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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
Services Leader Seeks to End SEIU’s Campaign of Extortion
GAITHERSBURG, Md., March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Sodexo USA today filed a civil lawsuit against the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other defendants under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to stop the illegal campaign of extortion that the SEIU has been waging in the U.S. for over a year.
“This is about protecting the Company’s business and the rights of our employees to vote freely about union representation,” said Robert Stern, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Sodexo USA. “We work constructively with unions every day but the SEIU has crossed the line by breaking the law. We will not tolerate the SEIU’s tactics any longer. Their campaign jeopardizes our Company and our employees’ jobs, and ultimately would rob our employees of their right to vote.”
Sodexo USA has filed the lawsuit seeking to halt the SEIU’s extortionate threats and barrage of unlawful tactics. The complaint alleges acts of SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.
Sodexo USA recognizes the value of union activity and has built positive relationships with more than 30 different unions. Over 15 percent of Sodexo USA’s workforce is unionized, which is more than twice the national average for the private sector, and the Company has more than 300 collective bargaining agreements. Despite this positive record, the SEIU has engaged in a vicious campaign to force the Company into broadly recognizing the SEIU to the exclusion of other unions without allowing its employees in the U.S. to exercise their right to vote for or against the SEIU in a federally supervised secret ballot election.
The complaint alleges that the SEIU, in face to face meetings, threatened Sodexo USA’s executives that it would harm Sodexo USA’s business unless they gave in to the union, and then carried out its threats through egregious behavior, including:
- throwing plastic roaches onto food being served by Sodexo USA at a high profile event;
- scaring hospital patients by insinuating that Sodexo USA food contained bugs, rat droppings, mold and flies;
- lying to interfere with Sodexo USA business and sneaking into elementary schools to avoid security;
- violating lobbying laws to steer business away from Sodexo USA, even at the risk of costing Sodexo USA employees their jobs; and
- harassing Sodexo USA employees by threatening to accuse them of wrongdoing.
The complaint, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, seeks an injunction against the SEIU and its locals and executives, as well as monetary damages to be determined by the court.
Sodexo, Inc. (www.sodexoUSA.com), leading Quality of Daily Life Solutions company in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, delivers On Site Service Solutions in Corporate, Education, Health Care, Government, and Remote Site segments, as well as Motivation Solutions such as Esteem Pass. Sodexo, Inc., headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., funds all administrative costs for the Sodexo Foundation (www.SodexoFoundation.org), an independent charitable organization that, since its founding in 1999, has made more than $15 million in grants to fight hunger in America. Visit the corporate blog at www.sodexoUSA.com/blog.
From Freedomworks…
All across the country, state budgets are dripping in red ink from years of public sector union extortion.
And in many states, bold conservative lawmakers are breaking this stranglehold by pushing legislation to curb collective bargaining powers for public employees.
The Big Labor backlash has been swift and severe. But FreedomWorks, with your help, is rolling out a massive program — including hard-hitting TV ads — to fight back!
Please watch the ad we’ve prepared to air in Ohio. We’ve also created several similar ads for other states, but we need your generosity — of $25, $50, $100 or more — to get them on the air.
In all, our target budget for this campaign is $5.6 million. Some generous donors have gotten the ball rolling, but to meet our goals — and to get this ad and others like it on TV — we desperately need your support, too.
The unions have no shortage of forced-dues dollars to flood the airwaves with their anti-freedom message.
Please, watch our Ohio ad and help keep it on the air with as generous a contribution as you can afford.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Law breaking and violence has always been the stock and trade of unions and today’s budget conflagrations are no different as witness the most recent threatening actions by a union thug, this one in Lansing, Michigan, the Wolverine State’s capitol city.
On March 17 a man was arrested at the Capitol armed with a “sharp-edged weapon,” after he broke through a window and assaulting officers. 13 other protesters accompanying the man in his illegal entry and were charged with trespassing.
Meanwhile, in Camden, New Jersey, the police union chief there has compared Governor Chris Christie to Hitler. More of that “new tone” we keep hearing about from Democrats, I suppose.
John Willliamson, president of the police union, tried to be cagy about it, but there is little doubt of what he was saying.
Williamson did not say it directly, but he cited an historical figure to imply that the countywide plan is part of a larger plot to dismantle public employee unions in New Jersey.
“‘We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers’ salaries and take away their right to strike,’” he read aloud.
“That was said on May 2, 1933, and the person who said it was Adolf Hitler.”
Asked if he was actually comparing Gov. Christie to Hitler, Williamson said, “I’m just looking at the parallel, at what’s happening across the country, and the vicious attacks that have been launched against police and fire and teachers unions.”
To be a unionista is to be a hypocrite…. and a dangerous one at that.
(H/T New Jersey info Matt DeLuca)
The Los Angeles Times has a disheartening report about the graft, corruption, and nest-feathering infesting the administration of California’s government employees pension fund, CalPers (California Public Employees’ Retirement System). It reports that subordinates were pressured into investing in to firms run by political buddies and that one of the former CalPERS administrators was “lucky” enough to have been handed a high paying new job in one of those politically connected firms after he left the government agency.
Some of these officials now under investigation are also accused of falsifying documents to further their schemes of self-enrichment at the expense of the people, accepting large gifts that went unreported, and earning millions in “placement agent fees.”
A 17-month investigation also found that Federico Buenrostro Jr. — along with former pension fund board members Charles Valdes and Kurato Shimada — strong-armed a benefits firm to pay more than $4 million in fees to consultant Alfred J.R. Villalobos, who later hired Buenrostro.
Buenrostro and Valdes raked in millions of dollars each in supposed commissions and finder’s fees while pressuring the government run pension fund to invest in their pal’s firms and businesses. And even after taking in millions in illicit income, J.R. Villalobos has declared bankruptcy claiming he owes more than $5 million to Nevada casinos.
Once again we see the corruption endemic in the pension systems for government employees. It isn’t just California. Sadly things are like this throughout the country.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Ann Althouse has been one of the leading bloggers chronicling the union thugs that have infested Wisconsin over the last few weeks and yesterday she did it again. With her trusty video camera in hand, Althouse found some Wisconsin “teachers” leading little children in protest chants at the State Capitol at Madison.
I just want to ask a question here before we see the video, though. Imagine the screams of agony we’d hear if a group of conservatives had taken children out of school, bussed them to a state capitol, then trained them like good little robots to chant a conservative protest chant. Such a video would be all over the news, wouldn’t it? Such a group if a conservative one would be excoriated from coast to coast by every newspaper and every TV station in existence. If conservatives had done this, the entire Democrat Party would be rising up as one to say that conservatives were child abusers, without a doubt.
… and yet…
Althouse asks if it is a good idea to teach children to mindlessly protest authority when they haven’t the slightest intellectual grasp of why they are protesting! That is certainly a good question, don’t you think?
Of course, we’ve seen the hatemongers on the left indoctrinating kids before…
Sickening, isn’t it? Stalin would have loved this stuff.
From Labor Union Report….
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
In December 2009, though little attention was paid to it at the time, Wisconsin’s then-Governor Jim Doyle signed a bill into law that force feeds unions on schoolchildren:
Wisconsin schools will be required to teach the history of organized labor under a bill signed by Gov. Jim Doyle.
The bill Doyle signed Thursday also requires Wisconsin schools to teach the history of collective bargaining.
The proposal has been around for years but never passed. This year it cleared the Democratic controlled Legislature despite opposition from school boards and administrators who said they didn’t want the curriculum micromanaged.
Labor unions supported the bill.
Now, witness the the planning of the pro-union cirriculum [via Trevor Loudon]
According to Loudon, the three male speakers in the above video are:
- Bryan Kennedy was supported by the Marxists of Democratic Socialists of America during his unsuccessful 2004 Congressional run (as a Democrat).
- David Newby serves on American Federation of Teachers committees with Democratic Socialists of America member Don Taylor.
- Andrew Kersten runs the “Social Change and Development” Department at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, with Democratic Socialists of America member Harvey Kaye.
As as been noted before: the Battle of Wisconsin is about the future of America…in more ways than one.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston