Recently Politico reported on a new Big Labor tactic to help pass the latest union boss power grab, the woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (more accurately called the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill).  Politico acquired a revealing letter and accompanying survey sent by Teamsters Local 507 in Cleveland to Wall Street fund managers:

"Has your company made any public statements in support or opposition to EFCA?" asks one of nine pointed questions in a polite, detailed four-page questionnaire.

"If 'Yes,' please explain."

The cover letter, signed by the local's Secretary-Treasurer and President, makes the union's purpose even more clear:

As a trustee, I have an obligation to determine whether our fund's asset managers are engaged in partisan political activity that could adversely affect our fund, its participants, and beneficiaries.  I therefore request that you complete the enclosed Asset Manger [sic] Survey to disclose your firm's political spending and activity with regard to this important issue and return it to me with in the next couple of weeks.

Apparently they don't actually know what being a trustee of a pension fund entails.  They have a fiduciary duty to ensure the financial health of the union members' pension fund.  But here, these union bosses are putting politics, lobbying, and their desire to crush more workers under the thumb of forced unionism ahead of their fiduciary duty.

The Teamsters Local 507 union bosses -- likely as part of a wider strategy of the Change to Win union cartel -- want to know whether a company managing their pension funds has in any way opposed the job-killing, freedom-crushing Card Check Forced Unionism bill, by taking a public position, supporting certain politicians, or having any kind of relationship with various organizations, including the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which they list by name.

The National Right to Work Foundation is a charitable, nonprofit organization which provides free legal aid to the victims of compulsory unionism, including victims of card check intimidation.  Foundation attorneys are bracing for the cries for help from countless workers who will face ugly intimidation and violence if the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill becomes law, thereby making the less-abusive secret ballot election for union certification a dead letter.

Here's the latest from the Foundation's press room:

With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, a Los Angeles Times employee has filed unfair labor practice charges against newspaper and union officials for threatening him with an illegal lawsuit.

Over the past six months, union officials from the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (GCC/IBT) Local 140-N have repeatedly ordered Leon Carey, Jr. and similarly situated employees to join the union and pay full dues or face a lawsuit in California civil court, citing a clause in the union’s contract with the Los Angeles Times. Carey’s charges allege that these actions violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which prohibits union officials from restraining or coercing workers who refrain from formal, full dues-paying union membership.

Click here to read the whole thing. For more on the Foundation's frequent courtroom clashes with the notoriously-corrupt Teamster union, click here. 

The following is a statement from Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, regarding today's Washington Superior Court ruling in Anfinson v. FedEx Ground. The court ruled the plaintiffs are independent contractors and are not therefore "employees."

"This case is nothing more than a Trojan Horse -- a union organizing tactic brought by lawyers allied with UPS and organized labor. The real goal of this litigation is to force FedEx Ground independent contractors out of business and instead turn them into 'employees' for purposes of forced unionization.

"Union bosses are desperately grabbing for more forced union dues -- and meanwhile UPS is buckling under pressure from its non-union competition.

"But they know that federal forced unionism laws do not give union bosses the ability to shove independent contractors into union ranks, so this case was simply brought to impose a change in the drivers' status.

"We're pleased that the court ruling will have the effect of protecting drivers who may wish to refrain from union affiliation from being compelled by federal labor laws to join or support a union."

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, is assisting thousands of employees in close to 200 cases nationwide.

The woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (better known as the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill) isn't the only proposed union boss power grab pending in Congress. Big Labor's high command is always looking for new ways to force more workers into dues-paying ranks -- pushing bills from Card Check Forced Unionism to Police and Fire Monopoly Bargaining.

Now, Teamsters union bosses and UPS executives are lobbying Congress to grease the rails for unionization at FedEx, UPS' chief rival (for background, see this article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal).  Collusion between Teamsters union brass and UPS is nothing new -- in fact, independent-minded UPS employees have frequently turned to staff attorneys with the National Right to Work Foundation reporting violations of their rights by both union bosses and the company, including coervice card check campaigns approved by UPS executives.

Many UPS employees who have exercised to refrain from formal union membership have nonetheless been forced to contribute to a "Strike and Defense Fund," which bars benefits to nonmembers. Of course, it was Teamsters union bosses who had no choice but to settle a lawsuit filed by UPS driver Rod Carter, a man union militants severely beat and stabbed for choosing to work during a strike to support his family (union officials also used union funds to bail the assailants out of jail).

With stories like these, it's little wonder Americans oppose giving union bosses even more government-granted special privileges.

Truck Drivers and Dockworkers Fight Back Against Teamster Union Intimidation

Employees seek to throw out union after union bosses’ ugly campaign of harassment and coercion

Seattle, Washington (March 5, 2009) — Employees from nine collective bargaining units of Oak Harbor Freight Lines, Inc. have filed decertification petitions seeking elections to oust the Teamster union as the workers’ monopoly bargaining agent.

With help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the employees – drivers and dockworkers – filed the decertification petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) seeking secret ballot elections to determine whether the workforce wants to retain the Teamster union as their monopoly bargaining agent.

On September 22, 2008, Teamster union brass called a strike against Oak Harbor Freight. Teamster union operatives picketed Oak Harbor Freight’s clients with the goal of discouraging them from doing business with the company. Teamster union bosses sought publicly to damage Oak Harbor Freight’s reputation and openly celebrated when clients refused to do further business with the company.

Teamster union bosses organized a subsequent campaign of intimidation and harassment of Oak Harbor Freight employees who continued to work during the strike. Teamster union partisans participated in ambulatory strikes, in which they stalked and picketed Oak Harbor Freight drivers on their daily routes.

(Continue reading this news release...)

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.

In May, a devastating piece from the Far Left New Republic highlighted the Teamsters' officials attempts to get rid of the Independent Review Board (IRB), a federal oversight body intended to police the union's well-documented connections to organized crime. Here's a particularly choice example of Teamster union "representation" from the article:

But Hoffa's efforts [to get rid of the IRB] were derailed by a sensational IRB report that appeared late that year detailing the efforts of Chicago Teamsters, working with a Chicago labor broker, Richard Simon, whom Stier [a former federal prosecutor] would later describe as "having ties to organized crime," to undermine a Teamster local in Las Vegas by negotiating non-union, low-wage agreements to service the city's numerous business conventions.

Now a former Teamsters boss has written in to announce he's shocked - shocked - by the magazine's allegations of corruption. Having already been ejected from the union by the IRB for innappropriate conduct, his credibility on this issue is somewhat strained. Fortunately, the author ably defends his original contentions:

The IRB found that the two men [two Teamsters officials -- one of whom wrote in to object to the first article] tried to get the Teamsters local 631 in Las Vegas, which provided workers to convention shows, to allow Richard Simon, a Chicago labor broker, to provide non-union workers to conventions. The workers, which would be provided by Simon's United Temps, would not receive benefits or overtime. All in all, they would earn less than half of the Teamster workers; and under the labor agreement that the Teamsters had with the conventions, Simon's cut-rate contract could then become the standard for all convention employees. The Teamsters would be screwed, but Simon would come out ahead, and so would Hogan's brother Michael, who was the vice president of Simon's company, and also the head of a convention company that would be hiring Simon's workers.

Notably, the IRB's investigation was later validated by a federal court:

"Having carefully reviewed the hearing record," the Appeals Court wrote, "we concluded that the IRB's findings are supported by substantial evidence, are not arbitrary or capricious, and plainly demonstrate that Hogan and Passo were negotiating a contract that they knew would have harmed the union."

While more oversight may seem desirable, it's no substitute for real reform. Corruption will remain endemic to labor unions like the Teamsters as long as union officials have access to a bottomless source of mandatory dues payments. Furthermore, the entire structure of monopoly bargaining gives employees no meaningful recourse to combat union fraud and corruption, as union officials are essentially installed for life as workers' sole representatives [this National Institute for Labor Relations Research paper is good primer on the relationship between compulsory unionism and union corruption].

Good-faith efforts at union oversight are also vulnerable to changes in the political environment. According to this Wall Street Journal article, one presidential candidate has already announced his support for dismantling the IRB and giving the Teamsters free reign to police themselves. Unfortunately, we already know how that strategy will turn out (from the original TNR article):

To build an argument for getting rid of the IRB, Hoffa set up his own internal oversight group. It was called RISE (or Respect, Integrity, Strength, and Ethics) and was run by a former federal prosecutor and organized crime expert Ed Stier.

. . .

For Stier, however, those hopes were dashed the next year when he began investigating Chicago-area Teamster locals for corruption. As he later detailed in a report, Stier discovered "multiple issues related to organized crime [and] corruption" in Local 714, and similar issues in five other area locals. The report concluded, "Issues related to organized crime infiltration and associated corruption in the Chicago area are numerous and cut across jurisdictional lines." But in the fall of 2003, as Stier was still in the midst of his investigation, the Teamster leadership began objecting vociferously to it, and in February 2004, Hoffa shut it down.

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.

What do union bosses do when independent-minded employees refuse to succumb to union organizing pressure?

Well, it turns out Jimmy Hoffa’s solution is to write a letter to the president of the companies he is trying to organize in order to smear those companies.

Teamsters boss Hoffa did just that in writing to CEO Moir Lockhead once FirstGroup employees began showing admirable resistance to the union's thuggish organizing tactics.

Workers at a Hodgkins, Illinois busing facility – owned by the UK-based FirstGroup – are saying “no” to the Teamsters’ unionization hopes, but union bosses don't like hearing "no" from independent-minded employees.

Hoffa's letter underscores the problems with so-called “neutrality agreements,” since FirstGroup entered into such an agreement with the Teamsters union in order to get the union off its back. Neutrality agreements give unions sweeping access to employees’ personal information and ban secret-ballot elections, since the employer agrees to support a union’s attempt to organize its workforce.

Hoffa’s letter shows that anything short of unyielding assistance to lock employees up in forced unionism by employers is unacceptable to union officials.

In a similar Right to Work Foundation-aided case in Batavia, Illinois, another union with a neutrality pledge refused to go away from a FirstGroup facility – just like what is happening here.

Following up with Justin’s post on an ugly Teamsters picket in Somerville, Massachusetts, today’s news stories report that 10 Teamsters thugs were arrested during the mess.

The Somerville News has the story:

10 Teamsters were arrested “for rude, offensive and threatening conduct,” according to police.

The owner of Russell Disposal, Charles Carneglia, explained that he feared for his safety after Teamsters militants harassed him when he entered the facility:

…when Carneglia walked to front gate the Teamsters would begin taunting and catcalling him. “Ya piece of s**t,” yelled one picketer Thursday afternoon. “You’re a criminal.”

After the incident last week, Local 25 chief Sean O’Brien was apparently “too busy” to address repeated press inquires. Unable to answer for the Teamsters union notorious and thuggish actions, it’s no wonder this union boss went into hiding.