The row between the UNITE-HERE hospitality and textile union and Workers United — which broke away from UNITE-HERE earlier this year and joined the powerful and growing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — has taken a bizarre and ugly turn.

According to The New York Times, several UNITE-HERE organizers have complained about a practice known as “pink sheeting,” in which union members are pressured to reveal private and potentially embarrassing personal information about themselves. Union organizers then allegedly use those workers’…

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At Reason Hit & Run, Michael C. Moynihan looks at the Service Employees Internatinoal Union’s harassing of broadcasters who air ads opposing the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

According to this letter obtained by TPM, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is threatening television stations broadcasting this anti-card check advertisement produced by the Employee Freedom Action Committee. In the letter (viewable here), SEIU lawyer Dora V. Chen tells stations in Arkansas and Nebraska that they should “immediately cease airing this false and deceitful…

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The civil war between the two factions that until recently made up the union UNITE-HERE heated up further this week. Yesterday, the leadership of the rump UNITE-HERE voted to suspend the union’s general president, Bruce Raynor, who led a dissident faction out of the union. Raynor’s group incorporated as a new union, Workers United, which is now affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), as a “conference” of SEIU. Today, UNITE-HERE followed up with a protest outside SEIU’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, at…

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Like the Cold War-era Third World civil wars in which the superpowers would fight each other by proxy, the increasingly bitter row within  UNITE-HERE appears to have blown up into a confrontation between the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which disaffiliated from the former in 2005, taking other unions with it to form a new labor federation, Change to Win.

UNITE-HERE, formed from a 2004 merger between the Union of Needletrades, Industrial & Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel…

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UNITE-HERE, the 450,000-member textile and hospitality union, is embroiled in a “civil war,” according to its president, who is now openly considering breaking up the union. UNITE-HERE was created as a result of a 2004 merger between the United Needletrades, Industrial & Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE). The New York Times explains the logic behind the merger:

On paper, the marriage made sense, besides making for the catchy Unite Here name. Unite — the descendant of…

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In response to my two posts on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), I got forwarded this story. Pro-union student activists, in a recent open letter to SEIU head Andy Stern, angrily denounced what they see as SEIU’s undermining of their efforts, according to Insidehighered.com. The big point of contention is an alleged secret agreement between SEIU and the hospitality union UNITE-HERE on one side, and the “Big 3″ food service catering companies — Aramark, Sodexho, and Compass Group — on the other.

Under the…

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I noted yesterday that vetoing the Employee Free Choice Act, the mandatory card check bill that the House passed yesterday, would provide President George W. Bush a great opportunity to reconnect with and reenergize his conservative base. There’s been plenty of righteous noise about this bill from conservative pundits — but it’s not all just from the Right. Vetoing mandatory card check could give Bush a boost among some in the political center.

In today’s Washington Examiner, James Kirchick of The New…

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The U.S. House of Representatives today approved, by a 241-185 vote, the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800), which would destroy secret ballot protections in union organizing drives. As I commented earlier, this provides President George W. Bush with an opportunity to reenergize the conservative Republican base — by vetoing this terrible bill. Now that the House Democrats have rammed this through, the conservative commentariat is making much indignant noise about this, which reinforces the argument that a card check veto…

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