LaborPains.org

Another great catch by Phillip Wilson at Laboring Away At The Institute:

I ran across an unfair labor practice charge that I thought was interesting. You can download a copy of the charge here but the basic point is that (surprise, surprise) the union used a variety of heavy-handed tactics including, harassment, intimidation, threats, and bribes to get authorization cards signed. I guess that’s a lot easier than just delivering results for your members and standing on your record… Free Choice indeed.

The union in question is SEIU 1199P, from Pennsylvania. See the ULP here.

Saturday’s Chattanooga Times Free Press has an editorial taking a critical look at an article in the April issue of NEA Today, the magazine of the National Education Association. Titled “Uncle Sam Wants…You?”, the union article in question scrutinizes military recruiters’ attempts to establish rapport with schoolteachers. As the critical Times Free Press editorial put it, NEA Today

saw scary motives behind the program and approvingly cited teachers’ attempts to shut out military recruiters: “In Tucson, Arizona, Rolande Baker had had enough of the (recruiters’) feet in her and her colleagues’ doors,” the reporter wrote. If she got a note from a recruiter requesting to speak to her students, “It would make me so angry, I would tear it up into little pieces,” she said. So, Ms. Baker “successfully lobbied the Tucson Unified School District last year to severely curtail recruiters’ access to schools.”

The article included this ominous assertion as well: “The Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force are working overtime to win the attention of teachers and education support professionals in order to reach their ultimate quarry: students.”

And here all this time we thought the armed forces’ “ultimate quarry” were terrorists who would think nothing of reducing to a cinder the very schools that are intent on “protecting” students from military recruiters.

• A little too close to home: Pro-labor scholar starts his Los Angeles Times sales pitch for ending secret ballots with a quote from Karl Marx.
• More from L.A.: The LAT reports UFCW officials are calling in chits from local political allies to pressure grocery chains during L.A.’s Labor-Pa-Looza Part 2.
• Sick union tactics: A Wisconsin hospital settles its lawsuit against UNITE HERE over dirty organizing tactics, saying its “intent all along was to protect our patients from harassment and interference. We’re satisfied to have done just that.”
• A different kind of RICO case against the Teamsters: Investors sue IBT officials over an alleged insider deal.

They say you gotta pay your dues. But shouldn’t those dues be less than what you’re making? Even as tensions rise in the what may later be dubbed “Southern California Grocery Apocalypse II: The Sad Sequel,” members from UFCW continue to note their unhappiness with their union bosses — especially over the issue of dues. We’ve noted before that the use of dues money to fund lavish salaries for UFCW bosses has already provoked a picket against the union in Southern California. Now another SoCal member is running the numbers, and they’re leaving him broke.

On his livejournal blog, our UFCW member notes the math involved in paying his dues. His math:

My hire date is april 12… so by may 12 i have to go to the local union office and activate my membership… I’m to come prepared to pay my financial obligation and all that for a total of $396…. I’m making about $150 a week so it seems in essence most of the money I’m making for the next month i have to save up to pay the union… WTF is the point of working if it’s all gonna go to the union…

But wait, there’s more! He received a letter from his local, which reads:

… you are a General Merchandise Clerk, therefore, your monthly dues are 45.50 per month and we are charging you May and June dues. Your one time initiation fee is $300.00 for your classification. We also have a $5.00 death benefit charge. This is a life insurance policy and it [covers] you for $2,500.00.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that this luxury resort was the final destination for UFCW members’ dues last year.

According to the Bureau of National Affairs’ Daily Labor Report, the AFL-CIO’s Sheldon Friedman made the interesting claim that the anti-democratic “Employee Free Choice Act” could be the “most important” labor legislation since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

Wow. One little statement can say a lot.

The 1935 Act was crucial because it gave Big Labor its power, so it’s understandable that it’s still #1 in the hearts and minds of labor leaders. It’s equally notable that the Taft-Hartley Amendment in 1947 is less than great in labor leaders’ minds because it diminished their power to abuse their members. See Wikipedia’s entry on the issue:

The Taft-Hartley amendments made sweeping changes in U.S. labor law: they outlaw secondary boycotts and closed shops, allow individual states to outlaw union security clauses by passing what opponents of compulsory unionism call “right-to-work” laws, require unions and employers to give sixty days’ notice before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action, give the President authority to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, exclude supervisors from coverage under the Act, require special treatment for professional employees and guards, codify the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition to unions, give employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its employees, and allow employees to petition to oust their union or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing collective bargaining agreement.

And we at the Center for Union Facts can offer firsthand testimony that union bosses don’t much care for the effects of 1959′s Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, which was instituted in large part to allow union members to see where their money was being spent and to fight organized crime’s influence on the labor movement. Said union bosses really, really hate that.

It was only a few words, but once again union bosses’ preference for curtailing employees’ rights in favor of their own power comes through loud and clear.

There’s something about New York City’s “rubber rooms” (where unionized teachers with tenure are paid not to work) that makes for an endless number of good stories. Previous examples we’ve written up include a teacher accused of making “Columbine-like threats”, a gentleman who allegedly can’t stop leering at girls leaving the restroom, and another with years of sex-based allegations to his name. Just this week, The Village Voice published a fascinating in-depth feature on life inside the rubber room. (Did you know that the city spends $33 million on salaries for rubber-room teachers, not including the cost of their investigators or substitutes?) It’s a good read — here’s an excerpt:

Teachers say they soon learn that their peers are territorial and often cranky. One young teacher serving his fifth month tells the Voice the first thing he was told by a supervisor was not to sit in seats claimed by others. Fights have broken out over less, he was told.

“It’s high school on steroids,” he says. “Or maybe a mixture between a minimum security prison and a senior home.”

To keep occupied, teachers read, play games like Scrabble or chess, or work on their screenplays. Art teachers work on paintings. Masters degrees get completed. Last year at the Seventh Avenue rubber room, a group of teachers taught each other to knit. Exercise is a popular activity.

Jeremy Garrett, a former teacher, has spent the last two years producing a film about rubber rooms by sneaking in cameras. He says he’s known some teachers who actually didn’t mind spending years doing little more than showing up every day for a paycheck. “There are people on the inside who are milking the system,” Garrett says. “You’d have to expect that, though.”

Garrett’s documentary is called “The Rubber Room”, and its website advertises that “sleeping in a sleeping bag,” “practicing karate on file cabinets,” and “running a small business” all occur within the rubber room’s confines. I’m sure the movie will be both hilarious and depressing.

(Hat tip: Mike Antonucci)

If a union official tells you that he’s looking to add to his membership just to help out the workers, you’d be forgiven for asking one or two pertinent follow-up questions. Like, say, how they choose the places they want to organize. In Colorado, a UFCW organizer explained how he picked some casinos over others: “We’re going after casinos making huge amounts of money.”

Two questions: 1) Are the employees of a successful casino somehow more deserving of union representation than are employees of a faltering enterprise, and 2) isn’t this more or less an unintentional admission that a union could help kill off a faltering business?

“On October 14th, 2006 AUD held a one-day conference to assess fifty years of efforts by unionists and government agencies to drive out the mob and rid unions of corruption.” Listen to the audio, especially the section by Robert Fitch, author of Solidarity for Sale.