Kaiser Permanente and SEIU Union Forced to End Illegal Tactics To Push Unwanted Union on Workers

**Portland, OR (July 18, 2006)** – In a victory for employee free choice, a group of workers aided by the National Right to Work Foundation have forced Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 49 officials to renounce their monopoly bargaining power over employees of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (a component of the national Kaiser Permanente health network) after union organizers, with the company‘s help, used coercive tactics to force unionization on the employees.

The settlement of the employees’ unfair labor practice charges states that Kaiser will immediately terminate its voluntary recognition of the union as monopoly bargaining agent. Additionally, both the union hierarchy and Kaiser must issue notices to employees alerting them of their rights – including the right to refrain from formal union membership – and informing workers that the company will not bargain with union officials unless the employees so choose through the less abusive National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) secret ballot election process.

Kaiser unlawfully granted recognition to the SEIU union in October 2005 based on the results of a “card check” scheme – where union organizers browbeat employees to sign cards that are then counted as “votes” for unionization – even though an agreement between the company and union specifically stated that recognition would only be granted after a secret-ballot election determined that a majority of workers support the union. Workers reported that union officials explicitly told them that signing the “cards” was not a vote for unionization, but instead was a request to hold a secret-ballot election and to receive more information.

After having the unwanted union forced upon her and her coworkers, Karen Mayhew, who works in the Patient Business Services Department at a local Kaiser office, contacted the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation for free legal aid. In November, Mayhew filed charges at the NLRB for herself and roughly 65 similarly situated employees with legal assistance from Foundation attorneys.

Mayhew also filed a petition for decertification of the unwanted union within days of Kaiser’s granting SEIU officials monopoly bargaining power over the 65 affected workers. Now that union officials are stripped of their tainted monopoly bargaining status as part of the settlement, that petition to throw out the unwanted union is no longer necessary.

“Union officials tried to force unionization on these workers from the top down, like it or not,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Union officials’ illegal behavior shows that they do not respect the rights of the workers they sought to represent; it was all about the money and finding additional sources of forced union dues revenues.”




View the NLRB Settlement, and the required union and employer notices to employees

Worker Advocate Slams AFL-CIO’s “Week of Action” Protests While Do-Nothing NLRB Sits on Union Abuse Cases

**Washington, DC (July 13, 2006)** – Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation, made the following statement in response to today’s protest by AFL-CIO union conglomerate professionals outside the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):



“The public shouldn’t be fooled by AFL-CIO professionals shedding crocodile tears about recent National Labor Relations Board activity. They should instead be outraged that the Bush NLRB has done almost nothing to reverse substantial damage inflicted on independent employees’ rights by the labor agency during the Clinton era.

“According to a study by Jones Day attorney G. Roger King prepared for the American Bar Association, during the period of 1994-2001, the Clinton NLRB overturned 60 long-standing cases for a jaw-dropping 1181 years of combined precedent.

“These activist rulings increased union coercive privileges, entrenched incumbent unions, sharply undercut the rights of employees who disagree with a union, and diminished employer free speech.

“Yet, the Bush NLRB has been plagued by more than 5 years of paralysis and lack of productivity. As a result, the Bush NLRB has only overturned 9 precedents in the past 5 years, and several of them were insignificant procedural rulings. The Clinton NLRB turned labor law upside down, and the Bush NLRB has yet to right the ship.

“What concerns union officials the most is that the NLRB is considering several National Right to Work Foundation cases brought for workers who are desperately seeking protection from Big Labor’s increasingly ‘in your face’ organizing tactics. In these many long-pending cases, employees are pleading for the NLRB’s protection from union coercion and relief from Big Labor’s efforts to deny employees even so much as a secret-ballot vote when choosing whether to unionize.

“While workers seeking to remain union-free face public interrogations, bribery, threats, and stalkings by union operatives during these Top Down organizing drives, the Bush NLRB has dithered. If the agency fails to rule on the workers’ cases challenging these abusive tactics, employees face the further erosion of their freedom to choose whether to unionize.”

Nurses Hit Union and Medical Center with Federal Charges for Violating Their Freedom to Choose Whether to Unionize

**Santa Ana, CA (July 6, 2006)** – A Western Medical Center nurse has filed class action unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against his employer and the California Nurses Association (CNA) union to stop an illegal scheme designed to push unwanted unionization on him and his fellow registered nurses.

Sherwood Cox filed the charges at the NLRB Region 21 office in Los Angeles, against the CNA union and Western Medical Center in Santa Ana with assistance from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

Cox’s charges seek to protect the nurses’ right to choose freely whether or not to unionize. The charges detail how CNA union officials illegally bargained with the nurses’ employer over their wages and working conditions despite the fact that the nurses have not chosen to unionize. Included with Cox’s charges is a copy of a 26-page “neutrality agreement” negotiated by union officials with the medical center that describes how the employer will assist the union in organizing the medical center’s registered nurses, and it details specific collective bargaining concessions, including terms for wages and health benefits, that the medical center will receive in exchange.

The traditional process requires that the NLRB hold a secret ballot election to determine if a majority of workers support unionization, but the pact – misleadingly dubbed the “Election Procedures Agreement” – outlines a system by which union officials can organize the nurses without even demonstrating true majority support. With monopoly bargaining status, union officials could then force all the nurses to pay dues to the union just to keep their jobs. Union officials hold this power because California is one of 28 states that has not yet passed a Right to Work law, which would mandate that union membership and dues payment are strictly optional.

“Union officials have violated long standing Supreme Court and NLRB precedent in their push to sweep these nurses into their forced dues-paying ranks,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Instead of allowing employees to exercise free choice in deciding if they want a union to represent them, CNA officials are determined to push unionization on these nurses from the top down – like it or not.”

Under the Supreme Court’s International Ladies Garment Workers v. NLRB decision, a union cannot become the monopoly bargaining representative of workers without the support of a majority of all employees. Furthermore, in the NLRB’s Majestic Weaving Co. decision, the board recognized that allowing union officials to engage in pre-recognition bargaining with an employer is a violation of worker rights.

The NLRB Region 21 Director will now investigate the charges and decide whether to issue a formal complaint and prosecute the CNA union and the Medical Center.

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’s the victory" Workers will have less freedom to choose whether to unionize, of course! The union will now be allowed to use its weapon of choice—the notoriously abusive procedure called “card check” 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’s home addresses by UNICCO—a standard concession in such card-check arrangements—union organizers know it will be easy to coerce the signing of “authorization cards” from harassed and browbeaten employees. Under card check, workers frequently report that union organizers lie to them about the cards’ 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’s wishes. In fact, its own handbook for union organizers has noted that workers will often sign such cards just “to get the union off their backs.” 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 “group pressure.” 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’ 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’s 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’s new *modus operandi*, one SEIU local chief recently quipped to the Wall Street Journal that “we don’t do elections”—a statement proved in Miami. After all, if the employees had actually wanted the representation of union officials, they could have petitioned the NLRB—but they didn't. So the union brass put on their charade—parading a steady stream of union professionals, Washington-based activists, and Hollywood stars through their makeshift “Freedom Village” 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’ 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’t 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 “victory” 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.*

Freightliner Faces Federal Prosecution for Retaliation Against Employee Who Questioned Special Treatment of Union Reps

**Charlotte, NC (April 27, 2006)** – The Regional Director for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed a formal complaint and agreed to prosecute Freightliner LLC for federal unfair labor practices after an autoworker suffered retaliation for questioning a pattern of special treatment given to United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials by the company.

Kristi Jones, a Freightliner employee at the company’s Gastonia facility, sought free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation to file unfair labor practice charges in early April after she was suspended, demoted, threatened, and stripped of her leadership position.

Company officials retaliated against Jones in response to an email she sent in December 2005 that simply questioned whether a new work rule applied to UAW union officials as well as nonunion workers. The rule specified that workers on the facility floor must wear safety glasses with clear lenses. Jones sought a clarification of how the new rule would be enforced due to an ongoing pattern of special treatment for union officials – including the exemptions of union stewards from ten-minute team “huddle meetings” and from a requirement that workers formally sign in when working overtime.

NLRB prosecutors agreed with Jones’ charges in finding that Freightliner maintained a work environment where even implicit criticism of union officials was met with harsh and unlawful disciplinary action.

Aside from violating the National Labor Relations Act, such actions also run contrary to the spirit of North Carolina’s highly popular Right to Work law – on the books since 1947 – which prohibits forcing workers to join or pay dues to a union as a job condition.

“UAW officials have enlisted Freightliner to do their dirty work by retaliating against employees that refuse to toe the union line,” said Stefan Gleason, National Right to Work Foundation Vice President. “The bullying of employees to support a corrupt union cannot continue unpunished.”

The formal complaint comes on the heels of a class-action federal racketeering lawsuit filed by employees in U.S. District Court in January seeking significant damages after Freightliner, a Daimler/Chrysler subsidiary, and UAW union officials had already been found to be in illegal collusion by NLRB investigators.

Jones and four other autoworkers from three major facilities in North Carolina, including the Gastonia facility, brought the lawsuit against the UAW union and Freightliner, also with free legal aid from Foundation attorneys. That complaint outlines a secret quid pro quo arrangement between Freightliner and the UAW in which union officials agreed in advance to significant concessions at the expense of Freightliner’s workers at its nonunion facilities in the state in exchange for valuable company assistance in organizing those workers.

The NLRB has scheduled a hearing before an administrative law judge on June 5 to prosecute Freightliner and remedy the allegations set forth in the complaint.

Thomas Built Buses Employees Sue Federal Labor Board for Denial of Constitutional Rights

**High Point, NC (April 6, 2006)** – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, a group of Thomas Built Buses employees today filed a federal lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for refusing to allow them to bring extraordinary last-ditch union election misconduct to the attention of the agency.

Filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, the suit alleges that the NLRB improperly refused to allow workers to challenge the results of a tainted union election that granted United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials monopoly bargaining power over roughly 1,200 employees at the Thomas Built plant.

NLRB officials decreed that employees may not intervene to assert their rights and challenge union representation election results. The precedent-setting decision contradicts the notion that the National Labor Relations Act establishes rights for employees, rather than simply empowering union officials. Foundation attorneys point out that the ruling violates workers’ procedural due-process rights under the U.S. Constitution.

The NLRB’s decision whitewashed the illegal eleventh hour intervention of Thomas Built to assist its hand-picked union in winning monopoly bargaining representation over the employees. Thomas Built officials issued a surprise memo to all High Point workers in June 2005, one day before a union representation election, announcing that employees would have to pay higher health insurance premiums if they remained nonunion.

Working in tandem, UAW union operatives immediately circulated copies of the memo around the facility with “DID YOU SEE THIS" THE COST OF BEING NON-UNION JUST WENT UP!” written at the top. Employees opposing unionization report that this intervention by the company swung a large number of votes in favor of the union.

Under longstanding NLRB practice, such conduct requires that the election be set aside because it taints the employees’ vote. Union and company officials, however, wanted the same election result and did not file objections. Because the NLRB would not grant independent employees the right to intervene, the UAW union was certified as the monopoly representative because, according to an NLRB regional director, “no timely objections have been filed.”

“Thomas Built employees must be allowed to challenge this unlawful last-minute intervention that clinched an election victory for the UAW union – or workers’ rights under the law will be sharply undercut,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Outrageous decisions like this seriously damage the credibility of the federal agency that supposedly protects the rights of rank-and-file workers.”

Facing prosecution by the NLRB in early 2005, UAW union and Thomas Built officials agreed to cancel outright a company-wide sweetheart deal in which union officials had unlawfully bargained to limit workers’ wage demands and made other concessions in exchange for the company’s assistance in organizing the workers. After the union was forced out of the plant, however, UAW union officials petitioned for the election at issue in this case.

San Diego, CA (February 28, 2006) – The following is a statement of Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, in response to AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney’s announcement that the labor conglomerate will spend an “unprecedented” $40 million to influence the 2006 mid-term elections. “It’s disappointing to learn that the AFL-CIO’s plan for 2006 is ‘more of the same.’ Rather than getting workers to join unions voluntarily, union officials have stepped up their assault on employees’ legal rights to say ‘no’ to unionization. “The AFL-CIO’s top priority appears to be electing politicians who pledge support for granting union organizers sweeping new coercive privileges under federal law– namely the Kennedy-Miller bill. “At the same time, the AFL-CIO elite is expected to announce later this week that it will divert significant additional resources into corporate campaigns and other Top Down organizing methods. These abusive tactics involve attacking companies until they agree to hand over their employees into forced unionism through the so-called “card check” method rather than utilizing the traditional, less-abusive election procedure. “Rather than working to expand their political clout and coercive organizing, union officials should instead clean up the corruption, shun the radical political activism, and turn their energy to improving the product they’re attempting to sell to America’s hardworking men and women.” To schedule an interview with a Right to Work spokesperson, call Justin Hakes at 703-770-3317.

Charlotte, NC (January 31, 2006) – A local autoworker today filed federal unfair labor practice charges against the United Auto Workers (UAW) union and Daimler-Chrysler subsidiary Freightliner LLC after she suffered retaliation for questioning a pattern of special treatment given to union officials. The unfair labor practice charges come on the heels of a class-action federal racketeering complaint filed by employees in U.S. District Court last week seeking significant damages after Freightliner and UAW union officials had already been found to be in illegal collusion by federal labor board investigators. Kristi Jones, a Freightliner employee at the company’s Gastonia facility, sought free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to file today’s charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after she was suspended, demoted, and stripped of her leadership position. Union and company officials retaliated against Jones in response to an email she sent in December 2005 that simply questioned whether a new work rule applied to UAW union officials, as well as nonunion workers. The new work rule specified that workers on the facility floor must wear safety glasses with clear lenses. Jones sought a clarification of how the new rule would be enforced because of an ongoing pattern of special treatment for union officials – including the exemption of union stewards from 10-minute team “huddle meetings” and from a requirement that workers sign in when working overtime. Jones’ charges allege that the UAW union local and national affiliates and the company are maintaining a work environment where even implicit criticism of union officials is met with harsh and unlawful disciplinary action. Aside from violating the National Labor Relations Act, such actions also run contrary to the spirit of North Carolina’s highly popular Right to Work law, on the books since 1947, which prohibits the forcing of workers to join or pay dues to a union as a job condition. “Freightliner and UAW officials have cut an illegal sweetheart deal and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Stefan Gleason, Foundation Vice President. “This illegal intimidation, retaliation, and harassment must end.” Jones filed her charges just days after she and four other autoworkers from three major facilities in North Carolina, including the Gastonia facility, filed a class-action federal racketeering lawsuit against the UAW union and Freightliner, also with help from the National Right to Work Foundation. That complaint outlines a secret quid pro quo arrangement between Freightliner and the UAW in which union officials agreed in advance to significant concessions at the expense of Freightliner’s workers at its non-union facilities in North Carolina in exchange for valuable company assistance in organizing those workers. The NLRB will now investigate Jones’ charges and decide whether to issue a formal complaint and prosecute the company and union.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 8, 2005) – Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization that provides free legal aid to employees suffering from compulsory unionism abuses, made the following statement in response to today’s so-called “International Human Rights Day” rally, organized by AFL-CIO officials: “When union officials use code phrases like ‘make it easier for workers to organize unions,’ they are talking about their campaign to make it easier for organizers to force workers into union ranks regardless of their wishes.” “Orchestrated to invoke the sympathy of the American people, this one-sided media-blitz ignores the widespread abuse of employees who choose to refrain from union affiliation. Big Labor is trying to build public support for the enactment of a new wave of coercive union ‘organizing’ privileges. “Since employees are increasingly voting unions down, union officials want to change the law to clear the few remaining roadblocks in the way of their ‘card check’ organizing scheme. Union officials want to wipe out the secret ballot election process, get gag orders to prevent employers from telling employees about possible downsides of unionization, and require employers to hand over workers’ home addresses and phone numbers without the employee’s knowledge or consent. Employees often receive menacing home visits from union operatives. “Responding to a wave of employee backlash, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has brought numerous legal cases to the attention of the federal labor board documenting illegal activities by union organizers under these so-called ‘card check’ organizing drives – including threats, bribes, and stalking rank-and-file workers. Other workers have repeatedly reported being lied to about the purpose of the ‘authorization’ cards, with some being told that they are merely health insurance enrollment forms, requests for an election, or even tax forms. “Workers across the country facing such abuses are standing up to what Big Labor considers to be the only ‘choice’ that workers ought to have when it comes to union membership: Either pay dues to a union – or forfeit their jobs.”