As Right to Work attorneys’ efforts on behalf of Pomona nurses grab headlines, one noteworthy comment comes from SEIU union official Sue Weinstein. Aside from the issues of threats of fines, arrests, and jail:

As for the dues, Weinstein said the local has a policy not to collect dues retroactively.

The union operatives that widely distributed this flier (see underlined portion) must be unfamiliar with that policy.

Union officials are threatening nurses in Pomona, California, with fines, arrests, and jail for refusal to walk off the job during a union ordered strike early in October. Right to Work attorneys helped a nurse challenge this coercion earlier this week at the National Labor Relations Board.

Employees that do not want to abandon their jobs during a strike can learn more here.

The arrest threats sound all too familiar.

The Press of Atlantic City today wrote about the brief filed by Right to Work attorneys in the Trump Plaza union election dispute, which you can read more about here. The brief states that if the election is not set aside:

"…politicians can (and will) use the authority of their office to mislead employees that the government requires or favors a particular result in Board certification elections."

To watch video of the sham union "certification" event at issue, click here.

The AFL-CIO hierarchy has taken its latest beef with Right to Work attorneys’ victory for employees up with the International Labor Organization (ILO). About the complaint, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney says:

"The Bush NLRB is kryptonite for America’s workers."

This is like Lex Luthor complaining that his kryptonite doesn’t work well enough. While the recent Dana victory was an encouraging step forward for employee freedom, the Bush NLRB still has lots of work left to do.

And as we see everyday, compulsory unionism abuse is the real kryptonite for America’s workers.

The National Institute for Labor Relations Research released its 2007 fact sheet that confirms those in Right to Work states benefit from faster growth and higher real purchasing power.

Among the most noteworthy, real personal income between 2001 and 2006 grew practically double in Right to Work states with 15.2% versus forced unionism states with only 8.0%. The national average was also higher than that of forced unionism states at 10.5%.

Not only that, but percentage growth in construction employment, manufacturing, privately-owned single family homes, number of the people covered by private health insurance, and the number of children covered by private health insurance all grew in Right to Work states too. In fact, Right to Work states growth repeatedly beat out the national average in all of these categories.

Check out the complete report here to see what other benefits those in Right to Work states enjoy.

Yesterday, John told us how employee John McHenry was told that to get out of the Teamsters-controlled pension plan he would have to “quit, be fired or die.”

An article in yesterday’s New York Post demonstrates why McHenry was wise to opt out of the union pension plan. In addition to being massively under-funded (only 3.2% of multi-employer union pension plans have enough assets to pay the promised benefits), it seems that NEA union officials have taken to getting kickbacks for endorsing under-performing, high-fee investment plans to teachers:

Not including management fees, the NEA’s only officially endorsed "retirement program" – the Security Benefit Life Insurance Corporation’s Valuebuilder annuity – charges 0.9 percent to 2.6 percent a year. Throw in management fees, and the least expensive option costs a teacher 1.73 percent of her account balances each year, while the most expensive costs 4.85 percent.

Over time, a fee that large is devastating. Without inflation, the educator would have to earn nearly 5 percent each year simply not to lose money. Consider a teacher who socks away $500 a month and earns an average yearly return of 10 percent for 35 years: She’d wind up with $1,788,760 upon retirement – quite a sizeable nest egg. But if she were paying 4.85 percent in fees, she’d accumulate less than one-third as much – just $587,854.

It appears that the NEA is willing to endorse a shoddy plan in exchange for a contribution to its coffers. In 2004, the union collected nearly $50 million from the investment vehicles it endorsed.

When a company official told Perfecseal, Inc. employee John McHenry and his coworkers that the only way out of a union-controlled pension fund was to “quit, be fired, or die,” they fought back.

With help from Right to Work attorneys the employees forced Teamsters Local 14-M officials to stop requiring the pension fund contributions, though union officials stopped short of returning the pension fund money that John and others already contributed.

Like many employees, John continues to feel intimidated at his workplace. But when one company official said John’s “name was mud” and claimed that “corporate” was “pissed” at him for standing up for his legal rights, John refused to back down.

In a paper union officials will undoubtedly ignore, Michael Oswalt, a graduate of the AFL-CIO’s “Law Student Union Summer” program, observed an obvious truth: unions in Right to Work states are more accountable to their members because they have to be.

Citing AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gomper’s own opposition of forced unionism, Oswalt writes that “simple logic” shows that when forced dues are eliminated union officials must be more accountable to the concerns of individual members:

Indeed, simple logic suggests that when dues are guaranteed, attentive member servicing may not be, cultivating a frustrated and apathetic rank and file. The right-to-work environment, alternatively, stands in sharp relief. Where dues are linked to member satisfaction, leadership’s responsiveness embodies a special urgency…

In other words, if Oswalt’s former bosses at the AFL-CIO were really concerned with what is best for rank-and-file workers, they would support a National Right to Work Act.

To re-introduce ourselves to readers that are well familiar with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, and to introduce ourselves to those that are not, we recently produced this video. Be sure to check back at www.nrtw.org and this blog in the months to come for additional video profiles about employees helped by the Foundation.

As the National Institute for Labor Relations Research documents, every year there are hundreds of incidents of union violence, and countless more go unreported. However, since only a tiny percentage of them end up in arrests or convictions, people often have trouble grasping the scope of the problem.

This video (about a campaign of union violence and intimidation surrounding a strike in Westminster, VA) demonstrates how emotionally damaging such intimidation is to rank-and-file workers who refuse to toe the union line. The retaliation in this case took the form of Godfather-esque bullying. If only union violence was Hollywood fiction.