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Research from the Center for Union Facts Uncovers Union Agenda Behind President Obama’s Minimum Wage Hike Proposal

Today the Center for Union Facts released new research detailing how many collective bargaining agreements link union salaries and wage rates to the federal minimum wage. This research comes two days after President Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9—a move which labor unions broadly praised.

The research brief can be accessed here.

“This research shows that labor unions stand to gain from minimum wage increases, even though their members don’t make the minimum wage,” said Richard Berman, Executive Director of the Center for Union Facts. “Some union contracts set starting union wages as much as fifteen percent higher than the federal minimum wage.

“Union officials have been anything but altruistic in their support for minimum wage hikes over the years,” Berman concluded. “This also calls into question whether some politicians who support minimum wage hikes do so out of support for unions—the same unions that are some of the nation’s biggest campaign contributors.”

Organized labor just had a tough week. First, it had to endure the report of devastating membership numbers that show that only 11.3 percent of the workforce is stuck in a union. Then, the pro-union National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the President who blindly supports labor had to face the reality that the Board was illegally constituted, and its recent radical decisions may soon be no more.

So after comically spinning about the numbers and ignoring the reality that the NLRB has questionable authority at best, it’s clearer than ever that labor needs a backup plan.

Josh Eidelson, a union organizer-journalist, writes in the American Prospect that the next generation of the so-called labor movement will be in the form of “alt-labor.” Eidelson devotes much of his article to the UNITE HERE-linked Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), a radical labor group that isn’t legally a union. Eidelson would know best: According to his blog, he was an organizer for UNITE HERE for five years, so undoubtedly, ROC is close to his heart. Groups like ROC are part of labor’s rebranding, trying to make itself more palatable to the employee of the 21^st century (or even the latter half of the 20^th, for that matter).

The problem is that ROC and others like it provide all of the problems of regular unions and none of the benefits. “Alt-labor” groups are convinced that they have managed to find the sweet spot that allows them to ignore the hard work posed by running a real union and to focus on well-publicized harassment and shakedowns. In an article published in Engage, a legal journal, this strategy is explained:

But Eidelson says that this is what labor will look like in the foreseeable future, and the AFL-CIO and Change to Win have both endorsed the worker center “movements.”

As members of Congress, state legislatures, and the President of the United States are sworn into office, we’re reminded of our American democratic ideals. Unfortunately, many union members don’t get the chance to celebrate democracy thanks to a unionization procedure known as “card check.”

Take Karen Cox and her coworkers at Americold Logistics, who are only the latest examples of how unions intend to end the secret ballot in labor organizing. In spring of 2012, she was given a card that she was told would be used for information purposes. She filled it out and returned it. But in June, she learned that she, along with at least 50 percent of her fellow coworkers, had signed and returned the cards that recognized a labor union.

Cox, who opposed the union, tried to collect petitions from co-workers to call for a secret ballot vote. But rather than let her have the same access rights as union organizers, Cox was stopped from doing so by Americold. She’s now being represented by National Right to Work Foundation in a complaint against the company filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

“I think they did it that way as a way for the union to sneak in without opposition,” Cox told Sauk Valley Media. “Some people were mad about that, and all I want is a legit election.”

In 2011, Barbara Ivey shared her very similar story. A 21-year employee at Kaiser Permanente in Oregon, she was shocked that after only 13 days, a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) card check campaign successfully turned her workplace into a union shop. Ivey said that her coworkers felt pressure to sign the card.

Ivey began to collect signatures for a decertification election, which would allow the employees to vote on the unionization by secret ballot. Although these elections used to take place immediately after a card-check drive, a “safety valve” provision to ensure the card check collection was proper, the NLRB’s penchant for overturning precedent ended that protection. In Lamons Gasket, the NLRB did away with the immediate vote petition and instead required that more time elapse before the decertification vote could take place.

These women aren’t outliers. In fact, denying the secret ballot vote is policy for labor. That didn’t die with the EFCA. With UNITE HERE leading the way, several labor groups, notably the AFL-CIO, backed a boycott of Hyatt Hotels in July because the company refused to allow card check unionization at its hotels.

Just prior to the November election, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO told the Atlantic that labor will never give up on card check. “That’s within the next term,” he claimed.

Card check is no way to determine if an individual really wants to join a union. The process is fraught with potential problems—deception and intimidation chief among them, as shown in the workplaces of Cox and Ivey. Card check makes the vote public and puts employees in the difficult position of openly stating their position to a union organizer. The Employee Rights Act requires secret ballot elections for union certification votes in order to ensure that each individual employee can decide whether she wants to join a union without someone looking over her shoulder.

The notable supporters of the plan are the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the Big Labor-funded Economic Policy Institute. The report was released at EcPI and included remarks from Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO.

The group Loewentheil founded, The Roosevelt Institute, received a total of $35,000 from the AFL-CIO, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters in July and August of 2011. And the website for the report directs the “Contact Us” email address to Jeff Parcher of the Center for Community Change, another supporter of the plan. The Center and its sister organization, the Campaign for Community Change, received a combined $35,000 from the SEIU National Headquarters and a local chapter, AFL-CIO, and UNITE HERE in 2010-2011.

So how do we get to the promised land? With more unions, of course!

In October 2009, UNITE HERE hotel workers in San Francisco voted to go on strike against several hoteliers. The workers organized ostensibly because they don’t feel the hotels are doing enough for them to cover health care costs.

But the hotels aren’t the only ones supposedly depriving them of benefits. UNITE HERE was caught diverting money from a union benefit fund to spend on their strikes:

After the National Labor Relations Board brought a legal case against Unite Here Local 2, which represents 12,000 hotel employees in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, the union agreed to reverse its actions and restore the monies to the proper funds with interest, hotel spokesman Pete Hillan said in a written statement.

In May, the Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency complained about the practice to the NLRB, and the agency subsequently intervened, Hillan said. Before the union redirected the funds, the money had been going to fund child care and elder care.

“One million dollars is a lot of money to chase business away from San Francisco,” San Francisco Grand Hyatt General Manager David Nadelman said Tuesday at the first of two dueling news conferences at the Union Square Grand Hyatt.

The employees are striking primarily over a reduction in health benefits. Organized labor has reacted with outrage when states don’t fully fund their benefit funds. Alleged attempts to “raid the Social Security and Medicare funds” have also elicited dramatic responses from unions.

There can only be one solution. In order for UNITE HERE to be consistent, it has to go on strike against itself. Any business or government willing to raid its employees’ benefits for cynical purposes must be taught a lesson. That’s their talking point, right?

Image courtesy of Marshall Astor.

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.”

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.

There have been several times when I’ve discussed the alternate means of implementing some of the key tenets of the Employee Free Choice Act, like HERE and HERE. It’s just nice to have the President blatantly confirm this agenda in his speech to the AFL-CIO.  Basic story? EFCA will be a challenge in the lame duck session, but no worries, we’ve got other ways of making it happen. From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama reiterated that the administration will put its weight behind it. “We are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act,” he told the 54 executive council members and others in the room. “We also know what and who is standing in the way of progress,” he said, adding that it will be “tough” to get the bill through the Senate and will take time to reverse the impact of “at least eight years in which there was a profound animosity toward the notion of unions.”

Mr. Obama also reminded the labor officials of the ways in which the administration has already supported unions, in part by wielding executive powers for actions that don’t require legislation.

“There’s a reason why we nominated people to the National Mediation Board that would ensure that folks in the rail and air” industries can organize, said Mr. Obama, referring to the board’s overhaul in May of a decades-old rule that had made it harder for airline and railway workers to unionize. He also cited the Democrats he nominated to the National Labor Relations Board to “restore some balance” to the group, which supervises union elections and referees disputes between private-sector employers and employees.