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SEIU organizers file complaint against SEIU for unfair labor practices

By: Soren Dayton (Diary)  |  March 18th, 2009 at 10:02 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

I love this. According to the WaPo, SEIU is getting rid of union organizers, who are filing a complaint with the NLRB over the issue:

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 laid off. In return, the workers’ union, which goes by the somewhat postmodern name of the Union of Union Representatives, has filed unfair labor practices charges against SEIU with the National Labor Relations Board. The staff union’s leaders say that SEIU is engaging in the same kind of practices that some businesses use — laying off workers without proper notice, contracting out work to temp firms, banning union activities and reclassifying workers to reduce union numbers.

This reminds me of ACORN’s 1995 lawsuit to exempt them from paying minimum wage, while working on a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage. EPI has the story, wtih the full report after the jump:

In 1995, ACORN sued the state of California, claiming that it should be exempted from the state minimum wage. The group realized the simple economic fact facing all employers: being forced to pay higher wages means that you must employ fewer workers. A legal brief filed by ACORN during the appeal of its lawsuit admits:

As acknowledged both by the trial court and California, the more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker—either because of minimum or overtime requirements—the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.

This argument is particularly ironic. In 1996, when New Orleans business targets of Rathke’s minimum wage increase campaign acknowledged the economic reality that increasing the cost of labor would lead them to reduce employment or cut hours, Wade Rathke snapped, “If their business is that marginal, they probably shouldn’t be in business.”

(Crossposted from The Next Right)

Rotten ACORN – America’s Bad Seed – By The Employment Policies Institute – Free Legal Forms

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  • USNJIMRET

    How totally screwed up is THAT?
    Irony falls down and dies from a MASSIVE Coronary!

    • Achance

      astoundingly well. They usually make it look like they’re paid the same as the leadworkers or foremen in the units they represent, but then they base their pay on six tens or seven twelves because union reps have to spend sooooo much time looking out for the members.

  • Achance

    Actually, you can even get a form from the NLRB to file one. It’s better to write up a narrative separately though. Some of the best filings I ever saw were from a Correctional Officer at our Max prison. His post was the prison library, so he had his own law firm of lifers who lived for legal research and writing and could work in his complaints between their habeas corpus motions.

    Actually proving an unfair labor practice is another matter altogether, but if this gets dropped or dismissed by the Board, nobody will ever hear about it. Actually, there is a lot of litigation between unions and their staff people. Having been on both sides, I can tell you authorititatively that supervising labor relations people is like herding cats; they know the game, they know how to play it, and if they don’t want to be disciplined, dismissed, or laid off, they know how to make your life a living Hell. You learn to be very careful when you hire them because you may have them a while.

    I’m usually a real nice guy, but when the Democrat Knowles Administration rather loudly proclaimed that they had promised one of the unions that they would fire me and several of my merit system coworkers, I took umbrage. We were the only non-union merit system employees and that status relied on our good will towards the State. Promising a union to fire me because I was good at my job kinda exhausts my good will. So, a co-worker and I filed a ULP against the State and the Union which we would normally be in alleging just about everything this side of baby rape and devil worship, of course accompanied by a lurid press release and some good, “highly placed, usually reliable, anonymous source” quotes to our favorite reporters. When the Labor Board found probable cause against the State and Union, we did another round of lurid press releases styled to make the unintiated believe they’d been found guilty already. Of course, a PC finding only means that if the facts as asserte constitute a ULP, you go to hearing over it, but reporters don’t know that. Anyway, it didn’t take a lot of that stuff for the Administration to lose their ardor for keeping the campaign promise and they settled the ULP without a hearing by agreeing to put us in the union and pay us a bunch of backpay since the union pay was higher than our non-union pay. And they could tell the union that wanted us fired that they couldn’t fire us because of the union contract they’d been forced to put us under. Doing that was just my idea of good, clean fun!

  • Jeff Weimer