Teamsters: Taking on freedom of speech around the world
Argentina has faced a lot of adversity in the last decade, not the least of which was the Kirchner Administration’s (and the legislature’s) recent attack on free speech and the press, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. It doesn’t help that the Teamsters locals are cutting off paper distribution, to force unionization under the [more...]

Posted Thu, 05 Nov 2009 .

Retirement: Sexual harrassment by any other name
One of 24 international vice presidents of the Teamsters, James Santangelo, has resigned his multiple posts within the Teamsters union. He was the president of Teamsters Joint Council 42 which represented 129,000 members in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere. He also led Local 848. While the Teamsters maintain they didn’t force him out, you wonder why they [more...]

Posted Thu, 05 Nov 2009 .

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 Furthermore, we demonstrate that other research on the subject relies on outdated assumptions that do not represent current NLRB data on the issue.