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.

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 Washington Post has an interesting article up on internal divisions within the Washington, DC teacher union. The corrupt union has been in a state of turmoil since former top boss Barbara Bullock was caught embezzling millions of dollars from union funds.

From 1995 to 2002, Bullock ripped off teachers’ forced dues to go on massive shopping sprees at Saks, Nieman Marcus, and Tiffany’s. Unsurprisingly, Bullock funded her excessive spending by jacking up mandatory union dues.

However, getting rid of Bullock hasn’t solved rank-and-file teachers’ problems. Teachers, parents, and administrators are dissastified with the system, and teacher union officials are resisting any change that may result in fewer teachers in their forced dues-paying ranks.

"Reformers" are calling for more oversight and transparency, but true reform can only occur if rank-and-file teachers are given a choice to keep their hard-earned money. Only the elimination of forced dues will make it possible to hold union officials accountable.

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.

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.

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.

A recent ruling by a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative law judge upheld the right of employees to sign a union decertification petition in the midst of a debilitating strike. More importantly, the ruling also endorsed the employer’s refusal to hand over non-striking workers’ home addresses and other personal information to union officials bent on harassment and intimidation.

On the advice of Foundation staff attorneys, a substantial majority (77 percent) of non-striking employees at a Tenneco facility in Grass Lakes, Michigan signed a petition in favor of union decertification. Unwilling to relinquish their stranglehold on workplace representation, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 660 officials filed a complaint with the NLRB, arguing that non-striking employees favored decertification only because of Tenneco’s unfair labor practices. The NLRB judge rejected these claims and concluded that the UAW’s objections to the decertification process were entirely without merit.

More significant, however, was the stern rebuke delivered to UAW officials for demanding Tenneco hand over the non-striking workers’ personal contact information, including home addresses. Union officials claimed they needed the employees’ home addresses to "communicate" the benefits of membership directly, but the judge decided that the threat of union intimidation justified Tenneco’s decision to withold personal information from UAW militants.

The judge noted that the union’s rationale for acquiring the employees’ home addresses was suspect, as " . . . the Union had other viable means of communicating with the replacements short of having access to their homes." He also recognized that union operatives had exhibited a pattern of harassment, having previously " . . . traveled to the personal residence of two members, whose address they certainly had access to, and staged a protest of their stance on the strike." The judge further noted the UAW’s "venomous" and "disrespectful" attitude towards non-striking workers. So much for fair representation.

Full text of the NLRB ruling is available here. It’s a long decision, but you’ll find the judge’s response to union demands for employees’ personal information on pages 62-65. His assesment of the decertification petition’s legality is available on pages 74-79.

Strike-related violence is an under-reported aspect of compulsory unionization, and the UAW has a long history of harassment and abuse. In fact, Freedom@Work recently exposed a similar campaign of intimidation against non-striking workers at a Volvo auto plant in Pulaski County, Virginia.

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.

A Foundation Action subscriber recently brought this developing story to our attention. Reports of union-related violence and intimidation have surfaced in Bakersfield, California, where members of the local United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners are accused of physically abusing a project manager at a local construction site. Police have responded to reports of union-related violence by opening an investigation into the incident.

Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. intends to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board charging the union with physical violence, coercive behavior, and invasion of a job site. The organization represents non-union contractors nationwide.

This incident is only the most recent example of union members threatening non-striking co-workers with violence and intimidation. In case you missed it, Freedom@Work has been covering a campaign of union-instigated harassment at a Volvo auto plant in Pulaski County, Virginia. Data compiled by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research suggests that these confrontations are symptomatic of a wider problem, as union violence is often under-reported and difficult to prosecute.

As global food prices continue to skyrocket, regulations that entrench union special privileges are delaying critical food shipments from reaching their intended destinations. According to the Center for Global Development and The Los Angeles Times, union-imposed labor requirements have slowed food shipments because aid agencies are forced to rely on U.S.-flagged ships for transportation:

The Center for Global Development also estimates that these regulations increase the cost of foreign assistance by up to 30%, eroding the benefits of aid through massive overhead costs. Union officials support this wasteful policy because it forces ports to rely on a heavily unionized workforce that generates millions of dollars in dues payments each year.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Union-boss-inspired maritime regulations have plagued the delivery of foreign aid consignments for over a decade. With food prices soaring throughout the Third World, however, now is an ideal time to jettison these obstructionist compulsory unionism privileges.