The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union is objecting to a plan by Detroit city officials to turn over an abandoned nursery to Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit group. What’s the problem, exactly?

Using privately raised funds and volunteers, the group would restore the nursery and use it to provide mature trees to neighborhoods. Greening already plants 2,000 trees a year throughout the city.

But the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees obtained an injunction from Wayne County Circuit Court against the deal, saying it violates the collective bargaining agreement. The union says the bargaining agreement applies to any deals to turn over control of city operations to a third party — meaning city workers must staff the nursery.

…

Terrence King, director of the city’s General Services Department, called the union’s position baffling. Not only would no city workers be displaced, but there should be more work for city forestry workers once the trees are grown, he said.

Baffling is an understatement. But if these volunteers were paying forced union dues like Detroit city employees must do, we doubt the union bosses would be objecting.

Not long ago we anonymously received a copy of the following press release from the National Labor Relations Board Professional Association union dated June 30:

The Battle To Prevent Another September Massacre at the NLRB

The National Labor Relations Board Professional Association, the union representing attorneys at the Board’s D.C. headquarters, is fighting to prevent another September Massacre. The “massacre” that the Union fears isn’t dozens of controversial decisions but a wave of unfair and discriminatory mid-year appraisals and reprisals against its members.

A new performance-appraisal program sparked this battle. Applying a “forced distribution” model like those popular with corporations like General Electric, the Board forced attorney ratings to fit a pre-established distribution. As a result, the Board’s staff attorneys were more or less equally divided into Exceptional, Commendable, and Proficient categories.

To get this predetermined distribution, Board managers unfairly tinkered with individual ratings. The resultant ratings “downgrades,” in many instances of attorneys long rated in the highest category, prompted grievances by more than one third of 45 staff attorneys.

In addition, because the NLRB’s “rank-and-yank” appraisal system had a discriminatory, adverse impact on the Board’s older female and disabled attorneys, the new system generated discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity office and a grievance of the new system’s discriminatory impact on the bargaining unit by the Union.

Board management’s response to the Union’s efforts has been anything but predictable. The NLRB’s lone Democratic member, Wilma Liebman, has not settled a single grievance and threatened reprisals against grievants and a Union officer. Meanwhile, Chairman Peter Schaumber, despite his conservative, pro-employer reputation, has cooperated with the Union to settle most of the appraisal grievances of the attorneys assigned to him.

The Union recently filed grievances against retaliatory conduct by Member Liebman and contacted Congress and the NAACP for help remedying discrimination at the Board.

Where do we begin?

First we chuckle at the notion that every Board attorney fits into one of three categories ("exceptional, commendable, and proficient"), as this ranking system leaves out any possibility that a Board employee does less than "proficient" work. Given the many decisions where the NLRB has been slapped down by appellate courts for faulty logic and abuse of discretion — particularly in cases involving individual employees dissenting from union activity — it would seem that a Board attorney could easily earn a ranking of "deficient" or worse.

Still, Liebman’s apparent hypocrisy raises eyebrows. After years of carrying Big Labor’s water and working to shove forced unionism down the throats of both employers and individual employees (and she apparently also views her quasi-judicial role to essentially include lobbying for Big Labor’s coercive card check bill), Liebman suddenly finds the tables turned. The union activist now stands accused of threats, reprisals, and discrimination against employees by the very union officials that she has worked overtime to empower.

Meanwhile, these union bosses praise NLRB Chairman Peter Schaumber who Liebman has derisively referred to as a promoter of an "individual rights regime." (An individual rights regime? My lands – how positively awful!)

If we thought the situation would make Liebman more sympathetic to employee free choice and individual rights, the whole experience could be a nice little learning experience for her. But we won’t hold our breath.

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.

Foundation VP Stefan Gleason has an op-ed up over at Human Events on union political activism in the wake of the Supreme Court’s favorable Chamber v. Brown decision. Money quote:

Although the court ruled in favor of employer free speech and employee free choice, workers remain vulnerable to an onslaught of intimidation brought on by card-check organizing drives. In one article about the ruling, an AFL-CIO union lawyer snickered that the outcome would only encourage union bosses to pour more money into passing the erroneously titled “Employee Free Choice Act.” That bill passed the House this year, but a filibuster has stalled it in the Senate. Even if Big Labor and its allies in the Senate don’t get it through this year, you can be sure they’ll be back in ’09.

This legislative power grab—endorsed by union-label politicians and bankrolled by union political funds—is designed to allow union bosses to bypass government-supervised secret ballot elections in favor of card check, tilting the playing field in favor of union organizers.

Read the whole thing here.

On May 12, the Department of Labor issued a notice proposing a few minor rule changes aimed at improving union transparency. To help workers get more information on union expenditures they’re frequently obligated to fund as a condition of employment, the new regulations would revise parts of the LM-2 form, a financial disclosure report filed by unions with over $250,000 in annual revenue.

Among other things, the new regulations would require unions to disclose the amount of money spent on benefits for individual union officers, to report indirect monetary disbursements, to itemize certain receipts of $5,000 or more, and to disclose the identity of the purchaser or seller in transactions involving union assets.

Sounds pretty modest, right? In the past, we’ve blogged about the false promise of reducing union corruption simply by regulating financial disclosure. That said, Freedom@Work certainly doesn’t oppose measures that promote greater transparency. In fact, Foundation staff attorneys filed comments (.pdf) with the Department of Labor in support of the proposed rule changes. We believe that workers have a right to know what activities their mandatory dues payments are funding.

But Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller beg to differ. In a public letter (.pdf) to the Department of Labor, they claim that the burden of financial accountability (for funds that are essentially handed to them on a silver platter, I might add) is simply too onerous for union bosses to bear (emphasis mine):

The NPRM also advances a misguided proposal that makes it more likely that smaller local unions will face dramatic increases in their financial record-keeping and reporting obligations. The officers of small local unions often work full-time for a represented employer while simultaneously performing their duties as union officers. Their resources are small, and their access to professional assistance – including lawyers and accountants – can be limited.

Senator Kennedy’s newfound enthusiasm for easing America’s regulatory burden is a bit surprising – one wonders why he recently introduced legislation requiring restaurants to list nutritional info for every single menu item – and wholly disingenuous. Local unions are affiliated with larger national and international unions precisely because these entities are supposed to provide "access to professional assistance."

Kennedy and Miller’s blatant hypocrisy is particularly rankling because union bosses have repeatedly used this justification to extract more mandatory dues-payments from nonunion employees. In Lehnert v. Ferris (1991), for example, Foundation attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that nonmember workers should not be forced to pay for union "services" provided from other union affiliates. However, union lawyers successfully claimed that "services" provided by the union’s parent organization justified additional compulsory dues-payments. Here’s the crux of Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion (emphasis mine):

Because the essence of the affiliation relationship is the notion that the parent union will bring to bear its often considerable economic, political, and informational resources when the local is in need of them, that part of a local’s affiliation fee which contributes to the pool of resources potentially available to it is assessed for the bargaining unit’s protection, even if it is not actually expended on that unit in any particular membership year.

In other words, support from Big Labor’s national affiliates is part and parcel of the mandatory agency fee package. If unwilling workers are funding unions’ "considerable economic, political, and informational resources," shouldn’t local affiliates have access to the resources they need to comply with these modest disclosure requirements?

This sordid episode demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty of union bosses and their political allies. Kennedy and Miller should just cut the crap. Like their Big Labor cronies, they just don’t want workers to see the extent to which they are being ripped off. Period.

Jill Long Thompson, the Democratic nominee for governor of Indiana, is campaigning on the promise that her first action as chief executive of the state would be to impose union monopoly bargaing on Indiana state employees (and ultimately compel them to fund unions against their will, I presume). Her reasoning could even be viewed as sacriligious by some:

"I think (collective bargaining) is a God-given right," she said.

For the record, union monopoly bargaining is not even a constitutional right, but rather just a controversial statutory privilege granted by certain legislatures. Meanwhile, many sincere employees of faith have successfully raised their religious objections to union affiliation, based on their reading of Scripture (or teachings of other religious faiths).

Thompson’s comments are likely to be deeply offensive to individuals who believe God disapproves of laws that strip employees of their individual freedom to contract and that force workers to affiliate with radical ideological groups.

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have secured the right of employees of faith to trigger federal civil rights laws to secure a reprieve from all requirements to pay dues to unions thought immoral. Religious objectors to compulsory unionism can learn more about their rights here.

A recent survey of New Jersey job providers featured some interesting conclusions. It turns out that current state policies have discouraged new businesses from setting up shop:

Such findings have given the state a national reputation as inhospitable to industry. In 2007, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council rated New Jersey last among states to foster small-scale operations. This year, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation said the state was second to last on its tax-climate index.

So what’s an economically stagnating state to do? Here’s some sound advice:

"It is not about the broader economy. It is about the poor choices New Jersey has made," said Philip Kirschner, president of the business association…

"As for legislation and policy reform, he said, New Jersey could adopt other states’ successful models.

"North Carolina’s economy, for instance, grew from agriculture and manufacturing to include tourism, technology and finance, some well-served by research universities. Unlike New Jersey, it is a Right to Rork state – in which union membership is not compulsory…"

Surprise, surprise!  Incidentally, here’s CNBC’s recent ranking of "America’s Top States for Businesses" in the workforce category.  What do the leading states all have in common?  Every one is a member of the Right to Work club.

Of course — first and foremost — Right to Work is about employee freedom in the workplace, but much to the chagrin of union bosses, rolling back coercive union power has undeniable economic benefits as well.

Karen Ackerman, the national political director for the AFL-CIO, recently had this nonsense to say about the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act:

"Of course, employers are not happy about it," Ackerman said of the legislation. "Of course, employers are going to call it undemocratic.

"But, in fact, if people want to be members of the Republican Party, they don’t have to have a secret-ballot election. If folks want to join a church or be a member of a Boys Club, they don’t have to have a secret election," she said.

The Employee Free Choice Act, she said, is "a way to even out the system."

What she doesn’t want to acknowledge is that my political party or church does not have special coervice powers granted by the government to compel other people to accept its "representation" and even to join or pay dues.

Even secret ballot elections for union certification are far from fair. That’s because if a union is voted in, it is awarded the power to be the "exclusive representative" of all members of the bargaining unit — even those workers who do not want to join (or be "represented by") the union brass.

Opponents of Card Check Instant Organizing shouldn’t only rely on appeals to "democracy" in the debate against union officials and union-backed politicians. A democratic election may seem a better alternative to union goons misleading or coercing workers into signing authorization cards — but one should not overlook the link between card check and the greater evil of monopoly bargaining.

If Ackerman were to be honest, she would look at the flip side of her own example — I may be free to donate money to the Republican party, but she is also free NOT to do so. A worker should be free to join or pay dues to a union, but a worker should also be free NOT to support a union — or to be "represented" by a union.

As long as there is monopoly bargaining — whether it is imposed through an NLRB-supervised election or the even more abusive card check process — there can be no real employee free choice.

A couple of weeks ago, Will Collins blasted Denver Post deputy editor Bob Ewegen for his misleading column denying the economic boom underway in Right to Work states. This weekend, Ewegen once again spouted the talking points of compulsory unionism (emphasis mine):

Despite the label, "Right to Work" laws don’t guarantee anybody a job — unless you’re a lawyer. Unions have filed a lawsuit alleging widespread fraud by the petition gatherers hired by the anti-union forces. The challenge could knock the initiative off the ballot, though sponsors have asked for the right to seek extra signatures to "cure" those defects.

Big Labor and its media stooges love setting up a tired false dichotomy about Right to Work. The Right to Work principle is not at all "anti-union." The Right to Work principle makes no judgment on whether workers should join/support a union for whatever reason. That is a decision best left up to the individual. The Right to Work principle is therefore anti-compulsory unionism and pro-freedom of choice.

Whether he knows it or not, Ewegan actually ends up highlighting an injustice flowing from forced unionism later in his column:

Amendment 27, the 2002 Colorado campaign finance law written by Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, allows labor unions to contribute up to $4,000 to candidates to the legislature. Businesses and private citizens are limited to one-tenth as much as unions can contribute, no more than $400 per election season.

That’s because Amendment 27 allows "small donor committees" to give politicians 10 times as much as any other person or group if they get only $50 or less per contributor. Unions are well positioned to exploit that loophole because, for example, the Colorado Association of Public Employees/Service Employees International Union, can deduct $4 a month from a member’s $15 monthly dues for political purposes and count the resulting $48 a year as a "small donor" contribution from a member who may not even be aware that she made that particular "donation."

Let’s sum up: Colorado law (1) limits the amount of money an individual person can choose to donate to a political campaign and (2) refuses individual employees the right to decide whether they want a union’s "representation."

But when it comes to unions, Colorado law (1) allows unions to donate up to ten times as much as individuals to political campaigns and (2) grants union officials the government-backed coercive power to seize dues from individuals and divert them into the union’s political agenda.

Ewegen also laments that Right to Work does not guarantee employment. That’s true, and Right to Work doesn’t guarantee rainbows or sunshine either, although it is worth pointing out that Right to Work laws certainly do help create jobs.

Next time, instead of shilling for Big Labor and complaining about Right to Work laws’ lack of mystical powers, Ewegen should acknowledge the fact that compulsory unionism guarantees special privileges for Big Labor at the expense of individuals’ freedom of association.

Last week, officials from the United Steelworkers union and "Unite the Union" — among the largest unions in North America and the United Kingdom — announced that they had signed an agreement to merge into a single, global union. From their joint press release:

Consistent with this calling, Workers Uniting will "match our words with action and resources, utilizing our collective expertise and knowledge through collective bargaining, organizing, global political action and international solidarity."

What might this "global political action" include? Among other activities… "Exposure to the political processes in each other’s countries, including Democratic Party primaries and Labour Party conferences."

Initially, the two unions claim, "Workers Uniting" (though "Union Bosses Uniting" would be a more accurate name) will operate with a budget of several million dollars.

Of course, the press release fails to mention that the bulk of the budget will be funded by forced union dues from American workers who never asked for globalist union "representation" in the first place.