April 16, 2008 - 12:22 am - Posted by WTH
The Philadelphia Inquirer gives us the sad news that a union busting hero has passed away in Pennsylvania. So, we here at the Union Label Blog wanted to take note of the passing of this strong proponent of open shops. He was a one of a kind and we thank him for his stalwart efforts in those early days of anti-union fights in the 1970s.
J. Leon Altemose, controversial contractor, dead at 68
J. Leon Altemose, 68, a contractor who gained national attention for his stand against building trade unions, died in his Malvern home Friday from a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis.
Mr. Altemose made his mark developing major projects in the suburbs, especially the Valley Forge Convention Center complex. In June 1972, his firm’s building site in Valley Forge was attacked by union members, causing an estimated several hundred thousand dollars worth of damage.
Two months later, in August, Mr. Altemose was outside his bank at 15th and Chestnut Streets when he was personally attacked by union members. The attacks made national news and were the subject of a special feature on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
To his fellow “open-shop” builders, Mr. Altemose was a hero, paving the way for non-union contractors to gain ground in a heavily unionized area. To those in the building trades, Altemose represented a threat to union abilities to make sure workers were paid well and had adequate benefits and safety protections.
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April 15, 2008 - 1:16 am - Posted by WTH
Well, it was funny seeing the SEIU and the CNA squaring off for a battle royale, but now things are really getting serious and at this point even a staunch anti-unionist has to say that things are getting out of hand.
The folks over at LaborNotes.org brings us the story of SEIU members being bussed in six, count them SIX, busses to invade and disrupt a conference being attended by California Nurses Association members in Dearborn, Michigan last weekend. Reports are that people were injured as the hundreds of bussed in SEIU members forcibly broke into the conference to disrupt the proceedings.
The ridiculous thing is that the conference was supposed to be about “democracy” in unions put on by Labor Notes Magazine.
This escalation of violence by SEIU members is a disturbing trend that really does make the lie to the claim that SEIU prez Andy Stern is interested in legitimate representation, but is more interested in coercion and intimidation.
Rose Ann DeMoro , president of the CNA told reporters that, “There is an ugly pattern here of physical abuse and tactics of intimidation that have no place in either our labor movement or a civilized society.” She has a point, too.
Deborah Burger of the Huffington Post has a longer report on this unabashed thuggery by the SEIU.
It looks like the SEIU is turning into the lowdown sort of actors that we are used to seeing from union thugs everywhere.
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April 13, 2008 - 7:23 am - Posted by WTH
The Beatles once had a song in which the line “It’s getting better all the time” was featured as the theme. Well, that is how I feel about this fight for supremacy between the CNA and the SEIU over the enrollment of Ohio’s healthcare workers. Each day this fight gets funnier and funnier for those of us that are not a real big fan of unions.
Well, last week things got physical, the fight boiling over into fisticuffs for some members of the two battling unions. We get the gory details from the Los Angeles Times.
A nasty fight erupted at L.A. County hospitals today when organizers for the California Nurses Assn. launched a campaign to persuade 6,000 county-employed nurses to ditch the Service Employees International Union, the powerful organization that represents them, and join the CNA instead, Garrett Therolf reports.
Police arrested a CNA organizer accused of slapping an SEIU organizer and of stomping on the foot of another. A county official who asked for anonymity claimed CNA organizers dressed up as nurses so they could get into areas of the hospital normally off limits.
Every time I open a paper to see a story about the CNA/SEIU fight I feel like I should be popping some pop corn for the show I’m about to enjoy!
Ad the fight is spreading. From Ohio to California, Texas, and Nevada the CNA is aggressively courting new members setting the SEIU’s nerves on edge.
Now that they are starting to get physical we can assume that this fight is way beyond the annoyance stage and now into the truly meanstreet phase. We’ll keep an eye on the fun.
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April 12, 2008 - 8:57 pm - Posted by WTH
This one is interesting. The SEIU was ordered by a California judge to rebate assessments charged non-union members who were charged fees by the union that were used to fight a political campaign against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We get the story from the Sacramento Bee.
Judge Morrison England, in a decision Thursday, ordered Service Employees International Union Local 1000 to send notices to the workers who opted out of union membership. The union must issue refunds, with interest, to those non-union members who object to the special assessment. The rebate would amount to $135 plus interest for a worker who made $4,500 a month in 2005.
The special fee raised $12 million to fight Schwarzenegger’s agenda, about a quarter of which was paid by state workers who chose not to join the union
But, how is it that this union was able to extort money from non-members in the first place, you might ask? It’s only because of the cozy relationship that the union has with the state that allows even non-union members to be ripped off by the union. Thanks to the stupidity of the state of California, even non-members have to pay money into the union! In any other situation this would be called theft. But, when a state government that bends over backwards for unions is involved, it’s called law.
Naturally, the SEIU thinks this is a bad ruling because it limits their “free speech.”
“We feel it’s a bad decision,” Zamora said. “It really hurts free speech” and the union’s ability to respond to issues that affect its membership.
Uh, no. It might put a crimp in the union’s extortion scheme, but it does nothing to “hurt free speech.”
As mentioned in the past, court rulings like this are beginning to happen more often. Let’s hope such cases end up protecting workers who don’t want to belong to or be forced to pay for unions against their will.
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April 10, 2008 - 8:34 pm - Posted by WTH
Well, now I have laughed out loud. It seems that the Services Employee International Union (SEIU) has now launched a website made solely to attack the California Nurses Association (CNA) all over their fight to unionize healthcare workers in Ohio.
It is un-inventively called “Shame on CNA” and it features video clips of nurses and workers who are upset at the CNA for their efforts.
It has sensational titles like “CNA exposed” and sections imploring folks to “take action.”
Ya gotta see it to believe it.
Doncha just hate union on union violence? I have to admit, I find it all hilarious.
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April 9, 2008 - 3:02 am - Posted by WTH
This is a story that has been coming to the fore more every year. The idea that union members should have a choice whether their dues money goes to fund political causes is getting more cachet all the time. Today we have another call to stop unions for using dues money for political causes without getting permission from the dues paying union members first, this time from the Sacramento Bee.
Editorial: Refunds from union are only right
Should government workers be forced to pay for political activities with which they disagree to keep their jobs? That was the fundamental question underlying the case federal court Judge Morrison England decided last week. In a ruling that relied on simple fairness and federal law, Judge England said no.
In the case before the court, the Services Employees International Union Local 1000 had imposed a special assessment on state workers it represented to bankroll its “Political Fight-Back Fund.” The fund was established in 2005 to finance the union’s campaign against Propositions 75 and 76, two measures on the November ballot that year, pushed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The union deducted $12 million from the paychecks of 92,500 of its state worker members to support SEIU’s campaign to defeat the initiatives. Some 28,000 non-union workers, state employees who opt not to join the union but are required to pay fees to finance the union’s bargaining activities from which they benefit, were also forced to pay. That’s where the union tripped up. The non-union members sued to get their money back, and last week they prevailed.
As the Bee editorial notes, its a good thing that unions are beginning to have taken away the ability to casually use of everyone’s dues money to fund the union leadership’s pet political causes. After all, what if Democrat union members were forced to see their dues used to fund Republican causes?
If this idea separating the use of union money from political campaigns becomes more widespread, this could put a great dent in funding for extreme leftist, anti-business, anti-American causes.
Let’s hope this is a ball that find a continued downhill path!
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April 7, 2008 - 6:03 am - Posted by WTH
Jennifer Rubin over at Commentary Magazine has a rather interesting little piece on CM’s “Contentions Blog” that, if true, shows that the Democrat Party’s devotion to Big Labor isn’t really the winning strategy that they think it is.
After noting that the AFL-CIO announced that they were devoting 53 million dollars to attack John McCain during this election cycle, and after noting that the Barack “no special interest money” Obama doesn’t seem to mind this absurd outlay of cash, Rubin reports on a study that shows some bad news for unions and their lap dogs in the Democrat Party.
Now comes some evidence that Democrats do the bidding of Big Labor at their political peril. McLaughlin & Associates, a well-regarded GOP polling group, has conducted a survey for a business group, Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, in the battleground states of Minnesota, Colorado, and Maine. The results (according to the press release) show that large majorities of voters in Colorado (68%), Maine (72%), and Minnesota (65%) oppose the EFCA. Moreover, voters in Minnesota and Colorado would be less likely to support Democratic senate candidates who support the EFCA. (Specifically, a plurality of voters would be less likely to vote for Democratic Senate candidates Mark Udall (44%) and Al Franken (41%) if they support this legislation.) To boot, at least 80% of voters in all three states believe that secret ballot elections are the cornerstone of democracy and should be retained for union elections.
This is one more instance in which Democrats have confused the interests of union power brokers with the interests of working-class voters. Unions may want to do away with workplace democracy, but real workers do not. Similarly, teachers’ unions hate school choice measures, but working-class voters whose kids are trapped in underperforming public schools like them.
Of course, the fact that the excesses of union manipulation, corruption, and stupidity won’t slow down Big Labor’s iron grip over the Democrat Party any time soon, but, as Rubin notes< these facts do lend Republicans with some clear strategy choices in the meantime.
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April 5, 2008 - 6:00 am - Posted by WTH
This internal brawl within the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) is getting uglier by the minute. Readers of the Union Label Blog will certainly know we’ve been watching the fisticuffs inside the union over the direction and policies of current president Andy Stern and we have to admit that there’s been no lack of smirks and guffaws over the union’s infighting among the denizens of the ULBlog offices! Some of us here have even been tempted to chortle openly at the union’s troubles.
Still, when serious reflection is directed at this incident it cannot escape notice that everything that is going on within the SEIU seems to violate every principle that unions are mythically assumed to hold dear. Under Andy Stern’s leadership, the “democratic process” has been steadily thwarted and union leadership has attempted to create a top-down, autocratic style of control belying the supposed principle of the rank and file “having their say” in how the union operates. Andy Stern has done his best to emulate Stalin instead of Ghandi. Stern seems the very picture of the elite instead of a man of the people.
And, isn’t it the common assumption that unions stand against “the man” telling them what to do? Yet, here is Andy Stern doing his level best to himself become the man!
Well now we can add delegate stacking and election rigging on top of his other tyrannical attempts to rule with an iron fist. According to a San Francisco Bay Guardian story by JB Powell, Andy Stern’s office has been exposed for efforts to make sure that SEIU dissidents don’t end up elected as delegates to the upcoming SEIU convention.
And the emails appear to show a concerted effort by Stern’s senior staff and local loyalists to ensure that the dissidents don’t dominate the convention delegation.
Critics charge that these activities violated Local 1021’s Election Rules and Procedures – specifically Rule 18, which states, “While in the performance of their duties, union staff shall remain uninvolved and neutral in relation to candidate endorsements and all election activities.”
It also seems that these same staffers were telling their office employees that the employees shouldn’t involve themselves in the delegate elections, even as the staff leaders were doing that very thing.
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April 4, 2008 - 6:15 am - Posted by WTH
For those of you that have been around the Union Blog for a while, you’ll remember we’ve highlighted the troubles of mob infested New York City bus drivers union before. Well, we have another update in this tale so filled with corruption, criminal activity, and mob actions.
The Village Voice reports that three union officials are now on the outside looking in at their former positions in the union.
Three officials with alleged mob ties got the boot today from the union representing the city’s 15,000 school bus drivers and escorts. Union delegates Paul Maddalone, his brother Nick Maddalone, and Gary Gugliaro were told they were personnae non grata by union trustee Tommy Mullins, who has been running Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transport Union since the local was exposed as a nest of mob corruption by a federal investigation.
The officials’ removal comes one month after The Voice reported that former union bigs had named the Maddalones and others of having ties to mobsters.
All three men were closely associated with ex-local president Sal Battaglia, a Genovese crime family associate who pleaded guilty in January to federal bribery and conspiracy charges.
This, I’m sure, is but another small chapter in the ongoing mess happening in New York. You’d be best advised, though, not to imagine that this is an isolated case of union corruption. It seems all too representative, unfortunately.
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April 3, 2008 - 9:24 pm - Posted by WTH
James Sherk makes a good case for understanding how unions have become detrimental to American interests in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
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Labor unions add to costs and discourage productivity
Would you want to work for a company that treats all workers exactly the same, no matter how hard they work? What about one that promotes only on the basis of seniority and not merit?
Few Americans want a job with an employer who ignores their individual efforts. Yet that’s what labor unions offer employees today. Small wonder membership is steadily declining.
The premise of collective bargaining is that by representing all employees a union can negotiate a better collective contract than each worker could get through individual negotiations. But because the union negotiates collectively, the same contract covers every worker, regardless of his or her productivity or effort.
In the manufacturing economy of the 1930s, this worked reasonably well. An employee’s unique talents and skills made little difference on the assembly line.
In today’s knowledge economy, however, collective representation makes little sense. Machines perform most of the repetitive manufacturing tasks of yesteryear. Employers now want employees with individual insights and abilities. The fastest-growing occupations over the past quarter-century have been professional, technical, and managerial in nature. The jobs of the future include Web designers, interior decorators, and public-relations specialists, among others.
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April 2, 2008 - 5:52 pm - Posted by WTH
Now, this is the sort of thing that liberals do very well. They hide behind grand sounding organizations that claim to be “community” based, “non-partisan,” or but humble servants of the people. What they really are, however, are subversive organizations that try their best to stay behind the scenes while they promulgate their special brand of socialist policies. Most of all, they are massively funded by people like George Soros who have specific anti-American policies they wish to put into effect.
A new report from the Capital Research Center by James Dellinger and Karl Crow has recently been released to highlight the efforts of at least one of these back-room, secretive, leftist organizations.
In 2006, voters in 37 states faced a total of 203 state ballot initiatives and supporters and opponents of these measures raised and spent more than $350 million. Many ballot initiatives were sponsored and supported by labor unions, and often they received help from the little-known Washington, D.C.-based Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which quietly provides assistance in promoting ballot initiative campaigns in states where the initiative process exists. But the Center plays another increasingly important role for Big Labor and its allies. It devises tactics for blocking ballot initiatives by union opponents using aggressive methods.
Conservatives have seen success lately using ballot initiatives and this has caused liberals to try to subvert the process of ballot initiatives that their side has used to effectively for decades. This shows once again that the left is not interested in the democratic process… unless it is on THEIR side.
However, BISC is moving into a new area in 2008: It is using its expertise to thwart efforts by groups it opposes from making use of the ballot initiative process altogether. BISC has become the “go-to” group that Big-Labor relies on whenever it wants to organize a “blocker campaign,”a tactic unions use to restrict access to the ballot initiative process. The victims of these tactics argue that BISC’s abuse of the initiative process is a form of political thuggery that has no place in a democracy.
The CRC report details how this secretive, behind the scenes liberal group does more than merely promote liberal/union causes, but also “tracks the funding of ballot initiatives and tries to prevent conservatives from getting their initiatives on state ballots.”
This report is informative and really shows the sort of overwhelming odds that true community based citizen’s groups that attempt to use the democratic process have lined up to defeat them.
To get the full PDF report, visit Capital Research Center.
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April 1, 2008 - 2:51 pm - Posted by WTH
Uh, oh. Looks like SEIU Chief Andy Stern isn’t taking this insurgency in stride. He’s breaking out the long knives for this one.
We’ve mentioned before how the SEIU president is under internal pressure over his growth model. Stern’s internal union opponents are claiming that he gives away too much power to employers solely to get new membership. Because a certain faction of the SEIU thinks Stern is weakening the union, they have risen up from within and challenged his position as the union chief.
Well, ol’ Andy isn’t taking this lying down. He’s fighting back like a good union thug does by making allegations and trying to have his opponent thrown out of the union. Yes, in typical undemocratic union style, Stern is ignoring the real issues and trying to strong-arm his opponent into oblivion!
We get the tale from the San Francisco Chronicle.
The president of one of the nation’s largest labor unions moved this week toward ousting the leaders of its West Coast affiliate, in a power struggle that could affect hundreds of thousands of California workers and the state’s strained health care industry.
Ooopsie, trouble in the worker’s paradise.
Andy Stern, president of the Washington-headquartered Service Employees International Union, sent a letter on Monday - obtained by The Chronicle - that alleges misconduct by Sal Rosselli, president of the Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers West, who has been Stern’s most vocal critic.
I guess we shouldn’t expect Stern to delineate his strategy, bring it to the membership, and run on the strength of his ideas, huh? No, like a true union thug, Stern has to try and use strong-arm tactics to eliminate the opposition.
Stern’s opponent, Sal Rosselli is a bit taken aback, too.
Rosselli insists Stern is seeking to oust him for his outspoken views. Last month, Rosselli resigned from SEIU’s executive committee after accusing Stern of consolidating power in the hands of his allies while marginalizing other elected leaders. He also alleges that Stern has cut deals with corporate leaders to grow SEIU’s rolls at the expense of current members’ contracts.
“It’s retaliatory because we are speaking out against his ideology, his direction,” Rosselli said. “The simplest way I can say it is, it’s top-down versus bottom-up, corporate unionism versus social unionism.”
Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but don’t unions always claim that they are all about “democracy” and that the people should be allowed to decide? Yet, here we have union chief Andy Stern trying to kill off his opposition instead of trusting to the membership to decide who is right.
Ah, the hypocrisy is thick, isn’t it?
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