Blogs For Victory

Senator Hatch’s press release:

U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today wrote to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member and former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) official Craig Becker to inquire about his involvement in union intimidation efforts. The letter sent to Becker comes after the SEIU’s “Contract Campaign Manual” was made public. The handbook tells union members to purposefully try to damage their employers’ reputations by coming up with allegations against their employers and managers and to even break the law to gain leverage in contract negotiations.

In the letter, Hatch writes that, “the manual explicitly advises union members to engage in tactics designed to attack the reputation of an employer as well as its managers and to purposefully damage an employer’s relationship with vendors and customers.  In addition, it advises employees to uncover “dirt” on management officials and publicize the information in order to obtain leverage in contract negotiations.  The manual even goes so far as to encourage union members to disobey certain laws when it serves the union’s purposes.”…

As a matter of free speech, you can write all the books on how to be a union thug you like – but who writes the thuggery how-to books is a matter of public interest.  Did Becker write it?  If not, then who?  Inquiring minds want to know…

As the unions become ever more irrelevant to the average, American worker they do appear to becoming more desperate in their tactics.  Remember, when you intimidate an employer you are also intimidating employees…if you are willing to smash the property of a corporation which can call upon financial resources to fight back, imagine what effect that will have on individual workers who have no such resources?  Essentially, the unions are trying to scare everyone – to prevent anyone from challenging the unions.  And that works out to a prohibition against challenging the union bosses, who often don’t act as if they give a fig for the cares of workers.

Finding out who wrote this manual is a good, first step in trying to curb this intimidation…and to call unions back to their duty.  A union dedicated to representing the legitimate interests of workers who voluntarily belong to the union is  good thing…but a union dedicated to advancing the cause of a particular party and keeping the bosses rolling in wealth, that is another mater, entirely.