor combined to pursue an agenda that put union bosses and special interests ahead of the rights of individual workers and job creation.

If there was any doubt the Department of Labor was pushing a partisan agenda, just look at former Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s new job: head of the Democrat Party.

It is time to restore employee rights and create a pro-growth, pro-employee environment within the workplace, and I am pleased to already see the new administration working aggressively to create jobs by undoing job-killing regulations.

I’ve said time and time again that promoting fair and free labor policies in the workplace have nothing to do with whether or not you are pro- or anti-union, and everything to do with the rights to which every American worker is entitled.

Still, current law does not accurately reflect the 21st century we live in today. In fact, these laws have remained largely unchanged since the National Labor Relations Act was passed 70 years ago.

A striking statistic finds that 94 percent of workers represented by a union today never voted for that union to represent them. Today, labor unions’ membership is down to about 11 percent of the workforce as more and more employees have opted for a free-market economy.

For this reason I introduced the Employee Rights Act.

The Employee Rights Act is a comprehensive labor law update that will allow places of employment to serve the interest of their employees—not unions or other special interests.

The Employee Rights Act would ensure the right to a secret ballot is always protected.

It would also require permission from union members for the use of their dues for any purpose other than collective bargaining, ensuring union members’ dues cannot be used for political purposes without members’ knowledge or permission.

The bill requires periodic recertification of union elections so every employee has a chance to weigh in on whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.

Finally, the Employee Rights Act requires a majority vote of all employees—not just those present—to decide whether to unionize or strike.

These are commonsense protections every worker deserves.

The right to a secret ballot is one of the most fundamental protections of American democracy. It’s how we elect our presidents, our representatives, and our local leaders.

A secret ballot protects employees from intimidation during union elections—from both sides. Further, requiring employees to recertify their union regularly will keep union leaders attentive to the needs of workers.

This commonsense measure will help protect employee privacy and create safeguards for the American worker, and I look forward to working with the Trump administration to ensure worker rights are protected.

SOURCE

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In a World of Real Evil, the Left Fights Fake Evil

Dennis Prager

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils. This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left.

During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism.

The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. It loathed Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Leonid Brezhnev.

It regarded Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with contempt.

Typical was the reaction of one of America’s best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at Amherst College. He said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”

With regard to fighting communism—which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism)—the left was an obstacle, not an ally.

The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.

The same holds true with regard to the greatest evil in the world at this time: totalitarian Islam, or Islamism.

The left is doing precisely what it did during the war against communism: It’s fighting the anti-Islamists, not the Islamists. Just as it labeled anti-communists “cold warriors” and other derisive epithets, the left labels those fighting Islamism as “Islamophobes” and, of course, “racists.”

In the moral order as perceived by the left, it is the anti-Islamists who are the enemy of the good.

In this battle, the left fights American conservatives—and Israel, the country in the front line against Islamism. In a nutshell, rather than fighting evil, the left fights those who fight evil.

Therefore, if you have moral clarity, you are not on the left. If you have moral clarity, you can be a liberal, a conservative, a centrist, an atheist, a believer, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a black, a white, a Latino, an Asian, a Native American, a gay, a straight, or a bisexual.

But you cannot be a leftist.

The problem, however, is that people want to feel morally good about themselves, and no one wants this more than the left. It has written the proverbial book on moral self-esteem. Therefore, it does not merely believe that it is morally superior to all others; it knows it is.

Leftists know they are more compassionate, more enlightened, more intellectual, and more intelligent than conservatives. And they know that they care more about the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized,” and the “disenfranchised” than conservatives.

But to feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.

For example, the left relentlessly fights racism in America, even though America is the least racist multiracial society in history; it relentlessly fights sexism in America, the country that has afforded unprecedented equality and liberty to women (but it does not fight the terrible sexism that pervades the world’s most women-suppressing societies—those in the Muslim world); and, of course, it fights Nazis and white supremacists—who, though evil, constitute an utterly negligible threat to America today.

Fighting Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was an act of moral heroism. Given their negligible numbers and nonexistent power, fighting Nazis in America in 2017 is an act of moral onanism.

There’s a lot more on the list of made-up or lesser evils that the left fights instead of fighting real evil.

It fights religious Americans, specifically religious Christians and especially evangelicals. Now that’s an enemy worth fighting—those mean Christians (and Jews) on the religious right. And it fights conservatives, or at least the conservatives who fight them.

And, of course, it fights global warming. Leftists have convinced themselves that the real fight against evil in the world today is not against Islamism; it’s against carbon emissions.

And now, we can add statues to the list. The left was AWOL against communism, and it’s AWOL against Islamism. But it’s in the vanguard of fighting statues.

SOURCE

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Leftist hate never falters
   
The nation’s eyes are fixated on dramatic flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, where the death toll (so far) is thankfully small compared to flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The government response on all levels seems to be fairly effective, and unlike with Katrina, the press coverage hasn’t been dominated by accusations of racism or inhumanity in the rescue effort.

There’s one obvious exception: cartoonists for the Left. Politico tweeted an image by radical artist Matt Wuerker in which he mocks Christian wackos wearing Confederate flag shirts. A man being rescued from his rooftop declares: “Angels! Sent by God!” A Coast Guard pilot is shown correcting him. “Er, actually Coast Guard … sent by the government,” he says.

After mocking the victims still suffering from a hurricane as stupid religious folks, Wuerker tried to dig himself out of a hole on Twitter. He lamented: “Just trying to point out times like this we’re lucky to have rescue services. Don’t see how this takes away from private individuals heroism.” Then he added: “Respectfully — it’s making fun of the Secessionist movement. Not at all aimed at all Texans.” Politico soon deleted its promotional tweet, but not the cartoon.

A poll taken in 2016 (by Democrat pollsters) showed that 59 percent of Texans opposed secession, and only 26 percent expressed support. Wuerker claimed that his job is to prod people into considering “the ironies and subtleties of the world we live in,” but cartoons like this aren’t ironic or subtle. They’re ham-fisted and ignorant.

Wuerker also felt it was safe to mock conservatives. “Times like this it’s ironic to say that the government is the enemy,” he said. It’s not conservatives who have protested the front-line heroes of local government but leftist street agitators who have endlessly denigrated the police as racist child killers.

Then there’s the scabrous French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose latest cover shows a bunch of Nazi flags mostly underwater and a few white hands sticking out of the water in the “Heil Hitler” salute. The cover text in French translates to “God Exists! He Drowned All Neo-Nazis of Texas!”

To liberal elites, all Texans are somehow bigoted white Christian males. Even a hurricane can’t restrain their rage about their satirical targets having any power in America. Cartoons like these strongly underline why so many Americans find that the secular-progressive media are either tone-deaf or blatantly hostile toward what (and Who) they hold dear.

SOURCE

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By their deeds shall ye know them



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