Showing posts with label Michigan right to work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michigan right to work. Show all posts
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Judge chides Republican legislators for right-to-work laws
By Kristen M. Daum/Lansing State Journal via Detroit Free Press
MASON -- Ingham County Circuit Judge William Collette took a verbal shot Wednesday at the Legislature over Michigan's new right-to-work laws, saying he was "amazed" legislators would create laws "to avoid me."
Collette's comments came as attorneys delivered arguments in a lawsuit over whether the new labor laws were passed in violation of the state's Open Meetings Act.
Attorney General Bill Schuette had asked Collette to throw out the lawsuit, filed by a coalition of labor supporters who seek to invalidate the laws that prohibit requiring the payment of union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
Part of Schuette's argument was based on the fact that the right-to-work laws say that any legal challenges must originate in the Michigan Court of Appeals, not the lower courts.
Collette said he had no "great deal of interest" on the jurisdictional issues of the lawsuit because potential violations of the state's open meetings law are the foremost issue of the legal challenge.
However, Collette took a few moments to chide the Republican-led Legislature for creating such an issue in the first place.
Typically, Ingham County is the starting point for lawsuits against the State of Michigan because Lansing, the capital, is in that county. Judges in Michigan are nonpartisan.
"I find it amazing that a law would be created to avoid me," he said, to brief chuckles from the courtroom audience of mostly lawyers and journalists. "I find it absolutely amazing that they would be so afraid of me and those few others like me that serve (in the court) that the Legislature would pass a law."
Ari Adler, spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, deferred comment on Collette's remarks to the Attorney General's Office because it is representing the Legislature and other state entities in the lawsuit.
Schuette spokeswoman Joy Yearout declined to comment.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Outnumbered Michigan Democrats start longshot bid to repeal right-to-work laws in Legislature
By
LANSING, MI – In what likely will turn out to be a largely symbolic move, Michigan Democrats who are outnumbered in the Legislature say they are submitting bills that would repeal the state’s new right-to-work laws.
Chances of passage in the Legislature? Likely none, since it would require the blessing of Republican leadership that just endorsed right-to-work to get a hearing or a vote. But the bill introductions serve as a reminder that Democrats are starting the 2013-14 legislative session still upset about the right-to-work laws that were signed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder late last year.
Michigan is becoming the nation’s 24th right-to-work state, with laws that prohibit requiring workers to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
Republicans hold a 26-11 edge over Democrats in the Senate with one vacancy. The GOP holds a 59-51 edge over Democrats in the House.
Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood, D-Taylor, announced Thursday that he has submitted for introduction bills that would repeal right-to-work laws. Democrats are upset that the right-to-work bills were approved last month without public hearings on the legislation.
“The people of Michigan were completely shut out of the legislative process with this regulation,” Hopgood said in a statement. “I will continue to stand with Michigan workers in the fight to repeal this misguided legislation.”
House Democrats are working on similar legislation.
Supporters and opponents of right-to-work disagree about where the majority of the public stands on the laws. They also disagree about its potential effects on the Michigan economy.
Hopgood said his legislation will be Senate Bills 95 and 96. The bills weren’t yet available on the Michigan Legislature website as of Thursday evening.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Oops: Michigan Republicans Have Passed a Right to Work Law that may be Impossible to Implement
By: Sarah Jones/politicususa
Did Michigan Republicans even read the ALEC-Koch “Right-to-Work” legislation they just passed?
It doesn’t appear likely. Why? Because the law may not be able to be implemented as intended.
Just as the Wisconsin law violated their state constitution, so it appears the Michigan law does the same, albeit for different reasons. In addition to the violation of the state constitution, just as in Wisconsin, we also have a lawsuit filed over the violation of the Michigan Open Meetings law. But to the constitutional issue…
Michigan Senate Democrats report, “The Michigan Constitution gives clear authority to the Civil Service Commission over conditions of employment for the state’s workforce. Experts have suggested today only a vote of the Civil Service Commission could enact Right to Work policies for state workers.”
Oopsie.
This is the sort of thing that happens when a national organization is writing your legislation for you. But one assumes that the big boys at ALEC did not count on the uber laziness of the Republicans. Surely they were meant to fine tune the bill to suit their state. But then, when you shove a bill through in a lameduck session and don’t hold it open for debate, these things tend to happen.
Senator Bert Johnson (D – Detroit) pointed out that not only the public, but also the lawmakers were not given a chance to read the bills, “The public was not given an opportunity to read these bills, legislators were not given an opportunity to read these bills, and we now know that the Governor himself either didn’t read or didn’t understand these bills himself. This process has been a complete affront to Democracy from the start and was nothing more than a political gift to the Koch Brothers and ALEC who bought and paid for this legislation.”
Over and over again, we see Republicans violating the law to pass ALEC legislation, and we also see them refusing to even read the bills they present let alone the bills of the opposition. What, exactly, are they being paid by the people to do, if not read and write legislation that actually fits the laws?
The same law that Governor Walker passed in violation of Open Meetings laws and in violation of the state constitution was struck down by the courts in September. The millions wasted on passing legislation illegally and fighting it in courts speaks to the seriousness of Republicans when they talk about deficits. There’s always money to enact a political agenda aimed at the opposition party, but there’s no money for starving kids.
Further irony is provided by Michigan State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons (R-Alto), who called the passage of the “right-to-work” law “freeing” the workers. Apparently Ms. Lyons didn’t want her husband freed. He is a corrections officer and Ms. Lyons fought to have corrections officers exempted from the law. She explained, “When we talk about the brave women in police and fire we need to remember people in corrections. These guys work in conditions that we can’t even begin to imagine. It’s not financial. It’s philosophy. I am saying we need to treat our corrections officers that way we treat our police men and women and firefighter men and women.”
So, Ms. Lyons believes that we should treat our corrections officers (like her husband) the way we treat our police and firefighters, which she implies is better than we treat the other workers, because they work in tough conditions and therefor deserve or have earned the right to be treated better. And yet, she calls denying the right to collectively bargain freedom. What we have here is an admission by a Republican that when it comes to their own personal lives, they’ll take the union, please. No doubt Ms. Lyons is familiar with all that the union does to protect her husband. If she’s lucky, the law she supported will be struck down.
Ms. Lyon’s amendment was not taken up by the Michigan legislature, but then, seeing as they appear not to have read the actual bill they passed, she should take heart that it wasn’t personal. ALEC doesn’t recognize corrections officers as worthy; aka, voting Republican.
Selective Editing by Fox News Contributor Revealed by Fox News
By ROBERT MACKEY/New York Times
As my colleague Jennifer Preston reported, there were scuffles between union activists and supporters of Michigan’s Republican-dominated Legislature outside the state Capitol in Lansing on Tuesday, as the lawmakers approved sweeping changes to the way unions will be financed.
At one stage during the tense standoff, union members opposed to the so-called right-to-work legislation ripped down a tent erected by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. Several supporters of the conservative group recorded video of their efforts to defend the tent, but the footage that got the most attention, with more than half a million views on YouTube, was an 80-second clip that showed a conservative comedian named Steven Crowder getting punched in the face by a union activist.
Immediately after the incident, Mr. Crowder posted photographs on Twitter documenting what he said were his injuries — a cut on his forehead and a chipped tooth — and his video quickly went into heavy rotation on Fox News, where he frequently appears and is identified as a contributor.
On Wednesday, however, questions were raised about the way in which Mr. Crowder had edited his video. After speaking with a witness to the events, the liberal blogger Chris Savage argued on his site Eclectablog that the video edit was misleading:
This video is actually a composite of a things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart. The initial conversation happened early in the morning. At about 0:16, it cuts to Crowder saying, “You’ve already destroyed one tent, leave this one alone.” That happened hours after the interview with the union workers that starts the segment. The guy he’s talking to is standing quite a distance from the tent but Crowder insists that he’s somehow tearing down the tent.Selective editing at about 0:39 mark shows what appears to be union guy attacking Crowder for no apparent reason. However, if you look closely, you’ll see that the guy is getting up off the ground — that he was NOT the one that became aggressive first.
As Mr. Savage noted, raw video of the scuffle over the tent shot by another camera showed that the man who punched Mr. Crowder was engaged in an angry discussion with a defender of the tent when the comedian stepped in between them. Within seconds the fight broke out.
In response to questions, including from his supporters, about the way he had edited the video, Mr. Crowder was by turns philosophical and prickly, but pointed out that more of the footage he used to make the clip was broadcast during his appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program on Tuesday night.
Unfortunately for Mr. Crowder, a look at the video broadcast on the Sean Hannity show appears to show quite clearly that he left out an important section of the footage when he put together his edit. A section of the Fox News broadcast preserved by the Web site Mediaite shows that Mr. Hannity’s producers at Fox News started the clip five seconds earlier than Mr. Crowder did. What the extra footage reveals is the man who punched Mr. Crowder being knocked to the ground seconds before and then getting up and taking a swing at the comedian.
It remains unclear what caused the man who threw the punch to fall to the ground at the start of the incident, but Mr. Crowder did say in an interviewwith a conservative blogger that he and other men defending the tent did get into a physical confrontation with the union activists. “We didn’t get violent with them, but we did try and push them off the tent,” he said.
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