Wouldn’t you want to know if union officials illegally obtained your personal information?

That is the question raised in a motion filed today by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys in Philadelphia, PA. And the answer is not only would you want to know, but employees who have had their personal information illegally collected by union organizers have a right to know.

The legal filing is the latest in the ugly saga of UNITE union officials’ efforts to force employees into the union, like it or not. The motion was filed in a case brought by a group of Cintas employees against UNITE for having union organizers cruise parking lots collecting license plate numbers and then unlawfully using the plate numbers to access DMV information about employees that had been targeted for unionization.

Having found that union officials did illegally abuse the rights of over 1,500 Cintas employees by violating the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) of 1994, the judge has ordered that the union pay damages to employees.

But also revealed in the case is that all total, union officials conducted more than 13,700 DMV searches, meaning that more than 12,000 workers still don’t know that their rights have been violated, and that union organizers unlawfully obtained personal records for the purpose of making “house calls” on the employees. According to court records, these records were illegally accessed in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.

And so far these employees are still in the dark about the violations, despite the fact that the union may owe them millions for the violations of their privacy.

And these home visits that resulted from the information were anything but gentle. Organizers used the information to gain access into employees’ homes where they would then agitate the employee into signing a union card. And as a former union organizer for UNITE during the Cintas campaign recently testified to Congress, signing a card has nothing to do with support of the union:

Frankly, it isn’t difficult to agitate someone in a short period of time, work them up to the point where they are feeling very upset, tell them that I have the solution, and that if they simply sign a card, the union will solve all of their problems. I know many workers who later, upon reflection, knew that they had been manipulated and asked for their card to be returned to them. The union’s strategy, of course, was never to return or destroy such cards, but to include them in the official count towards the majority.

And according to the testimony, when not harassing workers at their homes the UNITE organizers were busy trying to agitate workers in other ways, such as getting them fired:

Ernest Bennett, the Director of Organizing for UNITE at the time, told a room full of organizers during a training meeting for the Cintas campaign that if three workers weren’t fired by the end of the first week of organizing, UNITE would not win the campaign.

With such tactics there is no doubt that the employees targeted by UNITE are owed an apology. And while they might never get that, they should at least be told that union organizers broke the law to violate their privacy.