LaborPains.org

Here’s a tip: Be careful what you label “For Internal Use Only- Not For Distribution.” And don’t put it on the internet.

“Language Tips on Employee Free Choice” contains multiple tips, courtesy of the SEIU, on the verbiage of the the EFCA debate (see document below).

I guess since the SEIU figured their employees might have a problem keeping the proverbial “cat in the bag” as the the real motivations behind card check, I mean EFCA, I mean the Employee Free Choice Act, ie., get a lot of people unionized really fast so our pension funds don’t go bankrupt and we don’t become an irrelevant part of the American work force….and so we can replace all the disenchanted workers who leave unions.

One of the more damning interesting points is this:

Instead of calling current law the “secret ballot system” or “private ballot system,” the SEIU instead recommends that employees call it the “Company-dominated system” that “denies workers free choice.”

According to the SEIU, a private election is “company-dominated.” Whereas, an election where workers have no privacy and can easily be coerced into joining a union, i.e. card check, (or “Majority sign-up” according to the SEIU) is real “free choice.”

Why do I get the feeling that the SEIU needs to go back to grammar school?

Image courtesy of….well….the SEIU.

Together: Moyano and Kirchner

Argentina has faced a lot of adversity in the last decade, not the least of which was the Kirchner Administration’s (and the legislature’s) recent attack on free speech and the press, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.   It doesn’t help that the Teamsters locals are cutting off paper distribution, to force unionization under the guidance of their leader and kept man of the administration Hugo Moyano. The Buenos Aires Herald reports: 

The workers of four of the six cooperatives that distribute dailies and magazines in different parts of the City of Buenos Aires, have now joined the lines of the Teamsters’ Union after truckers last night blocked the entrance of their workshops threatened to block all their operations. The move is increasing the influence of Hugo Moyano, a loyalist of the Kirchners, over the supply of dailies, as his union now controls the supply of paper. Deputy-elect Néstor Kirchner and his wife, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner are at odds with dailies Clarín and La Nación, which they have accused of smearing the image of the government. Last month, pro-government lawmakers passed a bill in Congress that generated concerns over growing press censorship.

Teamsters last night used a handful of trucks to block the entrance of all the buildings from where paper is distributed to the vendors in the City, to press the cooperatives to write their employees under the powerful teamsters’ union.  […] After three hours, the directors of the four of the total six cooperatives agreed to meet with union leaders today at the Labour Ministry building to enroll their employees under the union led by Moyano. One of the cooperatives last night refused to comply with the truckers’ demands, and its entrance remained blocked this morning.

Maybe the American Teamsters should cry for Argentina. Or cry foul.

One of 24 international vice presidents of the Teamsters, James Santangelo, has resigned his multiple posts within the Teamsters union. He was the president of Teamsters Joint Council 42 which represented 129,000 members in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere. He also led Local 848.  While the Teamsters maintain they didn’t force him out, you wonder why they care so much.  The LA Times reports:

A top West Coast Teamsters official has resigned his post amid allegations that he sexually harassed a union secretary. [...] The terms of the settlement were confidential, but a person close to the case confirmed a report in a dissident Teamsters blog online that the union agreed to settle the matter for $500,000. In her lawsuit, Corral alleged that Santangelo subjected her to “unwanted verbal and physical conduct of a sexual nature including … offering to give her a raise in exchange for sex, repeatedly trying to kiss her on the mouth, showing and sending her sexually explicit e-mails, commenting on her breasts, asking to come to her hotel room during a business trip, [and] suggesting he be her ‘sugar daddy.’”

You wanna know how union this man was?  Listen to his “pick up” line–about salary increases:

Over dinner at a hotel restaurant in March 2008, Corral alleged, Santangelo propositioned her when the two were discussing upcoming salary increases. “What if I said you can make $700.00 a week more if all you did was pass through those doors and go to a room with me?”

Something must be in the water in LA.  Maybe the unions really do just want to clean up America’s ports. The LA Times continues:

Santangelo is the second high-profile union leader in Southern California to resign in the last 15 months amid allegations of wrongdoing. Tyrone Freeman of the Service Employees International Union stepped down as head of a Los Angeles SEIU chapter in the wake of Times reports that the organization and a related charity paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to firms owned by his wife and mother-in-law.

If you count Alejandro Stephens last week, former head of the LA SEIU Local 660, for engineering thousands of dollars in kickbacks, I’d say that makes three.

Image courtesy of janusz.

Loyal readers of DC Velocity, the only site, according to them, that offers content to distribution centers, warehousing and transportation, got a treat today.  Apparently, the whole incident involving the labor unions being up in arms over Anne Ferro’s nomination to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, ended abruptly for a reason. Payback.  From DCVelocity:

An agreement between the Obama administration, the Teamsters Union, and safety advocate group Public Citizen to revamp existing truck driver “hours of service” regulations was pushed by the White House to quell concerns over the controversial nomination of Anne Ferro as Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator, according to a trucking industry executive.

The executive, who asked not to be identified, said it appears the administration worked out an agreement to appease Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure Subcommittee. Lautenberg was delaying action on Ferro’s nomination amid concerns expressed by labor and safety groups that Ferro, who has been president of the Maryland Motor Truck Association since 2003, was too close to the industry to regulate it effectively. Ferro and the two groups have been at odds over the so-called hours of service rule governing the amount of time truck drivers spend on the road.

The trucking executive noted that the full committee announced it had approved Ferro’s nomination the day after news that the FMCSA would revisit the hours of service rule was made public. Her confirmation by the full Senate seems assured, the executive said. The executive added that the trucking industry was not party to the agreement and was “totally surprised” by the announcement.

Teamsters spokeswoman Leigh Strope called any talk of a backroom deal to allay union concerns over Ferro’s nomination a “ridiculous assertion.”

Image courtesy of bayat.

The SEIU infomercial “Labor Day” came out this weekend. Here’s what a few people had to say.

By far the most honest review for the film comes from The New York Times. The rest vacillate between sappy and pandering. Read the New York Times one first.

Last things first: a credit at the end of “Labor Day” reads, “The film was partly financed by SEIU who cooperated fully with the filmmakers.” And how.

Glenn Silber was producing videos for the Service Employees International Union in 2007 when he decided to make a film about the union and its role in the presidential campaign. The result is, more than anything else, a slickly produced 76-minute commercial for the union; to call it a documentary is to stretch the term almost beyond meaning.

Not everyone caught the “financed by SEIU” note at the end apparently. From GapersBlock.com:

In fact, if you told me that the SEIU personally financed the making of this film, I’d have no trouble believing you.

Image Courtesy of Laurie :: Liquid Paper.

The ongoing (6 year) labor saga at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in, you guessed it, Santa Rosa, California, has hit a new low. . . or a new high, since a higher power is weighing in.  The local priest, Monsignor John Brenkle of St. Helena Catholic Church, is utterly fed up with the SEIU.

Put simply, the SEIU has, in every way sought to stall the unionization of the hospital’s workers (simply because they want to join a union that hasn’t sought to make their lives a living hell, i.e. the SEIU).

And here’s what the Monsignor has to say:

On April 13, a majority of Memorial workers filed a petition with the board seeking union representation with the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Both the union and St. Joseph management have expressed willingness to sit down and negotiate ground rules leading to a fair election agreement.

Yet what should be a time of reconciliation is instead a time of disheartenment, as workers must continue to wait for their day to vote. Sadly, the delay now comes not from management, but by another labor union – the Service Employees International Union – bent on stalling and suppressing workers’ voice. SEIU has been misusing labor law as a means for delaying an election as long as possible and refusing to come to the negotiating table with the other parties.

I am not prepared to take sides in the broader conflict between the unions. I am sure that both parties have made mistakes in their dealings with one another. But as I have written before, the decision about unionization should be in the hands of workers alone. At Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, workers have clearly chosen to cast their lot with the NUHW. SEIU’s continued delay of the workers’ election, and its refusal to agree to ground rules for the election at Memorial, flies in the face of Catholic social teaching and contradicts SEIU’s own national advocacy for exactly the types of agreement it is now trying to thwart. [...]

Labor unions, like all human enterprises, are imperfect institutions. [...] SEIU should end its puzzling anti-union campaign of delays and enter into discussions with NUHW and St. Joseph to set ground rules for the union election at Memorial based on the principles we have all worked so hard to achieve.

Image courtesy of left-hand.