A few weeks ago we reported on how the Services Employees International Union was attempting to fix the vote in Sonoma County, California so that Sonoma’s in-home healthcare workers would end up with SEIU representation instead of NUHW representation.

Well, Sonoma wasn’t an isolated case. The SEIU used the same vote fixing tactics in Fresno County.

Andy Stern’s SEIU is playing hardball, using techniques that harken back to the mob-infested old days in order to win the game of representation. And THIS is the guy that President Obama is taking close counsel from? A goon. A thug. A mob-like hitman.

It’s the Chicago Way, alright. From Chicago to Fresno and Sonoma Counties all the way to the White House. This president and his cronies are instituting mob action everywhere they go.

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Obama’s purple shirted SEIU cronies are his favorite people. They’re his most frequent visitors, after all, and they stand ready and willing to do whatever Comrade Obama asks of them. If you want to know what direction this country is headed in, just look at the shenanigans the Service Employees International Union thugs are pulling.

For example, Obama is supposedly all about volunteering. He wants young people to be willing to devote their lives to service. He likes that idea so much, that he even floated the idea of instituting a Hitler youth brigade, and for all I know, is still keen on the idea. But Obama and his SEIU pals are only fans of volunteer service performed by young people if they toe the Obama line. Boy Scouts, for example, are far too traditional and they cling to such old, antiquated, conservative values — and therefore, they must be destroyed.

Starting with a seventeen-year-old boy who was doing volunteer work to try to earn his Eagle Scout badge.

In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.

Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.

Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.

“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano told the council.

Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said “there’s to be no volunteers.” No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.

“We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union,” said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. “This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such.”

Balzano said Saturday the union is still looking into the matter and might cut the city a break.

“We are probably going to let this one go,” Balzano said .

The possible entanglement of a local Boy Scout in a union dispute underscores the frustration and anger SEIU members feel after being the lone city union to suffer layoffs in the ongoing financial crisis. It may also serve as a preview of future labor battles as the city tries to outsource some necessary jobs as a result of the layoffs.

Anderson, a junior and varsity soccer player at Southern Lehigh High School, is a member of Boy Scout Troop 301 of Center Valley.

He got the idea for the trail while taking hikes along the partially complete, 165-mile Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor. He noticed there were a few missing connections to the trail in Kimmets Lock Park, which is on the Lehigh River near Dauphin Street. He already has logged 250 hours trying to carve out a walking and biking trail along the river.

“I decided to do my part in completing this part of the trail. In that way, others could enjoy walking along the river, without having to walk on the busy road,” Anderson said in an e-mail Friday.

Selfless service? Apparently, this poses some kind of imaginary threat to SEIU workers. And if Balzano isn’t targeting the Boy Scouts, then what is he targeting? People who just do things for the sake of others without asking anything in return? This is typical of liberals to attack the Boy Scouts and a teenage boy trying to do a good thing. And what comes next? Will SEIU members be the only people allowed to mow our lawns? Paint our walls? And then of course, if we do it ourselves rather than letting Obama’s crony pals do it, will Balzano threaten to come after us, too?

Balzano said that he would let this one go — because of the holiday spirit. It’s more likely that he let it go because of all the bad PR he’s getting. It’s sad, though, when you think about it. What would’ve happened if he hadn’t been threatened by bad press filled with the holiday spirit? We all know the answer — he happily would have persecuted a seventeen-year-old kid who was just trying to do a good thing, and Obama would just look the other way. And if we don’t stand up to their thuggery, then our capital could remain looking like this.

Hat Tips: Moonbattery and Michelle Malkin

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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Burdened by a decision on Afghanistan, Obama has apparently sent military planners back to the drawing boards to redesign a strategy in the wake of concerns about the ability of Hamid Karzai’s government to serve as a viable partner. He’s also worried about a jobless economic recovery

So before leaving, the president announced a jobs summit at the White House in December, at which CEOs, union leaders, nonprofits and government officials can figure out how to jump-start the lagging business indicator.

Hot Air has the relevant transcript

Over the past 10 months, we’ve taken a number of bold steps to break the back of this recession (WT-none of which have worked). We’ve worked to stabilize the financial system, revive lending to small businesses and families, and prevent responsible homeowners from losing their homes. And through the Recovery Act, we’ve cut taxes for middle class families, extended and increased unemployment insurance, and created and saved more than a million jobs.

Worked to take over huge segments of the private economy and put them under the control of the Federal government. People are still losing their homes. Small business is still having a tough time getting loans. And taxes? Where? Hey, didn’t he promise us a $500/$1,000 check during the campaign?

As a result, the economy is now growing again for the first time in more than a year — and faster than at any time in the past two years. But even though we’ve slowed the loss of jobs — and today’s report on the continued decline in unemployment claims is a hopeful sign — the economic growth that we’ve seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need. As I’ve said from the start of this crisis, hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth. And given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we’ve experienced, employers are reluctant to hire.

Slowed because there aren’t that many jobs left to lose. I’m not blaming him fully for that, recessions happen. But, Los Federales can mitigate and reduce the issue with wise business plans.

We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times.  But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step that we can [take] to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country.  And that’s why, in December, we’ll be holding a forum at the White House on jobs and economic growth.  We’ll gather CEOs and small business owners, economists and financial experts, as well as representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups, to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again.

Oh, good, labor unions and nonprofits. Ed Morrissey is pointing out that labor unions tend to be job killers, and nonprofits? They do not really tend to stimulate much. They can be useful, certainly, but companies looking to make a profit get people back to work. And you do not do that by yammering on and on. You take action.

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The best one-liner? “It tells us who the real villain is here… a federal government that is big enough and powerful enough that it can absolutely, positively guarantee that it can crush any business over night.”

Of course, we talked about this FedEx/UPS argument last June.

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The Associated Press had an interesting article reporting that women are fast becoming the majority of union members and will be the majority in 10 years if current trends continue.

As it stand now, women make up 45 percent of union members today, up from 35 percent in 1983. Apparently white men now only make up 38 percent of the union workforce, down from almost 52 percent in ‘83.

The AP notes that this preponderance of women is changing the goals of union negotiators.

“When you have a majority of women in the labor movement, issues like work-family balance, paid sick days and paid parental leave become more important,” said John Schmitt, an economist at the left-leaning think tank and one of the authors of the report.

And what has caused this change? The growth of public, government unions. At this point, the AP reports, that 49 percent of all union members are now working for local, state, and federal workers in public employees unions. 61 percent of public employees are female.

It is some necessary and interesting information to have when considering how to face unions in America. It also goes to show that the road to defeating unions is to have them removed from the public sphere. Unions only recently became pervasive in government as before the so-called little Wagner act in New York, government employees were not unionized. We must return to this status as government employees unions are antithetical to good government.

(Cross posted at TheUnionLabelBlog.com.)

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In a victory for free labor, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has cancelled its solicitation for bids to build a new Jobs Corps Center in the state of New Hampshire. Why is it a victory? Because initial plans to receive bids would have discriminated against non-union construction companies per President Obama’s orders. Over 80% of all construction companies are non-union.

Executive Order 13502, signed early in Obama’s term, was applied to the New Hampshire construction project and instituted what is known as a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). A PLA is a way to force all companies working on a construction project to agree to union rules, dues, pensions and payments whether they are union shops and their employees are union members or not.

In effect, a PLA turns every employee and company working on a PLA enforced project into a unionized force. Naturally, this drives up costs, lengthens deadlines, and forces employees to fork over dues money even if they don’t belong to a union.

A PLA ruling either outright excludes non-union companies (often as much as 80% of the workforce in any particular state) or forces them to be hobbled under union rules, but PLAs are nothing less than a government payoff to unions. In essence a PLA is a direct transfer of government money to union coffers and that is precisely why President Obama decreed via Executive Order that henceforth all government construction projects would be forced to proceed under PLAs.

As David Denholm amusing put it:

To put this in perspective, picture a thug at a candy store in Chicago telling the store’s owner that for a weekly payoff his windows won’t be broken and his customers will not be molested. The cost of the weekly payoff is, of course, passed along in higher prices to the purchasers of candy. The thug has the additional economic responsibility to impose the same terms on all other candy stores in the area so that his client won’t be at a disadvantage.

I wonder why Mr. Denholm used Chicago as his example…

The victory in New Hampshire came after Associated Builders and Contractor (ABC) member North Branch Construction of Concord, N.H. filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). North Branch Construction challenged the PLA as unlawful and discriminatory.

“This is a real win for the principle of fair and open competition in government procurement,” said North Branch Construction attorney Maurice Baskin of Venable LLP, ABC’s General Counsel. “It is no coincidence that the Department of Labor canceled its unlawful PLA mandate the day before the agency was required to file a response to our bid protest. We demonstrated that there was no justification for imposing a PLA on this project and that the PLA mandate violated the Competition in Contracting Act and other longstanding federal procurement requirements.”

“There is no justification for playing favorites in the government procurement process,” said ABC President and CEO Kirk Pickerel. “We hope that other federal agencies will heed this example and recognize that PLAs only result in delayed construction and harm to taxpayers. ABC will continue to protest any attempt to impose PLAs on federal construction projects in violation of competitive bidding laws.”

“The Department of Labor can still move this project forward by abandoning this illegal PLA,” said Ken Holmes, president of North Branch Construction. “Our company and other New Hampshire businesses deserve a fair opportunity to provide the public with the best construction product at the best price and we hope the Labor Department will build this project without a PLA in early 2010.”

It remains to be seen if this success can be replicated in other projects in the future, but for now this can be seen as a victory for free labor and a hopeful precedent for the future.

(Cross posted at TheUnionLabelBlog.com.)

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There’s not much that union supporters and I can agree upon. But here is one incident where I can wholeheartedly support the aggrieved members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who have found themselves victims of their own union.

The SEIU wanted to renegotiate a contract with officials of Sonoma County, California for its in-home healthcare workers supported by county funds. SEIU representatives met with and crafted a new contract with the assistance of County officials. This was all done behind closed doors without the general knowledge of or the assistance of the workers themselves.

But that isn’t the main problem here. It’s how the contract was approved that shows how little the SEIU cares for democracy, member’s rights, and the American way.

First of all, the SEIU tried to prevent the members from voting and having a say in the contract. Unions officials changed the voting rules in an effort to drive down participation by members. The SEIU went so far as to hire thuggish “security guards” to prevent members from entering the county facilities where the vote was taking place. Then, the SEIU carefully instructed those that were “allowed” into the facilities on how they must vote. This vote was entirely rigged by the SEIU with the tacit approval of Sonoma County officials. Additionally, the SEIU never provided the actual contract ahead of the vote so members could see what was in it and steadfastly refused to provide any information about the contract to members.

The fact is, the SEIU orchestrated a sham vote on the contract, squelched its member’s voices and stomped on nearly every American right in the process.

In an email to me on this issue it was asked, “I wonder how SEIU’s Andy Stern can possibly square SEIU’s supposed advocacy for ‘employee free choice’ with SEIU’s vote rigging and voter intimidation practiced against his own members. Would you trust SEIU to run your city council or municipal elections? Not me.” I have to agree with this question, of course, and have asked the same questions myself many times.

Now, doesn’t this all sound like Obama’s Washington, Pelosi’s House of Representatives and Harry Reid’s Senate? Doesn’t this sound like the same sort of un-American style perpetrated by the Obama administration — its “Chicago way” if you will?

But the essential anti-American, anti-democratic actions of the Obama administration should not surprise anyone when looked at through the prism of the actions of the SEIU under President Andy Stern. After all, Stern is the single most frequent visitor of the White House as the recent release of the White House visitor records have shown. With Stern’s 22 visits to the White House, one cannot help but recall that old adage “birds of a feather flock together.”

A new healthcare worker’s union that split from the SEIU, The NUHW, is hosting an interesting video featuring some of the SEIU members that were so ill treated by their own union leaders. The video also shows that County officials were taken aback by the SEIU’s actions.

The NUHW also has a webpage filled with interesting violations of common decency perpetrated by the SEIU.

Now I do not support these members in the details of their complaint against the contract, to be sure. They are, of course, complaining about cuts in their benefits. That, I have no problem with. In fact, I’d likely support deeper cuts in their over generous California benefits. The simple fact of the matter is that California cannot afford luxurious benefits to be given to in-home healthcare workers. As a matter of fact, I don’t support a state giving any benefits at all to in-home healthcare workers.

But that is not why I am supporting these workers. These workers have every right to expect their union to negotiate their new contract with the full participation of the members. They have every right to expect that the union will provide them with all relevant information as to what will be in the very contract upon which they will be called to vote. And, above all, they should expect their union to allow them unfettered access to the ballot box so that they can vote their conscience on that new contract.

The SEIU’s actions are un-American in the extreme and these union members have been sorely mistreated by the Service Employees International Union.

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SEIU has earned its face time with the POTUS by donating $60 million and 100,000 volunteers to Obama’s campaign. Although Stern has made it clear that every single member of SEIU is to devote time to helping elect Democrats, the union is designated a 527, meaning that it is supposedly apolitical and therefore is not limited in the soft money it can shovel at sleazy politicians, unlike honest institutions.

Given Stern’s radical background, it’s unsurprising that his tactics are thuggish:

Under Stern’s leadership, SEIU commonly bullies and pressures companies into signing agreements to make SEIU the representative of their employees. If a company resists joining the union, Stern and his political, media and activist allies conspire to launch “corporate campaigns” aimed at breaking down that resistance through what they term the “death of a thousand cuts.” In such campaigns, the cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, and plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation.

These pressure tactics are often successful in bringing companies into SEIU’s fold. When this occurs, all of their employees are required to join the union. SEIU prefers this arrangement (which Stern calls “Union Democracy”) because, in times past, a large percentage of workers who were given a choice voted against joining the union.

This is also why Chairman Zero & friends favor card check.

SEIU stands to make out big from healthcare nationalization, so when patriots spoke out against it at town hall meetings, even high-level SEIU thugs turned out to rough them up.

Another favored White House visitor is the radical financier George Soros, who only has to snap his fingers for a sit-down with the Manchurian Teleprompter. Investors.com reports:

Like the sociable Stern, administration records show Soros’ appointments were officially scheduled within hours of his actual visit. It looks like fast service.

Soros not only has made statements critical of free-market capitalism, he’s also a philanthropist whose hobbyhorse MoveOn.org tried to smear Iraq war commander Gen. David Petraeus as “Gen. Betray-us” in a full-page ad in the New York Times.

Both Soros and Stern are prominent partisans in the Shadow Party, a network of ultra-left activist groups working feverishly toward the destruction of liberty in favor of collectivist statism. They have a comrade at the top.

On tips from Milton and Edward. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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National Right to Work President Mark Mix is calling on Newt Gingrich to rescind his endorsement of Dede Scozzafava, the liberal candidate chosen by New York’s GOP powermen for the special election for the 23rd District Congressional seat. The reason? Scozzafava is a supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act and Newt has said he isn’t.

Liberal Republican Scozzafava has announced her support of the EFCA and its card check feature, a bill that will give unions a free hand to intimidate workers during the election period for voting on union representation. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich is in such opposition to card check that he once sponsored a petition against the EFCA.

Back in March, Gingrich created a video for American Solutions decrying card check and informing the viewers that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost with card check. Newt strongly supported the American Solution petition drive titled Freedom Not Fear drive.

Yet now Newt is supporting a candidate that supports the very job-killing bill that he was so strongly against only a few months ago?

This is why Mark Mix is saying that Newt’s apostasy “is an outrage.”

“Newt Gingrich has collected signatures and raised funds from supporters of employee freedom, and now he is stabbing them in the back by supporting Big Labor Republican Dede Scozzafava.”

“Gingrich owes these Americans an apology, and he should immediately rescind his endorsement of Scozzafava so that Big Labor doesn’t have bipartisan cover in the House of Representatives to pass the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill.”

I can’t say that Mr. Mix’s logic has any flaws in it. After all, how can Newt get all exercised over the evils of card check in March and then in October support a candidate that would vote to put the same bill into place?

So what will it be? Will Newt continue this seemingly hypocritical behavior? Well, Newt was saved from having to make the decision since Scozzafava dropped out of her obviously doomed candidacy on Saturday. In that case, Newt went a head and announced that he’d support Doug Hoffman.

Whatever the case, Newt did himself no favors with this incident.

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Reports have emerged over the behind-closed-doors deal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is desperately trying to make with Big Unions in order to get the waters smoothed for his Obamacare policies. These reports show where Reid’s sympathies lie: with union bosses and not with the voters.

The Hill reported that Reid made “several significant concessions” to organized labor to smooth the way for his healthcare policies.

We’ve reported in the past that Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has been highly skeptical of Obamacare because of the punitive tax placed on so-called Cadillac healthcare plans. Trumka feels that this tax will hit his membership too hard. For several decades unions have often foregone hourly wage hikes in order to take on richer benefits the result is that union members often have more extensive healthcare plans than most American workers.

Legislation passed by the Senate Finance Committee would impose a 40 percent excise tax on family plans costing more than $21,000, a provision estimated to raise $201 billion for healthcare reform. Under heavy pressure from unions, Reid has increased the threshold so that only family plans costing $23,000 or more would be taxed, said a source familiar with the bill.

The Hill reported that Trumka “praised Reid” for “trying to lessen the impact” of the tax on cadillac healthcare plans.

Still The Hill reports that Trumka had concerns yet.

Trumka said his union would not support an “opt in/opt out” compromise on the public option but he said it was a step in the right direction.

PoliticsDaily.com went further into detail about Trumka’s heartburn over a lack of the public option making his “praise” of Reid seem less meaningful. Trumka is noted on his feelings about the “public option.”

With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid poised to announce that the Senate version of health care reform will include a public option that would let states opt-out of the program, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Monday that his members do not want anything less than a “robust” public option provision. “We cannot be in favor of reform for reform’s sake,” he said. “We have to make sure that reform is real and we have to be honest about that.”

Of course, the reason that Trumka wants a public option is because he and other union chiefs want to cut older member’s generous benefits and unions want the pubic option for older members to fall back upon if necessary. These cuts are wanted because union pension plans are universally in much trouble. It isn’t just the AFL-CIO finding pensions woefully underfunded, just about every union in the country is having pension troubles.

In any case, some unions are fighting Reid on his Obamacare plans. Coupled with right leaning Democrats putting pressure on Reid to dump the public option, we find that Obamacare is not on an easy road to passage.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

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