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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Larry Seale
Poor ole’ Andy Stern, the iron-fisted boss of the oft scandal ridden Service Employees International Union (SEIU) just can’t catch a break – he puts SEIU right in the middle of all the feudin’ in the break-up of the 2004 marriage between Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE); next, SEIU rising star Byron Hobbs, former Chicago based SEIU Local 20 President, SEIU Local 2000 trustee, SEIU mega-union “Healthcare Illinois-Indiana” Executive VP and SEIU national board member, gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Hobbs “resigned” in February, 2009, after it was reveled that he had charged $9100 in personal expenses to his Local 20 credit card. SEIU states that Hobbs has since repaid the money and that SEIU is auditing Local 2000, where Hobbs served as a trustee.
Perhaps SEIU ought to audit Local 20, now merged into Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, and Healthcare Illinois-Indiana as well -who’s bright idea was it to give him a credit card to begin with?
You can read “The Rest of the Story” on the First Transit Employee Right Blog.
Larry Seale is 62, a former member of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001 and he lives north of Denver where he was employed as a Regional Transportation District sub-contractor bus driver until a serious illness forced his “partial retirement” in January, 2009.
Editorial, The Washington Examiner
Never mind Big Labor’s continuing all-out push to take away workers’ right to a secret ballot in the workplace with Card Check, which is officially and misleadingly known as the Employee Free Choice Act. Even if Card Check fails in Congress, the game will be rigged against small business owners and the managers of private corporations if President Obama wins Senate approval for Craig Becker as a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Presently associate general counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Becker wants to use new bureaucratic regulations to interpose government between workers and the alleged atmosphere of compulsion created in the workplace by owners and managers. Writing in 1993 in the Minnesota Law Review, here’s how Becker, then a UCLA law professor, put it:
“This new legal framework would entail a body of new campaign rules. For example, employers could not lawfully exploit employee dependence to insure audiences for their anti-union speech. Thus, captive audience meetings at any time, not simply during the final twenty-four hours before an election, should be grounds for overturning an election. Similarly, the Board should not hunt through the workplace searching for the ‘locus of final authority,’ but instead should acknowledge that employer authority pervades the workplace and that compulsion is implicit when employers campaign during the work day.”
Becker’s new legal framework would bar owners and company managers from attending NLRB hearings about elections or to issue challenges even when there is evidence of union abuses. Becker would also prohibit owners or managers from having independent observers at the polls to challenge questionable ballots during union representation elections.
Such changes would translate into a dramatic departure from current law. Both sides of labor-management disputes have a voice at NLRB election hearings, and owners and managers can present their case to workers 24 hours prior to any workplace representation election. Union leaders claim the rule changes are needed because the field is tilted in favor of the companies. But data compiled by the Bureau of National Affairs show unions won more than two-thirds of NLRB-sanctioned workplace representation contests in 2008. That hardly sounds like the results one would expect in an atmosphere of compulsion.
More likely, Obama nominated Becker to advance the administration’s agenda of expanding the suffocating role of Big Government into every nook and cranny of the workplace. To whose benefit? Why, Obama’s friends in Big Labor, of course. They gave more than $74 million to federal candidates in 2008, 92 percent of which went to Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Looks like only one of those candidates really stand firmly against Card Check…
-By Stephanie Condon, CBS EconWatch
As Democrats and Republicans stand increasingly at odds over measures to help improve the economy, one bill under consideration highlights how critical party loyalty could be in determining policy measures.
Mitt Romney, a likely contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, joined a forum of business advocates in Northern Virginia on Thursday to denounce a union-backed bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, as little more than political payback from Democrats that would worsen the nation’s economic footing.
The bill would be “catastrophic for the economy,” Romney said. “The impact long term is people start less businesses here. It’s not great for the people who start businesses today, but it’s even worse for the employees of tomorrow.”
The act would make it easier for workers to form a union. Most notably, it would allow workers to automatically form a union if more than a half of them sign a card indicating they want to join one. This method is currently an option for employees so long as their employers approve it; otherwise, workers can form a union through a secret ballot and election process.
Read the full report at: CBS EconWatch.
Last year, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) performed a hostile take over of a local California health care workers union that was resisting being absorbed and disbanded by the powerful national union. We reported on that incident for many months in 2008 here at theUnionLabelBlog.
The United Healthcare Workers lost their bid to stay separate from the SEIU, but that hasn’t kept them down. They have formed a new union to challenge the hegemony of the SEIU. They are calling it the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).
NUHW members are saying that they formed their new union because the SEIU was preventing whistleblowing of its internal corruption and because the hostile takeover of the UHW was predicated on giving away too much local power to employers.
“We want our union back,” said Esperanza Cardenas, a homecare provider in Fresno. “Before SEIU took over, we had a voice to stand up for the people in our care. We always stopped the budget cuts. Since the takeover, SEIU didn’t stop massive cuts to our wages by the County. Now they want to win us back with robocalls, ads and publicity stunts. We’re sticking with NUHW, the union we built with the leaders we elected.”
Now, apparently the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union (UFW) is joining the new NUHW in its fight against the SEIU. Delores Huerta attended a rally with the NUHW this week to show her support.
The new NUHW is requesting a vote of thousands of workers that now belong to the SEIU in hopes that they will vote to dump the SEIU and join their new effort. This vote is important because it may serve as the first dent in the power of the SEIU.
We will try to keep an eye on this situation here on the blog.
Not long ago the San Diego Union-Tribune got bought up by a private Beverly Hills firm named Platinum Equity. Platinum was heavily invested in by the Los Angeles police pension fund. And so, because the police are large stake owners of the news paper, the police union has called for the firing of writers it considers anti-union.
So much for freedom of the press as far as this union is concerned!
League President Paul M. Weber believes that he has the right and the power due to that financial stake to demand the firing of writers of the Union-Tribune that have been outspoken advocates of cut backs in salaries and benefits for California’s public employees and politicians.
Yes, this union thug is demanding the head of anyone that has the audacity to suggest that unions should sacrifice as everyone else is expected to do in this harsh economic climate.
“Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced,” Weber wrote in a March 26 letter to Platinum CEO Tom Gores.
This is more evidence of the essentially anti-American philosophy underpinning the concept of unionism. If you don’t like freedom of the press, you are essentially saying that American principles are not good ones and that tyranny is the way to go.
For the paper, editor Bob Kittle scoffed at the union leader’s arrogance.
“We are not anti-public safety or public employee,” he said. “All of this has to be considered within the context of what the city can afford. A bankrupt city can’t provide any public safety very well.”
This is also proof once again that unions are antithetical to good government and should be eliminated.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston