Right to Work Blog

Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s campaign was so dependent on big labor, “it was all we had,” one Democrat political consultant said.

The Purple Army of SEIU agitators are heading to Massachusetts to try to elect SEIU water-carrier Martha Coakley to the open Senate seat.

With their forced unionism agenda threatened, the SEIU has jumped into the Massachusetts Senate race with an attack ad against Republican Scott Brown.  The ad buy is a cool $685,000 – straight from the coffers of workers dues money.

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 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.

Massachusetts labor bosses are used to getting their way, especially from Gov. Deval Patrick. But labor activists are throwing up the red flag at Patrick’s proposed idea to use civilian flaggers on highway work projects instead of state troopers. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation that uses police officers instead of civilian flaggers at nearly all road and utility construction sites, giving union officers a way to make overtime pay. In fact, nearly five percent of the state highway construction budget went to pay state troopers.

Patrick’s draft regulations, which could go into effect as soon as October, would encourage the state to use less expensive civilian flaggers or electronic signs on roads with a 45 mph speed limit or less, and the AFL-CIO isn’t happy about it.

AFL-CIO spokesman Tim Sullivan, who blasted the plan as unsafe and questioned the cost savings, said the union would fight the regulations. “Who’s going to pay for these flagmen to be trained, who’s going to pick up their unemployment insurance? We just don’t think the cost savings are there,” Sullivan said.

This, of course, raises a more important issue in the eyes of David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute. Under Massachusetts Prevailing Wage Law, the state pays about $40 an hour to police officers who do flag work. Union activists note that the law would require civilians to be paid the same amount — thus create no savings to the taxpayers.

Tuerck correctly argues, “By making this argument, the unions have done us a service. If a law compels the state to spend the equivalent of $80,000 a year for someone to flag down oncoming traffic, then it’s time to rethink the law.”

The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) points out that Massachusetts’ infamous Central Artery Tunnel union-only project, known as the “Big Dig”, is threatening the solvency of the state of Massachusetts.

The ABC notes:

Despite receiving federal funding, the Big Dig was subject to a union-only project labor agreement (PLA) that required project contractors and subcontractors agree to recognize unions as the representatives of their employees on the job, use the union hiring hall to obtain workers, pay union wages and benefits, and obey the union’s work rules, job classifications and arbitration procedures. . . .

This union-only funding orgy was estimated to cost $2.8 billion dollars, but costs have exploded to over $22 billion.

Union-only jobs cost taxpayers millions of dollars every year — but as in the case of the “Big Dig” — millions easily add up to billions.

Teamsters bosses in Massachusetts have cancelled a scheduled election by FedEx drivers after realizing they had little chance of victory. “This is a complete victory for FedEx Home Delivery contractors Worcester and a total defeat for the Teamsters,” said a FedEx spokesman.

Rather than admitting that they were going to lose the election, the bitter Teamsters proclaimed the election would not go forward because it was “not going to be free or fair.”

Free or Fair?

Apparently the Teamsters knew, if the drivers got a chance to vote in a secret ballot election, they were going to lose.

Free or fair now means one-on-one intimidation by union operatives to get a worker to sign a card forcing the union in without an election.

If they ever enact their Card Check Scam Bill, elections won’t be either free or fair because there won’t be any.

Crocodile tears indeed!

Let me get this straight.

After “. . . convincing only six of 100 Russell workers to picket with them and gaining 12 votes in favor of unionization,” over “. . . 30 members of Teamsters Local 25 padlocked the entrance of Russel[l] Disposal and parked a large tractor trailer in front of the business to block access to the waste businesses’ yard.”

And then, according to witnesses and as reported by the Somerville (MA) News, “. . . the union attempted to intimidate everyone in sight, including police and media, with curse-laden threats. A fracas erupted between Teamsters, police and Russell employees.”

So much for union democracy.

Even the very liberal Globe says the city of Boston shouldn’t have to bargain with firefighter union bosses over random drug testing. Yet right now Congress is considering legislation that would force localities all around the country to recognize firefighter union bosses as firefighters’ monopoly-bargaining agents, and “terms of employment” such as random drug testing would have to be part of the negotiations.

As the Globe opined, “Impaired firefighters pose a serious potential risk to the public and themselves.”

It is unconscionable that Congress is even considering allowing its public safety responsibility to be subject to negotiations with Big Labor self-interest.

Read more about the Police and Fire Monopoly-Bargaining Act here.