Regular Freedom@Work readers may remember the Foundation’s ongoing efforts helping nurses fight back against the California Nurses Association (CNA) union’s coercive organizing drives at Houston and Philadelphia-area healthcare facilities.

Now an employee at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia has again stepped forward, filing unfair labor practice charges against Tenet Healthcare Corporation for giving CNA operatives preferential access to company property for the purposes of union organizing. Previous Foundation unfair labor practice charges also allege union organizers are engaging in illegal prerecognition bargaining: in exchange for company assistance, union officials may have agreed to terms and conditions of employment on behalf of workers they don’t even have the power to represent yet.

Here’s a copy of the Foundation’s unfair labor practice charges (.pdf). And here’s a link to the Foundation’s video on coercive CNA organizing in Houston. 

Regular Freedom@Work readers will remember our extensive coverage of Barack Obama’s numerous executive orders (during the first month of his Presidency) paying back union bosses for their efforts getting him into the White House.

Yesterday, a provision in Obama’s January 30 executive order took effect — revoking former-President Bush’s February 2001 executive order which required federal contractors to post notices in the workplace simply informing employees of their right to refrain from formal, dues paying union membership and withhold forced dues for everything but the documented cost of collective bargaining. 

The Obama directive is intended to ensure millions of workers do not learn of their right, won in the National Right to Work Foundation’s precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court victory Communication Workers v. Beck, to withhold forced union dues earmarked for union politics, lobbying, and other non-bargaining activities.

This is just the first of many steps by Barack Obama and his Big Labor cronies (for example, his Labor Secretary Hilda Solis) are already taking to help union bosses to seize more forced dues revenue to fund Big Labor’s political agenda.

The woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (better known as the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill) isn’t the only proposed union boss power grab pending in Congress. Big Labor’s high command is always looking for new ways to force more workers into dues-paying ranks — pushing bills from Card Check Forced Unionism to Police and Fire Monopoly Bargaining.

Now, Teamsters union bosses and UPS executives are lobbying Congress to grease the rails for unionization at FedEx, UPS’ chief rival (for background, see this article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal).  Collusion between Teamsters union brass and UPS is nothing new — in fact, independent-minded UPS employees have frequently turned to staff attorneys with the National Right to Work Foundation reporting violations of their rights by both union bosses and the company, including coervice card check campaigns approved by UPS executives.

Many UPS employees who have exercised to refrain from formal union membership have nonetheless been forced to contribute to a "Strike and Defense Fund," which bars benefits to nonmembers. Of course, it was Teamsters union bosses who had no choice but to settle a lawsuit filed by UPS driver Rod Carter, a man union militants severely beat and stabbed for choosing to work during a strike to support his family (union officials also used union funds to bail the assailants out of jail).

With stories like these, it’s little wonder Americans oppose giving union bosses even more government-granted special privileges.

Two years ago, an employee at a San Diego-area childrens’ hospital filed a union decertification petition to eject an unwanted SEIU local. Instead of submitting to a formal decertification election, SEIU union officials filed a series of frivolous "blocking charges" in an attempt to indefinitely delay any decision.

After years of legal wrangling, however, the SEIU’s charges were finally resolved. But rather than face a union decertification election, SEIU officials opted to withdraw from the bargaining unit, knowing full well that they’d lose employees’ votes by a wide margin.

This is the paradox of union "representation": instead of allowing themselves to be held accountable to workers through a secret ballot election, SEIU lawyers took advantage of a few loopholes to stall the entire process — when that ultimately failed, the union bosses finally took a hike. Does anyone think these cynical antics resulted from a sincere desire to represent workers’ interests?

Here’s a copy of the union’s letter (.pdf) disowning any interest in retaining its monopoly bargaining privileges at the hospital. Here’s the National Labor Relations Board’s decision (.pdf) formally revoking the union’s workplace authority. The San Diego Tribune also featured a decent article on the union’s decision to withdraw from the hospital. 

National Right to Work President Mark Mix sits down with nationally syndicated talk radio host Janet Parshall to discuss card check, union intimidation, and the larger problems of compulsory unionism. Click here to listen or use the embeddable player below:

You can also listen to the Foundation’s podcast via iTunes or manually subscribe to the feed. 

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has a good op-ed up on "card check" legislation at the Los Angeles Times:

There is a bloody spin war over whether card check abolishes the secret ballot or not. Pro-card-check forces insist that it doesn’t. Unfortunately, these voices include many mainstream reporters who consistently use the language preferred by Big Labor. They note that if 30% of the workers sign a card asking for an election, they can have
one.

But this ignores the unions’ crimp tactics. For starters, the cards are written in ways that make "predatory lending" mortgages seem like paragons of full disclosure.

At the National Right to Work website, you can find an example of one of these cards. In big, bold letters on top, it says "Request for Employees Representation Election." But after you fill out all the relevant info, then there’s the small print, authorizing the Teamsters to "represent me in all negotiations of wages, hours and working conditions."

In other words, in many cases, workers who think they’re just voting for an election are in fact voting for unionization. The unions make it as difficult as possible to do the former without also doing the latter. Check a card, find the king’s shilling.

Also, if the number of cards is over 30% but below 50%, there still isn’t an election unless the organizers — not the workers — want it.

As Mickey Kaus, a one-man blogging crusader against card check, wrote, "No individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31% plurality or the 51% majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There’s no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to ‘choose’ a secret ballot."

Translation: They’re not workers with a vote, they’re marks.

Here’s a link to the "authorization card" Golberg references. Can you read the fine print? Better yet, would you have a chance to read it in the midst of an aggressive card check drive, when you’re surrounded after work by three union goons demanding signatures?

Now we know why union bosses don’t believe in the secret ballot: they don’t really know what a secret ballot looks like.

Film crew union IATSE recently conducted a vote of its members to ratify its contract proposal with Hollywood producers. The union bosses sent each member a large packet containing the proposal, a ballot, and two reply envelopes.

After marking the ballot, members were instructed to put the ballot in a white envelope (which does not include any identifying information), and then put the white envelope in a blue envelope (which does include identifying information).

The problem? The white envelopes were see-through, meaning union bosses could automatically throw out votes opposing the union boss line. Worse, because the outer envelope contains the voter’s name, union goons would also know which members voted which way.

No wonder union bosses complain the secret ballot doesn’t work.