Mallory Factor, the author of the new bestselling expose of the unions’ control over America, Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind, has a mesmerizing new column that explains one of the most frightening possibilities of unions’ quest for control: their unionization of our national security apparatus and ultimately our military.
Under current law, the armed forces cannot be unionized. But the employees working in civilian jobs relating to our national defense number more than 700,000, and of those almost 60 percent are already unionized. That means that the full-time military, including active military and civilian personnel, is more than 20 percent unionized. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Factor, “Even the Department of Defense has come under the influence of unions.”
At the same time, government unions are on our military bases and inside the Pentagon, where they determine workplace rules and norms and file grievances. Although the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act barred collective bargaining among CIA, FBI, NSA, and Secret Service employees, other agencies have already been infiltrated; Transportation Security Administration (TSA) baggage screeners are now unionized, and here’s how President Obama made that happen.
Barack Obama’s TSA Administrator, John Pistole, started the TSA employees toward unionization in 2011. Two unions vied for control; although less than 40 percent of TSA workers voted, all 44,000 baggage screeners today, and all future screeners hired will be under the thumb of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). Even before the union vote, the DHS acknowledged that according to its own labor-management forum meeting notes, 62 Homeland Security employees are paid with tax dollars to work full time as union officials, under a procedure called “official time.”
The only way to reverse this position would be to have a highly unlikely union-decertification election. Once unions win certification, that essentially means forever.
U.S. Border Patrol agents, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees, our citizenship and immigration agents, our customs agents, and some Coast Guard employees are already unionized. The unionization of our defense personnel is trulydangerous; because the government would be limited to deploying them as and where needed; mandatory union policies and work rules would triumph. The possibilities of strikes would be rampant.
But Barack Obama is trying to force union control down the American people’s throats.
Soon after he was inaugurated, President Obama issued Executive Order 13,522, which requires federal departments and agencies to consult with unions before setting almost any workplace policy. This order also gave unions power to bargain over issues that they had no legal power to oversee.
Were Barack Obama to win a second term, unions would soon determine the fate of America. And if national security is unionized, we are all at risk.
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