Wausau, Wis. Labor Council Bitterly Reverses Ban on GOP Pols' Labor Day Parade Participation
In Wausau, Wisconsin, after being told by the town's mayor that it couldn't exclude GOP politicians from a Labor Day parade unless it reimbursed the city for its out-of-pocket costs (noted Tuesday night at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Marathon County Labor Council reversed its earlier decision and will allow them to participate.
Labor Council President Randy Radtke is not handling it well, something readers of the Associated Press's terse three-paragraph locally distributed story predictably won't learn. Reuters and Fox News have far more complete coverage. Here is the portion of Mr. Radtke's rant carried at Reuters:
Story Continues Below Ad ↓"We didn't start this fight in Wisconsin, but were responding to anti-worker positions and policies supported by local Republican politicians, including those who have complained about not being invited," Radtke said in the statement, posted on the website of WAOW-TV in Wausau.
"Just like we'd hoped, our decision has stimulated a great debate in our community about the meaning of Labor Day," Radtke said.
"But because we don't want to wind up having community groups and school bands affected in the process, we will let everyone march and hope these Republican politicians finally take away some lessons about what Labor Day really means. We know their actions and voting records speak more loudly than waving at any parade."
Reuters clearly identified the contentious legislation passed by Wisconsin's legislature earlier this year as being about public-sector workers' collective-bargaining rights. Yesterday, its story's opening paragraph gave readers the erroneous impression that the law applies to all unionized workers.
Here is additional Radtke verbiage found at Fox News:
“We didn’t start this fight in Wisconsin, but were responding to anti-worker positions and policies supported by local Republican politicians, including those who have complained about not being invited,” Radtke’s statement said, according to Wausau Daily Herald.
“With the track records that Pam Galloway, Sean Duffy, Scott Walker and Jerry Petrowski have all put together this year, they should be ashamed to even show their faces at a Labor Day parade."
Kudos to Wausau Mayor Jim Tipple for his principled insistence that an exclusionary Labor Day parade would have to foot the bill for city services used.
Before Mr. Radtke tries to take ownership of Labor Day in Wausau again, he should consider the following words from Samuel Gompers, whom writer Aaron Steelman accurately described in 1997 as "the greatest friend labor has ever known":
“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day…is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”
Contrary to what you and your "brothers" believe, Mr. Radtke, Labor Day is not exclusively about unionized workers. It's about all workers, and all producers.
Readers would be interested to know that the quote from Mr. Gompers, who recognized the need for unionized business to progress and make profits while opposing the welfare state and heavy-handed government regulation, was scrubbed from the Department of Labor's "History of Labor Day" web page last year after appearing there during at least the previous nine. That would appear to be because Hilda Solis's Department of Labor is now populated with more than a few Randy Radtke's -- and we're decidedly not better off for it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
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Comments
Unions
Submitted by Emil on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 1:44am.
Anti worker, anti freedom, anti democracy, anti American!
That quote
Submitted by Galvanic on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:22am.
Emil, I believe the quote is by George Orwell, not Winston Churchill.
Churchill vs Orwell vs Kipling
Submitted by ThePickle on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 1:08pm.
While the above direct quote is attributed to Winston Churchill it does bear some similarity to comments made in an essay that Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling.
Orwell wrote, in his essay on Kipling, that the latter's "grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." (1942)
So, in essence, if we are wishing to properly attribute the "idea" rather than the direct quote it was likely Rudyard Kipling that first advanced the "idea" that the majority of us live in relative peace mainly because some small minority of us are willing to "kill people and break things" to maintain said peace..
Unions definitely have their place...
Submitted by Order270 on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 2:42am.
...but after the Wisconsin CBA brouhaha, I resent traffic tickets on a whole new level. Before I was consoled in knowing that at least tickets paid for city services. Now I realize I'm just paying the pension of the cop writing the ticket while the same government he represents has spent my pension which came from the non union fruits of my labor.
In my opinion unions HAD their place. My hope is that all unions
Submitted by Rush Fan on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 3:55am.
will eventually disappear. The sooner the better. With the disappearance will come improved productivity and quality of work product, more workplace flexibility, raises based on merit, and the retention of only qualified workers. Now isn't that a good thing?
As a one-time member of the United Steelworkers union, I have seen how destructive to employment unions can be.
Amen
Submitted by rickbren on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 7:24am.
AMEN!
No to Old Union Constructs
Submitted by Tracker 3 on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 8:07am.
+1 to your Amen! Greed, laziness and entitlement are the cornerstone of "unions".
uaw
Submitted by kinijane on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:15am.
As a former member I have to agree, they need to go.
I was told I had to give money to democratic campaigns
regardless of how I thought about the candidate..plus I
was never consulted about what my dues were spent on.
I never had a choice about being in the Union or paying
the dues, but when your raising 2 young children, you
do what you have to do.
Just Like...
Submitted by GeneralAl on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 6:08am.
"Now I realize I'm just paying the pension of the cop writing the ticket while the same government he represents has spent my pension which came from the non union fruits of my labor."
This is just like the seven weeks of back vacation pay I had earned under our contract that was traded off to bring back a worthless lout who had been fired!
"Old Soldiers never die, they just fade away"!
Also a former union member..
Submitted by bbboss on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 11:35am.
One of the railroad unions...I found them useless unless the union member was a bum who needed to be fired. They would protect the bum until the end of time...and the rest of us who actually did our jobs had to put up with the useless bum.
However, this Wisconsin bruha brought out something very wrong....there is a significant difference in private and public sector unions. In the private sector as in my old union..The Maintenance of Way (track labor union)...the two sides..the representatives of the railroad companies and representatives of the unions..would sit across the table from each other in a adversarial mode. They go back and forth with proposals and hopefully before economically damage to the companies and the workers a deal would be reached and everyone goes back to work.
In the pubic sector unions...reps from the government and reps from the government union sit across from each other. All friends and all on the same side...no adversity at all. "You scratch my back and I will get what you want.....besides, the morons out their in the hinter land are paying for both of us out of the high taxes so f*** them and lets both take as much as we want". Too paraphrase of course, but you get the idea.......
over 3 grand
Submitted by no you cant on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 5:02am.
wow
"But because we don't want to
Submitted by DaChew on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 7:05am.
"But because we don't want to wind up having community groups and school bands affected in the process,..."
Oooh, they lost their local high school marching band, the backbone of any community parade. Makes sense, we certainly can't have the children participating in a political rally, can we Randy?
Looks like Randy suddenly realized that without the local public entities participating in his parade, all he was going to end up with was a bunch of union guys in the back of a flatbed tossing Jolly Ranchers to nobody.
I bet even the Shriners pulled out. A fez-less parade, can you imagine?
Could I be mistaken?
Submitted by notinstl on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 7:52am.
Isn't there a lot of LABOR going on that does not involve a union?
Why yes,
Submitted by Boudin on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:00am.
In-fact, you could argue, the only labor being performed is non-union.
Hostage freed -- Labor Day Parade for all
Submitted by Galvanic on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:13am.
It's obvious that the labor unions hijacked a national holiday as their own, but as was quoted in the commentary, even the venerable Samuel Gompers stated that Labor Day did not belong to any one person or group -- it's a celebration of American workers, period.
So, unions, which represent approximately 17% of the American work force, took it upon themselves to rule who could and could not participate in the local Labor Day Parade, and they are now chafing under the mayor's warning.
This won't stop with this 'concession' on the part of the Labor Council. I expect that GOP participants in that parade (and likely others across the nation) will be subjected to verbal and even physical abuse.
That will be interesting ...
Submitted by Tom Blumer on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:18am.
... I hope people are there with video-recording devices in case it happens.
Tom, this is one of those
Submitted by Scuba Dude on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:25am.
Tom, this is one of those situations that makes me wonder how the LSM will handle it.
Will they ignore any and all abuse these union goons will be throwing at the Republicans in the parade?
Or will they try and frame the story of how after all these months the bitterness of the "unfair" legislation Wisconsin passed has not abated.
One thing is obvious, they will do everything they can to portray the Republicans as the bad guys.
Which is why ...
Submitted by Tom Blumer on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 11:22am.
... people need to be there recording the "festivities."
I hope they don't forget to record how the Mayor gets treated.
"We hope these Republican
Submitted by ThisnThat on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 8:28am.
"We hope these Republican politicians finally take away some lessons about what Labor Day really means."
That kind of talk just makes me smolder. Who do these dims think they are, that they hold all ground truth in all matters? What they're really saying is "Knuckle down, because we're going to harass you, call you names, and make your lives miserable until you accede to all our demands." But I guess this type of statement also comes under the "Dims lessons on civility".
__________
“Didn't win the Medal of Honor? Didn't even serve? Then lie about it. We'll support you." — 9th Circuit Court
Makes you wonder what they think of all the dimwits
Submitted by Boudin on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:01am.
On the dole?
The real reason the union leaders are so furious
Submitted by Blonde on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 9:37am.
....at Scott Walker and the rest of the Republicans in Wisconsin is because they broke the stranglehold of the union's power to control its membership and lock up state funds.
First, the state no longer directly pays the union its members dues. This means that the members are now going to (shock!) see how much of their paycheck feeds the union coffers for their "membership". I heard someone say yesterday (on Fox, don't remember who) that when the employees of the public unions saw their "own" contributions, union membership fell by 90%. Oops.
Secondly, the vast majority of public union contracts with the multiple municipalities within Wisconsin required that the public entities ONLY purchase employee benefits from Union Trust providers of those benefits. Nothing like a monopoly there, huh?
Remember the old saying about "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"....replace "woman" with "liberal union leader" and you will perfectly understand this little diatribe. (Yes, that's me laughing you are hearing).
Handy Reference Guide to Obama's Gaffes and Goofs ~ Currently Numbering 200 (and Counting)
Unions are also angry at the President
Submitted by Galvanic on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:00am.
According to WH visitor logs, Richard Trumka visits the President on the average of once every 16 days.
We know that the unions were confident that with Obama in the Oval Office and a Democratic Congress lead by far left Pelosi and the pliable Harry Reid, the Employee Free Choice Act -- better known as Card-Check -- would pass into law. But even the Democratic Congress couldn't be pursuaded, and Trumka has been brow-beating Obama over it.
So, Obama has been slowly introducing the tenets of Cash-Check through the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) -- the Federal board establish under the New Deal to be a neutral arbiter and overseer of labor-business relations. Using a very contorted logic in order to exercise its authority, the Democrat-dominated NLRB ruled this year that Boeing cannot open a plant in South Carolina because such an action would "punish workers" in Washington state, or to put it another way -- Opening a 3,000-employee plant in a Right-to-Work state is construed as punishing unionized workers in Washington, even though Boeing was also increasing employment in Washington, too.
I saw Trumpka moaning the other day
Submitted by Blonde on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:12am.
And it made my day.
I wonder how much Boeing is going to contribute to the Republican campaigns this year?
Rather than hearing these candidates go "blah, blah, Obama, blah, blah, blah"....I'd like to hear them draw up a laundry list of all of the things they are going to do once in office. Including cleaning up the NLRB, Justice, EPA, for a start.
Handy Reference Guide to Obama's Gaffes and Goofs ~ Currently Numbering 200 (and Counting)
Blonde,
Submitted by Agnostic on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:33am.
According to IBD a "bureaucratic enactment of Card Check" has been implemented by the Obama Administration. A link is in a post below. This is truly a fight the Congress is going to have to win if they can figure out a way to even get their opponents into the 'ring'.
ugh..
Submitted by kata on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 1:38pm.
I went to the NLRB's site and looked at the writeup for "Specialty Healthcare" and although I am not a lawyer by any stretch but the dissenting opinion makes me very concerned.
Dissenting opinion was written by Brian Hayes., which I discovered Red State wrote an open letter to, asking him to resign so that it would "incapacitate" the NLRB.
Union's greatest weapon
Submitted by Agnostic on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 10:34am.
is their use of various types of threats - the Obama administration has just given the unions a weapon so powerful that it could kill business in America.
"Wilma Liebman, ..., left behind quite a present for her benefactors Sunday as she ended her chairmanship of the National Labor Relations Board. Included in a series of pro-union decisions was the bureaucratic enactment of "Card Check" over the heads of Congress." - IBD
What did the President say?
Submitted by CO2Maker on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 11:39am.
Elections have consequences. Suck it up, unions. Be grown-ups ... or run away to Illinois.