Central Islip, NY (March 18, 2004) – A New York City-area worker today became the first Cintas Corporation employee to file federal charges alleging that heavy-handed union organizers from the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) have been harassing and intimidating employees in retaliation for their refusal to support the union.

Receiving free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Miguel Sanchez, an employee at Cintas’ Central Islip commercial laundry facility, filed the unfair labor practice charges at the National Labor Relations Board. Sanchez alleges that UNITE union organizers have gained access to personal employee information such as home addresses and phone numbers, and are systematically and illegally bullying him and his coworkers.

Sanchez asserts that while a majority of the workers in the bargaining unit has signed a petition stating a desire to remain union-free, UNITE organizers continue to deceive, harass, and verbally abuse workers who refuse to sign union recognition cards.

“UNITE union organizers are trampling on those very workers they seek to ‘represent’,” stated Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Instead of resorting to these thuggish tactics, union officials ought to simply let these workers decide their union status free of threats and coercion.”

Currently hundreds of UNITE organizers are involved in a national “top-down” organizing drive, also known as a “corporate campaign,” intended to bully Cintas and its employees into accepting compulsory unionism without so much as a government-supervised secret ballot election. In spite of a growing number of voluntary petitions signed by workers in cities ranging from New York City, to Chicago, to San Francisco demanding that UNITE organizers leave them alone, union agents have stepped up their efforts to pressure Cintas and its employees.

UNITE president Bruce Raynor indicated at the January 2003 AFL-CIO-sponsored “organizing summit” that his multi-million dollar “corporate campaign” against Cintas is designed to destroy the company if it refuses to unionize roughly 17,000 of its employees. The union hierarchy wants to deny workers a secret ballot vote, and Raynor admitted that Cintas employees have voted against unionization in 39 different secret-ballot elections. Instead he has deployed hundreds of union organizers for a coordinated campaign that will involve, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, “putting pressure on the company, suing them, getting sued, picketing them and picketing their customers.” “It’s the right thing to do… to break the back of this employer,” Raynor stated.

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 about 200 cases nationwide per year.