The following is an excerpt from our Saturday email, which includes our musings on the latest developments impacting public employees, links to that week’s labor news, and a collection of whimsical reads for your weekend. If you’d like to receive our weekly email, you can use the sign-up form at the bottom of this page. We promise to respect your inbox, and we will never share your email address.
Maybe you saw the flurry of headlines about strippers unionizing in North Hollywood, CA.
And maybe you noticed the media’s absolute delight in teetering between the provocative nature of the profession and the serious and downright scary working conditions of the employees. And we won’t even comment on the volume of photos that accompanied these stories. Ahem, the photo assignment desk has never seen so many volunteers.
Somehow, adult dancers unionizing is not the most outrageous aspect of this story.
In yet another episode of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently issued a press release on the matter, announcing the U.S. government would require the strip club to “reopen its business” “and not refile for bankruptcy for one year.”
That’s right. The government is forcing a strip club to stay open.
May I remind you the NLRB is an “independent federal agency that protects employees from unfair labor practices and protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve wages, benefits and working conditions.”
Except, that independent part seems to translate into joined-at-the-hip-with-Big Labor. And with unions winning 80% of the representation elections conducted by the NLRB, that part about working withouta union seems to be misnomer.
So why is the government telling a strip club that it must stay open? Surely it isn’t for public good – this isn’t a health clinic, after all. Perhaps the labor-friendly bosses at the NLRB know unionization numbers are down and more than half of Americans say they are “not interested at all” in joining a union. (You’ll have to scroll down on that second link. Gallup appears to have buried the lead on their do-people-like-unions research project)
At any rate, truth is indeed stranger than fiction when it comes to Big Labor and Big Government these days.