New Adventures In The Law Of Unintended Consequences

Yesterday Breitbart.com reported that 40,000 Longshoremen, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), have formally ended their association with the AFL-CIO. In a letter to Richard Trumka, ILWU President Robert McEllrath cited quite a list of grievances as reasons for the dissolution of their affiliation, but prominent among them was the AFL-CIO’s support of Obamare. The AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is a strong supporter of President Obama and worked hard for the passage of ObamaCare. Like the rest of us, Mr. Trumka is now realizing what ObamaCare will do to America‘s healthcare system and to union healthcare programs, and is no longer supporting ObamaCare.

The article reports two areas of disagreement:

The Longshoreman leader said, “President Obama ran on a platform that he would not tax medical plans and at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, you stated that labor would not stand for a tax on our benefits.” But, regardless of that promise, the President has pushed for just such a tax and Trumka and the AFL-CIO bowed to political pressure lining up behind Obama’s tax on those plans.

McEllrath also went on to say that they support stronger immigration reform than the AFL-CIO is supporting.

The article reminds us that only 11.3 percent of the Americans belong to unions. In 2012, 35.9 percent of public-sector workers belonged to unions, and 6.6 percent of private sector workers belonged to unions. Unions need to expand their membership in order to fund their pension funds.

As previously reported at rightwinggranny.com:

In a column in the Washington Examiner in April, Mark Hemingway pointed out that the average union pension plan had only enough money to cover 62 percent of its financial obligations.  Pension plans that are below 80 percent funding are considered “endangered” by the government; below 65 percent is considered “critical.”  Union membership is declining, which means that less people are paying into these funds.

The fact that the ILWU is walking away from the AFL-CIO is significant. This is a serious blow to the unionization of America.

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