Phoenix, Arizona (September 19, 2005) – With the assistance of National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, five Arizona employees of Dex Media, the official publisher of the yellow page and white page phone books, have filed a racketeering lawsuit against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union Local 1269, Qwest Communications subsidiary Dex Media, and two Dex employees who are union officials.

The lawsuit, filed today in U.S. District Court alleges an elaborate scheme in which the employer, the IBEW union Local 1269, and IBEW Local union agents working for Dex, engaged in systematic violations of company policy and collective bargaining agreements in order to give preferential treatment to union officials at the expense of Dex’s advertising sales force. Because of a complex performance-based pay system used for workers selling advertising in its publications, union agents have not only used their power to create labor strife for their own personal profit, but they have also cheated other workers out of earnings. In effect, the ill-gotten commissions the union agents improperly received raised the bar against which the other workers’ compensation packages were determined.

By knowingly aiding the union agents as they repeatedly broke company rules to increase their performance-based pay, Dex allegedly bribed the union agents to act against the workers’ interests. Some of the methods used to increase the union agents’ compensation include reassigning to the union officials accounts that should have gone to other workers, giving the union agents “double commissions” for sales made by other workers, and allowing the union officials to regularly sell “group ads” allowing their customers to have better ad placement than would normally be warranted, all practices explicitly forbidden by Dex written policy.

Because of the pattern of illegal activity by Dex, the Local 1269 IBEW union, and the union’s agents, the suit lists five counts for violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and two counts for violating the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The RICO statutes are best known for having been used to prosecute criminals for Mob and gang activities.

“Union officials appear to be stealing from the very workers they claim to represent,” said National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason. “As long as workers are forced against their will to be represented by unions in monopoly bargaining with employers, the power wielded by union brass will continue to allow greedy union officials to sell out workers.”

The workers ask the court for injunctions to stop Dex from continuing to bribe union officials with undue compensation, and ask for financial compensation for the workers whose money was effectively stolen from them by the IBEW Local 1269 union agents’ corrupt actions.

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, assists thousands of employees in more than 250 cases nationwide per year.