The SEIU: Safeguarding and taking money from illegals…for years

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

Give me your union dues and union fees,

I will take them so ever happily…

While this may not rise to the level of harboring a fugitive, since harboring a fugitive refers to “the crime of knowingly hiding a wanted criminal from the authorities,” it comes awfully darn close.

SAN FRANCISCO – Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.

ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. “They’ve been working in the buildings downtown for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years,” said Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees Local 87. [Emphasis added.]

Okay, let’s stop there for a moment, shall we?

Here is a local SEIU president stating that the unionized company has employed illegal aliens for 15, 20 and as many as 27 years…as her union has collected dues from these workers.

Such is the state of today’s unions.  Which begs the following questions:

If you see someone commiting a crime, do you have a duty to call the police…or do you “look the other way?”

If you see someone comitting a crime, do you help the criminal perpetually perpetrate the crime, as well as charge him for your time? Does that make you a criminal or a mere opportunist? If you go out and actively recruit said persons engaging in the illegal activity into your organization, wouldn’t that make you a conspirator or your organization a criminal organization?

Now, as unions are going out to recruit workers who are in this country illegally, why is it that no one has questioned Big Labor’s complicity in furthering a illegal activity? Doesn’t Big Labor have a civic duty to turn in illegal activity? How is it they can get away with taking money from workers who they know are working for a company employing said workers illegally? Aren’t they furthering a crime?

How is it that Big Labor gets a get-out-of-jail-free card on this one???

Just curious.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

Dues-sucking unions threaten blood collection at Red Cross

 

Led by the United Food & Commercial Workers, unions including the Teamsters, SEIU, Steelworkers, CWA, and OPEIU, may be striking the Red Cross next week.

Unionized blood-services workers at the American Red Cross’ regional offices based in Toledo have notified the agency they could strike June 2 if they do not have a new contract by then.

The strike, which would involve 184 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 75, would be one of seven walkouts being coordinated in several states by different trade unions, all to commence at 9 a.m. that day.

[snip]

However, Mr. Dudley said the UFCW is coordinating its actions with several other unions, including the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, the United Steelworkers, the Communications Workers of America, and the Office and Professional Employees International – representing about 1,000 workers total at Red Cross blood services offices in Michigan, California, Connecticut, Georgia, New York, and West Virginia. None of the unions reached new contracts, Mr. Dudley said.

The Red Cross has a contingency plan in the event the unions strike.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

The SEIU, the NPA & Organized, Premeditated Intimidation

It wasn’t a secret.  They were planning it for weeks.  Their plans were to protest and protest they did.

They even brag about it on their website:

A little rain didn’t stop thousands of people from gathering on K Street to call out the big bank lobbyists corrupting our democracy.

After two days of confronting the bank lobbyists with National People’s Action, we were joined by our brothers and sisters from the AFL-CIO, Jobs with Justice, MoveOn, and hundreds of supporters from around the country.

However, before astroturfing K street on Monday, they decided to trespass onto the private residential property of two of their targets, one of which happened to be a neighbor of Fortune’s Nina Easton.  Perhaps they did not know she would write about their trespassing this way:

Every journalist loves a peaceful protest-whether it makes news, shakes up a political season, or holds out the possibility of altering history. Then there are the ones that show up on your curb–literally.

Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC,Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that — in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action — makes his family fair game.

Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.

“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

Now this event would accurately be called a “protest” if it were taking place at, say, a bank or the U.S. Capitol. But when hundreds of loud and angry strangers are descending on your family, your children, and your home, a more apt description of this assemblage would be “mob.” Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked-even on the police. A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might “incite” these trespassers.

[snip]

In the business community, though, SEIU has a reputation for strong-arm tactics against management, prompting some companies to file suit.

Now those strong-arm tactics, stirred by supposedly free-floating (as opposed to organized) populist rage, have come to the neighborhood curb. Last year it was AIG executives — with protestors met by security guard outside. Now it’s any executive — and they’re on the front stoop. After Baer’s house, the 14 buses left to descend on the nearby residence of Peter Scher, a government relations executive at JPMorgan Chase.

Targeting homes and families seems to put SEIU in the ranks of (now jailed) radical animal-rights activists and the Kansas anti-gay fundamentalists harassing the grieving parents of a dead 20-year-old soldier at his funeral (the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the latter). But that’s not a conversation that SEIU officials want to have.

No, they would rather not have a conversation about their intrusion onto another person’s property, nor do they consider intimidating family members immoral or unlawful.

And, they have no remorse whatsoever.

More than 1,000 visited two bankers at their homes Sunday afternoon to ask for meetings with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

When mobs trespass onto the private residential property of a private citizen and intimidate their children, and the police refuse to take action, no one should act surprised if a citizen acts to defend his property and his family from the lawless hordes…but, perhaps, that may be what the SEIU, the NPA, and their ilk want.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

Arizona Electrifying Response to the Left’s Boycotts-R-Us Campaign

Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. 

Wyatt Earp

With the SEIU, the UFCW and the AFL-CIO up in arms over Arizona’s new immigration law (which enforces already-existing law), Obama administration officials Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano have admitted they haven’t actually read the law, despite their condemnation.

Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles has opted to boycott the State of Arizona.  According to union-backed Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa:

Boycotts work. We saw this in the early 1990s, when people last boycotted Arizona for the state’s refusal to observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: people canceled their vacations to Scottsdale and the Grand Canyon; conventions were moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles, and the NFL moved SuperBowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena.

In response to L.A.’s arrogant attempt to economically blackmail the Grand Canyon state, Arizona’s Corporation Commissioner gave the L.A. mayor a message:  Two can play that game.

In a letter [see below] to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Gary Pierce said a boycott war is bad for both sides, and said he would “be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements” to end the electricity flowing to Los Angeles.

“I am confident that Arizona’s utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hands,” Mr. Pierce said. “If, however, you find that the City Council lacks the strength of its convictions to turn off the lights in Los Angeles and boycott Arizona power, please reconsider the wisdom of attempting to harm Arizona’s economy.”

We’ll have to wait and see who blinks first…Arizona or Los Angeles (and its lights).

Response to the LA Boycott by AZ Corp Commissioner
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

Andy Stern’s War on Terror: NUHW insurgents inflict more damage on SEIU

Andy Stern may be gone, but his California Civil War still rages on and, in Saturday’s Washington Post, Andy used an interesting analogy metaphor comparing his union battles to the War on Terror:

“It’s a tragedy in terms of how the money was spent, but a necessity in terms of preserving the organization’s integrity,” he said. “I don’t want to analogize this, but there is not enough money you can spend in America to protect us from terrorists. And you know, sometimes you have to spend money to protect the integrity of the institution from its own version of self-righteousness and terrorism.”

To compare fellow unionists to terrorists is an interesting choice of terminology.  Especially since the latest battle between the SEIU and its former local (now known as the National Union of Healthcare Workers), the purple behemoth lost another election to the union “insurgency”:

Caregivers at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital have voted to leave Service Employees International Union and join the rival National Union of Healthcare Workers.

Results, announced Monday after three weeks of voting by mail, shows 408 votes for the health care union, 242 votes for SEIU, and 13 votes for no union. The local union represents more than 830 workers, including respiratory care practitioners, licensed vocational nurses, certified nursing assistants, clerical workers and others.

[snip]

The election for NUHW “is our second-biggest hospital election,” said Sadie Crabtree, a spokeswoman for the union. About 2,600 Kaiser Permanente health workers in Southern California have voted to go with the new union. NUHW is working toward an election that would ask 47,000 Kaiser workers throughout the state if they want to change unions. Workers at more than 360 facilities have petitioned to join NUHW in the last 15 months, and most are still waiting for their elections, Crabtree said.

With Stern now gone, it will be interesting to see if the SEIU’s new president, Mary Kay Henry, will be able to contain the Iraq NUHW insurgents.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

A Race to the Bottom: Unions hate individual rights

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims. Ayn Rand.

Some time ago, union bosses, who purported a desire to help people, fell off the train, bumped their heads, and woke up on a mission to eliminate individual rights.  It’s hard to say when they fell off that train.  It might have been sometime after Samuel Gompers died in the late 1920s, or when the Reds infiltrated the unions in the 1930s, or when John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO in 1996, or it could have been just a long, slow slog to the bottom of the tracks.  Whatever the case, the proof is in:  Today’s union bosses absolutely, without-a-doubt, abhor individual rights.

Today, goons from the SEIU are in Washington taking over a Bank of America lobby (pictured at right).  This follows the weekend union takeover of a lobbyist’s private property (his front yard) in the name of protesting for “financial reform.”

Of course, unions have long believed that employers should have limited (or NO) property rights when it comes to union organizing.  After all, a job is a right and therefore the workers’ right to a job trumps an employer’s right to his property.  However, to believe that the right to trespass onto an individual’s private property takes this collectivist philosophy to breathtakingly new levels.

If the taking of a individual’s private property (whether it be temporary or permanent) is put into the capricious will of whatever astroturf gang comes along that day (be it a union or the Klu Klux Klan), then no individual rights are safe from the tyranny of the masses, including the right to one’s life.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

SEIU runs from Obama, dumping $142,000 on Tim Burns attack ads

Trying to keep is purple fingers on the throats in the pockets of the late Jack Murtha’s constituents, the SEIU is dumping $142,000 on ads trying to defeat GOP candidate Tim Burns in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District.

The SEIU’s ad tries to tie Burns to “special interests” because of campaign contributions.

The commercial matches up with other Democratic-aligned groups advertising in the district: it avoids any mention of the policies of the Obama administration or the Democratic Congress, focusing instead on a purely economic message that depicts Burns, a former businessman, as out of step with the struggles of working class voters.

Oddly, the SEIU ignores the fact that the SEIU is…well...a special interest.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

SEIU’s New Burger Queen? Internal Documents Expose Plan to Unionize Fast-Food Industry

If you’d like to see how a union plans to exploit and target workers if the hallucinogencially-named Employee Free Choice Act (aka “card-check”) is passed, read this post.

Last weekend, we reported on what appeared to be a new union battle that the SEIU was going to wage by invading the UFCW’s turf and attempting to unionize grocery workers.  The foundation of this was an interview new SEIU boss Mary Kay Henry gave to a reporter.  On Tuesday, the SEIU was forced to issue a press release reassuring the UFCW it had no plans on invading (also known as raiding) the food sector.

SEIU fully recognizes the food sector as a core industry of sister union United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents more than a million supermarket workers.

Well, it turns out that the SEIU’s “correction” (see above) may not be entirely accurate.

Internal SEIU documents have exposed a December 2009 plan hatched to unionize the nation’s fast food workers.  The SEIU plan details how the purple behemoth plans on targeting fast-food chains in Los Angeles first, the using L.A. and an “east coast” city as a spring board into other cities.

The SEIU’s plan is based on a labor landscape that is post Employee Free Choice Act, but its strategies demonstrate how the SEIU plans to use EFCA to unionize an almost-entirely union-free industry.  While there is much to comment on about the SEIU plan and how a union targets workers within an industry (see highlighted text), we’re just going to show you the plan itself.

In its plan, the SEIU states:

Our initial probing in this industry has taken place in the Los Angeles metro area.  Los Angeles County has over 60,000 fast food workers in just the top ten chains.  When we mapped out the restaurants of the major chains, we saw that they encompass large groupings of low income tracts.  While just over 20,000 workers are employed in the top 10 chains in Fast Food in LA, we have broke [sic] down 75% of the geography into 4 Clusters.  This encompasses just over 15,000 of the 20,000 workers.

The SEIU’s One-year goal:

Organize 15,000 food service workers in LA County and thousands of additional workers in an east coast market within the first 6 months, and begin raising the standards for these workers.

The SEIU lays out its strategy, as follow:

• Initiate a focused experiment in one or two metro areas to test the organizing theory and bring resources to bear on a limited geographical target.
• Choose metro areas with a favorable local political environment and workforce composition (Los Angeles and an east coast market)
• Target 7-10 of the largest chains to keep bargaining manageable and map out geographic clusters where field work can be concentrated.
• Build broad-based support for targeted workers via extensive community outreach and organizing and political work with prominent local elected officials
• While staying focused on the 7-120 chains, bring workers together across companies within geographic clusters to build a sense of movement and solidarity.
• Use a living wage as a vehicle to excite, build momentum, build worker lists/ID potential leaders and potentially support collective bargaining.  We believe we will have enough traction with an ordinance to use as a legitimate tool for organizing and potentially as legislation to raise standards.
• Move fast and furious with an army of 200-300 Staff/MOs/VOs/other volunteer organizers and the necessary number of leads to:
• Petition for living wage
• ID leaders 
• Bring workers together within geographies
• Sign authorization cards
• File on dozens of restaurants per week 

While the SEIU’s plan was prepared during the reign of Andy Stern and presented to the SEIU’s Executive Board, there is no indication to believe that this plan has changed as Mary Kay Henry has committed $4 million to organizing and was part of the Executive Board at the time of this proposal.

You can read the rest of the SEIU plan here (captured just before it was mysteriously ‘scrubbed’)…

h/t: SternBurgerWithFries.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

 

Reading the Tea Leaves: Anna Burger will be stepping down at the SEIU

Okay.  We’re going out on a limb here, but it’s not without some solid foundation:  If we’re reading the tea leaves correctly, Anna Burger will likely be leaving her post as Secretary-Treasurer of the SEIU.

In less than a month, the (former) Queen of Labor has gone from being the assumed-next-in-line to lead, to being unceremoniously dethroned by a coup led by the union’s top generals.

Yesterday, CQ Politics laid out the strongest evidence yet that Andy Stern’s “partner” may have reached the end of the rope.

Major changes to the Service Employees International Union’s downtown operations could be under way soon.

In an interview Tuesday, new SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said she is conducting a monthlong review of her top deputies, including Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, Henry’s main opposition in the union’s recent election to replace longtime head Andy Stern. Burger mysteriously dropped out of the race two weeks before the May 8 election.

“She and I have begun discussions and are committed to reaching an agreement by the end of May. … Every officer is now in a review process about what role they will assume,” Henry said in the interview. “It is the prerogative of the president to reassign responsibilities.”

Reading between the lines, it appears that the new SEIU leader doesn’t want or need Anna Burger undermining the union’s “new” direction, or stabbing her in the back in trying to re-take the union.

It should be noted, we’re not suggesting that Anna will be leaving the SEIU or the labor movement.  For the moment, she is still the head of the failed Change to Win federation and has a seat at the White House dinner task force table.  However, it appears that her power within the SEIU will almost certainly be diminished if when Mary Kay Henry gets her way.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

SEIU Pushes Members to vote for Specter

The Union of Purple People Eaters is pushing its members to vote for Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter.  Specter is behind in the Pennsylvania primary, trailing Rep. Joe Sestak. 

[via The Atlantic]
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.