The May/June 2008 Foundation Action newsletter is now available for download!

In this issue:

• Foundation Helps Volvo Workers Targeted by Union Terror
• Foundation Fights Labor Board's Erosion of Worker Rights
• Big Labor Dumps Hundreds of Millions into 2008 Elections
• The Wall Street Journal: The Union Agenda
• High Court to Review Union PAC Deductions
• 28,000 Employees May Claim $3 Million in Forced Dues
• Remembering Charlton Heston: Legendary Actor and Right to Work Champion

Download the May/June 2008 Foundation Action in PDF form today.

You can sign up for a free subscription to Foundation Action here.

An article in The New Republic points to the tens of millions of dollars being spent by union officials on politics and specifically focuses on the massive involvement by the so-called "Change to Win" union coalition in politics.

The article calls Change to Win's decision to endorse Obama an "about-face," citing Change to Win's early declarations that it would not focus on politics but on organizing. Yet, Change to Win's emphasis on politics (led by SEIU top boss Andy Stern) really wasn't that hard to predict.

In fact, back in 2005 when Change to Win union bosses split from the AFL-CIO union hierarchy National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason had this to say:

This political posturing within ultra-elite union hierarchies amounts to nothing more than a shell game by power-hungry union officials bent on control over more than $10 billion in compulsory union dues. In the end, it doesn’t matter who is steering Big Labor’s ship as long as individual workers continue to be strapped to the mast.

Ultimately, it is not Change to Win's flip-flop on its rhetoric about that political spending that is the real hypocrisy, but the split itself...

Change to Win left the AFL-CIO because Change to Win union officials objected to how dues money was being spent and they didn't like the representation they were receiving from the AFL-CIO. Yet, everyday individual employees who object to how their dues are being spent and to the representation that they are getting from union bosses are told to just pay up or be fired.

For two weeks now, Freedom @ Work has covered the indictment of twelve union officials in Upstate New York for a laundry list of criminal activity that includes a stabbing and death threats. Nonunion employers and employees were targeted in an effort to push more workers into the union officials' forced dues-paying ranks.

A local paper even compared the acts depicted in the indictment to an episode of the HBO hit TV show The Sopranos.

The latest video added to the National Right to Work Foundation's YouTube video channel shows just how brutal these union officials' acts were by simply quoting word for word from the 62-page indictment.

As we've said before in this space, defending the rights of employees' not to be forced to pay dues to get or keep a job is the right thing to do no matter the economic ramifications. Fortunately though, there are economic benefits to protecting employees' Right to Work, as many studies by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research have found.

And a new paper released yesterday by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center, again confirms the Right to Work economic advantage:

In the key metrics of economic growth, Right to Work states have a distinct advantage when it comes to unemployment rates, income growth, population increases and jobs.

You can read the Mackinac paper in its entirety here. The paper also looks at the devastating economic impact that forced unionism has had on Michigan.

The Foundation's sister organization, the National Right to Work Committee, reports that it is increasingly gaining traction in efforts to pass a Right to Work law through the Michigan legislature.

The Rocky Mountain News recently published a misleading op-ed by union organizer James Hansen. The article contains a number of misleading claims, but the following passage’s description of a Right to Work law is so fundamentally wrong that it has to be addressed:

“A right-to-work [sic] law would allow the government to intervene in labor-management relations, undermining the freedom that employers and workers now have to negotiate the best agreement possible for both sides.”

Union officials in Colorado already have government granted power to force every employee - member or not - to pay union dues as a condition of keeping their job (or getting a job in the first place). No other organization or association is allowed to extort forced fees from individuals.

State Right to Work protections simply eliminate this extraordinary government intervention, which is the exact opposite Hansen’s claim.

Further, if Hansen was really concerned with government intervention into employer-employee relations, he would call for the repeal of government imposed monopoly bargaining (that allows union officials to forcibly represent every employee) or the numerous other special government-granted powers that unions have.

But contrary to Hansen’s assertion, union officials are not at all concerned about preventing government intervention into employee-employer relations, as they long ago rejected AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers' call for purely voluntary unionism. For the better part of the last 100 years, union bosses have built their empire on special government-granted powers, with forced dues as the most glaring example of the power.

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."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today opposing the federal imposition of monopoly bargaining on America's firefighters, police, and EMTs.

The article lists many compelling reasons to be against monopoly bargaining, but never fully lays out the case for opposition to this form of compulsory unionism as a fundamental issue of employees' individual rights.

The fact is freedom of association should preclude union bosses from being able to force employees to accept their so-called "representation," thereby stripping individuals of their freedom to contract. Even worse, union bosses force employees -- union members or not -- to pay money for the "privilege" of losing their right of self-representation.

Even convicted criminals have the right to choose their own representation. It's deplorable that Congress would try to force states to strip first responders of their freedoms.

Over at the LRC blog, a reader writes in to say how Grand Theft Auto 4, currently the best selling video game on the market, contains dialog that compares unions to the mafia. At one point the main character is told: "union's just another word for mafia."

Ultimately the pop culture video game comparison of union bosses to mafia dons is more than mere tongue-and-cheek.

As currently constituted, with their many compulsory unionism special privileges, some union officials run what could be compared to a classic mafia enterprise: the protection racket.

Wikipedia defines a protection racket as follows:

an extortion scheme whereby a powerful entity or individual coerces other less powerful entities or individuals to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase "protection" services against various external threats.

In the case of unions, union bosses frequently paint employers to be exploitive and then demand that workers pay money in exchange for "representation." At the same time, in forced-dues states, employees are threatened with the loss of their job if they refuse to pay for the so-called "representation," whether or not the employees want it.

And for another example of how compulsory unionism leads to union officials' involvement in organized crime, watch this video: