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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Workers may get violent if their wages are cut. The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has a monopoly and was an anchor on the Big Three U.S. automakers. These two ideas were professed by two labor leaders at the recent Federalist Society Convention in Washington, D.C.

There may be violence, says Damon A. Silvers, Associate General Counsel for the AFL-CIO and Deputy Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Silvers spoke on last Friday’s panel “Labor: Wall Street, Labor Unions,…

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The bitter ongoing fight between the national leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the former leadership of a SEIU Oakland, California, health care workers local has taken an even nastier turn.

Early this year, SEIU, under the leadership of Andy Stern, forced a merger between the Oakland health care local, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), and a Los Angeles-area local where a major corruption scandal broke last year — leading that local’s chief, Stern ally Tyrone Freeman, to resign.

In response to the Stern-led SEIU bullying,…

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Slate blogger Mickey Kaus explains how public sector unions are driving state and local governments to the brink of bankruptcy (via Nick Gillespie at Reason Hit & Run, via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):

The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. “[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes,” as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key…

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In his Wall Street Journal column today, Holman Jenkins highlights one of the prizes at stake for organized labor in the current health care debate.

Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health -care benefits they’re used to getting. More important and often overlooked, organized labor itself is increasingly made up of health-care workers who benefit from an incentive system that artificially force-feeds great gobs of GDP into the industry’s maw.

Their long retreat elsewhere in the economy may continue unabated, but…

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Remember the California budget debacle? Now it seems like not a month goes by without another state facing a budget crisis. Now it’s Michigan’s turn. Predictably, state politicians are trying to scare the public with talk of cutting funding for libraries and prisons, in order to make tax increases an easier sell. Also predictably, policy makers appear to be avoiding looking for budget savings where substantial ones could be realized: government payrolls. As The Detroit News points out:

Employee pay and…

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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is giving away copies of a poster (pictured right) of Barack Obama, which it describes as “an original piece of art for those closest to the movement to fix health care.” Of course, for this crowd, to “fix” generally means to bring government in.

Fittingly, SEIU is limiting the giveaway to “only ONE poster per person and address.” This led the Libertarian Party to challenge SEIU “to live up to the promises behind government-run health care and offer…

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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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It may not get card check this Congress, but organized labor still has plenty for which to thank the Obama administration. Today, in The American Spectator, F. Vincent Vernuccio describes one such fulfilled item on the unions’ wish list:

Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis betrayed rank and file union members by repealing vital reporting regulations that allowed members to see how union bosses were spending their hard-earned dues money. …

Solis’s repeal weakens one of the chief reporting tools used by…

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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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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is being denounced by a group of its own employees for doing, well, nothing wrong or illegal, but something that SEIU wants to keep businesses it unionizes from doing: laying off staff and contracting out some operations. Reports The Washington Post:

The Service Employees International Union, considered the most influential union in the nation, has notified the union that represents about 220 of its national field staff and organizers that 75 of them are being…

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Today’s Wall Street Journal, in an editorial, notes organized labor’s latest hardball tactic in its effort to help enact the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, H.R. 1409), which would effectively replace secret ballot organizing elections with the card check process — whereby union organizers ask employees to sign union cards out in the open. Essentially, some unions want the Treasury Department to muzzle companies that have received any funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to keep from lobbying…

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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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Ousted officials from a Bay Area local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced yesterday that they were forming a new union, and asked members to join. They were ousted from the local, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHWW), after a long-threatened takeover by the union’s national office became official on Tuesday, as the local was placed in trusteeship, for alleged “financial malpractice.”

From the SEIU national office to claim such concern about corrupt practices now seems strange, particularly in California. A Los…

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As Barack Obama is sworn in as the nation’s 44th President today, Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) will likely be the next Secretary of Labor. As I’ve noted here recently, her cozy relationship with organized labor should raise concern among not only lawmakers and the public, but among rank-and-file union members who could soon find it harder to find out how union leaders spend their dues. The Department of Labor, under outgoing Secretary Elaine Chao, has enacted stronger reporting requirements. Reports The…

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Service Employees International Union (SEIU) finalized a contentious merger of several California locals into a statewide “superlocal.” Sal Rosselli, the head of one of the locals that was dissolved in this process, has fought the centralizing efforts of SEIU President Andy Stern, but, as evident not, to no avail. SF Weekly’s Matt Smith notes:

The move is seen in U.S. Labor movement circles as a ploy to neuter Sal Rosselli, president of United Healthcare Workers - West.

Rosselli has clashed with Stern…

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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Change to Win (CtW) union coalition have each released statements denying involvement in the corruption scandal that led to the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich this morning.

However, it may be some time before more is known. SEIU, in its statement, says, “In keeping with the U.S. Attorney’s request, we are not sharing information with the media at this time.”

Meanwhile, the Politico’s Ben Smith credits an unnamed “Democratic source” with confirming the identity of “SEIU official”…

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Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern is not known for being shy about his ambitions. Since taking his union out of the AFL-CIO and forming the new Change to Win federation in 2005, he has sought to assert his union’s influence over private equity firms, centralize his authority within the union by forcing various locals to merge, and negotiate large deals with employers without member participation. Now, however, it is worth asking who is really in charge at SEIU.

Amidst all…

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