Unions Abusing Members to Force Them to Toe the Line

November 23, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Business, Crime, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Speech, Jobs, Liberals, President, SEIU, Socialism, Society/Culture, Unions, Warner Todd Huston |

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s called “pink sheeting,” a practice employed by union bosses to bully their membership to vote the “right” way. The practice consists of forcing employees to reveal deeply personal information about themselves — such as abusive relationships, addictions, or legal trouble — so that these items can be used against the employees at a later date to elicit cooperative behavior.

Union members are denouncing the practice of pink sheeting while union chiefs, particularly those of the hotel employees union UNITE HERE, are either denying that they use the method or saying that the practice has been stopped.

More than a dozen organizers said in interviews that they had often been pressured to detail such personal anguish — sometimes under the threat of dismissal from their union positions — and that their supervisors later used the information to press them to comply with their orders.

Naturally, UNITE HERE officials claim this practice doesn’t happen.

John W. Wilhelm, Unite Here’s president, condemned the tactics. “I have zero tolerance for inappropriate intrusions into people’s private and personal lives,” he said. “I have not personally used these techniques, and I have taken a very strong stand against them.”

One of the excuses union leaders have given for the emergence of this controversy is interesting, too. It reveals another long-standing “practice” of sorts going on behind the scenes in uiniondom of late. Wilhelm claims that this whole thing is but a campaign perpetrated by rival union the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) to discredit UNITE HERE.

This is a piece with the sort of goon tactics that SEIU President Andy Stern has been employing all across the country. Stern has been methodically attempting to destroy every smaller union in order to absorb them into one mega-union and he doesn’t care at all how it gets done.

In California he’s hired intimidation squads to force in-home healthcare workers to vote for the SEIU (here and here), not to mention the underhanded tactics he’s employed to destroy the NUHW healthcare workers union in the Golden State. An SEIU thug recently tried to intimidate a Boy Scout in Pennsylvania. The SEIU tried to force private citizens in Illinois into a union without their consent… and these are only the recent outrages perpetrated by Stern’s union thug squads at the SEIU.

Still, despite UNITE HERE President Wilhelm’s protestations, multiple members of his own union, and folks in supervisory positions to boot, have attested to the pink sheeting practice.

In an open letter released in October, four hotel workers attested to the practice saying, “This practice is a cynical and manipulative system of control. It is a tactic designed to keep those involved in the union’s work from straying from the directives of the union leadership.”

This all testifies to the fact that unions are not the free associative organizations that they are painted as. It shows that coercion, even violence is perpetrated by union chiefs to keep employees in line. Unions are essentially anti-American in practice and organization and this is just one more example of that truth.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.

He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston

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