A shocking lawsuit filed last month alleged that several student organizations at Columbia University had advance knowledge of the Hamas October 7 terrorist attack. Among the people and organizations being sued are Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), student and UAW member Mahmoud Khalil, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) – an organization closely tied to UAW Local 2710.

According to the legal filing, SJP had allegedly remained dormant before being suddenly reactivated shortly before the attack, posting seemingly pre-prepared public relations materials. In the case of SJP, the organization started publishing materials shortly before the attack actually took place.

The lawsuit lists several people taken hostage by Hamas as plaintiffs, and includes allegations from them that their Hamas captors “bragged about having Hamas operatives on American university campuses” and “showed [the hostages] Al-Jazeera stories and photographs of protests at Columbia University that were organized by [CUAD, SJP, and the other anti-Israel groups at Columbia].”

SJP would be suspended for its activities in November 2023, and its members immediately started using CUAD as a mouthpiece in its place – an organization that SJP helped found several years ago but remained mostly inactive until SJP was suspended.

One of CUAD’s other founders was Columbia student Grant Miner, the president of UAW Local 2710.

Along with being a founder of CUAD and a UAW local president, Miner has led his union to be a significant anti-Israel force on campus. Under his stewardship, Local 2710 signed on to CUAD’s anti-Israel coalition (alongside SJP), pressured the university to divest from Israel, and took part in the university’s anti-Israel encampment.

Several weeks ago, Miner was expelled from Columbia for his anti-Israel activism. The national UAW union released a statement on the expulsion, calling it a “gross injustice.” Later, UAW President Shawn Fain would personally call out the expulsion in a union livestream.

Perhaps the union should have kept a closer eye on what its campus members are up to before writing them blank checks of support. Or perhaps the increasing proportion of UAW membership made up of college student employees is pushing the union towards radical campus activism.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has made it their mission to unionize California hospitals saying it will “lead to safer conditions for our patients.”

The data tells a different story.

Today, the Center for Union Facts released a new, first-of-its-kind report showing that hospitals that employ nurses who are unionized with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) statistically have worse patient outcomes. 

The report analyzes the ratings of hospitals in the state of California by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The CMS scoring system summarizes a variety of patient outcomes, including mortality rates, readmission rates, complication rates, and provides a score between 1-5 based on each individual hospitals’ performance. The report focused on California, as that is where the SEIU has a large concentration of unionized hospitals.

CUF’s analysis shows that, when compared to non-unionized hospitals and hospitals where nurses are represented by other unions, SEIU-affiliated hospitals correlated with lower overall hospital ratings . 

The SEIU has a controversial history of harmful hospital strikes and allegations of abuse and harassment from the union’s own employees. The SEIU has had to pay out millions in response to legal filings and allegations, likely causing the hospitals to suffer further from lack of resources. It’s unfortunate but not surprising that the union seems to be doing much more harm than good for patients at California hospitals.

Highlights from the report include: 

• Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representation for nurses correlates with a lower overall hospital rating by as much as -0.95 stars (out of five stars) compared to hospitals with nurses represented by no unions or other unions. 
• Despite accounting for less than 11% (271 out of 251) of California hospitals, SEIU unionized hospitals account for 26.7% of all 1-star hospitals in California. 
• SEIU-unionized hospitals failed to record a single 5-star rating in California, while 17.4% of non-unionized hospitals and 12.3% of hospitals represented by other nurses’ unions achieved a 5-star rating.
• SEIU-unionized hospitals are responsible for a disproportionate share of the lowest-rated hospitals: 11.8% of Los Angeles hospitals were rated 1-star, while 35.3% of SEIU hospitals in Los Angeles County scored 1-star. 
• Instead of caring for patients, many hospitals are forced to utilize resources and money towards mitigating damages of any strike the SEIU may impose, this has included hiring a backup registered nursing staff to reduce its risk in the case of an SEIU strike.

The union is working relentlessly to expand their presence at hospitals and healthcare facilities across the country, and it’s our responsibility to call attention to the negative consequences of associating with an organization that makes the lives of patients harder, not better. 

Last year, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union was riding a wave of positive press in the wake of its high-profile strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers… 12 months later, it seems the union and its president Shawn Fain have been thrown off their high horse.

The union’s attempts to escape its corrupt past and unionize new plants have taken serious setbacks this year, and recent layoffs have made the UAW’s “record contracts” with the Big Three lose much of their luster. 

Last summer, the UAW’s court-appointed corruption monitor released a shocking report detailing an investigation into allegations that the UAW Presidents Office was engaged in misconduct and retaliation against other members of the UAW executive board. To make matters worse, the UAW was also accused by the monitor of withholding documents needed for the investigation. Eventually, a federal court needed to step in to force Fain to hand over the documents, and a new report by the monitor this month announced yet another investigation into the UAW’s leadership.

The UAW’s campaign to expand its membership in the South isn’t having much better luck, despite the $40 million committed to it. 

The unionization campaign ran into a brick wall after a humiliating defeat at Mercedes-Benz’s Vance, Alabama plant last May. Since the defeat, the UAW has failed to unionize a single one of the Southern autoplants on its hit list and has made no public announcements of unionization progress in the South.  

It’s no surprise that autoworkers are rejecting the union’s invitations, given how Fain’s members have been treated under the UAW’s “record contracts.” Over the past year, tens of thousands of UAW members have been laid off at Detroit’s Big Three, many of them permanently. At Stellantis’s Warren Truck Assembly Plant alone, over 1,000 UAW members were laid off last October – around a third of the plant’s workforce. 

Even the UAW members who managed to keep their jobs are reporting lower overall pay as they’re scheduled for fewer hours to offset the higher pay rate from the contract. 

Fain recently characterized his term as president as “the most successful year and a half in the history of this union.” Thousands of laid off UAW members likely disagree. After a year like this it would be more appropriate for Shawn Fain to change his name to Shawn Fail.

Today, the Center for Union Facts (CUF) launched a new website, TeamstersTruth.com, and digital effort aimed at educating the public and workers about the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and its history of bankrupting companies, causing job losses, and pushing harmful strikes on workers.

“The Teamsters union has a concerning history of putting its bottom line above workers’ livelihoods,” said CUF communications director Charlyce Bozzello. “It’s time for the public and workers everywhere to get the whole truth about the Teamsters, not just the rhetoric put out by the union.”

Highlights from the website include:

• Corrupt Officials: The union has not entirely escaped the corrupt legacy of former President Jimmy Hoffa. In the past decade 16 Teamsters officials have been charged with or indicted for financial crimes, totalling some $1.6 million.

• Job Losses: A union threatened strike at the Yellow Corporation, a major trucking company, pushed the company into bankruptcy. It cost Teamsters members 22,000 jobs.

• Worker hardship: In 2002, the Teamsters attempted to represent nurses in Petoskey, Michigan. The union launched a strike with nurses in the area – and kept it up for four years, only to be forced out by fed-up workers in the end.

• Political Advocacy: Between the years 2019 and 2022, the Teamsters sent over $9 million to left-leaning advocacy groups. Overall, 99% of political spending from the Teamsters went towards left-leaning organizations, much without the consent of union members.

CUF is launching two new videos aimed at the Teamsters’ controversial history in coordination with the new website. You can watch them here and here.

The new website is a part of CUF’s ongoing education campaign to ensure the public and union members have access to transparent information regarding union spending. The education campaign previously included a billboard outside the RNC calling Teamsters President Sean O’Brien “Two-Faced”, and a report that shows the union spent 99% of its political advocacy dollars on left-leaning causes.

Today, the Center for Union Facts (CUF) released a new report detailing how the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) union has spent members’ dues to fund a largely one-sided political advocacy agenda.

“The public and union members deserve to know how the union is spending workers’ dues dollars. 99 percent of SMART’s recent advocacy spending has gone to left-leaning organizations,” said communications director Charlyce Bozzello.

CUF examined the SMART’s LM-2 financial filings from 2019 – 2022 with the Office of Labor and Management Standards (OLMS) to offer a transparent look into the union’s financial priorities and how it spends members’ dues dollars. The full report is available here.

Highlights from the report include:

• Six million dollars spent on left-leaning advocacy while SMART only directed $15,000 toward bipartisan efforts and $59,636 toward GOP-led initiatives and campaigns;

• DNC and aligned organization received $2.15 million from SMART;

• The union sent $150,000 to various efforts to stop the recall of Gavin Newsom.

It’s been about a year since the UAW went on strike against Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers. Are UAW members better off than they were before? 

At Stellantis, the answer is a resounding “no.” 

While the union’s new contract with Stellantis did raise wages, the company had to offset those increased labor costs by reducing hours for employees. Today, some UAW members at the automaker now report taking home smaller paychecks than they did before last year’s strike and “record contract.”

But those workers might be the lucky ones. Since the new contract, Stellantis has been rocked by a massive number of layoffs. Thousands of employees have missed paychecks due to temporary layoffs, and over one thousand temporary Stellantis employees were permanently laid off over the past year. Currently, Stellantis is considering laying off over two thousand employees indefinitely at its assembly plant in Warren, Michigan. 

Notably, jobs at facilities like Warren could be saved if overflow work from other Stellantis plants gets sent there. However, this overflow work is being sent to places with lower labor costs, like Mexico. Reportedly, the UAW’s “record contract” with Stellantis included language allowing overflow work to be sent outside of the country. 

The UAW’s promises of higher paychecks and job security aren’t panning out, and some of the union’s other high-profile promises aren’t doing much better.

The union made a big show of getting an agreement to reopen the shuttered Belvidere Assembly Plant in its contract. That was almost a year ago.

Today, Belvidere remains unopened. In fact, the company is now saying that operations won’t restart at Belvidere until 2025, and won’t be at full capacity until 2027. The UAW criticized this decision, but Stellantis simply pointed to a clause in the “record contract” that allows the company to modify its product commitments depending on market conditions. 

The UAW-Stellantis department is currently being directly overseen by UAW President Shawn Fain. His response to the long list of issues hitting his members at Stellantis has been to give a few speeches and threaten (another) strike.

Fain seems to have a gift for making noise, but his ability to write a good contract isn’t breaking any records.

The Hotel and Gaming Trades Council – a union which represents hotel and casino employees in the New York area – is pushing a citywide regulation that would ban hotels from contracting out cleaning and administrative work. 

It’s a self-interested scheme designed to provide more dues money for the union. The result could mean pricier hotel rooms and fewer tourists willing to pay.

It’s also hypocritical. If the Hotel Council wants to stop outsourced cleaning services, it would be better off starting in its own backyard. The union and its affiliate Unite Here Local 6 have spent millions of dollars on outsourced services. 

Unite Here Local 6 is joined at the hip with the Hotel Council, sharing several executive officers. Local 6 even owns the property that the Hotel Council lists as its address through an LLC. Unite Here Local 6 has spent over $700,000 on outsourced cleaning and maintenance services over the past decade. The union even spent some $240,000 on Sterling Cleaning Services – a non-union company. 

The Hotel Council’s record isn’t much better. The organization spent over three million dollars last year on outsourced legal and consulting services.

It’d almost be funny, if these new regulations didn’t pose a risk to jobs in New York’s hospitality industry. Hotels often contract out work to help manage costs – especially during off-seasons. A ban on contracting could mean a significant increase in the cost of doing business in New York City. That means hotels could cut staff hours or jobs entirely.

It also means hotels would have to pass on the higher cost to tourists in the form of more expensive hotel rooms. Considering the city already has some of the most expensive hotel rates in the country, even a slight bump could drive tourists away from the Big Apple. 

In response to this hypocrisy, the Center for Union Facts put up a billboard in Times Square to shine a light on the Hotel Council and Local 6’s hypocrisy. You can view the full ad here. 

Last month, the UAW’s court-appointed corruption monitor revealed that he was investigating UAW President Shawn Fain over allegations of misconduct, retaliation, and for “slow-rolling” documents needed for an investigation. 

Now, a new federal court filing from shows that UAW Vice President Rich Boyer alleged that he was removed from overseeing the union’s Stellantis department after his “refusal to accede to demands by [the President] and his agents that [the Vice President] take actions . . . that would have benefitted [the President’s] domestic partner and her sister.”

The filing also detailed the impact of the UAW’s “slow-rolling” of the investigation:

“… The Union has effectively stalled the Monitor’s work… These investigations would likely have been resolved by now had the union cooperated with the monitor’s requests.”

While these allegations are troubling enough, there’s also evidence that the removal of assignments from Secretary-Treasurer Mock and Vice President Boyer have had a significant impact on the UAW’s future ability to root out corruption. 

The Monitor released his 10th status report on July 12, which detailed how these recent allegations and dismissals may have contributed to a culture of fear within the union. 

“… These events have been perceived by Union staff — that already has significant concerns about a ‘culture of fear of retribution’ — as confirmation that even the highest-ranked Union officials can be subject to retaliation. 

Specifically, reports to the Monitor’s Hotline from Union staff have cited the actions taken against the Secretary-Treasurer and Vice President as driving retaliation fears that reporting alleged abuses might lead to retribution from the President’s Office.” 

A recent third-party audit of the union’s culture, which was recommended by the monitor, confirmed these concerns. The audit found that 40% percent of UAW’s staff members would decline to report acts of misconduct over fear of retaliation.

As the investigation continues to unfold, these monitor reports raise a troubling question: How different is Fain’s “new” UAW from the old one?