Yesterday, Democrat Presidential contenders addressed SEIU officials at a candidates’ forum in Washington,DC. The Presidential wannabes all know the massive financial support that can come from the support of union officials and their forced-dues coffers.

And if past experience is an indicator, an endorsement by SEIU officials is particularly lucrative.

After all it was SEIU officials that in 2004 sent $26 million, much of it seized from employees as a condition of employment, to the 527 group Americans Coming Together (ACT). After a complaint filed by the National Right to Work Foundation, the Federal Election Commission fined ACT for illegally spending the money on partisan electioneering… and that’s just one union’s electioneering efforts with one outside group. (Total estimates for the amount spent by union officials to influence the 2003-04 political cycle are nearly a billion dollars.)

But, as former-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson showed, kowtowing to union officials can be quite confusing, what with so many union officials and so little time. That’s why Richardson undoubtedly left union operatives scratching their heads when he ended his speech to the SEIU exclaiming “Thank you AFSCME!”

Wouldn’t you want to know if union officials illegally obtained your personal information?

That is the question raised in a motion filed today by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys in Philadelphia, PA. And the answer is not only would you want to know, but employees who have had their personal information illegally collected by union organizers have a right to know.

The legal filing is the latest in the ugly saga of UNITE union officials’ efforts to force employees into the union, like it or not. The motion was filed in a case brought by a group of Cintas employees against UNITE for having union organizers cruise parking lots collecting license plate numbers and then unlawfully using the plate numbers to access DMV information about employees that had been targeted for unionization.

Having found that union officials did illegally abuse the rights of over 1,500 Cintas employees by violating the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) of 1994, the judge has ordered that the union pay damages to employees.

But also revealed in the case is that all total, union officials conducted more than 13,700 DMV searches, meaning that more than 12,000 workers still don’t know that their rights have been violated, and that union organizers unlawfully obtained personal records for the purpose of making “house calls” on the employees. According to court records, these records were illegally accessed in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.

And so far these employees are still in the dark about the violations, despite the fact that the union may owe them millions for the violations of their privacy.

And these home visits that resulted from the information were anything but gentle. Organizers used the information to gain access into employees’ homes where they would then agitate the employee into signing a union card. And as a former union organizer for UNITE during the Cintas campaign recently testified to Congress, signing a card has nothing to do with support of the union:

Frankly, it isn’t difficult to agitate someone in a short period of time, work them up to the point where they are feeling very upset, tell them that I have the solution, and that if they simply sign a card, the union will solve all of their problems. I know many workers who later, upon reflection, knew that they had been manipulated and asked for their card to be returned to them. The union’s strategy, of course, was never to return or destroy such cards, but to include them in the official count towards the majority.

And according to the testimony, when not harassing workers at their homes the UNITE organizers were busy trying to agitate workers in other ways, such as getting them fired:

Ernest Bennett, the Director of Organizing for UNITE at the time, told a room full of organizers during a training meeting for the Cintas campaign that if three workers weren’t fired by the end of the first week of organizing, UNITE would not win the campaign.

With such tactics there is no doubt that the employees targeted by UNITE are owed an apology. And while they might never get that, they should at least be told that union organizers broke the law to violate their privacy.

Today’s Birmingham News has an excellent article exposing union officials’ hypocrisy when it comes to “threats” against employees.

In Birmingham, United Auto Workers (UAW) union organizer and Honda employee Sheila Boyd recently complained to local media outlets that a letter sent by Honda executives "is trying to threaten us" and claimed that the letter is "just an intimidation tactic.”

So what does the “intimidating” letter say?

The letter, which the Birmingham paper quotes from extensively, merely points out that Honda has never had to layoff a worker in 30 years, something its competitors in compulsory unionism states can’t say.

Simply pointing out how laughable it is to call that letter “intimidation,” would be enough if union propagandists weren’t using such baseless claims as “evidence” that Congress should pass a law mandating coercive “card check” organizing drives. These types of unsubstantiated claims by union organizers were the exact basis for a 2005 study created for the union-funded and –financed lobbying group, “American Rights at Work."

But more to the point is the hypocrisy of union officials to complain about threats and intimidation, when every day they threaten millions of workers with termination, if they refuse to pay forced union dues (like 16 year old Danielle Cookson).

And the UAW has a particularly dubious history when it comes to actual threats and intimidation against employees:

• Responding to actual threats, the National Right to Work Foundation hired round-the-clock private security guards for Thomas Built Bus employee Jeff Ward who was targeted for opposing the UAW’s unionization tactics at his facility.
• At a Freightliner facility in Gaffney South Carolina UAW militants threatened employee Mike Ivey that “things are gonna get ugly” if he didn’t stop opposing UAW organizers.
• In another case the UAW was forced to settle a lawsuit filed against it for its role in a violence campaign against workers at a Virginia plant who refused to walk off the job during a union-ordered strike. A lawsuit in that case charged several union militants with civil conspiracy and other counts for making death threats, shooting out windows, sending obscene mail, acts of stalking, theft of property, and harassing workers on the job to coerce them into quitting their jobs. And in a particularly vivid image of UAW intimidation, 55-year old Sucheng Huang was greeted early one morning with a bloody severed cows head on the hood of her car.

So it turns out that UAW officials have no problem using intimidation and threats against employees. They just don’t like those employees being given any information that “threatens” the union’s ability to force workers into union ranks.

UAW union bosses are currently threatening to order autoworkers at General Motors plants across the country off the job at 11 am. As per usual when union officials order strikes, expect threats and/or violence against employees who wish to continue working to support their families.

But for all the media attention this strike will receive, one under-reported fact is that high on the list of UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger and the other top union officials’ list of demands is the ability to force nonunion employees into their forced unionism ranks.

The Youngstown, Ohio Vindicator reported in late August that the ability to forcibly organize nonunion employees is a sticking point in negotiations all around the country:

In the current talks, Automotive News reported that UAW officials in Detroit are allowing GM assembly plants in Spring Hill, Tenn., and Lansing, Mich., to negotiate two-tier wage systems. Nonproduction workers would be paid roughly half as much as production workers.

In return, the UAW would organize nonunion suppliers that handle parts sequencing, building maintenance and nonproduction tasks, the trade publication said.

Union sources reported that UAW officials around the country are considering such arrangements.

[emphasis added]

That negotiating demand was echoed again in a September 14th Detroit News editorial that noted “the UAW is still holding to the position that it must have veto power over plant closings and contracts issued to nonunion suppliers in exchange for the other concessions.”

So what do rank-and-file workers think of the fact that union officials are willing to make “concessions” just for the ability to swell their forced dues-paying ranks' Sadly, many are probably unaware of the union officials’ self-serving demands.

But if they did know, their reaction might be like the one Mike Ivey had when he found out that UAW union officials were holding up a promised pay raise in an effort to force him and his coworkers into the UAW union.

Some analysts are suggesting that the when UAW union bosses ordered the strike against GM on Monday it was so that the union officials could look tough for the rank-and-file workers, as opposed to being a negotiating tactic with GM.

Goldman Sachs Analyst Robert Barry, expressed this view in a research note on GM prepared in response to the strike:

In our view, the action is designed to allow UAW leaders to look vigilant in fighting to preserve benefits, members to feel concessions are not being given gratuitously, and GM management to appear to be maximizing shareholder value…

If experts like Barry are correct (and he did correctly predict a short strike) that means that once again, union officials were placing their own well-being and power above what is best for the employees they claim to “represent.”

While the majority’s decision in yesterday’s Dana/Metaldyne National Labor Relations Board case was a meaningful step forward for employees who have been forced into a union through the abusive “card check” process, the two-member dissent by Democrat NLRB members Liebman and Walsh should terrify anyone who thinks that the choice to unionize should be one solely made by employees.

In their dissent they write: “An employer has little incentive to recognize a union voluntarily if it knows that its decision is subject to second-guessing through a decertification petition.”

That single sentence reveals at least three biases against employee free choice held by Liebman, Walsh and the union officials who support them:

• First, it implies that employers should have an “incentive” to push employees into unions through card check.

• Second, it implies that employers (cooperating with union organizers) should be able to make a “decision” on when and how employees join a union.

• And third, it assumes that once an employer and union decide that workers should be unionized, the very employees whose rights are at stake should not even be able to weigh in on that “decision” through a secret-ballot decertification election. (Liebman and Walsh call this “second-guessing” but since many employees sign cards because they are misled or pressured by union organizers, really this is often the first chance employees have to freely express their view on unionization.)

Currently in Congress, Big Labor politicians are pushing a bill that would strip thousands of police, firefighters and other public-safety employees of their right to negotiate contracts with their local city and state governments for themselves. The bill would federally impose monopoly bargaining onto the state and local government employees, instead of the current system under which each city determines whether or not to impose monopoly bargaining.

But in addition to eliminating the public-safety officers’ right to negotiate for themselves, the bill also helps put these employees’ lives at greater risk, as evidenced by a recent incident in Boston where such monopoly bargaining is already law:

There are a lot of troubling questions regarding the reported autopsy results showing alcohol and cocaine in the blood of two Boston firefighters killed in August…

The results of the autopsies, which are not considered public documents, reportedly show that Cahill, a father of three, had a blood alcohol content of .27, more than three times the legal limit for driving.

Payne’s autopsy showed traces of cocaine in his blood, but it is unclear what the amounts were or how long before his death he ingested the drug.

Boston, like many other fire departments, does not have mandatory random drug testing because of collective bargaining agreements. That’s not to say that the tests would have found the men impaired, but the threat of testing would be a way to reduce the possibility.

[Emphasis added.]

After only three months without the ability to automatically deduct dues from workers’ paychecks, Transit Workers Union officials are in court asking that one of their many special privileges be restored. They lost the ability to automatically deduct dues after TWU bosses illegally ordered a strike in December 2005 that crippled New York City.

According TWU’s own newsletter, without the automatic dues deduction, less than half of the over 30,000 workers have paid their dues in full, including four union officials who have been prosecuted by the TWU International, for their failure to pay up. Demonstrating that when given the choice, rank-and-file employees (and even, apparently some union bosses) don’t find the union’s “services” valuable enough to warrant their hard earned money.