Union bosses ooze hypocrisy

TEMECULA, Calif. — Amid Labor Day's parades and picnics, union bosses will bellow Monday about workers' rights and the alleged greed of management, especially inside big business. Such class warfare sloganeering would be easier to stomach if big labor were internally consistent. Instead, when their own workers channel Norma Rae and demand better wages and benefits, labor leaders imitate union-busting robber barons:

"I was fired for trying to start a union at the UFT," said a stunned Jim Callaghan. For 13 years, Callaghan penned speeches and newsletter articles for Gotham's United Federation of Teachers. He told the New York Post that when managers sacked one of his colleagues without cause, he decided to organize the UFT's 12 in-store, non-union writers.

His employers were not amused. About two months after Callaghan announced his plans, he was jettisoned on August 12 and given 30 minutes to clear his desk. When he lingered, union bosses got six uniformed police officers to eject him.

The UFT claims that Callaghan had disciplinary problems. Even if true, compare Callaghan's instant dismissal to the years it can take to fire failed teachers. Even those accused of groping children have become virtually permanent fixtures in union-protected "rubber rooms" where they receive salaries, read newspapers, and even run businesses while their cases inch through administrative hoops.

International Brotherhood of Teamsters President James P. Hoffa resembles a stingy CEO in a July 2009 letter to his local officers. Hoffa and Secretary-Treasurer C. Thomas Keegel wrote that the union for workers at IBT headquarters "refuses to acknowledge the current economic conditions and their impact on per capita revenues at the IBT." Hoffa and Keegel counsel "prudent belt-tightening" and conclude: "...we must make contingency plans to operate in the event of a labor dispute."

So, an organization's president and treasurer decry falling revenues, urge belt tightening, and operate during a strike. Isn't this why big labor got started?

"We've got to downsize," a United Auto Workers source said last December. As its membership shrank from some 500,000 in 2008 to 431,000 in 2009, the car-industry union fired 120 of its own staffers "to balance its budget," the Detroit News noted. More amazing, after UAW personnel voted down their management's austere contract proposal, union bosses imposed it on remaining staffers anyway. The UAW's work force suffered reduced retiree benefits and, for each laborer, the choice of either a two-week unpaid furlough or no matching 401(k) contribution for 2010.