Dems finally ready to cut government office

No, not defense spending. From Opinion Journal:

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.

In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration's budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.
...
OLMS, the Labor office that watches over union disclosure forms, says that last year 93% of unions met its reporting requirements. But the other 7% deserve scrutiny. Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. They might want to know that in 2005, the National Education Association gave more than $65 million to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and dozens of other liberal advocacy groups that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers. In 2006, 49 individuals employed at the national AFL-CIO headquarters were paid more than $130,000. "Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining," says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
...
Investigations conducted by OLMS also have led to an impressive list of successful prosecutions of union officials. Just last week Willie Haynes, a member of the Saginaw, Mich., City Council who also served as a United Auto Workers financial secretary, pleaded guilty to falsifying his union local's reports. In May, Chuck Crawley, a former Teamster's local president in Houston, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for stuffing a ballot box so he could be elected president of his union local and embezzling dues money.
...Union officials have publicly stated that they believe many of OLMS's requirements are burdensome and unnecessary. Since unions helped elect the current Congress, they are now seeking action on their agenda, which ranges from holding fewer secret ballot elections to cutting back on the oversight that is at the heart of the 1959 union "bill of rights" that JFK championed.

Once again, the Dems have their dirty little hands in the "culture of corruption" cookie jar.

Bad news for teachers unions

That means good news for parents of school-aged children. The Supreme Court recognizes the right to homeschool your child. From the Washington Times:

It is no secret that home-schooling is growing and gaining credibility as a viable educational alternative.

More and more colleges are actively recruiting home-schooled students, each year there are an estimated 50,000-plus home-school high school graduates who find work or go to college and thousands of new curriculum products have become available over the past five years. Meanwhile, the number of home-schoolers continues to grow by 7 percent to 15 percent each year, more states are reforming their laws to remove the burdens from parents who want to home educate, and home-schoolers continue to excel in national competitions as well as on standardized tests. In short, home-schooling is a major success story.

Now, for the first time, home-schooling has been recognized in an opinion by a U.S. Supreme Court justice as a viable educational alternative. Morse v. Frederick, which recently made national headlines, involves free speech and whether a public school can regulate what a student says. The 5-4 decision said that the school principal, Deborah Morse, did not violate the free speech rights of Joseph Frederick when she took down his pro-marijuana banner, which said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." The student had violated school policy and was advocating illegal drug use.

While the Home School Legal Defense Association agrees with the ruling in this specific case, it is a reminder to all families that when your child enters the public school, you have virtually ceded your parental rights to the public school.

The clearest explanation of this view was expressed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale, when it said, "While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to a public school, they do not have a fundamental right generally to direct how a public school teaches their child."

This is the reason many parents have chosen to home-school, especially those parents who have a religious worldview, because they know their children will be taught secular values by the public system.

In Morse v. Frederick, however, Justice Clarence Thomas said, "If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move."

This is the first time the Supreme Court specifically has recognized home-schooling as a viable educational alternative. HSLDA has worked for 24 years to advance a parent's right to home-school and to promote home-schooling to the general public.

After 24 years, it is gratifying to read the words of a Supreme Court justice who rightfully placed home-schooling on a level playing field with public and private schools. This kind of recognition is tremendously significant to the home-school community.

It's another step on the long road to raise home-schooling to the point where, when the terms public, private or home-school are used in the same sentence, they all will be seen as mainstream educational alternatives.

Home-schooling is a modern education success story and HSLDA urges all parents to carefully consider their educational options. Home-schooling should be front and center because it is a viable alternative that has helped hundreds of thousands of children become mature, productive citizens.

If you don't like how your local government school is educating Little Johnny, you can either move to a different school district, enroll him in a private school, or home school. That's it. Efforts have existed for years by the NEA (leftist teachers union) to eliminate homeschooling, since homeschooling makes their job of indoctrinating and dumbing down your kid considerably tougher.

No, I am not bashing all or even most public school teachers. I am blessed to know far more decent, competent, and dedicated teachers than those who are not. I also recognize that some parents are about as sharp as a velvet bag full of styrofoam peanuts and probably aren't serving their children well by educating them directly. However, I reflexively defer to parents in determining the best interests of their kids until it can be demonstrated that the contrary is occurring.

Maybe homeschooling is for your kids. Maybe it's not. The good news is that it's your choice.

Teachers' free speech trumps union politics

Once in a while, the Supreme Court gets one right. From WND:

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that could impact millions of public-sector employees nationwide, concluded today the First Amendment right of teachers trumps the speech privileges of organized labor.

The decision, in the consolidated Washington vs. Washington Education Association and Davenport vs. WEA cases, found organized labor, such as teachers associations, have no "constitutional right" to use money collected as "agency fees" from nonmembers for political purposes.

"We are elated that the U.S. Supreme Court has honored the First Amendment rights of teachers by overturning the state Supreme Court's decision," said Bob Williams, president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which has worked on the case for a decade. "The court understood that the constitutional rights of teachers should be protected and are not superseded by the union's statutory rights.

"This ruling will help protect non-member teachers from having their agency fees used on union politics against their will," he said.

Booker Stallworth, communications director for the foundation, told WND the case originated with a list of teachers who had a variety of complaints about the Washington Education Association's dedication of its financial resources to help causes to which the teachers objected, including homosexual marriage and abortion issues.

Some of the teachers appreciate collective bargaining but don't like union politics," he told WND. "Some of the teachers are pro-life, some are against homosexual marriage. For a number of reasons they preferred to not have the union speak for them politically and have their own dollars used against them."

Diane Lenning, an English and history teacher, said, "My major objections to the NEA are that there is an operative glass ceiling for moderate and conservative Republicans, independents and Christians."

Added Cindy Omlin, a speech pathologist. "There were many political causes that they were funneling my union dues toward that I found to be very offensive."

"I wanted to be congruent with my beliefs," said Karen Petty, another instructor. "My dues were going to causes that personally I would go against."

The case focused on a Washington initiative, approved by voters, that required labor organizations to get permission from nonmember workers before using mandatory dues for political purposes.

In many cases, workers are not required to be union members but must pay a fee equivalent to union dues because they are the beneficiaries of collective bargaining.

Unions, however, are increasingly active politically, and many times support causes such as homosexual marriage and the abortion industry under the guise of "rights" -- issues Christians and others would choose not to back.

WEA had admitted to multiple violations of the Washington law during an investigation then was fined more than $590,000 for its actions. However, on appeal, the Washington state Supreme Court concluded the "free speech rights" of the union superseded the First Amendment rights of the individuals.

"The agency-fee cases did not balance constitutional rights in such a manner, because unions have no constitutional entitlement to nonmember-employees' fees," the U.S. Supreme Court countered. "For First Amendment purposes, it is immaterial that [state law] restricts a union's use of funds only after they are within the union's possession. The fees are in the union's possession only because Washington and its union-contracting government agencies have compelled their employees to pay those fees."

"As applied, … [Washington state law] is not fairly described as a restriction on how the union can spend 'its' money; it is a condition placed upon the union's extraordinary state entitlement to acquire and spend other people's money," the Supreme Court said.

"The next step is to make sure the law is strongly enforced … to ensure the WEA and other unions are in compliance," Williams said. "The WEA has been busily attempting to undermine the law while it was under Supreme Court review." ...

This is good news for teachers everywhere who object to their unions spending their dues on grotesque liberal policies and agendas.

Bush to veto a bill?

Wow...twice in six years. Must be a record. Oh, well, at least it would actually be a good thing this time. From the Boston Herald:

President Bush would veto legislation championed by Democrats and labor groups that would make it easier to organize unions by eliminating employer rights to demand secret-ballot elections, the White House said Wednesday.

The House is to vote on the legislation Thursday and, with help from pro-labor Republicans from the Northeast, it is almost certain to pass. But the margin of support is expected to fall well short of the two-thirds needed to overturn a presidential veto.

The Employee Free Choice Act, also known as the card check bill, is the top legislative goal of labor groups eager to reassert themselves with the emergence of the Democratic majority.

The current system is broken because employers can coerce and intimidate workers into rejecting unionization, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a phone interview this week. The House bill, he said, is ”the most important improvement in labor law in many decades.”

But the White House, in a statement, said the measure ”would strip workers of the fundamental democratic right to a supervised private ballot election.” Substituting a card check mechanism under which unions would get bargaining rights as soon as a majority of workers at a plant sign approval cards, ”would turn back the clock 60 years and return us to a failed system.”

Under the bill a company would no longer have the right to demand a secret-ballot election, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, before a union can be certified.

The legislation also imposes tougher penalties on companies that violate the rights of workers trying to organize and sets up a binding arbitration process to prevent companies from thwarting a new union by bargaining in bad faith on an initial contract.

Big Labor says that secret ballots allow employers to intimidate employees. However, there's an intimidation that's being missed, albeit intentionally, by the left: the intimidation of employees by pro-union employees. Here's how it would unfold:

Let's say you work for Company X. Company X doesn't have an employee's union, however a group of employees there decide they want to form one.

Today: They go around hounding and browbeating their co-workers into signing the petition to organize a union. Very few employees will want to piss off their supervisors and colleagues ("Come on, Jim, sign the damned thing! Why would you want us to suffer? Wait 'til Bert finds out what you did!"). So even if they don't want a union, they'll sign the petition, knowing they can always vote "Nay" secretly. The signatures on the petition aren't from people who want to form a union, but are signatures of people who are agreeing to VOTE on the matter.

If enough signatures on the petition are gathered, the employees of Company X get to hold an election as to whether to form a union. The ballots (which are secret ballots, i.e. no names attached) are tallied, and the most "Yea" or "Nay" votes will determine if a union will be formed at Company X.

Big Labor's plan: They go around hounding and browbeating their co-workers into signing the petition to organize a union. Very few employees will want to piss off their supervisors and colleagues ("Come on, Jim, sign the damned thing! Why would you want us to suffer? Wait 'til Bert finds out what you did!"). So even if they don't want a union, they'll sign the petition. However, now the signatures on the petition are enough to form a union, with no election necessary. No secrecy or protection of employees' rights.

If you think that employers can coerce their employees, but co-workers cannot coerce each other, you're officially an idiot. Need proof? Think about labor strikes, and what happens when union employees cross the picket to actually do their jobs. Their striking union thug co-workers make their lives a living hell! If bullying groupthink plagues the workers (or, in the case of striking, "not-currently-workers") during strikes, do you honestly believe that said groupthink won't occur anywhere else in the workplace, such as organizing a union in the first place?