The July/August 2008 Foundation Action newsletter is now available for download!

In this issue:

• Administration Lawyer Undercuts Another Foundation Case, Abruptly Resigns
• Foundation Pushes to Close Union Disclosure Loopholes
• Union Boss Monopoly Bargaining Rears Ugly Head
• Foundation Victory Reveals Widespread Use of Card-Check
• Foundation Attorneys Expose Shady Union Accounting Scheme
• Planned Giving Strategies Pay Off Now and Later

Download the July/August 2008 Foundation Action in PDF form today. You can sign up for a free subscription to Foundation Action here.

Via the Education Sector’s blog, the Washington Post has an excellent article up on DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s proposal to create a two-tier pay system to allow administrators to reward teacher excellence in the capital’s hidebound public schools.

Rhee’s reforms would permit teachers to forgo tenure in favor of higher pay scales based on student achievement, or choose better job security at lower rates of compensation. Predictably, union bosses are fighting the reform tooth-and-nail because it weakens their education stranglehold:

"It’s degrading and insulting," said Brocks, to ask that teachers give up tenure and go on probation for a year if they choose the more lucrative of the two salary tiers under the plan, which is at the center of contract negotiations between the city and the Washington Teachers’ Union. He said that Rhee wants only to purge older teachers and that for instructors to sell out hard-won protections against arbitrary or unfair dismissal is unthinkable. "For Michelle Rhee or anyone to ask that is like Judas and 30 pieces of silver," Brocks, 59, said.

Apparently it’s "degrading and insulting" to demand accountability from a school system that has been wracked by massive corruption scandals and boasts some of the lowest test scores in the country, even when all that the proposal does is allow individual teachers to have one single choice about the terms of their employment. Here’s the Government Accountability Office’s 2008 report (.pdf) on DC public schools (emphasis mine):

The system serves about 50,000 students and operates 144 schools.1 In fiscal year 2007, its operating budget exceeded $1 billion and the federal government provided funds for about 13 percent of that amount. Long-standing problems with student academic performance, the condition of school facilities, and the overall management of the D.C. school system have been well documented over the last several decades. In particular, the academic challenges facing the District are enormous. In 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all tested urban public school systems on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

I particularly enjoyed reading the Education Sector’s response to union intransigence (emphasis mine):

There’s a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can’t be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn’t be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make: more accountability and less security in exchange for more recognition and compensation.

. . .

So on the one hand you’ve got an uber-responsive chancellor who reformed the bureaucracy to better support teachers and wants to give them the option to voluntarily enter a system that would pay them a whole lot more money. On the other hand, a union that can’t return emails and is notable chiefly for a history of theft and venality so outrageous that it’s memorable even by the highly attentuated moral standards of DC municipal government.

Ultimately, this boils down to one thing: union boss control over teachers and their paychecks. If DC teachers are permitted to make their own decisions about their terms of employment, even more DC teachers may discover how unfair it is that they are forced to pay dues to union bosses for "representation" they may not they need or want.

Today, the Foundation issued a news release announcing parallel federal lawsuits concerning illegal forced dues:

With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, three UPS employees in Kentucky and two UPS employees in Ohio filed federal lawsuits Friday and Monday, respectively, against national and local Teamsters officials for illegal extraction of forced union dues.

In the lawsuits, the nonmember employees claim that the national and local unions breached their duty of fair representation and violated the employees’ First and Fifth Amendment rights by charging and collecting fees used for organizing nonunion workers throughout the United States and financing a members-only “Strike and Defense Fund.”

Read the rest of the Foundation’s news release here.

Erin McKee, top boss of the Charleston Labor Council, has written a mind-numbingly ignorant (or intentionally misleading) response to an op-ed which outlines the mass rewriting of federal labor law Big Labor is hoping for after the 2008 election. Several of Boss McKee’s assertions are just downright factually incorrect.

Lie #1:

Mr. Factor points out that [Big] labor’s agenda is to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed, which is true. If a majority of employees have signed cards saying they want a union, it doesn’t end there. They would then be allowed to have a fair election process and not be lied to, harassed and fired.

But as has been pointed out elsewhere, the text of the misnamed EFCA reveals that once union organizers present the signed cards of even the smallest majority of workers in a unit, the National Labor Relations Board "shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative." In other words, card check does effectively eliminate the secret ballot from union certification drives. The less-abusive current election process would be replaced by one-on-one harassment from union goons.

Lie #2:

In a right to work state such as South Carolina, the union is forced to represent everyone in the bargaining unit. This means that everyone benefits, not just those who choose to pay the union dues for the benefits they receive. (If you think this is fair, let’s try running our government this way and see what happens.)

Right to Work laws merely ensure that workers cannot be forced to pay tribute to an unwanted union. Unfortunately, even non members are forced to accept the union’s so-called representation, even when it works against them. It’s illegal for workers to bargain with their employer on their own merits.

Further, federal law doesn’t require that unions represent non-members, they seek and obtain monopoly bargaining status. Plus, as I have previously explained, if union bosses were serious about eliminating the so-called "free rider" problem, they would oppose federal and state monopoly bargaining statutes. They don’t. They want them.

Lie #3:

Mr. Factor also seems to have a problem with the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act. He states that public-safety employees would no longer be permitted to bargain individually and could be forced to accept a union’s representation. Do local governments have the manpower to negotiate a bargaining agreement with each employee individually, or would it be more effective if management worked with employees to come up with a wage and benefits package?

Yes, they do actually. Municipalities all over the country do it. (For a good summary of the more-aptly titled Police & Fire Monopoly Bargaining Act, check out this month’s Labor Watch article by Stan Greer of the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.)

Boss McKee’s language in this passage is particularly revealing of Big Labor’s patronizing attitude toward workers. Instead of each employee negotiating with the employer, union cheifs like McKee claim to want "management [to work] with employees to come up with a wage and benefits package." But what exactly is the difference? How is that not what is occurring when individual employees have the opportunity to negotiate directly with the employer? Why should a majority of the employee’s co-workers get to pick the employee’s representation? Even criminal defendants get to pick their own representation!

Foundation attorneys have filed an unprecedented lawsuit in North Carolina state court on behalf of 16 AT&T employees against local union bosses who illegally released their confidential personal information (including their social security numbers) as retaliation for exercising their right to refrain from union membership. Two of the workers explain their battle in the latest Right to Work video report…

For more background information on the case, the Foundation’s press release is available online here. The Burlington Times-News‘ coverage of the lawsuit is available online here.

Be sure to subscribe to the Foundation’s YouTube Channel for more Right to Work video reports.

In what has become an annual (or rather semi-annual) tradition, the increasingly discredited American Bar Association (ABA) is once again pointedly excluding the viewpoints of individual employees who don’t want a union in their workplace.

The intellectually dishonest organization is holding its second annual Labor and Employment Law Continuing Legal Education Conference in Denver this September. The cover of the event brochure (pdf) trumpets a panel titled "Hot Topic: Neutrality Agreements, Card Checks, and Voluntary Recognition After Dana."

The core case at issue, Dana/Metaldyne, was brought and won by National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, and most of the law in this area is the result of Foundation litigation. Yet, the roster of attorneys on the panel again consists entirely of union, company, and government lawyers.

Foundation VP Stefan Gleason wrote the following about the anti-individual worker bias of the ABA back in February, the last time Foundation attorneys were excluded from speaking about its many cases, and the criticism therein is only reinforced by this latest episode:

ABA political hacks have pointedly refused to allow the perspective of employees who may, God forbid, not want a union to dominate their workplace. Once again, a hot topic at the conference was the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s cases defending employees whose rights are abused during card check organizing drives.

And yet again, the ABA meeting planners refused to allow the perspective of workers or their Right to Work attorneys to be heard — instead selecting speakers representing Big Labor and a small faction of squishy, union-boss-friendly management lawyers. (Of course, the views of the speakers were rejected by the NLRB in its recent Dana/Metaldyne ruling, and the views of Foundation attorneys were embraced. Just a technicality, I guess.)

The ABA’s intellectual dishonesty continues to be an embarrassment to America’s legal profession.

Union boss hypocrisy is nothing new, but this recent case, filed by two nurses in Houston, Texas against the CNA union and Tenet Healthcare shows just how blatant that hypocrisy can be.

When the SEIU bosses got themselves a sweetheart deal to organize nurses from the top down with Catholic Healthcare Partners in Ohio, CNA/NNOC denounced the deal as an illegitimate sell out of workers’ rights to a free and fair election, and workers’ rights to choose or reject unionization with full information, and without coercion or discrimination:

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses association, condemned this [SEIU] agreement. She called it “a rigged scam” in which the service employees union would bargain only half-heartedly if it won the vote.

“This was a top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked union,” Ms. DeMoro said. “There was a gag order on everyone, and as a result this was a banana republic election.”

CNA/NNOC even went so far as to create anti-SEIU websites accusing that union of selling out workers while cutting secret sweetheart deals with management, in exchange for assistance organizing new workers from the top down.

This is the game that union bosses play nowadays: they increasingly fail in organizing workers the old fashioned way, since workers increasingly aren’t buying what the union bosses are selling. So, the union bosses try to organize companies, not workers, in what is known as “top down” organizing.

But all of this moaning and whining about SEIU’s secret “neutrality” deals has not stopped the CNA/NNOC brass from cutting their own secret sweetheart deals with companies. CNA/NNOC’s latest deal is a secret “neutrality” agreement with Tenet Healthcare, a nationwide hospital chain.

Under the agreement, Tenet is gagged from saying anything about the union, nurses’ personal information is handed to the union without their consent, and union agents get wide access to campaign inside the hospital facilities while anti-CNA nurses are barred from effectively providing an opposing view in their own workplaces. Perhaps worst of all, the NLRB is cut out from overseeing the process, which results in Potemkin Village “consent elections” in which the NLRB does nothing other than tally up “yes” votes and “no” votes and provide a veneer of legitimacy.

Sounds like a sweetheart deal to us: nurses handed over to the union with no real campaign about the effects of unionization, and no effective federal agency to oversee the process!

In fact, CNA chief DeMoro’s description of a "rigged scam," a "top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked union," and a "banana republic election" is a strikingly apt description of DeMoro’s own CNA union’s secret deal with Tenet.

Shameless…