As the National Institute for Labor Relations Research documents, every year there are hundreds of incidents of union violence, and countless more go unreported. However, since only a tiny percentage of them end up in arrests or convictions, people often have trouble grasping the scope of the problem.

This video (about a campaign of union violence and intimidation surrounding a strike in Westminster, VA) demonstrates how emotionally damaging such intimidation is to rank-and-file workers who refuse to toe the union line. The retaliation in this case took the form of Godfather-esque bullying. If only union violence was Hollywood fiction.

In a paper union officials will undoubtedly ignore, Michael Oswalt, a graduate of the AFL-CIO’s “Law Student Union Summer” program, observed an obvious truth: unions in Right to Work states are more accountable to their members because they have to be.

Citing AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gomper’s own opposition of forced unionism, Oswalt writes that “simple logic” shows that when forced dues are eliminated union officials must be more accountable to the concerns of individual members:

Indeed, simple logic suggests that when dues are guaranteed, attentive member servicing may not be, cultivating a frustrated and apathetic rank and file. The right-to-work environment, alternatively, stands in sharp relief. Where dues are linked to member satisfaction, leadership’s responsiveness embodies a special urgency…

In other words, if Oswalt’s former bosses at the AFL-CIO were really concerned with what is best for rank-and-file workers, they would support a National Right to Work Act.

Yesterday, John told us how employee John McHenry was told that to get out of the Teamsters-controlled pension plan he would have to “quit, be fired or die.”

An article in yesterday’s New York Post demonstrates why McHenry was wise to opt out of the union pension plan. In addition to being massively under-funded (only 3.2% of multi-employer union pension plans have enough assets to pay the promised benefits), it seems that NEA union officials have taken to getting kickbacks for endorsing under-performing, high-fee investment plans to teachers:

Not including management fees, the NEA's only officially endorsed "retirement program" - the Security Benefit Life Insurance Corporation's Valuebuilder annuity - charges 0.9 percent to 2.6 percent a year. Throw in management fees, and the least expensive option costs a teacher 1.73 percent of her account balances each year, while the most expensive costs 4.85 percent.

Over time, a fee that large is devastating. Without inflation, the educator would have to earn nearly 5 percent each year simply not to lose money. Consider a teacher who socks away $500 a month and earns an average yearly return of 10 percent for 35 years: She'd wind up with $1,788,760 upon retirement - quite a sizeable nest egg. But if she were paying 4.85 percent in fees, she'd accumulate less than one-third as much - just $587,854.

It appears that the NEA is willing to endorse a shoddy plan in exchange for a contribution to its coffers. In 2004, the union collected nearly $50 million from the investment vehicles it endorsed.

When union officials order a strike there is one word they use over and over to intimidate and harass: Scab

Case in point is the recent Writers Guild Union strike, and the recent decision of Carson Daly’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” show to continue production. Union officials immediately denounced the show for hiring “scabs,” but in reality their threat isn’t against the show so much as it is against rank-and-file writers.

The writers, like all employees who have been ordered out on strike by union bosses, have the legal right to return to work as explained here. However, in an effort to intimidate workers into toeing the union line, once again union officials are using the s-word as a slur to intimidate employees from exercising their legal rights.

In March, at the urging of the National Right to Work Foundation, the U.S. Supreme Court took up Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association. Now the Foundation has jointly filed an amicus curiae brief (pdf) in the case.

The High Court is reviewing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that says that Idaho's state law banning payroll deductions for union political expenditures (narrowly defined) can not apply to payroll deductions at the local government level. 

As the Foundation's brief explains, the Ninth Circuit's ruling wrongly forces Idaho taxpayers to subsidize union political activities by offering valuable payroll deduction services to union officials.

When the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would take the case, Foundation vice president Stefan Gleason noted "like state governments, local governments should not act as bagmen for union political funds."

And even more alarmingly should the Supreme Cout fail to overturn the Ninth Circuit's ruling, it will open the door for union lawyers to misuse the court's reasoning to launch fresh new attacks on state Right to Work laws as applied to local government bodies.

The Foundation's joined with the Utah Taxpayers Association, the Sutherland Institute, and the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Center in filing the brief.

U.S. Supreme Court to Review Idaho’s Ban on Payroll Deductions for Union Electioneering

High Court may secure right of states to prohibit at all governmental levels the practice of union payroll deductions for union electioneering

Washington, DC (March 31, 2008) – Today the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari and agreed to hear the case of Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association, thus agreeing to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that limited the applicability of an Idaho state law banning payroll deductions for union Political Action Committees (PACs).

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Sutherland Institute, and Utah Taxpayers Association filed a joint amicus (“friend of the court”) brief urging the Supreme Court to take up the appeal filed by the Attorney General for the State of Idaho.

The lower U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling argued that the payroll deduction ban should only apply to union payroll deductions at the state government level, and that local government bodies were independent political entities outside of the reach the state law.

But the joint amici brief pointed out that a ruling by the Ninth Circuit wrongly forces Idaho taxpayers to subsidize union political activities by offering valuable payroll deduction services to union officials.

Even more alarmingly, union lawyers could try to use the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning to launch fresh new attacks on state Right to Work laws as applied to local government bodies. The joint amici brief emphasized that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that unions have no constitutional right to collect union dues from non-union members, much less use payroll deduction privileges to do so.

In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case, National Right to Work Vice President Stefan Gleason made the following remarks:

“We applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to revisit the activist ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Just like state governments, local governments should not act as bagmen for union political funds.

“Stripping union officials of their payroll deduction privileges is good public policy. In fact, the State of Idaho should have gone much further than it did – by banning outright the use of public facilities to collect any union funds whatsoever.”

Carl Horowitz has an article up today at National Review Online about the SEIU union and its top boss, Andy Stern. The article plays up the supposed split in organized labor between the so-called “Change to Win” coalition (led by Stern’s SEIU) and the AFL-CIO over whether to emphasize politics and lobbying or more aggressive organizing through the abusive card check scheme.

Horowitz’s article deals mostly with the SEIU’s immigration policies, but the most important thing to take away is that both “Change to Win” and the AFL-CIO really have only one goal: sweeping more workers into their forced dues-paying ranks, and using card check to do it.

This is illustrated clearly by Horowitz who describes a secret sweetheart deal the SEIU struck to get employer assistance in forcing workers into union ranks:

In a secret 2003 agreement with California nursing-home chains — according to Bay Area alternative newspaper SF Weekly — the SEIU committed to: discouraging patients and their families from suing for negligence; and supporting a four-year, $2 billion increase in MediCal subsidies to nursing homes. In return for supporting these industry-backed measures, the union retained the right to organize other nursing homes.

In other words, whether pushing for the card check bill in Congress, or joining industry lobbying efforts in exchange for handing sweeping access to employees, the end is always the same: more forced dues dollars in the pockets of union bosses.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats held hearings and called on Members of the National Labor Relations Board to speak about their views of the NLRB.

Member Wilma Liebman, one of the most fiercely pro-compulsory unionism members ever to sit on the National Labor Relations Board, testified about what she described as “a loss of confidence in the board and its processes.”

To understand what she means by that, watch the following video clip of her testifying about the NLRB back in December before a House committee. Not long after the four minute mark of the video, Liebman bemoans the fact that, according to her, the currently NLRB seems too preoccupied with “freedom of choice”:

“The Board has said for the first time that freedom of choice – which is to say the freedom to reject unionization – prevails in the statutory scheme over promoting collective bargaining.”

So there you have it: Big Labor’s real problem with recent NLRB decisions is that the Board is protecting freedom of choice too strongly, thus allowing workers to reject unionization.