Category Archives: jobs

A Union MFWIC Brags about Disrupting Americans’ Holiday

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The lede laid it out.

Holiday travelers heading to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) faced severe disruptions as hundreds of protesters blocked the road outside during one of the busiest travel periods of the year, according to reports.

These were perpetrated by the United Services Workers West, a union that represents security officers and that is disputing with Flying Food Group, one of LAX’s largest airline catering contractors and by the Unite Here Local 11 which has 32,000 hotel workers across Southern California and Arizona.

The disruptions included blocking access to LAX’ main airport building, blocking a major street into the airport, blocking access to the airport’s main pickup and drop-off zones, and interfering with passenger flow in one of the airport’s other terminals.

There’s this from Susan Minato, Co-President of Unite Here Local 11:

[She] defended the timing, arguing that demonstrations during peak travel periods are necessary to draw attention.
“It is a busy time of the year, no question,” she said. “But that’s also how you get some attention.”

You have gained my attention, Madam. I’m calling for the decertification of your union and of the USWW and the termination from employment of those members who participated in these disruptions. Neither your union nor the USWW were picketing this employer or attempting to block its receipt of supplies. You were deliberately interfering with wholly unrelated Americans who were trying to go about their own business instead of yours.

That’s unacceptable.

A Prediction

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With the government newly fully operational again (the pundits’ hysteria notwithstanding, it never did fully shut down), the shutdown-delayed jobs report is out.

US job growth defied expectations in September, according to a Labor Department report issued nearly seven weeks late due to the government shutdown.

The headline was more specific.

Hiring Defied Expectations in September, With 119,000 New Jobs

This strikes me as a spike, not a resumption of a trend.

I don’t ordinarily make predictions on labor, but here’s one I make this time: the October jobs report, covering the bulk of the period of the “shutdown,” will reflect a spike down in new jobs, possibly even a negative number, paralleling August’s revised jobs report.

The October report will show me to be correct, or it will demonstrate why I don’t often make this kind of prediction.

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.

The Boss Wants to Know

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Bari Weiss, newly hired CBS News editor-in-chief, wants to know what her employees in her news division do while they’re on the company clock.

On Friday [10 October], she sent a note to CBS News staffers asking each member of the organization to detail what they do, and what they believe is working or not working, by Tuesday [14 October].

Weiss, in so many words:

I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt—it will help me greatly[.]

You’d think two things would obtain here in an honest industry. One is the widely understood concept that bosses get to know what their employees are doing on the clock to earn their paycheck. The other is that such reporting would be simple and straightforward to carry out. In those industries where employees are required to keep time sheets, it would be a simple matter for employees to submit theirs or for bosses to get them from HR. In those industries where time sheets are not kept, those employees still know what they’re doing, and it would be simple to write down a few bullets and submit those.

In the present case, Weiss is also asking her employees what they think works and does not work. This is the employees’ opportunity to provide serious input and to simply bellyache about how hard their work life is.

However.

The Writers Guild of America East, which is a union representing many of those news room employees, is advising its membership to refuse to supply the data.

That’s a highly instructive tell.

Either these unionized employees spend their time on the clock largely goofing off and want to cover that up, or this is all-too-typical union obstructionism solely for the sake of obstructing. Or both.

Wess needs to instruct her HR to prepare termination notices for those employees not meeting the deadline (who did not meet the deadline as this is posted a couple of days after it) and to instruct her legal department to prepare to defend in court (no settlement) those terminations.

Note: Since I wrote this, Weiss has acquiesced and advised the union that writers who ignore her deadline will be acting with impunity–she will not punish them for their disobedience.

How Many Bureaucrats?

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James Freeman asked this question in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the bureaucrats in the Federal government.

The government, and I [ahem], answered this question during an earlier Progressive-Democrat-led Federal government shutdown, and we’re about to get an empirical demonstration with the current Schumer Shutdown which began Wednesday morning. Here’s what that earlier shutdown demonstrated about the number of bureaucrats actually needed:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
White House 74
Treasury 82
Labor 82
Interior 81
EPA 94
NASA 97
Housing and Urban Development 96
Education 94
Commerce 87
Smithsonian 84

 

There are others, also, with a different per centage of nonessentials:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
U.S. Commission of Fine Arts 100
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness 100
USDA Risk Management Agency 100
Federal Maritime Commission 100
Economic Development Administration 100
Minority Business Development Agency 100

There’s a more complete list over at Slate.

The short answer is: not many of the bureaucrats on the payroll are actually needed. The longer answer will be begun to be delivered with the RIF that the OMB has instructed Executive Branch Departments and Agencies to prepare lists for, with those lists beginning with programs and projects currently unfunded and that do not align with Presidential policy. The answer will be expanded on by all the Leftist and Civil Service union lawsuits objecting to the RIF, even to preparing for a RIF. Those lawsuits will prove the lack of need for those bureaucrats.