Service Employees International Union

Judge Rules against SEIU in Fight with another Union

by Ivan Osorio on July 25, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor

A judge has ruled that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) improperly benefited from an employer threatening workers with loss of raises in a 2010 election in California that pitted it against a breakaway SEIU local. The election was to determine whether 43,500 Kaiser Permanente workers were to be represented by SEIU, the former SEIU affiliate, or no union. The Washington Post‘s Alec MacGillis reports:

Administrative Law Judge Lana Parke ruled that Kaiser had improperly withheld pay raises from workers in Southern California who had switched to the new union and that SEIU had then improperly threatened the workers voting in the Northern California election that they, too, could have raises denied if they made the switch.

Leaders of the new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), decided to split from SEIU in response to what they perceived as a power grab by the SEIU national headquarters, then under the leadership of Andy Stern.

Stern sought to consolidate several locals into a handful of giant mega-locals, a strategy that led to a series of embarrassing setbacks for the SEIU, including the split that created the breakaway NUHW and a corruption scandal in Los Angeles.

MacGillis further states:

Leaders of the breakaway union noted that the ruling came at the same time as SEIU and other unions are arguing in favor of new rules proposed by the labor relations board to reduce employer coercion against workers before union elections.

However, for NUHW to portray this incident as a case of employer intimidation is disingenuous. Kaiser’s conduct may hardly be exemplary, but its real fight was with SEIU, which has a history of making deals with employers without members’ input, and has tried to intimidate NUHW through strong-arm tactics ever since it became an independent union.

For more on the internecine SEIU fight and its related scandals, see here and here.

Hold the Sizzle: Chipotle, Immigrant Employees Get ICE’d

by Dennis Grabowski on February 14, 2011 · 4 comments

in International, Labor, Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

Chipotle boasts that it offers “food with integrity,” but the popular restaurant chain may want to consider an addendum in light of its recent actions: “so long as the federal government doesn’t get involved.”

The chain was forced to fire over 600 employees from its 50 Minnesota restaurants last month — about half of its employees in the state — in light of an audit conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Says one Minnesota paper,

The investigation of Chipotle began several months ago, [Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold] said, when ICE asked to see work eligibility documents. The company was not told why it was singled out for review. ICE then provided Chipotle with a list of employees whose documents might be invalid, he said.

Chipotle tries to screen new employees, but some provide false documents showing they are eligible workers, Arnold said. In cases where employees insist they have the proper documents, Chipotle has sought to give them extra time to produce the identification, he said.

“We have asked ICE whether they would allow a 90-day period to resolve discrepancies, and they have told us that they absolutely would not,” Arnold said.

Not only is ICE denying Chipotle the 90-day period to clear up documentation issues with its employees — an allowance that is “standard practice,” according to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — but it is actively increasing the size and scope of its investigation of the restaurant chain. Earlier this month, ICE announced that it would also be auditing the 60 Chipotle locations in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Robert McGoey, a co-coordinator of the rights-based organization Denver Fair Food, suspects that Chipotle will eventually be audited in every state due to its 80 percent Latino employment. Similarly, a February 11 article in The Nation reveals that John Morton, the head of ICE, says it “plans many more mass firings.” This tactic fails to meet the organization’s goals, made explicit in the same article:

The ICE website says it targets employers “who are using illegal workers to drive down wages … [those] likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”

At Chipotle, however, as in every other sanctions target, ICE never improved conditions. Wages remain the same. In fact, although Morton boasts ICE collected $7 million in employer fines during 2,740 audits, those who cooperated in firing workers were given immunity. The only people penalized were workers.

It seems that Chipotle is being targeted on the basis of its largely Latino demographics, rather than any abuse of undocumented workers in the workplace. While wages are unlikely to improve in a market in which “there are nearly five unemployed workers competing for each available job,” ICE’s failure to leave improvements in its wake was virtually guaranteed when it targeted a fast-food chain with above-minimum wages across the board. According to a report from the Immigration Policy Center published on February 9,

[Concerning] Chipotle, labor leaders who criticized the firm for the way it handled layoffs in the wake of the ICE audit say the company is “definitely above the bottom tier” in its overall treatment of workers. Even though the chain is non-union, the SEIU’s Nammacher said Chipotle pays above the minimum wage and offers some basic benefits. “They’re an above-board corporate player,” he stated.

Not only is Chipotle a poor target for an organization seeking to root out “intolerable working conditions” (Chipotle is even known for its practice of paying higher food costs in order to better the compensation of supply-chain employees), but ICE’s impacts harm the very individuals whose interests the organization purports to be acting in. According to a 2009-2010 report from the Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network,

ICE’s new workplace enforcement strategy of auditing employment files, allowing employers to fire undocumented workers en masse – also dubbed “silent raids” – has deepened the economic and humanitarian crisis in many communities across the country, making workers further vulnerable to labor rights violations and other forms of abuse.

The study details several cases in 2009 and 2010 in which ICE audits — intended to publish “bad apple” employers — did anything but.  ”In each of these cases, rather than hold the employer accountable for existing labor law violations and abuses, ICE’s I-9 audits triggered massive layoffs leaving thousands of families in crisis and more vulnerable to abuse.”

SEIU president Javier Morillo described the effects of this practice on undocumented workers, stating that “They are pushed out of jobs where they are being paid above the table.” He added, “They pay taxes, Social Security taxes, etc. They are being moved, many of them, to precisely the bad employers that pay cash, that pay less than minimum wage.”

The deeper that one delves into ICE’s actions, the more that the government organization’s actions seem inconsistent. According to the organization’s website, “ICE’s primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”

It’s unclear, however, how the organization’s recent moves against the employees of Chipotle are in any way consistent with its stated ends of promoting security and safety. It is similarly unclear that Chipotle was abusive  in its dealings with the undocumented workers that it unknowingly employed.

What is clear, however, is that ICE’s actions threaten the very employees whose working conditions it claims to defend.

Obama’s Nativist Scare Tactics May Backfire on Him

by Hans Bader on October 19, 2010

in Environment, Global Warming, International, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Trade, Zeitgeist

President Obama has made the baseless claim that the Chamber of Commerce is spending foreign money on political campaigns. This claim was widely disseminated to the general public through a hysterical ad campaign by the Democratic National Committee accusing the Chamber of Commerce of “stealing our democracy” and featuring an “ominous shot of Chinese currency,” suggesting that Chinese people are trying to take over America. Not only was this claim this untrue, but stoking nativism may backfire on Obama politically, since liberal interest groups that back Obama, like unions, receive large amounts of foreign money, and Obama himself has used regulations and subsidies to ship American jobs overseas.

As one writer notes in The Washington Post, “Labor unions are spending millions to tar Republican candidates — and they take in far more foreign cash than the Chamber.” “The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is spending lavishly to elect Democrats. . . takes in nearly $9.2 million per year from foreign nationals, compared to the mere “$100,000,” none of it used for political campaigns, that the Chamber “receives from its affiliates abroad” — less than 1/20th of 1 percent of the Chamber’s budget. Moreover, most foreign PAC money is going to Democrats, not Republicans.

And Obama’s policies have shipped American jobs overseas. Of the green-jobs funding contained in the $800 billion stimulus package, 79 percent went to foreign firms, aggravating the nation’s trade deficit. Meanwhile, the administration has paid $150 million a year to Brazilian cotton farmers, and supported a cap-and-trade global warming bill that would drive hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas.  (Although Obama and other backers of this “cap-and-trade” concept claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them by driving industry abroad to countries with fewer environmental regulations, resulting in dirtier air, and damage to forests and water supplies.)  Stoking anti-foreign sentiment may further increase public outrage over administration policies that help foreigners at the expense of Americans — like its backdoor bailouts of foreign banks, and the $6 billion Obama spent bailing out socialist Greece.

Obama’s attacks on foreign money may also remind Americans of Obama’s own 2008 receipt of foreign campaign contributions, which resulted from his campaign’s deliberate disabling of computer software that would have thwarted such contributions, as The Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund and others have pointed out: “As the Washington Post reported, the Obama campaign had turned off its Address Verification System, or AVS, at its Web site. That program should have stopped contributions coming in from citizens of foreign countries — a violation of federal law. Clearly, the Obama campaign’s decision to abandon filters had consequences — the campaign was forced to refund $33,000 to two Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip.”

The War of the SEIU Succession Is Over, or Is It?

by Ivan Osorio on April 26, 2010

in Economy, Labor

The battle over who would succeed outgoing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern (picture above, next to President Obama) appears to be over, as several key locals lined up to support challenger Mary Kay Henry against Stern’s handpicked successor, Anna Burger, who served as Secretary-Treasurer during Stern’s presidency. The story got largely buried because it broke at the start of a weekend, but Liberty Chick, at Biggovernment.com, has some useful background on Henry.

Mary Kay Henry’s history with SEIU began in 1979, as she rose through the ranks and became a leader and chief healthcare strategist, then was elected to the International Executive Board in 1996.  Today, Henry serves as International Executive Vice President of SEIU, a step beneath Anna Burger.  Henry’s efforts have been very focused in the health care sector and on building labor coalitions and partnerships with hospitals and health care facilities.  That said, we can probably expect to see SEIU’s stronghold on this sector continue to grow stronger.

In addition to her posts at SEIU, Mary Kay Henry has also been a labor adviser to and member of the Subcommittee on Catholic Health Care of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, an organization that in itself has become a major political force, having brokered deals with the likes of Nancy Pelosifor crucial votes in the eleventh hour of major bills, most notably on health care reform.  Additionally, she is a member of the executive board of Families USA, a left-leaning non-profit group that serves as a think-tank for most of SEIU’s and other progressive organizations’ research and reports to support universal health care.

In other words, we should expect a change in style — mainly in not antagonizing other labor leaders as much as the Stern-Burger duo did — rather than substance.

For more on Stern and SEIU, see here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Outgoing SEIU boss Andy Stern isn’t giving up the fight for Anna Burger to replace him; he said today that the selection of his successor is not over. However, the Huffington Post reports that, “Aides at SEIU didn’t dispute that Henry, owing to support of local affiliates in New York, Los Angeles, Oregon, and Washington State finds herself in a strong position to take over for Stern.”

Public Employee Unions’ Suffocating Grip on California

by Ivan Osorio on April 22, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

The current issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal features a must-read account of how government employee unions have turned California into “The Beholden State,” by Steven Malanga. The piece covers a wide range of issues and trends relevant to public sector unionism, so I will focus here on one particularly interesting section, in which Malanga ties together organized labor’s support for greater government intervention in the (already heavily regulated) health care market with the growing crisis of underfunded union and public employee pension funds. As in so many stories of recent union power grabs, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a major player.

The SEIU’s rise in California illustrates again how modern labor’s biggest victories take place in back rooms, not on picket lines. In the late 1980s, the SEIU began eyeing a big jackpot: tens of thousands of home health-care workers being paid by California’s county-run Medicaid programs. The SEIU initiated a long legal effort to have those workers, who were independent contractors, declared government employees. When the courts finally agreed, the union went about organizing them—an easy task because governments rarely contest organizing campaigns, not wanting to seem anti-worker. The SEIU’s biggest victory was winning representation for 74,000 home health-care workers in Los Angeles County, the largest single organizing drive since the United Auto Workers unionized General Motors in 1937. Taxpayers paid a steep price: home health-care costs became the fastest-growing part of the Los Angeles County budget after the SEIU bargained for higher wages and benefits for these new recruits. The SEIU also organized home health-care workers in several other counties, reaching a whopping statewide total of 130,000 new members.

The SEIU’s California numbers have given it extraordinary resources to pour into political campaigns. The union’s major locals contributed a hefty $20 million in 2005 to defeat a series of initiatives to cap government growth and rein in union power. The SEIU has also spent millions over the years on initiatives to increase taxes, sometimes failing but on other occasions succeeding, as with a 2004 measure to impose a millionaires’ tax to finance more mental-health spending. With an overflowing war chest and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, the SEIU has been instrumental in getting local governments to pass living-wage laws in several California cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. And the union has also used its muscle in campaigns largely out of the public eye, as in 2003, when it pressured the board of CalPERS, the giant California public-employee pension fund, to stop investing in companies that outsourced government jobs to private contractors.

In other words, SEIU pushed CalPERS to make an investment decision based not on what the returns from it would be, but on how it would advantage SEIU’s organizing — in this case, by maintaining a larger government workforce. This should constitute a clear violation of fiduciary duty under any sensible definition of the term. This kind of politicization of union pension investments has been going on for some time, so some pension funds have years of lost gains behind them today.

Further, to unionize “health-care workers paid by government medical programs like Medicaid,” unions are now trying to redefine the definition of “public” to any social service provider who receives state subsidies, even while not being directly employed by the state. By extending new subsidies to more people, the recently enacted health care “reform” bill has created even more opportunities for such a dubious expansion of the definition of “public.”

Now that Andy Stern has announced his retirement, is he is riding off into the sunset triumphantly after leading SEIU during its successful campaign to pass Obamacare, or is he jumping off a sinking ship as he leaves SEIU a financial mess? Maybe a bit of both.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

SEIU Recruits College Students as Muscle

by Ivan Osorio on April 19, 2010 · 2 comments

in Labor, Politics as Usual

At Biggovernment.com, the writer known as Liberty Chick offers a good, concise summary of the corporate campaign being waged by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against the catering company Sodexo, which it has targeted for unionization. As with any corporate campaign, the union is engaged not only in a frontal assault; it is also pursuing other lines of attack through allies, in order to obscure its self-interested economic motive in signing up more dues-paying members.

If you haven’t been following SEIU’s all-out war against Sodexo for the last 18 months, let me give you the crash course.  Sodexo is a food service and facilities management company that provides cafeteria and cleaning services at many of the nation’s companies, schools, event facilities and athletic stadiums.  The company’s 110,000 employees in the US (plus even more in international locations) have long been a been a prime target for SEIU’s organizing attempts.  In the “old days”, colleges and universities hired food and cleaning service workers as direct employees.  But as that need has declined over the years with all the food establishment choices available today, more and more  schools now outsource their food and cleaning services in an effort to leverage those cost savings to avoid making cuts to students’ educational programs. Organized labor has of course pushed back.  SEIU’s been pummeling Sodexo with their corporate campaign tactics through the usual outlets – the smear website, the manufactured “studies” from affiliates and allies,  the strategically times press releases, the coordinated protests, sit-ins and international delegations, and all the drummed-up issues…

Along with UNITE-HERE (which recently split, with one part it joining SEIU), SEIU has helped pioneer the use of the corporate campaign as a prime organizing tactic. Adapted from a strategy first articulated by the 1960s New Left, corporate campaigns target a specific employer or group of employers through the threat of destroying a company’s reputation. Tactics include feeding allegations of company wrongdoing to the news media, contacting stockholders to deride management and the company’s financial health, filing complaints with regulatory agencies, and plain vanilla picketing.

As George Washington University Professor Jarol Manheim noted in a 2002 Labor Watch article, “For unions, corporate campaigns are a powerful organizing tool because they focus not on prospective union members, but on their employers. The typical campaign does not depend on striking a massive blow against an employer. Rather, the idea is to generate a rising crescendo of psychological pressure to which management is eventually forced to respond.” One way to apply that kind of pressure is to enlist allies, such as environmental and other left-leaning activist groups. In the case of Sodexo, SEIU’s allies include student groups.

Manheim quotes Stern’s predecessor, John Sweeney, who recently stepped down as president of the AFL-CIO. In his 1995 AFL-CIO inaugural address, Sweeney said, “We will use old-fashioned mass demonstrations, as well as sophisticated corporate campaigns, to make workers’ rights the civil rights issue of the 1990s.”

Manheim’s Labor Watch article provides a very good overview of the evolution of the corporate campaign as a union organizing tactic. (Full disclosure: I was editor of Labor Watch when it was published.) And for a more in-depth history and analysis of corporate campaigns, I recommend Manheim’s book, The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation. The title of the book is illustrative. Manheim also quotes current AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who, when he was secretary-treasurer of the federation, candidly stated: “Corporate campaigns swarm the target employer from every angle, great and small, with an eye toward inflicting upon the employer the death of a thousand cuts rather than a single blow.”

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

Stern Jumps off Sinking Pension Ship

by Ivan Osorio on April 13, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern plans to retire as head of the union that he helped to transform into the most powerful in America. Considering the access he enjoys to the Obama administration — he was the most frequent visitor to the White House last year — the timing of his departure seems odd.

While it could be seen as a case of knowing when to quit so as to go out on top, or of riding into the sunset following SEIU’s huge victory in helping ram Obamacare through Congress, there may be another, much less triumphant reason for Stern to quit now.

He may be getting off the Titanic that is SEIU before it runs headlong into the proverbial iceberg in the form of severely underfunded pensions. As Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute notes in a 2009 study that compares union-sponsored vs. private pension funds:

On July 11, 2008, in response to an article published in the July 9 edition of the New York Sun by Diana Furchtgott-Roth on the state of union pensions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) issued a blistering press release. The article stated “Yet in 2006, the SEIU National Industry Pension Plan, a plan for the rank-and-file members, covering 100,787 workers, was 75% funded. That is, it had three-fourths of the money it needed to pay benefit obligations of workers and retirees. In contrast, a separate fund for the union’s own employees, numbering 1,305, participants was 91% funded. Even better, the pension fund for SEIU officers and employees, which had 6,595 members, was 103% funded.”

The SEIU lambasted the article and claimed that the SEIU National Industry Pension Fund had achieved high funding levels, 92 percent in 2006, and 96 percent in 2008. Now, perhaps the union’s internal calculations showed the SEIU pension plan was in good shape, but in 2009, the SEIU National Pension Fund reported to the DOL that it was in critical status—a sign of serious funding deficiencies that suggests the SEIU’s arguments were ignorant at best, and disingenuous or worse if they were aware of these problems22.

In addition, three of SEIU’s pension funds were in endangered status as of 2008, and this year the 1199 Pension Fund declared critical status.

The Local 32BJ District 36 Building Maintenance Pension and the Local 32BJ District 36 Building Operators Pensions cover together 7,000 people. And the SEIU 1199 Greater New York Pension covers another 29,000, or 36,000 in New York in all.

Whatever the reason for the disparity in funding between rank-and-file pensions and those of SEIU staff and officers, it doesn’t look good. With Stern gone, it’s somebody else’s problem now. That somebody else will most likely be SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger, who has long been considered Stern’s heir apparent, though, as Politico‘s Ben Smith reports, she may be challenged from within the union.

For more on union pensions, see here, here, and here.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

Washingtonian mag: Stern is “union boss number one”

by Ivan Osorio on March 31, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

The current issue of Washingtonian magazine features a long, fairly in-depth interview with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern, whom author Chris Lehmann describes as an unlikely “Washington insider,” who “is very much in the thick of power politics today.” Lehmann describes the controversies for which Stern has become notorious, including his access to the White House and conflicts with other labor leaders.

What makes this interview especially worth reading, however, is its account of Stern’s and SEIU’s role in the recent policy fight over health care, which the Obama administration — and its labor allies, including SEIU — won. As Lehmann notes, “Perhaps more than any other influence broker in Washington, he has thrown the fortunes of his constituency in with the effort to revamp the nation’s health-care system.” So committed was he to this goal, that he approached with in grand strategic fashion.

A 2007 press appearance touting health-care reform with then–Walmart CEO Lee Scott—complete with a phone-in appearance by Republican California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—sent Stern detractors into fulminations that would bewilder the Glenn Becks of the world. “The single biggest obstacle to single-payer health care in this country is Andy Stern,” Michael Lighty, policy director for the California Nurses Association—a union locked into one of the state’s organizing disputes with SEIU—told the Nation’s Liza Featherstone at the time.

The Walmart event was one in a series of Stern-backed conciliatory moves toward management that have jangled the nerves of the rank and file. Stern’s union has endorsed contracts with provisions that many rival leaders view contemptuously as giveaways to employers—securing minimal cost-of-living wage hikes in exchange for management pledges of noninterference with organizing drives. And at times Stern has come out in favor of key business-backed proposals—such as tort reform and charter schools—whose benefits to most wage workers are far from clear.

Building off the arguments he advanced in his 2006 book on globalization and the workplace, A Country That Works, Stern contends that labor leaders can’t simply shun strategic alliances with management.

“There’s a certain level of a relationship we need with employers besides just demonizing them,” he says. He cites the health-care fight as a case in point: “All I would say is that if today the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, Walmart, and every big business was against health care, you could all go home and call this thing dead. But the truth is that people built coalitions with AARP and the Business Roundtable and Walmart, then kept an issue alive because it wasn’t completely politicized right from the beginning.”

Stern’s allies in the business world appreciate his more ecumenical approach to accommodating their interests. John Castellani, who heads the Business Roundtable, joined forces with Stern’s union as well as AARP and the National Federation of Independent Businesses in 2007 to spearhead the Divided We Fail coalition to keep the health-care issue in play before Congress.

As we now know, Stern’s strategy paid off. And while he and others on the left who wanted to see a “public option” health insurer directly run by government didn’t get everything they wanted, they still got plenty in the way of government expansion. That should be seen as part of an even bigger strategy of creating more opportunities for SEIU (and organized labor in general) to recruit new members, because government is the one sector of the American economy where unions’ organizing prospects look brightest. And they could look even brighter, if public sector unions bosses succeed in their efforts to expand the definition of “public” to include any service provider (such as for child care and home elder care) who receives any government assistance.

Just as troubling to those who value economic freedom should be business leaders’ readiness to meet leftists like Stern halfway in their government-expanding efforts, in the mistaken belief that the likes of SEIU will leave them alone well into the future. They will just eat them last.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Obama Names SEIU’s Stern to Deficit Commission

by Ivan Osorio on February 26, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Politics as Usual

President Barack Obama has appointed Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern to a new commission tasked with coming up with recommendations to help reduce the federal deficit. While disappointing, this is not surprising. Stern’s appointment is merely the culmination of a series of appointments by the Obama administration of individuals closely associated with SEIU to government posts.

These include Patrick Gaspard, a former vice president for politics and legislation for SEIU Local 1199, a giant New York health care workers union, who was named White House political director following Obama’s election, and SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger, who was named to Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Then there’s former SEIU associate general counsel Craig Becker, whose nomination to the National Labor Relations Board failed in a Senate cloture vote.

Stern himself, according to White House visitor logs released in November, visited the White House at least 22 times in 2009, making him the most frequent visitor during that time (the Alliance for Worker Freedom has filed a request for an investigation of Stern for possible lobbying disclosure violations, including during those visits).

This access hasn’t come easy. SEIU has invested heavily in politics. In 2008, it was the seventh biggest campaign donor, with nearly all of its contributions going to Democrats, according the the Center for Responsive Politics. Stern told The Las Vegas Sun in May 2009: “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”

Coziness between the administration and a special interest aside, asking the head of a union that organizes public sector workers presents a clear conflict of interest, especially now that union members in the public sector sectors outnumber their private sector counterparts for the first time ever.  Would Stern be willing to reduce growth of the sector where his union is most likely to find new members? More likely are calls for higher taxes to fund more “public services” for SEIU to unionize. That also shouldn’t be surprising. Today, government employee unions constitute a permanent special interest lobby favoring the growth of government, one that is motivated, organized, and well-funded.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Will Obama Recess-Appoint Becker?

by Ivan Osorio on February 10, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

With the nomination of former SEIU associate general counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) most likely dead in the Senate, the question now turns as to whether President Barack Obama will recess-appoint him to the Board. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka have both urged Obama to go the recess appointment route.

Organized labor went all-out for Obama during the 2008 election cycle, so union bosses are likely to put considerable pressure on Obama to recognize their efforts by moving forward on their policy goals, of which Becker’s nomination to the Board is a major one. However, Obama has other priorities, as well, mainly his stalled health care reform effort, for which he will need to spend political capital. Whether Obana is willing to spread that political capital around (to borrow his own phrase) would likely be a difficult decision for him.

Unions are so keen on Becker because of his radical anti-employer views. He has stated that employers should have no say in the unionization of their employees, and that changes to facilitate organizing could be advanced through the NLRB’s adjudicating process. The latter would allow unions to skew the law in favor of unionization, something they have tried but failed to do as the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) remains stuck in the Senate. With Massachusetts’ Scott Brown becoming the 41st Republican in the Senate, the chances for the Democrats getting EFCA through a filibuster look even slimmer.

Whatever happens, the defeat of cloture on Becker’s nomination is good news for free enterprise and for the economy. If recess-appointed,  Becker is almost certain to not be confirmed, so would never get to serve a full term. Therefore, whatever havoc he could cause would be limited; some cases would come before him, but others that would have, were he to serve a full term, would not. If Obama were to nominate somebody else, however friendly to organized labor, it is almost impossible to imagine somebody worse than Becker.

For more on Becker, see here.

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