Right to Work Blog

The Times Journal newspaper in Wisconsin hits the nail on the head calling the Employee Free Choice Act “no such thing”:

It’s called the “Employee Free Choice Act,” but it is no such thing. What the act would effectively do is deprive workers of the right to decide by secret ballot whether they want to join a union or not. It would instead replace that vote with a card check system that would be binding if union organizers get more than 50 percent of workers to sign them. And, under the law, once a union is authorized through a card-check campaign, it would require binding arbitration to set the terms of the first two years of a contract if the business and the union do not reach agreement through collective bargaining within 90 days.

The act would effectively end the long practice of having elections under the watch of the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board to determine whether a workplace is unionized or not. It would, at its heart, deprive businesses across the country from giving their side of the story on the implications of a unionized workplace. When they have that opportunity, businesses usually prevail in keeping their workplace union-free about 40 percent of the time.

Instead of a democratic process with a secret ballot, a worker would have to stand up to union organizers and workplace friends if they want to decline to sign a pro-union check card. It would give rise to an unprecedented level of workplace coercion.

Read on.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has launched its official Facebook.com group. The group will help virally spread information about the Right to Work movement while keeping supporters up-to-date on the Foundation’s latest news and views. The latest press releases, blog posts, and YouTube videos can be found on the Facebook group’s profile page, while the discussion board allows group members talk about current issues relating to compulsory unionism. Read on for more information.

Mark Mix, the President of the National Right to Work Committee, has sent Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s husband Todd a letter reminding him that he does have the right to cut off “forced” union dues being spent by the United Steel Workers (USW) union to defeat the Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Palin.

“While I’m sure you’re excited by your wife’s candidacy for high office, you may be discouraged to learn that the union dues you pay are already being used to defeat her,” writes Mr. Mix, reminding the candidate’s husband that when his USW bosses endorsed Democratic Sen. Barack Obama in June, they pledged to support his campaign with funds collected from union members. “In fact, at the USW’s 2008 convention, union officials adopted a resolution ‘vowing to play a key role in electing Obama,’ thus pledging workers’ dues to the effort to defeat your wife’s candidacy,” he adds.

“Moreover, a top USW official whose paycheck you help fund is viciously ridiculing your wife’s candidacy on the Steelworkers’ Web site, calling Gov. Palin’s selection ‘cynical’ and claiming that by choosing your wife ‘McCain has clearly shown he lacks the judgment to be president.’”
Alaska does not have a Right to Work law, but under the Supreme Court precedent “Communications Workers v. Beck,” employees are able to stop paying forced-union dues unrelated to collective bargaining, such as union electioneering, Mr. Mix reminded Palin.

Thanks to John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, many people across the country are for the first time learning about how her state’s law authorizing union “exclusive” bargaining over public-safety and other government employees works in practice.

And it’s not a pretty picture.

So says Stan Greer, senior research associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, in an article published by The [DC] Examiner. Go here to read what he had to say.

Mark Wylie does an admirable job responding to Florida International University’s Bruce Nissen, an advocate of eliminating the secret ballot election for workers to pad the union rolls for union bosses:

There is a great reason why the economy in the right-to-work states of the South has been so robust and the Rust Belt states, like Michigan, have experienced unemployment rates in double digits. It is because of the secret ballot, the exchange of ideas and workers freely choosing to be paid competitively based on merit.

Forming a union should be a basic freedom in the workplace. On that, I agree with Nissen.

Here is where we part company: That decision should also be personal and private — a decision not made under false pretenses, coercion and threats by either side.

Jon Chesto of the Gatehouse News Service in Massachusetts provides a fascinating peek at the incestuous relationship between the Massachusetts political establishment and local union bosses. As we have seen with members of the House of Representatives and even presidential nominee Barack Obama, politicians are using the card check system to pressure companies to unionize and force workers into joining a union without a secret ballot election.

In Massachusetts, according to Mr. Chesto:

Everyone who does business in Boston knows that if you want to build a commercial project of any size in the city, you’ve got to go through the Menino administration and its Boston Redevelopment Authority.

But if the claims made by operators of the Courtyard by Marriott in Dorchester are true, you may have to get a union’s approval as well.

According to a lawsuit that has been filed, the Jiten Hotel Management Firm was trying to get approval to build a hotel but they could not get the attention of the Boston Development Authority. A Jiten vice president, working with then-Brockton Mayor Jack Yunits, lined up a meeting with Boston Mayor Tom Menino in Brockton to discuss the problem.

At the meeting, according to the suit, Menino said the hotel operators would need to sign a card-check agreement with Local 26 to ensure the hotel’s work force would be unionized.

Such an agreement allows a union to be recognized as long as it collects authorization cards from the majority of affected workers. Approve the agreement, the suit says Jiten was told, and the hotel is a go. Jiten had already plowed $3 million into the project, so Jiten president Nayan Patel signed the agreement. The next day, the BRA approved the hotel.

So let’s be clear — in order to get jobs created in Boston you must grease the palms of the union who in turn grease the palms of the politicians. It’s a vicious cycle that harms taxpayers and workers.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is grabbing workers’ dues money and sticking it in an enforcement fund to threaten politicians of both parties that you better toe the Big Labor party line — or else.

SEIU’s boss Andy Stern “. . . threatened . . . to unleash money from a $10 million ‘accountability’ fund against any political figure — Democrats included — who breaks promises to organized labor.

‘Any Democrat — or Republican — who said they were going to support us on health care or free choice and turns against us is going to paint a target’ on their backs,” Andy Stern told the Associated Press in an interview. . . .

With the vast majority of Americans opposed to the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill, SEIU will need to hammer people to get them to stay in line. It’s sad, but true, but many elected officials still choose the will of the union boss over the will of the workers the union bosses claim to represent.

Ivan Osorio asks the question most in the Mainstream Media will not — “What does Big Labor Want?” The answer is more power, more forced union members and, of course, more coerced union dues money. So how will they achieve their goals? As Mr. Osorio opines:

Every four years, pundits look forward to Labor Day as the launch of the “real” election season. This year, it’s especially appropriate, since organized labor is going all-out to influence not only the November outcome, but policy into the next president’s term. With the Democrats’ control of Congress likely to continue, and possibly expand, and the presidential contest a toss-up at this writing, it is worth asking: What does Big Labor want?

At the top of the unions’ policy agenda is the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would mandate an organizing method known as “card check” whenever a union requests it.

Facing a decades-old private-sector membership decline, unions have sought other organizing strategies, and card check has been among the most effective. Card check circumvents secret ballot elections by requiring only that a majority of employees sign union cards for a workplace to become unionized. Employees are often urged to sign cards publicly and in the presence of union organizers, which exposes them to high-pressure tactics which the secret ballot is designed to avoid.

Were federal law to establish card check as union’s chief organizing tactic, Big Labor would find it easier to corral new members who might be reluctant or unwilling, but would no longer enjoy the privacy of the voting booth.

So what would their dues money gain these thousands of new union members? An unfolding corruption scandal and a look at the state of union pension funds don’t paint a promising picture.

THIS MONTH, Tyrone Freeman, the head of California’s largest union local, was forced to resign amid mounting allegations of misuse of members’ union dues — including, reports the Los Angeles Times, “nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.”

The local union, based in Los Angeles, is affiliated with the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the most powerful unions in the United States and one of the most aggressive in organizing private sector workers.

The Times’ investigation relied in part on “the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings,” which, as a result of improved reporting requirements, are available online at UnionReports.gov. This site allows individual union members to see how union officials are spending their dues money — without having to ask the union officials themselves.

The AFL-CIO loudly opposed the Labor Department’s new reporting requirements, which in reality were a long-overdue overhaul to a dysfunctional system. Under the old reporting requirements (filed in form LM-2), unions could report literally millions of dollars in expenses under such meaningless descriptions as “sundry expenses.”

Expect a union-friendly Congress to help labor bosses return to the financial opacity they so fiercely defended — and which could allow the likes of Tyrone Freeman [to] carry on their spendthrift ways.

Finally, new union members should consider their retirement security. In recent years, many labor unions have sought to leverage their pension funds to push for policy goals at public companies’ shareholder meetings, which may have nothing to do with union members’ interests.

For example, the SEIU and UNITE-HERE, the textile and hospitality union, have joined with environmental activist groups to pressure corporate America to adopt policies to reduce their “carbon footprint” — their amount of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

JOINING WITH environmentalists is now an established union tactic. Labor unions increasingly rely on their allies to attack a targeted company’s record on “sweatshop” labor, environmental pollution, and other issues, thus obscuring the union’s self-interested motive in gaining economic concessions from the company.

Now, it appears that unions are leveraging their pension funds to push companies to adopt policies favored by green activists — even when they don’t benefit the unions’ own members, who bear the cost of such activism.

Today, most union pension plans are funded at levels much below those of pension plans provided by private employers, according to a recent Hudson Institute study.

“Union-negotiated pension schemes consistently maintain dangerously low ratios of assets to liabilities,” notes Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the study’s author and former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “Although nearly 90 percent of non-union funds had at least 80 percent of the funds they need, only 60 percent of union plans were at or above that mark.”

Compared to pension plans for rank-and-file employees, the pensions funds for union officers and staff were in much better shape — which undermines the argument that lower pension fund values could be explained by weaknesses in the economy or the stock market. “The success of the officers’ funds shows the heads of the national organization know how to properly fund a pension plan if they choose to,” explains Furchtgott-Roth.

But apparently many union officials choose to pursue activism in causes that don’t directly benefit their members, instead. Corralling in new members would allow this Ponzi scheme-like arrangement to continue, feeding money into underperforming pension funds.

So, to answer our original question, Big Labor wants more members and more dues money to spend on politics — and it wants Uncle Sam’s help in getting them.

When workers don’t have a choice whether or not to join a union and pay dues, union bosses take advantage of the situation. Case in point is California’s largest local union that has paid hundreds of thousands of workers’ dues money to firms owned by the wife and mother-in-law of the labor organization’s boss.

The Los Angeles Times discovered:

The Los Angeles-based union, which represents low-wage caregivers, also spent nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.

In addition, the union paid six figures to a video firm whose principals include a former union employee. And a now-defunct minor league basketball team coached by the president’s brother-in-law received $16,000 for what the union described as public relations, according to the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings and interviews.

Most of the 160,000 people represented by the union, a local chapter of the nation’s fastest-growing labor organization, the Service International Employees Union [sic], earn $9 an hour or slightly more tending to the infirm and disabled in private homes under taxpayer-funded programs. The workers, whose dues fill the local’s coffers, often are described as “the poor caring for the poor.” In its Labor Department filings, the local, headed by Tyrone Freeman, has reported more liabilities than assets for each of the last three years. . . . .

Based on documents filed with the Labor Department and Internal Revenue Service, the Guidestar nonprofit database, business records submitted to several state and local agencies and numerous interviews, a Times investigation has also found that:

* Payments to the company owned by Freeman’s wife were among the local’s largest single expenses last year. Payments by the charity, the Homecare Workers Training Center, to his mother-in-law’s firm represented more than 10% of the nonprofit’s total annual expenditures.

* A housing corporation that Freeman helped found as a nonprofit has not been granted the IRS tax-exempt status it sought and was suspended from doing business in California. It also has claimed on its website to have a “strong relationship” with the prominent California Community Foundation, which says it has no such relationship.

* The union spent at least $123,000 more on the fund-raising tournament at the Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad than it received in reimbursements, according to Labor Department filings and interviews. Freeman said the event made money for the charity. The union’s expenditures included $100,000 in payments to entities associated with former professional football star Eric Dickerson, which have been suspended from doing business in California. The payments were listed as donations to nonprofits, not as fund-raising expenses.

* The local’s nearly $10,000 tab at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar lounge known for its celebrity clientele and invitation-only memberships, was for “lodging,” according to the union’s annual financial report. A Grand Havana spokeswoman said the club does not provide accommodations. Freeman declined to characterize the expenditure, and after The Times inquired about it, he said he had refunded it.

The Boston Herald weighs in on the anti-democrat, anti-worker Card Check Scam Bill:

Does “the politics of hope” mean scrapping the right of American workers to cast a ballot in private?

Does Barack Obama really want his image to include the systematic dismantling of union elections in the workplace?

Well, apparently so. Obama’s campaign is now inextricably knotted up with the campaign by organized labor to strip workers of their right to vote in private on whether they want to unionize.

The so-called Employee Free Choice Act has become labor’s top priority, with a labor advocacy group this week launching a $5 million ad campaign. And as the Herald reported on Sunday, local union affiliates are mobilizing the troops to press the case for the bill now before Congress.

The legislation would require employers to immediately recognize a union upon receiving cards signed by a majority of eligible workers. But under current law the signed cards lead to a workplace election, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. With a secret ballot.

Labor’s motives are clear. Union membership, with the exception of government unions, is declining. Naturally organized labor wants to reverse that trend. And hey, more power to ’em.

But just as workers have a right to organize, they have a corresponding right not to organize. And the card-check system essentially strips them of that right.

And heaven help the politician who ends up on the wrong side of this issue. At least one union has resorted to thuggish threats. At the Democratic National Convention last week, the head of the Service Employees International Union told The Associated Press that any Democrat or Republican who reneged on support for “free choice” would “paint a target” on their backs this election season.

Threats and intimidation. Not exactly the change we’ve been waiting for.