From WGEM, and the only thing funnier than their headline is the thought that WGEM likely receives a lot of ad money from the union in advertising.
It’s Christmas caroling with a message.Are you kidding me? A caravan of 80 people to sing insults and, according to eyewitnesses, shouting “F*CK YOU” at various houses right before Christmas? This isn’t “caroling,” this is intimidation. On private property. I’m told by locals that one of the houses they visited was down a private lane of an elderly couple whose granddaughter often stays with them (and luckily wasn’t the night the union struck) – the union trespassed.
Wednesday night, locked out workers from Roquette America in Keokuk staged a very unique protest.
They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.
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They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.
The union workers have been off the job for almost three months now.
Roquette locked them out on September 28th, and contract negotiations have pretty much stalled ever since.
It went like this, “God bless ye very wealthy men,we’re here so you can see. The workers who helped make you rich are now out on the street. You locked the doors while profits soared, how greedy could you be? Oh tidings of capital gains, oh what a shame, all you care about it capital gains.”Yes, those evil business owners who are trying to cut costs because a president who the unions supported and donated money to is forcing business to trim costs so they can afford his massive health control law and other regulations thrown on them. If the unions are unhappy with this then perhaps then need to look at the economic situation this president has created instead of blaming skittish business owners simply trying to stay afloat in a dismal economic period. The president for whom these unions worked has created an economic environment wherein there is less discretionary money to go around, thus less demand for goods and services, thus less revenue for small business, and so on and so forth. Union members should be “caroling” the source: their union bosses. Unions have become the very thing which they were formed to fight and many good men and women (my family is predominately union) are caught up as pawns in a game played by favored fat cat union bosses who send their workers out to engage in extortion and intimidation in exchange for work.
One of the budget items that the protested business, Roquette America, has listed that so angered the union?
Open health insurance premiums to drastic increases.Yes, because one of the side effects to the utopian health control law is higher prices for business who can’t afford further costs in this recessionary period. Numerous business have come out against their increased costs for this law, but apparently the evil business owners who’ve run their business and employed people for this long know far less than their workers about running a company.
And where is the local media on union members reportedly trespassing onto private property to terrify and intimidate private citizens? They’re fellated by WGEM in one of the most egregious examples of media bias I’ve seen in some time.
When tea partiers went to stand outside the home of a congressman for a prayer vigil after the passage of health care, his office went crying hysterically to the press, defamed the group by making up the story that one of them “left a coffin” on his yard, and it was a national story.
When union thugs – because members don’t show up to people’s houses but if you do you’ve crossed the line from member to thug – show up to the homes of private citizens, it’s all but ignored.
The long private drive down which it was said union members trespassed to protest.
Take for instance the rowdy union protest outside BoA attorney Greg Baer’s home wherein they again, trespassed on private property and shouted at a house that had a young, terrified child home alone inside.
The only reason that it got some attention is because Baer’s next-door-neighbor is Fortune’s Nina Easton.
Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.
Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.
“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”That’s intimidation and there’s no honor in it.
Easton continues:
What’s interesting is that SEIU, the nation’s second largest union, craves respectability. Just-retired president Andy Stern is an Obama friend and regular White House visitor. He sits on the President’s Fiscal Responsibility Commission. He hobnobs with those greedy Wall Street CEOs — executives much higher-ranking than my neighbor Baer — at Davos. His union spent $70 million getting Democrats elected in 2008.Unions to not have the right to trespass onto private property to terrify private citizens into behaving in ways that could harm their business. If they are unhappy, go work somewhere else. Unions do not have the right to employment; they only have the right to seek it and if they are upset with their circumstances then they should take it up with their wealthy bosses who use them like they are minions to enforce policy that is incredibly detrimental to their jobs. It’s unfair and malicious to mischaracterize every business owner in America as some rich fat cat. The couple on the private lane upon which the union trespassed? The gentleman, say the locals, got his start as a union member on the shop floor and worked his way up to achieve the American Dream, using the same right to pursue happiness that everyone else has. But once you achieve too much in America, you’re a target. There is no American Dream – just a nightmare of envy and penalties. It’s a gimmick to get you to earn money and once you do, the class warfare is invoked against you. Because somehow you’re a bad person for working hard and providing jobs.
In the business community, though, SEIU has a reputation for strong-arm tactics against management, prompting some companies to file suit.
Union at a private home, trespassing on a porch.
People like Andy Stern have more power than most of the targets on their near-home invasion hit list. But they won’t tell their workers that. If ever union members ever realize that they outnumber, and are more powerful than, their bosses, it would be a very bright day in labor.
*NOTE: Right before hitting “publish” I heard from a trusted source in Quincy, Illinois, who said they were informed that not all of the union members were happy at being apparently ordered to protest people’s homes. My sources says “Apparently not everyone in the union was in favor of the idea to go caroling at private residences and a fight almost broke out between some of the union members when they returned from caroling.”
Developing.
*UPDATE: The Washington Times’ Kerry Picket adds this from Twitter:
During a press conference last Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, told reporters about a bipartisan amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting the right of military families to bury the remains of their loved ones without being protested. I asked Mr. Reid if the same right to privacy should extend to private citizens whose homes are protested by public unions. Mr. Reid dodged the issue saying, “I don’t know anything about lawns and Bank of America executives.”
Big Journalism
