Kansas City and Missouri labor icon Bill Richardson’s response to an anti-labor opinion piece by E. Thom McClanahan in the Kansas City Star.

What McClanahan doesn’t tell you is that it passed the House, it couldn’t get 60 votes in the Senate to invoke cloture and remove republican obstructionism (it got 51 votes, that’s a majority), and it faced a veto by a failed president.

March 22, 2009

In his March 15 op-ed piece, Thomas McClanahan once again shows his disdain for labor unions.

He forgets, most likely on purpose, that labor unions are people – men and women who work hard every day to make a living for their families, and produce the goods and services that make up our economy.

He says the proposed “Free Choice Act” has a misleading title. However, I have never read in any of his columns that the “Right to Work” legislation passed many years ago is a misnomer. The so-called “Right to Work” does nothing to secure employment for anyone. What it does do, however, is set up a barrier to union organizing.  Its sole purpose is to wreck unions.

Perhaps one day McClanahan will get it right. Help workers and you help the nation. The more they make, the more they spend. Working people are the backbone of our economy.

McClanahan says the “Free Choice Act” takes away the secret ballot. He’s dead wrong again. The secret ballot still applies along with the card check. McClanahan assumes that workers are not smart enough to choose.  Wrong again. Workers are wonderfully astute when it comes to their workplace.  When it comes time to make the choice to unionize, they will be smart and deliberate.

What McClanahan does not tell you: the laws and regulations that govern union organizing now do not work.  When union organizers get signed cards from 30 percent of the workers, an election is scheduled. Then the employer has the opportunity to campaign against a union, often using misleading and coercive tactics. And if the employees vote to have a union, there is nothing in the present law that requires the employer to sign a contract with the union. There are many workers who voted for a union one, two or even three years ago who do not yet have a contract.

What McClanahan does tell you however: it’s alright for employers to exercise unfair tactics but it’s not alright for workers to have an even playing field. This is McClanahan’s so-called “Fairness Doctrine.”

Please call or write your Congressional representatives and ask them to support working men and women by voting for the Free Choice Act.

Bill R. Richardson

Retired

Kansas City Building Trades Council

Bill Richardson

Despite all the silliness in comments, something positive did come out of my critique of Maida Coleman’s website. The original complaint – the blog – still remains essentially unused, but the issue sections are fleshed out with more content and hyperlinks to articles backing them up. And Maida has her Senate record posted on the front of the website. There’s still a lot of problems, like the fact that half the landing page is taken up with a giant slogan and picture of Maida, instead of setting aside a space for links to a volunteer page and a contribution page, but I’ll give her credit for improving it.

“Petra” (1992) – Kathleen Caricof-Burns – on the campus of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg – installed 1993

Kathi [Caricof-Burns] grew up near the sea, and her work reflects the motion and the timelesness that the ocean holds. Her work is a balance between abstract motion, and representation of her subject. Kathi’s work as a stone sculptor is recognized in both commercial and residential spaces.

Kathi Caricof

For an artist to stand before a block of stone, a gift from nature, and begin to chip away at it takes real courage. For an artist to feel that the image they are about to awaken is worthy of that intrusion requires total trust that the parts eliminated will reveal a richer vision. For sculptor Kathi Caricof the concepts she wishes to liberate from the stone are, “those ideas that I am liberating from myself: independence, vulnerability, compassion, clarity, longing, sensuality and isolation…”

…Kathi Caricof is well known and much acclaimed for her marble sculpture and reliefs. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and has received many awards including the “People’s Choice” at the International Snow Carving Championships in Breckenridge. Caricof has installed major pieces of public art on the campus of the University of Denver, for the City of Broomfield, CO, and the cities of Cerritos and Burbank, California. Her main interest is stone but she also works in steel and other metals. Her work consists of three dimensional freestanding sculptures as well as large-scale bas-reliefs…

Artist: Caricof-Burns, Kathleen, sculptor.

Title: Petra, (sculpture).

Dates: 1992. Copyrighted 1992. Installed 1993.

Medium: Sculpture: white marble and black granite; Base: concrete and black granite.

Dimensions:

Sculpture: approx. 20 x 20 x 48 in.; Base: approx. 15 x 54 x 22 in.

Inscription: CARICOF (copyright symbol) 92 (On plaque on base, raised:) “PETRA”/BY/KATHLEEN CARICOF-BURNS/INSTALLED 1993 signed

Description: An abstract prone female figure with her head placed down suggesting extreme emotion. The sculpture is placed on a rectangular base. The sculpture and base are situated on a raised flower bed that is encircled by a multisided bench….

The Wednesday afternoon House budget hearings were political theater designed to help freshman Republican representatives Denny Hoskins, R–Warrensburg, and Scott Largent, R–Clinton, get re-elected. I know, the last election was only five months ago, but it’s never too soon for reps who barely squeaked out victories to start looking more magnanimous than they are.

As with any good script, the scene must be set. Let’s call Budget Chairman Allen Icet the playwright–because he is. And here’s how he set up the conflict of the play. He cut funds from a very popular social service budget: Meals on Wheels. And then he let Hoskins and Largent move to restore the cuts.

Now the rules of adding money for a given cause to the budget require that corresponding cuts be found elsewhere first. So a representative must first find “decreases” and get the body to approve them before he can even propose any “increases”. Largent and Hoskins proposed cutting set amounts of money from each of the thirteen departments in state government. And as it happened, when Democrats looked closely, those sums exactly corresponded to the salaries of the thirteen department liaisons.

Democrats were incensed for two reasons. First and foremost was that the original cuts to Meals on Wheels need not have happened. Stimulus funds are coming, and, unless Missouri gets so poor that it turns to cannibalism, we’re not going to seriously slash funds for a program as effective and well thought of as Meals on Wheels. Icet knows that. He just wanted to give his boys a chance to shine by putting the funds back in. No real damage was going to be done by this bit of theater, because the liaisons would almost surely be restored in the Senate.

Democrats were also gnashing their teeth over the scriptwriting because the liaison positions supposedly being cut were being called “government lobbyist” positions. Here were the Republicans proposing to cut some of those nasty beasts called lobbyists out of government salaries. Doing so–for the sake of Meals on Wheels–made Largent and Hoskins sound like paragons of ethics.

On the surface.

But these weren’t, like, AT&T lobbyists trying to deep six net neutrality for the corporate gain of their employers. No, these were “lobbyists” only in the sense that Nixon–and Matt Blunt had them too–asks them to lobby the legislature by explaining to its members the reasons for the governor’s budget requests. Otherwise, legislators get incomprehensible sets of numbers for billions on billions of dollars, without any grasp of what the governor is trying to achieve.

Democrats would prefer to call these people liaisons, though, because that’s what they are. When a constituent calls his representative or senator, frustrated with lack of progress in dealing with a governmental agency, the legislator puts the person in touch with the liaison from that department, who is often able to sort out the problem. Say a constituent has defaulted on paying his Missouri income taxes, but it’s because he’s been in Iraq and wasn’t receiving the bills. A liaison could help him work out the problem.

It rankled Democrats to be given the role of villain in this bit of theater. If they voted against cutting the lobbyist/liaison positions, they looked as they prefer the welfare of lobbyists to that of needy seniors. If they voted for it, they let Largent and Hoskins walk away as the heroes. And don’t think those two wouldn’t make hay of the vote with their constituents.

To add insult to all this injury, Largent also proposed a decrease of about $75,000 to the Department of Economic Development (DED)–job creation, in other words. Rachel Storch,  D-St. Louis, who has served on the budget committee for five years now, knows that issues of job creation are usually handled in a bipartisan fashion and was surprised to see that cut. Furthermore, because of the vague way Largent proposed it, she suspected he didn’t even know what the money was for.

So she asked him. She walked up to the mike and asked him what it was that he was cutting out of the DED budget. He said he was proposing to cut line 2 out of the budget. I know that much, she responded. You said that. But what is line 2? What are those funds for? Turns out she was right. He didn’t have a clue.

Then Bryan Pratt (if you understand British slang, he couldn’t be better named), R-Blue Springs, took the mike and asked Rachel if she knew what line 2 was. That backfired on him, because:  She did. He didn’t.

Storch pointed out to me that, as long as Icet made it plain what his caucus was to vote for, they were willing to “vote blind.”

In the end, Republicans had their way of course. Party line votes gave Hoskins and Largent the “facts” they need to look all humane and philanthropic to their voter base. So the House wasted several hours playing with popguns and fake swords when this state has real-life budget problems that need dealing with.

And the Senate is left holding the liaison/lobbyist bag.