We keep hearing all the fear and propoganda that is being spread by the enemies of an American middle-class about the Employee Free Choice Act. They say it will take your right to a secret ballot. They say it will destroy the economy. They say it will make business after business shut their doors. In truth, there is one industry the Employee Free Choice Act would cripple.
The liars, oops lawyers of the union busting movement and the dispicable companies that employ them would be severely crippled by this act that would empower the 60 million workers that wish to join a labor union in America to actually do so.
It would be good riddance too. For anyone that hasn't had to deal with these sub-human people and their tactics need only do a little research. First, a brief definition of "Union Busting":
Union busting is a term used by trade unions and others to describe a wide range of activities undertaken by employers, their proxies, and governments, which hinder workers from freely organizing, joining and maintaining trade unions. While the right to join and form trade unions is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),[1] union busting actions subvert the organization and continuation of unions by sowing discord amongst union members, challenging unions via law courts, strike breaking, lockouts, violent suppression, the sponsorship of anti-union organizations, or the creation of employer-controlled trade unions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
In modern times, instead of addressing the issues that have caused workers to seek the protection of a union, companies hire "consultants" and "lawyers" in other companies set up just to sow discontent among workers who have stated their desire for the protection of a union.
One such company is
Jackson Lewis. In a story written by an attendee of one of their $1595 "training" seminars on how to keep American workers from their legal right to join a union, some very telling perspectives emerge. First, it is important to note that they are actually ASHAMED of their activities:
This seemed to satisfy the people at the check-in table, who were careful not to say why we all were there. I was glad I found it at all: The seminar was kept so hush-hush that the name Jackson Lewis didn’t appear on the sign outside the door.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/...
At least the men who taught the seminar knew exactly where they stood on the evolutionary ladder:
As it turned out, the two men who had purged Richard would be our seminar leaders. The older man in pink was Michael J. Lotito, a 30-year veteran of anti-union legal wars. The younger was Michael Stief, III, a protégé and fast learner. I soon saw they knew their turf well. "We’re not moralists," explained Lotito. "We’re lawyers."
And of course, as they do with the workers in a company, they spewed propoganda and outright lied to the attendees of their secret seminar:
"The risk for some organizations is not that you’re going to be organized from within," he advised us. "It’s that you’re going to be organized from without."
Of course when you hold the American that works hard and aspires to reach the middle class with that hard work with such total and complete scorn why would you do anything but use and lie to them?:
Lotito informed us that his father had been a New York dockworker. "Back then, in 1935, [unions] made perfect sense," Lotito said. "Did they have legitimate issues about how they were treated in the workplace? Yes! There was no safety, no security, no benefits." But they, he explained, were a lot different from today’s whiners. "We didn’t have employees say: It’s my God-given right to have health insurance."
Lotito stopped pacing, faced a personnel manager in the audience, and, slumping his body, took on a mock hillbilly accent: "You owe me health insurance! It just ain’t fair! You owe me health insurance!" This got a few chuckles.
These people care nothing about any of the workers and not only feel like they are inferior, ignorant hicks but they have no problem bending the rules, and flat-out lying through their teeth to any worker who will listen:
What if we simply wanted to fire union organizers? That was possible to do, said Stief, as long as you were careful to do so for other reasons. "Union sympathizers aren’t entitled to any more protection than other workers," he explained. But the firing could not be linked to their union activity.
What if we felt like saying a lot of anti-union stuff to our workers? Lotito introduced a segment called "You Can Say It." Could we tell our workers, for instance, that a union had held strike at a nearby facility only to find that all the strikers had been replaced—and that the same could happen to the employees here? Sure, said Lotito. "It’s lawful." He added, "What happens if this statement is a lie? They didn’t have another strike, there were no replacements? It’s still lawful: The labor board doesn’t really care if people are lying."
The sad part is that they have taken the art of lying and cheating and looking down on a vast segment of the American population and actually made this hatred a multi-billion dollar industry. Of course, with absolutley no oversight on any of your activities the sky is indeed the limit:
Unionbusters operate under the radar intentionally. They often provide material and instructions behind the scenes while the employer’s management and middle-management/supervisory staff carry out the actual communications with workers. In this way, the unionbuster does not deal directly with employees and, as a result, may avoid having to disclose financial reports about such activity to the U.S. Department of Labor. The unionbuster’s name or firm is not used or referenced in the anti-union materials distributed to employees, further masking the unionbuster’s involvement in orchestrating the anti-organizing campaign. More importantly, the anti-union company is rarely called on to divulge that it hired a unionbuster or reveal the specifics of such expenditures. [W]ithout a paper trail, unionbusters are hard to detect, underreported and not in the public eye.
http://blog.aflcio.org/...
Quite sadly they have been so successful here, they are even expanding on an international scale and seeping into Great Britain:
British employers are increasingly hiring US-style consultants to persuade workers not to join trade unions, the TUC warned today.
Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, said scare tactics similar to those employed in the US were being used to demonise trade unions and keep workplaces union-free.
The union organisation, one of Britain's largest, has joined forces with its US equivalent, the AFL-CIO, to highlight the "threat" to the rights of British workers posed by consultants' "intimidating" tactics.
Barber said: "The underhand tactics employed in the shadowy world of the union-busting consultant are proving increasingly attractive to a handful of employers in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
This is why me simply MUST get the Employee Free Choice Act. Not just because it would put these leeches out of business but it would even the playing field with big business. Why is the money spent on these people not going back to the workers to begin with?? It seems if $4 billion is doled out to outfits like this every year, wouldn't that money be better spent on wages and benefits??
No working American is supporting the Employee Free Choice Act because they have any problem with the idea of the secret ballot. We are trying to change an election system in which vultures are allowed to be paid billions of dollars for circumventing the will of the majority of working Americans. The process is so tilted against the worker that even when a majority organize they still end up being shut out of that process.
Hopefully then we can set an example to the world by eliminating some jobs that NEED to be eliminated.