LaborPains.org

David Macaray is no lunatic screaming on the street corner. He’s a former nine-term president of the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers Local 672. He’s a labor commentator with a published a collection of essays to his credit. He’s also not a big fan of “scabs,” as he defines them:

While you occasionally hear the word misused or applied generically (e.g., calling a non-union facility a “scab shop”), there are two accepted definitions of the term:  (1) a union employee who continues to work during a strike, and (2) a person who accepts a job at a union facility that is being struck.

What’s wrong with a union employee dissenting from a strike and going to work? Quite a bit, according to an essay that Macaray wrote:

In time of war, a pacifist who’d rather empty bedpans and change soiled sheets is called a “conscientious objector.”  In time of war, a person who betrays his own country by taking up arms for the enemy is called a “traitor.”  And an employee who refuses to join his fellow union members in a legally mandated strike, or a person who crosses a picket line in order to steal someone else’s job is, appropriately, called a “scab.”

Unlike Europe, Mexico and Canada, where scabs are more or less outlawed, the United States actually encourages this form of economic treason. We openly flout the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who said, “Labor cannot, on any terms, surrender the right to strike.”  And make no mistake about what Brandeis was saying.  When your job can be given away while you’re on strike, striking becomes tantamount to quitting. …

People who try to steal your belongings from your home after you’ve been forced to evacuate are the lowest form of creature—scavengers looking to make a quick profit from your misfortune.  We call them called “looters,” and looting is against the law.  It’s fair to say that the bulk of the civilized world considers scabs to be “job looters.”

Yikes! Usually organized labor reserves those harsh terms for businesses. (Richard Trumka accused corporations that weren’t hiring of “economic treason” last year.) But apparently workers who dare to think differently from the greater union are traitors too — and also scavengers and looters.

Last week, the labor union UNITE HERE, which represents mostly service workers, issued a demand to the Democratic Party. UNITE HERE wanted Cleveland and Charlotte, N.C., two of the sites being considered for the 2012 Democratic National Convention, ruled out because the cities didn’t have enough unionized hotels.

While the demand seems rather comical to the casual observer, this is frankly nothing out of the ordinary.

DemConWatch, an online blog,  said conventions have been won or lost based on the issue. In one posting, the blog suggested the city of Charlotte is proud not to have any union hotels, and pointed to a “Visit Charlotte” spokesperson’s push to attract the DNC, which included the fact that Charlotte has non-union hotels. …

Democrats have not officially responded, but Dr. David Swindell, director of UNC Charlotte’s Public Policy Degree Program, says they’re probably not taking this lightly.

“It’s a core constituency of the Democratic Party so of course they’re going to be interested in something like that,” Swindell says.

Labor unions spent at least $171.5 million on the 2010 elections. They were by far the Democrats’ biggest sources of money, and their money undoubtedly helped stem some of the potential electoral damage. Now Democrats owe organized labor big time.

The Democrats are considering having their convention in Charlotte because North Carolina is a swing state that voted for Obama in 2008. But it’s also a right-to-work state where collective bargaining and strikes by public employees are illegal. By asking Democrats to rule out two perfectly viable American cities for their convention, UNITE HERE is testing the waters. Will Democrats give in to the pressure of their most deep-pocketed supporters? Given what happened with the 2008 convention, we’re going with “likely.”

According to analyses of the White House visitor logs released last year, former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House. This fact was repeated often by many SEIU critics, who wondered why Stern was spending so much time in Washington instead of addressing the concerns of his workers.

Well Rensselaer Polytech Institute recently crunched the numbers again, and Stern has been officially exonerated!

So, it turns out that as of May, when the Rensselaer team last went through the list, the most frequent visitor to the White House was (drum roll, please) Anna Burger.

Anna Burger? She was just ahead of Robert Wolf and Andrew Stern. Other names on the top-15 list were more familiar: Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., as well as Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers Union (editor’s note: I think he meant the AFL-CIO).

So the SEIU isn’t guilty of sending its number one official to Washington more than anyone else to push its agenda on the president. It was the SEIU’s number two official who was doing that. Burger is the former secretary-treasurer of the SEIU and a close friend of Stern’s. She was widely expected to succeed Stern when he stepped down earlier this year, but ended up losing the leadership election to Mary Kay Henry. Why? Burger was, well, a lot like Andy Stern.

Burger was either “not widely liked” or “widely disliked,” according to many SEIU officials and staff.  Critics saw her as “mean” or a “bully.”  Various reports described her presentations of her candidacy this past week as stiff and arrogant. She was closely identified with Stern, especially his emphasis on political action that has only grown since he led the split of the AFL-CIO to form Change to Win.

Henry’s election was widely viewed in the labor community as a repudiation of Stern and Burger. Specifically, workers were tired of Stern’s constant saber-rattling with other unions and his obsession with making Washington connections. But has Henry really changed anything? The SEIU is still waging its wars with other labor groups. It’s still wasting massive amounts of money to influence elections.

We’ll have to wait and see if Mary Kay Henry turns up in the White House visitor logs too.

The leaders of teachers unions often say that they want to help kids. Somehow, they’re just looking out for the young ones by blocking reforms like merit pay and changes to tenure. And by putting $25 million in federal funding at risk because they don’t want to work a full week:

That announcement was made this afternoon by Grand Rapids school administrators, who said they failed to reach a labor agreement with the teachers union to implement turnaround plans in five troubled city schools.

The failure jeopardizes a $25 million federal school improvement grant available to the district, administrators said. The state had set today as a deadline for submitting turnaround plans.

Requiring teachers in those five schools to move to a 40-hour work week, up from 33.6 hours, was a main sticking point, board President Senita Lenear revealed today.

Teachers unions are doing it for the kids! That’s why they’re instituting “work to rule” in cities with labor strife across the country, right? Like in Detroit:

The president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers has instructed some teachers to stop writing lesson plans, stop grading students and to not attend parent-teacher conferences.

Or in Berkshire, Massachusetts:

The 600-member United Teachers of Pittsfield (UEP) voted on and are now under a “work to rule” provision in an effort the union hopes will jump-start negotiations, according to union president Scott Eldridge. Teachers who work to rule strictly follow the terms of the previous contract and don’t volunteer to provide extra help for students or work on school activities beyond what is required of them in that contract.

But hey, I guess we should just take Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at her word when she says that “We are doing our part to help kids succeed.” Because nothing screams success like doing the bare minimum amount of work, right?

Last year, the UNITE HERE union, which consists mostly of service workers, reunited with the AFL-CIO. So it’s probably not surprising that UNITE HERE has been using hardball tactics that seem downright…Trumka-esque. While most unions might file a single complaint, UNITE HERE likes to shoot a little higher.

Union-represented housekeepers filed injury complaints against Hyatt Hotels Corp properties in eight U.S. cities on Tuesday, but the company said the filing was a union ploy to gain leverage and members.

The 12 filings with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration asked for an investigation into what the union, Unite Here, said were high rates of injuries among overworked housekeepers at Hyatt properties.

“Unite Here is making false charges about our work environment in hotels where we are currently trying to negotiate new union contracts,” Robb Webb, Hyatt’s chief human resources officer, said in a statement.

These complaints, timed perfectly, are an intimidation tactic to pressure Hyatt. And this is nothing new. In July, UNITE HERE led a high-profile strike against four Chicago Hyatt hotels, angry that workers were being laid off.

Then there was this amusing demand.

A union representing hotel workers has asked the Democratic National Committee to rule out two of its four convention-site finalists, Cleveland and Charlotte, N.C., because they lack sufficient unionized hotel facilities.

“Among the DNC’s four finalist cities, only St. Louis and Minneapolis” have the capacity to “house a large portion of the delegates and other guests … in unionized hotels,” John Wilhelm, president of the international UNITE HERE union of hotel and textile workers, wrote in a letter to DNC Chairman Tim Kaine.

Taking business from an economically-strapped city like Cleveland is apparently no problem for UNITE HERE. This isn’t really about the economy or hotel workers, after all. In fact, one of the hotels that UNITE HERE is picketing, the Hyatt Regency Chicago, was listed as one of the best places to work this year by Crain’s. UNITE HERE’s real goal is to attract attention to the union and stick it to successful businesses.

Sal Rosselli is the gift that keeps on giving. When Rosselli broke away from the SEIU and formed the National Union of Healthcare Workers, we could not have imagined just how many headaches he would cause for Andy Stern and Mary Kay Henry. Now, roughly a month after the NUHW lost a battle with the SEIU over Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California, the wrangling continues, according to the Sacramento Business Journal.

National Union of Healthcare Workers, an upstart rival to Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, won two of three unit elections tallied Wednesday for almost 2,000 Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California.

Behavioral health services workers voted 603 to 196 for NUHW over UHW and optical workers voted for NUHW over UHW 154 to 142. Medical-social workers voted to stay with UHW, 148 to 139.

This is a win for the NUHW, although they already lost the lion’s share of Kaiser’s 47,500 healthcare workers back in October. Current score: SEIU, 43,000; NUHW, 4,300. The NUHW disputed the October results, claiming that the SEIU worked with management to intimidate members into voting their way.

Imagine that! If true, this wouldn’t be the first time the SEIU has used top-down intimidation tactics to achieve its goals in southern California. For more, read this damning letter by Paul Krehbiel, a former SEIUer who left in disgust and joined the NUHW.

With the Employee Free Choice Act off the table, unions are looking for another way to tip the scales in their favor. Enter the so-called “quickie election.” Rather than implementing card check, the NLRB could shorten the amount of time between workers submitting a union petition and the election over unionization. Currently the median amount of time taken is about 38 days. But NLRB member Mark Pearce has said that time span should be “as brief as possible.” He pointed to the Canadian system, where elections are typically held between five to ten days after petition, as a model for the future.

It all sounds very inconsequential and loaded with jargon. Marty Payson and Roger Kaplan, labor lawyers at Jackson Lewis explain:

Of course, employees are much less likely to vote for union representation once they have had the opportunity to hear their employers’ side. But because union organizing is  usually conducted secretly, employers would not know they need to share their  views with their workforce until an election petition has been filed. A “quicky” election, then, really seeks to cut off debate over unionization before it begins. It  would make an employer’s statutory “free speech” rights under Section 8(c) virtually meaningless.

Unions file their election petitions by getting employees to sign authorization cards without employees necessarily knowing all the facts. The quicky election would simply  rubber-stamp the cards. Casting a ballot would be mere window dressing, an exercise  almost as meaningless as the drafters of EFCA could have hoped.

If employers don’t have the opportunity to sit down with their workers and respond to a union’s propaganda, those workers will be far more likely to vote to organize. Employers could find their workplace unionized before they even know what hit them.

Unions should be careful what they wished for. Many employers have already begun to include union organizing information in their employee orientations. For every action, there’s a reaction — and management’s reaction to this could leave organized labor worse off than they were before.

Still, it just goes to show that there are two sides to every argument, and unions don’t want you hearing the other side. Even the demise of EFCA won’t change that.

Cognitive dissonance is the holding of two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and believing both of them equally. I think of this phrase often when confronted by the demands of teachers unions. On the one hand, the unions believe that teachers are incredibly important to the development of children — that they are dedicated educators who can change the lives of any child through their efforts.* On the other, unions resist methods to judge the efficacy of educators because, they claim, factors for success in school have little to do with what goes on in the classroom and everything to do with factors out of their members’ control: poverty, parental involvement, and other factors are more important, they claim.

In other words: Pay teachers more because they’re incredibly important, but don’t hold them accountable because they’re not really that important. This is textbook cognitive dissonance.

I again thought of that phrase while reading this satirical “apology” from a teacher who received a poor evaluation. He sarcastically complains

If the “complex rubrics” cost this guy his job, I wouldn’t shed a tear. Would you?

*For the record: I totally agree with this sentiment. A good teacher can work miracles.