Hilarious!

Earlier this week, it was reported that employees of Media Matters, a non-profit that is a proponent of labor union issues and was founded to counter-interpret conservative misinformation, want to vote to organize as a union represented by a Services Employees union local, the nation’s largest non-manufacturing union.  However, Media Matters management, while publicly stating  it isn’t “actively opposing” unionization, has hired a high-powered anti-union law firm to work with it.  Media Matters has 51 employees, it’s reported, of which 36 have indicated an interest in unionizing.  Ironically, the SEIU is a top donor to Media Matters.

AND/BUT:  Hypocrisy has no boundaries.  In the past two weeks, the EEOC sued Kaplan, the for-profit learning company, for using credit-checks on applicants, saying there was no need to and it resulted in a “disparate impact” on black people.  The federal judge found that there was a legitimate business need … and indeed, it is the same credit check process that the EEOC uses on its own applicants.

One more thing, on Regulations …

I heard my U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, who ran the family roofing business with 150 employees for several decades before running for Congress, say that he has a mission to help his fellow Reps understand the impact of every Regulation that they authorize and gets issued:  That every Regulation that applies to that type of business requires someone to analyze whether it applies to it, and if so when, and then to set up up a record-keeping operation around it … and then to assign people to do the things that it requires.  In other words, every Regulation adds costs … at the low end in discretionary time (the person can fit in the analysis), but then when “doing” is required, it becomes costs that are passed on to the customer.

How effective is he?  Four of the five highest years of rule-making/publishing have occurred in the past four years … at around 80,000 pages.  The fifth was in 2008.  These pages publicize both the rules that are proposed, as well as when they are finalized.

Back in 1995, I was a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business, and I watched Bill Clinton and Al Gore show us on a table a stack of 16,000 pages, which represented regulations that had been repealed.  I guess it didn’t “take."