Following a two-month media circus at the University of Miami that included strikes, high-profile visits from national politicians and activists, and even a hunger strike, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials are now claiming victory. What\u2019s the victory\u00bb Workers will have less freedom to choose whether to unionize, of course! The union will now be allowed to use its weapon of choice\u2014the notoriously abusive procedure called \u201ccard check\u201d to sweep university janitors into union ranks. Under this scheme, rather than allowing employees to choose whether to unionize through the less-abusive election process run by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), union officials will now only have to collect the signatures of an agreed-upon number of employees before UNICCO, the employer, will recognize the union. Having been armed with employee\u2019s home addresses by UNICCO\u2014a standard concession in such card-check arrangements\u2014union organizers know it will be easy to coerce the signing of \u201cauthorization cards\u201d from harassed and browbeaten employees. Under card check, workers frequently report that union organizers lie to them about the cards\u2019 true purpose. Some are told that they are health-insurance enrollment forms, requests for a unionization election, or even tax forms. These lies, along with outright threats, bribes, and stalkings suffered by others have triggered a legal backlash by workers with help from the National Right to Work Foundation. Even the AFL-CIO knows that signed cards are not a true indicator of an employee\u2019s wishes. In fact, its own handbook for union organizers has noted that workers will often sign such cards just \u201cto get the union off their backs.\u201d And in a legal brief to the NLRB, AFL-CIO lawyers argued that end-running the traditional procedure creates an environment where employees are unfairly susceptible to \u201cgroup pressure.\u201d Furthermore, even though union organizers work for months to pressure employees to sign cards, revoking a previously signed card can be next to impossible. In 2000, an NLRB official told an employee who asked how to get back a card he had signed under false pretenses that union officials were not required to return it or rectify union organizers\u2019 misrepresentations. Not surprisingly, employees themselves oppose the card-check process. In a 2004 Zogby International poll, over three quarters of union members opposed the idea of mandating card check as the only legal unionization method, as Big Labor\u2019s allies in Congress have proposed. Yet for most union officials, this abusive and unpopular unionization procedure is their preferred method of bolstering their forced-dues revenue streams. In 2004, fully 80 percent of workers were unionized outside the traditional NLRB process. Summing up the SEIU union\u2019s new *modus operandi*, one SEIU local chief recently quipped to the Wall Street Journal that \u201cwe don\u2019t do elections\u201d\u2014a statement proved in Miami. After all, if the employees had actually wanted the representation of union officials, they could have petitioned the NLRB\u2014but they didn’t. So the union brass put on their charade\u2014parading a steady stream of union professionals, Washington-based activists, and Hollywood stars through their makeshift \u201cFreedom Village\u201d to pressure the University to put the screws on UNICCO to grant card check. The university officials wanted the circus to end before a flood of parents arrived for graduation, so they pressured UNICCO to cave to the union bosses\u2019 demands. In exchange, union officials dropped their PR campaign and trumped-up legal complaints. This shakedown of employers to agree to card check is the wave of the future because union officials know that workers won\u2019t vote for unions like they used to. SEIU chief Andrew Stern pulled the SEIU out of the AFL-CIO because he believed that the union conglomerate was not doing enough to pursue these tactics. And even before his \u201cvictory\u201d at the University of Miami, dozens of other card-check pushes were targeting workers around the country. Hopefully, the next time union officials and employee freedoms face off, workers will actually come out on top. *This article originally appeared in the National Review Online.*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following a two-month media circus at the University of Miami that included strikes, high-profile visits from national politicians and activists, and even a hunger strike, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials are now claiming victory. What\u2019s the victory\u00bb Workers will have less freedom to choose whether to unionize, of course! The union will now be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1646","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n