A couple of thousand protesters have showed up to rail against the Wisconsin Legislature's move to pass right to work legislation this week.

That number is far smaller than what was seen four years ago, when Badger State Governor Scott Walker championed Act 10, a budget repair bill which limited — but please note, contrary to frequent press assertions, did not eliminate — most public-sector unions' collective bargaining rights. Todd Richmond's Wednesday evening coverage of the situation in Madison at the Associated Press got plenty of perspectives from union members and others upset with the legislature's latest move, but predictably failed to get any insights from right to work supporters or those skeptical of protesters' positions. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbereed tags are mine):

The world's smallest violin this week goes to Politico labor reporter Mike Elk.

Elk, who has bragged about unionizing workplaces where he has previously toiled, is working on doing the same thing at the alleged news site, which is really a Democratic Party stenography machine posing as one. His major complaint, seen in an item by Erik Wemple at his Washington Post blog, follows the jump (bolds are mine):

Someone looking at the annual "Union Members" report released this morning by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics would logically conclude that 2014 was a year organized labor would rather forget.

While average nonagricultural wage and salary employment increased by over 2.32 million from 2013 to 2014, union membership only went up by 48,000, or about 2 percent of the nationwide increase. Additionally, the private sector's 41,000-person pickup in union membership was only 1.6 percent of its total 2.55 million increase. Yes, that means that public-sector union membership increased a bit while public-sector employment declined by 226,000. Of course, no such decidedly negative nuggets made their way into Labor Secretary Tom Perez's press release or Tom Raum's Associated Press report, excerpts of which follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Just before Thanksgiving, Our Walmart and the United Food and Commerical Workers went into high gear in their effort to draw attention to their advocacy of $15-per-hour minimum wage at the nation's largest retailer. Just after the holiday, I pointed to a column by the Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who quickly discovered that many Kroger employees represented by the UFCW earn far less.

It didn't take much additional research to demonstrate that any fair and balanced reporting on the union's Our Walmart activities should note that "thousands of UFCW members, and perhaps even a majority, earn less, and often far less, than $15 per hour."

"More than 300 union members and their families from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia gathered at the Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters Tuesday to protest a proposal to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants that they said would kill jobs in Appalachia," the Washington Examiner's Zack Colman reported today. Colman also noted, that "Many of the protesters were reliable Democratic voters who said they were venting frustration not with their party, but rather with an Obama administration that they say is pummeling their communities with too-stringent regulations."