Mobbed-up union boss sentenced to 57 months of hard time
Last week ATU Local 1181 former president Salvatore “Hotdogs” Battaglia—I couldn’t make up a better name if I tried—was sentenced to 57 months in jail for “racketeering based on the extortion of money from companies operating school buses under contract with the New York City department of Education.” The North Country Gazette reports that Mr. Hotdogs was [more...]

Posted Tue, 01 Jul 2008 .

Tink Fills His Tank With Special Interest Money
Congressional Candidate Elwyn Tinklenberg (MN-6) is making the usual end-of-quarter pitch to raise more money for his campaign. As of this morning he was only a few thousand dollars short of his goal. It’s a safe bet that union special interests have gone a long way toward helping him meet his fundraising goals. What [more...]

Posted Tue, 01 Jul 2008 .

Report: Union Math, Union Myths

Read the Full Report (.pdf, 88k)

Since its peak in the 1950s, union membership in the private sector has steadily dropped. To explain the decline, labor leaders have scapegoated businesses for intimidating employees during organizing campaigns. To justify the claim, they cite statistics from union-affiliated researchers which suggest that a significant number of employees are fired in the organizing process. But data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) do not—in any way—substantiate the notion that tens of thousands of employees are wrongly fired each year.

By logically linking organizing campaigns with Unfair Labor Practices, we determined that only 2.7 percent of union organizing campaigns feature an employee illegally fired (and offered reinstatement, typically with back pay). Furthermore, we demonstrate that other research on the subject relies on outdated assumptions that do not represent current NLRB data on the issue.