LaborPains.org

We’ve told you before about the thumpin’ Change To Win allies rivals UFCW and SEIU took in a recent vote among St. Louis nurses. Well, we thought the story was important enough that we should drop a letter to the editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who in turn kindly published our thoughts today:

St. John’s Mercy hospital employees sent a powerful message to union officials when 1,036 voted against union representation, while two voted to keep their current union, United Food and Commercial Workers (“Union says hospital used access to influence nurses,” Aug. 22). It’s equally notable that employees chose not to cast their lot with UFCW’s ally, the Service Employees International Union.

Labor organizations frequently suffer these public defeats thanks to increased employee education, as was the case at St. John’s. To stop the bleeding, both of these unions are lobbying Congress to keep employees from having the ability to vote their personal choice by secret ballot. They aggressively are pushing the misleadingly named “Employee Free Choice Act” in a brazen attempt to stop fair and open elections and prevent such visible embarrassments in the future.

Elected officials from Missouri must reject Big Labor’s lobbying and protect secret ballots for all working Americans.

Looks like those union financial disclosures — you know, the ones overseen by the only Department of Labor section whose budget will likely be cut by union-backed politicians — are full of good info. There’s simply too much info on UnionFacts.com to go through by any one group, but interested parties can find a lot. Witness the following from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Three Chicago area Teamsters officials are among the highest paid in the union, members of what a Teamsters reform group labels the $150,000 club — officials paid more than $150,000 last year. Teamsters for a Democratic Union said the list includes John Coli, president of Teamsters Joint Council 25 and secretary treasurer of Local 727 in Chicago, who made $360,510, exceeding that of international Teamsters President James Hoffa, who made $335,657. Other local officials on the list are Patrick Flynn, Council 25 recording secretary and secretary treasurer of Local 710, who was paid $315,281; and James Dawes, president of Teamsters Local 710, who was paid $279,000.

Teachers unions aren’t the only stakeholders in public education, but they’re almost invariably the most organized ones. One upstate New York doctor is attempting to change that reality, The New York Sun reports. As anesthesiologist David Smith tells the Sun: “There’s only one voice in Albany right now: That’s the voice of the teachers union. They don’t have that right. The people that are affected by the system most dramatically — parents and their children — should have the largest voice.”

Downstate, another reformer’s voice has piped up on a key school reform issue. Ariel Sacks has just finished her third year of teaching middle school English full-time in East Harlem, and she’s rightly distressed that, having been recommended for tenure, she’s reached “what could be the pinnacle of my career.” For teachers to have real professional growth, Sacks writes, they need professional pay — more money for better results. Instead, under New York City’s union salary schedule, “[w]hether I push myself year after year to attain the level of expertise I dream of (and my students deserve), or whether I make no effort to improve at all, I will earn exactly the same pay and have the same very limited career options.”

The biggest hurdle with merit pay (and the one that gives NEA UniServ directors sleepless nights) is measuring student learning well. But teachers must take the plunge regardless of the difficulty, as Sacks writes: “If we don’t, will we ever be seen as true professionals?”

Per our ongoing series, inspired by the Change To Win bloggers, here our fact of the day:

The Change To Win labor federation spent a whopping $829,938 for their 2006 organizing convention held at the plush MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas.

That’s a lot of money to boost organizing! But …
Bonus fact: According to a report from The Wall Street Journal in April of this year:

The federation, which represents 5.4 million workers in health care, trucking, hotels and construction, among other industries, has failed to significantly increase its membership.

Dear UFCW and Change To Win:

We recently had a blog exchange about UFCW president Joe Hansen’s misguided statements regarding U.S. immigration policy. We wanted to draw your attention to an editorial in the Fayetteville Observer:

The union called the arrests “a form of political theater that ends in real human tragedy — the devastation of communities, breakup of families and defilement of fundamental American values.”

Rampant lawbreaking — illegal immigration and identity theft — also is a defilement of fundamental American values. Enforcing the law isn’t theater. Communities and families are in no danger of devastation or breakup if they come here legally and obey the law.

We hope this clarifies the issue.

Best,

Center for Union Facts staff

There’s no doubt about it, capitalism is messy business. As the world changes, companies are built and destroyed. The knock on a lot of union “leaders” is that they fail to adapt with the times, or worse yet, they fight progress. In other words, they’re dinosaurs.

Exhibit A in this debate is usually the United Auto Workers. They helped cripple the U.S. auto industry with unreasonable wage, healthcare, and work rule demands.

The good news: one auto union leader is working with companies to overcome the hurdles of Globalization. The bad news: It’s in Brazil. The Detroit News reports on one union leader who:

made his own pilgrimage to Ford’s Dearborn headquarters. He negotiated a five-year deal that allowed Ford to eliminate several hundred jobs and consolidate two factories in exchange for guarantees for workers who remained. The union also dropped its opposition to Ford’s plan for a new factory in the state of Bahia in which suppliers would run their own assembly lines alongside Ford’s.

The president of Ford’s Brazilian operations, Marcos Oliveira , said the union’s help was instrumental in turning Ford’s operations in the country around. “(Feijóo) faced the same reality that we faced as a company. It was a matter of survival. We all had to do our part.”

Don’t bet the farm on seeing much more cooperation from American UAW officials, some of whom are starting the process of strike votes during this round of negotiations. That’s the real problem: supposed progressives fight actual progress.

But while national-level union officials fight trade agreements and bludgeon companies, some at the local level are more practical. After three dozen employees were laid off from a plant that found technology to make its products more efficiently and reduced labor costs, the local Teamsters rep said:

“This company has a brand new facility, state of the art … Technology, you’re not going to ever stop that.”

ULPs — unfair labor practice charges — are tricky things. They’re essentially complaints that an employer or a union has violated federal labor law. Sometimes they are meaningful, most of the time they are not. In fact, it’s not uncommon for an employee or employer (by an approximate 80-20 split, respectively) to file a complaint about a union. Some employees have done just that to SEIU — but this time it’s their own employees in the union’s capacity as an employer.

From A Voice for All Working People:

SEIU’s bullying of its staff continues to be met with resistance. Local 721′s attempt to force an unfair contract including a demand to waive legally protected rights has so far been resisted with the staff voting down their contract proposal by a wide margin days after filing an Unfair Labor Practice Charge against the employer.

Hat tip: EmployerReport.com

The Boston Globe this morning has a story fawning all over the Service Employees International Union. It seems the union has actually helped out one of its members. That’s a rare, albeit welcome, change. But there’s another important note from the story, which reports that the state’s governor is taking sides with one of his biggest supporters:

The state hires the contractors, but the administration has made it clear that, in this fight, it is siding with SEIU, one of the first labor groups that backed Patrick’s candidacy.

That’s money well spent for union bosses. The picture is less clear for taxpayers.