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The Tacoma (Washington) News Tribune editorialized last week about a middle school principal convicted of third-degree rape who’s still drawing $8,245 a month in salary because the state’s due process laws have thus far prevented his district from firing him.

Unfortunately, The News Tribune undermines its own case by claiming that tenure protections are the right way to protect “educators and other public employees from arbitrary, groundless firings by vindictive or incompetent administrators”. Thing is, it’s the very same tenure protections (defended by teachers unions, including the Washington Education Association) that keep bad administrators from getting the ax!

Raise the bar on teachers and administrators — our current laws let bad teachers hang on to their jobs and let administrators (bad or not) shirk responsibility for teacher quality.

(HT: Joanne Jacobs)

From an employee of Basha’s, the Arizona grocer under attack from the UFCW’s anti-corporate campaign machine:

The United Food and Commercial Workers has waged an unethical (at best) campaign of harassment and intimidation against our company and its employees.

When their tactics failed to drum up enough support among the Bashas’ membership to force a vote, they lowered themselves to the next level. They are now trying to damage our business by misleading our customers. 

It’s not often you see business leaders stand up to smear campaigns ordered by labor leaders. But Wackenhut, a security firm, is resisting an organizing drive by Service Employees International Union bosses which would deny employees the right to a secret ballot vote. Now Wackenhut is gathering several stories (many of which frequent Labor Pains readers will recognize) to balance the story. From the release:

• SEIU was recently forced to abandon multiple Kaiser Permanente units across the Southern California area after use of coercive union organizing methods, according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
• SEIU filed a lawsuit, post 9/11, to try and overturn the law requiring federal baggage screeners at airports to be U.S. citizens.
• SEIU officials have been indicted or convicted of embezzlement of union funds.
• A former SEIU Local 99 president has been charged in a federal indictment with conspiracy and 17 counts of embezzling union funds as a result of an investigation into former Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow.
• A New York Sun business reporter said, “SEIU now seems to depend more on corporate intimidation rather than recruiting.”
• The director of strategic research for the AFSCME union said, “UDW-AFSCME home-care workers across the state were tricked and coerced into signing membership cards with (SEIU) Local 434B.”

UPDATE: “Wackenhut a challenge to security guard union drive”

At the Center for Union Facts, our belief is that everyone who wants a union should have one as long as every employee gets a personal, private vote in an election overseen by the government. That’s the only way to avoid coercion of employees. But union bosses who are looking to add new members, quickly, say that the current process of elections is broken — instead, they want to codify “card check” organizing which steals workplace democracy from employees.

But there’s yet another recent story which puts the lie to the claim of a broken system. Some nurses at a Florida hospital — though by no means a majority yet — say they want to join SEIU, which is a leader in the fight to end secret ballot elections. Yet when the possibility of adding 300 new dues-paying members comes up, the union-seeking nurses say the “next step is to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board.” Good for them, let’s see how the election comes out.

But what about people who don’t get the right to that vote? Can SEIU leaders seriously say some employees deserve that right, while others don’t? That’s a question we’ll have to keep raising as the union becomes more and more desperate to maintain its growth.

We’ve told you … several times … about the campaign by United Food and Commercial Workers strategists to unionize Smithfield employees without letting them have a personal, private vote whose integrity is overseen by the federal government. Instead, UFCW continues to run its anti-corporate smear campaign tarnishing the company’s image in hopes Smithfield will simply throw its hands in the air and its employees into the waiting arms of the union. No such luck so far — but there’s an interesting story out of Tar Heel, North Carolina.

We won’t belabor the point, so see the story here. But there was an interesting quote from a local professor, whose expertise should be called into question after making this gaffe: “I am not sure if the card-check is the best way to resolve issues at Smithfield … But I don’t see anything else being offered.” Whoa, Nelly! The company is practically begging to hold a real election. That point has been discussed here.

Time for the professor to hit the books and study up on the subject. We suggest he start here.

UPDATE: Thought you’d want to see another quote from the story:

“Just let us vote and get it over with,” said Sarah Hayes of Dillon, S.C. “What is the problem with us voting? We will see how it goes with the letter that we sent. If that doesn’t work, we just have to take other measures.”

Indeed.

Bright-eyed readers of yesterday’s Washington Post will notice a letter to the editor from the well-paid Michael Sullivan, head of the Sheet Metal Workers union. Sullivan writes in response to a great column by Robert Novak — and to defend AFL-CIO top chef chief John Sweeney, who is supposedly “protecting the interests of not only workers of this country but also workers around the world who labor in unsafe conditions, receive inadequate wages and turn out products that fail to meet environmental, health and safety standards.” Wow, they’re looking out of the little guys!

But, wait, if you punch a few keys in the old google-izer, you come up with a story in which it wasn’t so long ago that union bosses were supporting steel tariffs. Those fees, essentially taxes on anything made outside the U.S., were designed to make foreign steel makers less competitive — which would definitely have the effect of ending jobs for non-American workers.

Once again, this latest round of anti-trade rhetoric isn’t about protecting foreign workers — it’s about protecting the dues dollars that flow into union executives’ offices.

From the same speech by New York City Mike Bloomberg we told you about yesterday, another gem about education reform and unions:

And when a tenured teacher’s students are not learning, principals, after a reasonable appeals process, should have the authority to let that teacher go. Right now, that appeals process is anything but reasonable. It’s a nightmare. That’s why many principals don’t even bother with it – and once again, it’s our children who suffer.

In New York City, we’ve begun taking the first steps toward tenure reform by requiring principals to evaluate each tenure-track teacher, so that tenure is earned by those who deserve it, and not granted as a right to those who don’t. But to inject some sanity into the process of firing bad teachers. And to pay bonuses to highly effective teachers, we need buy-in from the unions. That hasn’t been easy in New York – or anywhere else.

This just in from the Onion News Network: The AFL-CIO can’t remember what its acronym stands for. Tonight at 11.

Not really, but if you watch the first segment — which is hilarious — and then hang around through the ad for some not-so-funny movie, the Onion News Network has a great kicker.

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