More and more, American workers today are simply not choosing to unionize when actually given a choice — so Big Labor has come up with some creative methods to keep the forced-dues money flowing.
For many reasons, workers in the private sector have been a tough sell for union organizers. However, instead of trying to offer a product that workers would voluntarily buy, union officials have turned to a strategy of using so-called “corporate campaigns” to force unionization on employees by beating up their employers.
These campaigns involve the orchestration of political pressure, frivolous lawsuits, boycotts, and scathing attacks in the media to twist the arms of targeted non-union employers until they agree to help pave the way for unionization of their own employees.
Union officials already enjoy a host of special legal privileges, including exemptions from anti-monopoly laws, trespassing laws, and even federal prosecutions for violent acts.
They also enjoy the federally backed power to compel millions of workers to pay union dues or be fired.
But these coercive privileges are apparently not enough. So the corporate campaign strategy is used to further stack the deck against employee free choice and to hurt a company’s bottom line.
For example, Service Employees International Union organizers orchestrated a hunger strike at the University of Miami in which a handful of janitors and students were sent to the hospital, while another group of students and organizers stormed administration offices as part of their campaign to bully university officials until they aided the organizers.
In California, a jury recently ordered the UNITE-HERE union to pay a staggering $17.3 million libel penalty after union officials orchestrated a mass mailing of postcards defaming targeted hospitals by falsely claiming that their nonunion linen contractor “didn’t ensure that its linens are free of blood, feces and possible pathogens.”
Meanwhile, in Boston, police recently arrested an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union “business agent” after he released three rats into a restaurant during a crowded dinner rush.
In preceding weeks, he had been handing out “Don’t Eat Rats” fliers outside the restaurant because the restaurant refused to acquiesce to union demands.
While trying to muddy the waters and convince the public these tactics are necessary to secure the right to join a union, Big Labor officials use corporate campaigns to secure two basic choices for workers: Union “Yes” or Union “Yes.”
When a targeted employer buckles under the pressure, union officials agree to call off the dogs if the company concedes to waive the less-abusive government-supervised secret ballot election process for deciding whether to unionize. Instead, union organizers demand a deal to use a coercive “card check” scheme.
Under card checks, workers must decide in public whether or not to sign cards that will be counted as “votes” for the union.
Workers frequently report being harassed and lied to about the cards’ true purpose. Sometimes union operatives claim that the cards are necessary to obtain health insurance or that they merely request an election.
These agreements also include a gag rule on the employer, preventing managers from voicing any opinion whatsoever on the potential impact of unionization.
In fact, employers are also often forced to require workers to attend pro-union rallies on company time where union officials can pressure workers to sign the cards.
Employees refusing to sign often find union operatives showing up at their homes because organizers insist that employers hand over workers’ personal information, such as home addresses and phone numbers.
In some instances, only threats to call the police have finally gotten unwanted union agents off an employee’s property.
Responding to a wave of employee complaints from across the country, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys have filed numerous court and labor board challenges, and several prosecutions have already resulted.
In one foundation case involving the convention center in Hartford, Conn., a worker attended a union news conference to call out union officials for jeopardizing workers’ income by driving away business in order to obtain the power to use card check for organizing.
The fuming worker asked, “Why would we want to join a union that wants to choke us into submission?”
Instead of using hardball tactics to impose unionization on employees from the top down, union organizers should instead take a hard look at improving their product.
A movement built through coercion cannot ultimately be sustained.
Stefan Gleason is vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation.
