A few Right to Work-related updates from around the web:

1.) The Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog helpfully summarizes the corruption allegations surrounding Tyrone Freeman, head of California's SEIU chapter. What's worse, union mismanagement goes all the way to the top. According to the LA Times, SEIU national brass received word of Freeman's corrupt practices six years ago and still failed to act. (This is the same local union against which Foundation attorneys won a federal court settlement securing the return of almost $10 million in illegally seized forced union dues.)

Read the whole entry here.

2.) The New York Sun featured a great editorial yesterday on union bosses' half-hearted efforts at workplace "representation." Money quote:

But even as unions promote counterproductive economic policies, and push for legislation allowing them to essentially force more workers into their ranks, a look at union finances shows that many unions aren't looking after the members they already have — especially their retirement plans.

The Sheet Metal Workers International Union says prominently on its Web site that "Union Members Have Strong Retirement Plans."

But it turns out — as disclosed in unions' mandatory annual financial reports to the Labor Department — that the Sheet Metal workers' union pension plan is underfunded and so risks the future pensions promised to its members. Many other union pension plans are in similar straits.

This isn't an isolated incident, either. Check out the rest of the article for an in-depth look at the glaring disparity between union bosses' lavish salaries and the shortfalls facing rank-and-file workers' pension funds.

3.) Townhall.com has an article up on unions' efforts to ram the misleadingly-titled "Employee Free Choice Act" down workers' throats. The piece also mentions the Foundation's efforts to hold the SEIU accountable for a questionable political fundraising scheme:

In fact, alleged coercion for political gain is already occurring. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation asked the Department of Justice to investigate the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The basis for the request centers on this fact:

“The union adopted a new amendment to its constitution at last month's SEIU convention, requiring that every local contribute an amount equal to $6 per member per year to the union's national political action committee. This is in addition to regular union dues. Unions that fail to meet the requirement must contribute an amount in ‘local union funds’ equal to the ‘deficiency’ plus a 50% penalty.” (The Wall Street Journal, 7/28/08)

Can you name any other company or organization that could compel its membership to fund political organizations that rank and file membership may or may not agree with?

For more information on the Foundation's efforts to deter illegal union campaign fundraising, check out here, here, and here.

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...

The National Right to Work Foundation's letters calling for an investigation of the SEIU union's apparently illegal scheme to coerce "donations" for its Political Action Committee (PAC) prompted this excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

Now that editorial has caused a local union official to blow the whistle in this letter to the editor. Aside from cheering the Foundation's efforts, her letter alludes to another problematic aspect of the SEIU union's dirty political fundraising scheme.

Marlene Jones, a registered nurse who is also the head of her Pennsylvania-based SEIU local, writes the following:

I have been a member of the Service Employees International Union (1199P) for 27 years. I am the president of a local nurses union in Pennsylvania. Every day I experience the pressure for our local nurses union to have all of our members contribute to the Political Action Committee fund. SEIU even goes as far as telling its locals that if a percentage of its members contribute, they will receive 1% of their high union dues back to the locals.

[emphasis added]

So on top of the SEIU constitutional amendment penalizing SEIU locals by seizing dues money when they don't hit PAC fundraising goals, Ms. Jones says top SEIU bosses are promising conditional kickbacks of certain union dues seized from workers and sent to the International affiliate. But those kickbacks apparently do not occur if the local union fails to meet the SEIU's PAC fundraising mandates. This could be yet another way SEIU bosses are in violating federal law by securing PAC "contributions" with the threat of financial reprisals.

Nurse Jones ends her letter with the following plea:

When will it end? Good luck with the investigation. Our members do not want to contribute to the PAC fund.

Yesterday, SCOTUSblog reported on the opposition by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys to the Solicitor General's self-contradictory motion for divided arguments in the Foundation's Locke v. Karass Supreme Court case. (For more background on the SG's unwelcome machinations and the Foundation's principled opposition, read this post.)

The SCOTUSblog post brings to light this new tidbit of news: "Jeremiah Collins, a lawyer for the respondent, said the union did not plan to file an opposition."

Of course he won't. The Solicitor General is making Big Labor's legal arguments. Why not add another lawyer to the union legal team at taxpayer expense?

If the Solicitor General forces his way in, Foundation staff attorneys representing a group of Maine State employees may get 5 fewer minutes to argue their case. Looking at his misguided legal brief (which the union later cited 14 times in its own brief), there can be little doubt that the SG would use the time to make the union officials' case against the employees and the First Amendment.

As the Foundation attorneys' response makes clear, the Administration's interest in the case is extremely tenuous and far fetched, and under court rules it should therefore be barred from participation in oral arguments (as in similar situations in the past).

Welcome to Big Labor's anti-employee legal team, Mr. Solicitor General. Thank you very little.

Yesterday, a pro-Big Labor blogger at OpenLeft inadvertently highlighted the absurdity of the SEIU's apparently illegal fundraising scheme (emphasis mine):

If the local doesn't put enough money into the national PAC, they will have to pay a penalty of regular funds out of union dues to the international. PAC contributions are voluntary and only come when members feel empowered, whereas union dues are automatic, so this is a strong incentive for locals to organize and empower their members. It's a good policy move, and it was voted on and ratified at the SEIU Convention.

Surely the author realizes that there's some tension between "voluntary contributions" and an SEIU policy that penalizes local affiliates for failing to meet MANDATORY political fundraising targets? Actually, he does:

The requirement and penalty do somewhat cut against what it means to voluntarily give to political causes. A possible lawsuit might be viable.

For sure. Here's the relevant section of US code quoted in the National Right to Work Foundation's letters (.pdf) to the Departments of Justice and Labor (emphasis mine):

(2) For purposes of this section and section 79l(h) of title 15,^[1] the term “contribution or expenditure” includes a contribution or expenditure, as those terms are defined in section 431 of this title, and also includes any direct or indirect payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money, or any services, or anything of value (except a loan of money by a national or State bank made in accordance with the applicable banking laws and regulations and in the ordinary course of business) to any candidate, campaign committee, or political party or organization, in connection with any election to any of the offices referred to in this section or for any applicable electioneering communication, but shall not include

. . .

It shall be unlawful—

(A) for such a fund to make a contribution or expenditure by utilizing money or anything of value secured by physical force, job discrimination, financial reprisals, or the threat of force, job discrimination, or financial reprisal; or by dues, fees, or other moneys required as a condition of membership in a labor organization or as a condition of employment, or by moneys obtained in any commercial transaction;

No political expenditures " . . . secured by financial reprisals or the threat of financial reprisals?" Sounds like a pretty explicit violation of U.S. law.

The SEIU's political fundraising apparatus is absolutely enormous. As the author of the OpenLeft post notes, its institutional clout and massive campaign expenditures dwarf other organizations' contributions. But coercing local SEIU affiliates into bankrolling a national campaign strategy has the potential to irreparably taint our electoral process. When even a pro-Big Labor mouthpiece concedes the viability of the Foundation's case, it's time for the Departments of Labor and Justice to take action.

ADDENDUM: Here's more commentary on the political implications of the SEIU's fundraising from QandO and Protein Wisdom.

The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial up on the National Right to Work Foundation's ongoing efforts to push the Departments of Labor and Justice to investigate the SEIU for illegal campaign fundraising. Money quote (emphasis mine):

The mighty Service Employees International Union (SEIU) plans to spend some $150 million in this year's election, most of it to get Barack Obama and other Democrats elected. Where'd they get that much money?

That's a question the Departments of Labor and Justice are being asked to investigate by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Specifically, the labor watchdog group wants Justice to query a new SEIU policy that appears to coerce local workers into funding the parent union's national political priorities.

The union adopted a new amendment to its constitution at last month's SEIU convention, requiring that every local contribute an amount equal to $6 per member per year to the union's national political action committee. This is in addition to regular union dues. Unions that fail to meet the requirement must contribute an amount in "local union funds" equal to the "deficiency," plus a 50% penalty. According to an SEIU union representative, this has always been policy, but has now simply been formalized.

No other major institution could get away with its bosses demanding that every single one of its workers step in line behind its political preferences. This is the sort of imposed political obeisance that infuriates so many workers and turns them away from
unions.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air follows up with commentary on some of the broader implications of SEIU political activism (emphasis mine):

Now the SEIU suddenly has $150 million, from which they’ve already committed at least $85 million specific to Democratic candidates. That money got squeezed out of the locals under duress, in obvious violation of the spirit and letter of federal law. The union knows how to protect itself and its interests, and the lockstep nature of their support for Democrats should awaken voters to the threat their policies comprise. This is nothing more than a closed-feedback loop for Democrats, and Card Check is the prize that will ensure its rapid growth. The Department of Justice needs to put an end to this shakedown racket immediately.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a great editorial up on the hypocrisy of SEIU leadership. Andy Stern and his cronies are more intent than ever on blackmailing unwilling companies into forcing SEIU "representation" on their employees through a series of vicious corporate campaigns:

SEIU President Andy Stern is the drama king of Big Labor, and Thursday's publicity blitz will feature all of his signature choreography: Rallies in 18 states and even overseas, in which thousands of union activists will march against companies and politicians they don't like. Themes include "Buyout Monsters On the Loose" and "The War on Greed." To listen to Mr. Stern, this is about getting Congress to close tax "loopholes" for private equity firms, while funding national health care and "middle class" tax cuts.

That's a sideshow. The real targets are private equity firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Carlyle Group, which own companies that have resisted SEIU attempts to organize their workers. Mr. Stern wants to pound these firms with bad publicity and political retribution until they break.

What's worse, it turns out that the SEIU's activism is apparently being funded illegally. Just today, Foundation president Mark Mix requested a Department of Justice investigation into new SEIU directives allowing Andy Stern to impose financial penalties on any local affiliate that doesn't meet mandatory political fundraising targets. Not only that, but local unions may be forced to pay the SEIU's fines with money collected from nonmember employees' compulsory agency fees. We hope that the DoJ and the Department of Labor will move quickly to investigate this apparent criminal activity (the Foundation's press release is available here).

Given the SEIU's checkered past, these new developments aren't particularly surprising. But aggressive union activism does have a cost. Devoting untold sums of money to intimidating employers evidently comes at the expense of the union's so-called "representation":

Mr. Stern's "middle class" spin would be more believable if the SEIU did more for its own members, especially their pensions. Public records based on the SEIU's own filings show that the SEIU National Industry Pension plan – which covers some 101,000 workers – was only 75% funded in 2006. Put another way, the plan had only three-fourths of the money it needs to meet its retirement obligations. And the national chapter is only the start. Some 13 local SEIU pension plans in 2006 were less than 80% funded; several didn't reach 65%.

Some of this might be the result of poor investment performance, but the main problem is that the SEIU hasn't negotiated adequate employer contributions to the plans.

The SEIU's top brass, on the other hand, is guaranteed generous compensation funded by employees' mandatory dues-payments. Too bad the workers they're supposed to be representing don't receive similar benefits:

On the other hand, SEIU leaders are highly attentive to their own pension funding. A separate fund run by the national union, this one covering the benefits of SEIU officers, was 103% funded in 2006. The top SEIU guns are set for their golden years.

Read the whole sordid tale here.

The recent Chamber v. Brown decision (.pdf) highlighted one of the worst aspects of coercive union organizing. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens emphasized the California statute's most problematic feature: while the free flow of truthful information about the downsides of unionization was shut off by the state's draconian regulations, union organizers received special dispensation to harass workers both at home and on the job:

Instead of forbidding the use of state funds for all employer advocacy regarding unionization, AB 1889 [the California law] permits use of state funds for select employer advocacy activities that promote unions. Specifically, the statute exempts expenses incurred in connection with, inter alia, giving unions access to the workplace, and voluntarily recognizing unions without a secret ballot election.

"Voluntarily recognizing unions without a secret ballot election" is a euphemism for coercive card-check drives. And while the Chamber v. Brown decision is a small brake on in-your-face union organizing drives underway across America, the frequency of card-check drives has increased markedly over the past several years.  Evidently, union organizers have realized that publicly badgering employees into signing away their rights to self-representation is a lot easier than acceding to federally-supervised secret ballot elections.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Foundation staff attorneys recently acquired data from the National Labor Relations Board on the incidence of card-check petitions in the workplace.  According to this NLRB spreadsheet, union agents gained monopoly bargaining privileges using these methods in more than 250 America workplaces since November of 2007. The biggest offenders were members of SEIU President Andy Stern's so-called "Change to Win" coalition: the SEIU and UNITE HERE racked up 26 successful card-check drives each, while the Teamsters managed to pull off an impressive 108 card-check drives.  TheNLRB was not required to record this information until the Foundation's Dana/Metaldyne victory last September.

So why is coercive card-check organizing so uniquely damaging to employee freedom? The reason is simple: forcing workers to publicly disclose their preferences to union organizers leaves them vulnerable to intimidation, harassment, and retaliation.

Here's an excerpt from the congressional testimony of Jen Jason, a former UNITE HERE union organizer who participated in several card-check petition drives:

From my experience, the number of cards signed appear to have little relationship to the ultimate vote count. During a private election campaign, even though a union still sends organizers out to workers’ homes on frequent canvassing in attempts to gain support, the worker has a better chance to get perspective on the questions at hand. The time allocated for the election to go forward allows the worker a chance to think through his or her own issues without undue influence—thus avoiding an immediate, impulsive decision based on little or no fact. After all, the decision to join a union is often life-changing, and workers should be afforded the time to debate, discuss and research all of the options available to them.

As an organizer working under a “card check” system versus an election system, I knew that “card check” gave me the ability to quickly agitate a set of workers into signing cards. I did not have to prove the union’s case, answer more informed questions from workers or be held accountable for the service record of my union.

When the union is allowed to implement the “card check” strategy, the decision about whether or not an individual employee would choose to join a union is reduced to a crisis decision. This situation is created by the organizer and places the worker into a high pressure sales situation. Furthermore, my experience is that in jurisdictions in which “card check” was actually legislated, organizers tended to be even more willing to harass, lie and use fear tactics to intimidate workers into signing cards. I have personally heard from workers that they signed the union card simply to get the organizer to leave their home and not harass them further. At no point during a “card check” campaign, is the opportunity created or fostered for employees to seriously consider their working lives and to think about possible solutions to any problems.

Pretty sobering stuff.  Of course, the card-check strategy was never intended to fairly gauge workers' preferences.

After working with UNITE HERE organizers for years, Jen Jason finally got the full picture. Her experience should make the pernicious nature of card-check organizing abundantly clear:

I began my career with UNITE with a strong belief in worker’s rights and democracy in the workplace. During the course of my employment with the union, I began to understand the reality behind the rhetoric. I took in the ways that organizers were manipulating workers just to get a majority on “the cards” and the various strategies that they employed. I began to appreciate that promises made by organizers at a worker’s house had little to do with how the union actually functions as a “service” organization.

A few Right to Work-related updates from around the Internet:

1.) Over at "The Next Right," blogger Soren Dayton has an interesting post up about the implications for Right to Work if a union stooge wins the White House. Money quote:

This vision is about coercively moving more and more Americans into political organizations which use their precious financial resources in a way that they neither control nor even understand.

The entry also offers a compelling indictment of the SEIU's reliance on "card check" organizing drives. Check out the rest of the post here.

2.) The Detroit News has published a rebuttal by Foundation President Mark Mix to a union operative's misleading editorial on the economic benefits of Right to Work policies. Here's the letter's conclusion:

While the moral case for a right-to-work law rests on the principle
that no worker should be compelled to join a union against his or her
will, the economic benefits of protecting employee freedom are also clear. Michigan lawmakers would do well to heed the example of their more prosperous right-to-work neighbors when contemplating what to do about the Wolverine State's economic woes.

Read the whole thing here.

Here at Freedom@Work, we've been covering Big Labor's vicious corporate smear campaigns for quite some time. With the likelihood of pro-compulsory unionism politicians being swept into office and Big Labor's power on the rise, it looks like union organizers have redoubled their efforts to impose card-check certification drives across the country.

First, we have the case of Aramark Food Services, headquartered in Philadelphia. As mentioned earlier, Aramark has been targeted by the SEIU for refusing to cooperate with the union bosses' efforts to forcibly organize company employees. Now comes this latest update from Chicago's Daily Herald (emphasis mine):

"It's very typical of SEIU to … put pressure on the employer by … pointing out the various problems with the employer's labor relations or management practices," said Bob Bruno, a labor relations researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago...

Hade said the union is pursuing agreements that would allow suburban service workers to unionize without holding an election.

"It's a fair process," [service union spokeswoman] Hade said. "They don't face intimidation from anyone."

A fair process? Note how the article euphemistically alludes to card-check elections as "agreements that would allow suburban service workers to unionize without holding an election." That's an interesting way to characterize a process that subjects workers to coercive public pressure from both management and union organizers. Hade would do well to check out the Foundation's video on card-check harassment and intimidation.

But not surprisingly, this is happening all over the place. In Oregon, United Farm Workers operatives are pressuring Beef Northwest to organize its workers. The locale may change, but Big Labor's tactics stay the same (emphasis mine):

Now, the United Farm Workers' efforts to organize the state's largest cattle feedlot has turned ugly, as the two sides clash over one central question: whether or not the company's 80 employees even want union representation.

Union organizers say Beef Northwest workers don't get regular salary raises, affordable health insurance or respect. They want a card check process, in which workers sign union cards and a third party oversees the vote. In the card check process, at least 50 percent of workers need to agree to union representation.

Beef Northwest owners say their workers are among the highest paid in the industry and that the majority of their workers appear happy. They want the vote taken by secret ballot, in which workers vote anonymously without union involvement.

Oregon's experience foreshadows Big Labor's coming political ascendancy. Union operatives are in the process of securing the allegiance of state and local governments across the country. With a big national election coming up, Forbes has the story on union organizers' goals for the next election cycle:

Teamsters spokesman Galen Munroe says, "It's pretty much accepted that Americans want change after the Bush Administration," adding that the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to make it easier for workers to choose a union, would help strengthen the middle class. The measure didn't make it out of the Senate last year, but Obama has vowed to revive it if elected.