Much is being made of Big Labor’s stinging defeat in Arkansas, where Blanche Lincoln defeated the union’s hand-picked candidate, Bill Halter, to win re-nomination. Arkansas isn’t exactly a big Big Labor state, but still, this was about $10 million spent in an effort to send a message to Democrats about supporting card check and forced arbitration, and it failed.
What isn’t remembered is that this is the third major defeat for Big Labor Politics this year. The SEIU was a leader in efforts to defeat Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and we saw how that turned out. What slipped between the editorial cracks during the Turkish Flotilla (or as it’s known in the eastern Mediterranean, Fleet Week), was that the SEIU failed in its attempt to launch a third party candidate in North Carolina in several Congressional districts.
If I’m a union member with a defined benefit plan, I’m filing Beck paperwork yesterday, and putting that money into my retirement.