National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason made the following statement after the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld union lawyers' motion to dismiss of the case challenging a corrupt quid-pro-quo organizing agreement reached by Freightliner and UAW union officials in North and South Carolina:

Regrettably, the court severely misread and misinterpreted the statute. "Things of value" as defined under numerous federal statutes have long been held by courts to include intangible or non-monetary benefits.

The Congressional intent of the statute was to prevent employers from inducing union officials to bargain away workers' interests. That is exactly what was done here. Freightliner gave the UAW union officials organizing assistance that the court concedes is a "benefit" to the union. This benefit included preferred access to the employees, pro-union captive audience meetings on paid company time to solicit union authorization cards, employer silence, and an agreement that only the UAW would be able to recruit new dues payers without a secret ballot election.

These are most certainly "things of value" no matter how that term is defined -- subjective value, objective value, monetary value, etc. In fact, unions spend millions of dollars on corporate campaigns to attack companies with the very goal of obtaining these valuable advantages.

In return, the UAW hierarchy agreed to pre-negotiated contract concessions, and even the cancelling of certain employee benefits at other facilities. All of this was done before the employees had shown any interest in having UAW union officials represent them.

At the motion to dismiss phase, the allegations of the complaint must be taken as true. Therefore, even under the appellate court's holding that an ascertainable monetary value is required under 302, the U.S. District Court's dismissal of the complaint should have been reversed and case remanded for fact finding as to monetary value, which can easily be established.

Apparently union officials think they are entitled to another exception in federal criminal rules and procedures.

The union-abused employees represented by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys are likely to ask for a rehearing en banc or petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to correct this miscarriage of justice.

The decision can be downloaded here. Background on the case can be found here.

This week, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida challenging the quid pro quo between Mardi Gras Gaming and UNITE HERE Local 355 union bosses:

Boca Raton, Florida (November 6, 2008) – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, an employee at a Mardi Gras Gaming facility has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent UNITE HERE Local 355 union officials from obtaining illegal assistance in pressuring workers to unionize – including possession of workers’ personal addresses and other private information.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleges that union officials violated the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) by entering into an agreement with Mardi Gras Gaming that allows the union access to information about nonunion employees, use of the employer’s property for organizing, and control over the employer’s communications with workers. The LMRA expressly forbids employers from giving “any money or other thing of value” to unions.

The LMRA’s prohibition on transfers of things of value from employers to unions is intended to prevent deals that induce union officials to place their own interests or the interests of employers above the workers themselves.

Read the rest of the Foundation's press release here.

Union boss hypocrisy is nothing new, but this recent case, filed by two nurses in Houston, Texas against the CNA union and Tenet Healthcare shows just how blatant that hypocrisy can be.

When the SEIU bosses got themselves a sweetheart deal to organize nurses from the top down with Catholic Healthcare Partners in Ohio, CNA/NNOC denounced the deal as an illegitimate sell out of workers’ rights to a free and fair election, and workers’ rights to choose or reject unionization with full information, and without coercion or discrimination:

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses association, condemned this [SEIU] agreement. She called it “a rigged scam” in which the service employees union would bargain only half-heartedly if it won the vote.

“This was a top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked union,” Ms. DeMoro said. “There was a gag order on everyone, and as a result this was a banana republic election.”

CNA/NNOC even went so far as to create anti-SEIU websites accusing that union of selling out workers while cutting secret sweetheart deals with management, in exchange for assistance organizing new workers from the top down.

This is the game that union bosses play nowadays: they increasingly fail in organizing workers the old fashioned way, since workers increasingly aren't buying what the union bosses are selling. So, the union bosses try to organize companies, not workers, in what is known as “top down” organizing.

But all of this moaning and whining about SEIU’s secret “neutrality” deals has not stopped the CNA/NNOC brass from cutting their own secret sweetheart deals with companies. CNA/NNOC’s latest deal is a secret “neutrality” agreement with Tenet Healthcare, a nationwide hospital chain.

Under the agreement, Tenet is gagged from saying anything about the union, nurses' personal information is handed to the union without their consent, and union agents get wide access to campaign inside the hospital facilities while anti-CNA nurses are barred from effectively providing an opposing view in their own workplaces. Perhaps worst of all, the NLRB is cut out from overseeing the process, which results in Potemkin Village “consent elections” in which the NLRB does nothing other than tally up “yes” votes and “no” votes and provide a veneer of legitimacy.

Sounds like a sweetheart deal to us: nurses handed over to the union with no real campaign about the effects of unionization, and no effective federal agency to oversee the process!

In fact, CNA chief DeMoro's description of a "rigged scam," a "top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked union," and a "banana republic election" is a strikingly apt description of DeMoro's own CNA union's secret deal with Tenet.

Shameless...

This weekend the Chicago Tribune featured a story about secret deals that union officials are cutting with certain targeted employers to corral employees into the union's ranks.

In exchange for the company's assistance in unionizing employees (almost always by green-lighting a coercive card check drive and often by actively promoting the chosen union), union officials promise all sorts of things -- ranging from promises not to badmouth the company anymore, to agreeing to drop demands for higher wages and health care benefits, to concessions in other bargaining units.

Not surprisingly, union bosses do their best to hide these agreements from the very employees they seek to represent, and even a few union officials are critical of the deals.

In a rare moment of candor, one union boss spilled the beans that these backroom deals are also kept secret to avoid lawsuits brought by employees with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation:

Hurd added that unions also like to keep a lid on such agreements to avoid embarrassment if they don't succeed. Plus, they are concerned that other unions might want to join the bandwagon if they learn that the company has signed on to a neutrality agreement. And they want to avoid lawsuits from right-to-work groups challenging the agreements, he added.

For more on these secret deals and the legal challenges by individual employees enjoying assistance from National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, see our special page on Top Down Organizing.

Here's an interesting story (via EIA) from Nevada where teacher union officials are gathering signatures to put a massive tax increase on the ballot in November.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, union political operatives, who need to collect tens of thousands of signatures in order to put the tax hike on the ballot, are having trouble getting people to sign because "blockers" who oppose the tax increase are voicing their opposition to prospective signers during the collection process.

The article quotes one such "blocker" as saying "Say no to the tax grab! Think before you ink!" until the individual who might have signed the union operative's petition decides against it and leaves. Nevada's top teacher union official Lynn Warne denounced the actions as "thug tactics" (which is ironic because according to this website, the tactic was invented by union organizers in Oregon).

Normally there wouldn't be much to add to this story, but a closer look reveals another example of a nasty pattern: Union bosses have realized that absent opposing viewpoints or the privacy of the secret ballot, they have no problem getting anyone to sign anything.

However, when employees or employers insist on providing an opposing viewpoint or demanding a secret ballot election union officials have considerably more trouble selling their power grabs. Rather than persuade workers (or in this case registered voters in Nevada) on the merits, they'd rather hoodwink or pressure them into signing -- while denouncing the presentation of an opposing viewpoint as "thug tactics."

Oral arguments take place this morning at the U.S. Supreme Court in a key case in which the Ninth Circuit reversed two of its earlier rulings and found that employers that receive state funds can be forced to implement coercive union organizing, including "card check" drives.

When the Supreme Court took up the case in November, National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason had this to say:

“California officials are using the heavy hand of government to trample upon workers’ rights. Because union hierarchies seem to be having difficulties persuading employees to join unions voluntarily, they have resorted to coercive tactics in
order to maintain the flow of forced union dues."

Many other states and municipalities have passed similar special interest legislation, prompting the High Court review. To read the rest of Stefan's statement, click here.

Leaders of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe are up in arms because Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America union officials filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a representation election of their casino security personnel only to pull the plug at the last minute.

Meanwhile, SPFPA officials told The Morning Sun that they never had any intention of going through with the election:

"...the union simply wanted to get the list of names and addresses of
the casino security and surveillance personnel the union hopes to
organize."

Tribe representatives called the move a "manipulation" of the system, point out that two previous organizing attempts have failed, and question the NLRB's jurisdiction over their employees in the first place.

Most likely, collecting employees' personal information is geared at pressuring them individually to support unionization through a potential "card check" drive. Sadly, this situation shows that many times, when employees reject unionization, it's just the beginning.

Further undermining what little credibility it may still have, the American Bar Association held its annual labor law conference and loaded up the agenda with another one-sided panel discussion to attack the concept of employee free choice.

For the 4th year in a row, ABA political hacks have pointedly refused to allow the perspective of employees who may, God forbid, not want a union to dominate their workplace. Once again, a hot topic at the conference was the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation's cases defending employees whose rights are abused during card check organizing drives.

And yet again, the ABA meeting planners refused to allow the perspective of workers or their Right to Work attorneys to be heard -- instead selecting speakers representing Big Labor and a small faction of squishy, union-boss-friendly management lawyers. (Of course, the views of the speakers were rejected by the NLRB in its recent Dana/Metaldyne ruling, and the views of Foundation attorneys were embraced. Just a technicality, I guess.)

The ABA's intellectual dishonesty continues to be an embarrassment to America's legal profession.

If "UNITE-HERE" union officials have their way, employees of Donald Trump's new Windy City hotel may soon be hearing "you're fired" if they refuse to pay union dues. According to Crain's Chicago Business:

The Trump International Hotel & Tower offers both a high-profile target and an opportunity to bring 300 or more employees into the union fold. UNITE HERE wants Trump to approve a so-called neutrality agreement, which would permit organizers to try to persuade workers to sign cards supporting union representation.

So called "neutrality agreements"are anything but- they often require employers to assist union officials in organizing employees. Under such pacts, employers must often grant union organizers sweeping access to employees, hold "captive audience" meetings, and even hand out employees' personal information.

Notice too as you read the article, as is common in many similar situations, that union officials are targeting the hotel's employees rather than vice versa. Makes sense, since without a Right to Work law, union officials can force employees in Illinois to pay dues. Looks like it's all about the forced-dues cash.

The National Right to Work Foundation just filed a "friend of the court" brief supporting employee free choice at the U.S. Supreme Court in the Chamber v. Brown case. At issue is a controversial 9th Circuit decision that basically forces coercive union organizing on private companies receiving state funds.

Foundation attorneys have successfully helped contest similiar laws in Wisconsin, and through this brief in New York. Additionally, with 13 trips to the U.S. Supreme Court on record, most recently the 2007 Davenport defensive victory, Foundation attorneys are no strangers to the highest court in the land.