23 May 2008

What’s With This Love Affair Academics and Journalists Are Having With SEIU’s Andrew Stern?

Posted in Blog

A writer for the Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece up on Andy Stern, president of the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Stern has been a driving force behind the SEIU’s expansion since the mid-80s, and the article plugs his organizational success. What the article fails to do, like so many others, is grapple with the controversies and anti-employee freedom bent that has colored Stern’s tenure.

Consider the following passage:

"Stern’s ambition is to transform and revive American unionism. In 2005, he led several big unions, including the SEIU, the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers, out of the AFL-CIO. In their new coalition, known as Change to Win, Stern pushed each of the unions to devote a qualitatively large proportion of their resources to organizing, even if it meant reducing the number of staff who ‘serviced existing members.’ He insisted that unless unions such as the SEIU achieved a far higher degree of "density" in specific industries, such as healthcare, they wouldn’t be strong enough to raise wages and working conditions for everyone."

Although the article does highlight the considerable internal dissent provoked by Stern’s "growth at any cost" policies, the author glosses over the ugly truth behind the SEIU’s recent expansion. Stern’s strategy has been so successful in part because it emphasizes coercive, top-down union organizing drives, card-check campaigns that disenfranchise employees, and vicious corporate PR broadsides that blackmail businesses into collaborating with SEIU organizers.

Given Stern’s ambitious national strategy to build a larger political machine, it’s no surprise that workers increasingly question the union hierarchy’s desire to pursue the interests of workers.

20 May 2008

Chicago Tribune: Members Question Backroom Union Deals

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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.

19 May 2008

Right to Work Win Forbids Union Bosses from Using Another Enron-Like Accounting Trick to Jack Up Forced Dues

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The Daily Labor Report (subscription only) recently reported on an important win for National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys in the 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Court:

Upholding the National Labor Relations Board’s January 2006 decision against Studio Transportation Drivers Local 399 of the Teamsters, the appeals court found that the union, which used the arbitration awards for nonrepresentational purposes such as political and charitable contributions, should exclude the money from its calculation of agency fees rather than use it to reduce its reported nonrepresentational expenses.

By spending the arbitration award money on nonrepresentational rather than representational expenditures, the union in effect increased the agency fees owed by the objecting nonmember for representational expenses, Judge Harry Pregerson wrote for the appeals court.

The win is important because it prohibits cooking the books to overcharge nonmembers who are forced to pay dues to union officials as condition of employment.

It is now even more clearly illegal for union officials to funnel revenue from sources other than union dues to pay for "non-chargeable" items – like politics, lobbying and members-only activities.   Using this scheme, union officials try to get away with charging a higher percentage of the remaining activities to forced-dues-payers.

You can be certain that as long as union officials can force employees to pay dues they will continue to develop schemes to maximize the amount of the dues they extract from unwilling workers.  Thanks to National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, at least this particular method of union discrimination is clearly illegal.

16 May 2008

Annals of Union Corruption, Vol. XXXVIII . . .

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A recent U.S Court of Appeals ruling found several National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union officials guilty of violating the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The decision resolved a 1994 suit brought by David Noble, a postal worker who alleged union officials — including a former NALC president — funneled workers’ dues into unmonitored expense accounts.

Judge Williams’ concurrence features some particularly choice tidbits on the NALC’s corrupt practices:

"Placing union money in the officers’ hands, solely on those same officers’ bland assurances that it will be used for union business, completely subverts the [NALC constitution] clause’s obvious goal of preserving accountability."

He also chides his two colleagues on the panel for refusing to punish union officials for excessive "per diem" expenditures:

At every biennial convention after 1964, a small group of unnamed delegates received a “per diem” payment calculated on the basis of certain estimated expenses: lost wages, hotel rooms, and meals and incidentals. Noble argued in the district court that the presidentially appointed Committee on Mileage and Per Diem asked each post-1964 convention to approve these payments without informing the delegates of two facts: (1) that the union’s officers were among those receiving per diem payments, even though they continued to earn their salaries and thus had no “lost time” (unlike rank-and-file mail carriers); and (2) that the union had already paid (in full or part) for most officers’ hotel rooms, transferring the union’s hotel discount to the officers’ benefit. Thus, the members were unaware of these costs’ peculiarities — peculiarities that might well have been material to their decision.

[Emphasis added]

Full text of the decision can be found here (pdf). More Freedom@Work posts on union corruption available here, here, and here.

While the ruling is welcomed, the fact remains that regulatory oversight of unions — rather than simply stripping union bosses of the government-granted special privileges that facilitate the corruption — results in little more than make-work for federal bureaucrats.

 

15 May 2008

Solicitor General Paul Clement Resigns; But Not Soon Enough

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Solicitor General Paul Clement resigned yesterday after seven years with the Bush Administration. As reported by Tony Mauro on the Legal Times blog, Right to Work advocates are thrilled to see him go:

"Paul Clement did not leave soon enough," said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in a statement. "He kicked the cause of employee freedom from compulsory unionism in the teeth once again before heading out the door."

Clement’s latest offense against the right-to-work movement was a brief he filed with the Supreme Court May 12 in Locke v. Karass, which the Court will consider next term. The foundation is supporting 20 Maine state employees who object to their compulsory agency fees being used to fund nationwide union litigation far removed from the workers’ local bargaining concerns. Clement’s brief says it is constitutional for fees to be used in at least some kinds of pooling arrangements with other unions for litigation, though it suggests limits on the use. His brief can be found here.

The standard Clement uses is not good enough, says Gleason, who asks on his blog "Is Bush’s Top Lawyer Taking Orders from Big Labor?" He says Clement has been soft on unions in past right-to-work cases as well.

No word yet on the reason for Clement’s departure. But it was none too soon for rank-and-file workers under Big Labor’s thumb. Clement joins the ranks of other ex-Bush administration officials — such as DOL’s former General Counsel Andrew Siff — who used their positions to deliver goodies to the union bosses.

14 May 2008

The May/June Issue of Foundation Action is Online and Available for Download

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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.

 

13 May 2008

Is Bush’s Top Lawyer Taking Orders from Big Labor?

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U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, the Bush administration’s top lawyer, has just inflicted more damage on America’s working men and women laboring under compulsory unionism. Does President Bush even know what his administration’s lawyer is doing?

This week, the too-clever-by-half lawyer filed a brief in the National Right to Work Foundation’s latest pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Locke v. Karass, and has taken a position that surely must please the union bosses. The High Court in Locke will examine the criteria for determining how much non-union members must pay to a union where they do not enjoy the fundamental protection of a Right to Work law.

Foundation attorneys argue that the U.S. Constitution does not permit the forced extraction of dues or fees for any expenses not directly tied to representational activity in the employees’ actual bargaining unit.

But Mr. Clement apparently has no issue with forcing Maine state workers to pay for union activism anywhere in the world, so long as the union satisfies a vague and weak two-part test. In practical terms, Clement’s standard would further empower union bosses to charge workers for almost anything under the sun, unless a worker gets a lawyer and forces them to prove that the forced fees are being used for narrowly prescribed purposes.

This is not the first time that U.S. Solicitor General Clement has taken positions supportive of compulsory unionism. He adopted the AFL-CIO’s position and seriously undermined employee freedom during oral argument in the Foundation’s Davenport v. WEA case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

With "friends" like Bush’s Solicitor General, who needs enemies?

12 May 2008

‘Union’s Just Another Word for Mafia’

Posted in Blog

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:

12 May 2008

Wall Street Journal Exposes Union Power Grab Over America’s First Responders

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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.

9 May 2008

CWA Union Alert: May is the Window To Have Your Forced Dues Reduced

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The month of May marks the annual ‘window period’ for employees to obtain a reduction in mandatory dues payments from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union.

The Foundation has had success challenging these window period schemes designed to trap workers into the union’s forced dues-paying ranks, but if you’re a CWA-covered employee in a non-Right to Work state who wants to opt-out of dues spent on activities unrelated to collective bargaining it is still recommended that you file your objection this month. (If you are under a Right to Work law you cannot be compelled to pay any dues whatsoever.)

For information on the forced-dues objection process, read this letter by Foundation Legal Director Ray LaJeunesse (pdf). The document includes a sample objection letter for CWA employees to send in to the agency fee administrator.