Unions Abusing Members to Force Them to Toe the Line « Publius Forum

Unions Abusing Members to Force Them to Toe the Line « Publius Forum: "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."