Community Organizing with Barack, ACORN and SEIU: An Eyewitness Account, Part I

Earlier this month Don Loos wrote about SEIU and ACORN’s “corporate campaigns,” thinly veiled but apparently legal extortion attempts to get big companies to unionize. Wrote Loos:

SEIU, along with its partners… stage disruptive demonstrations, place derogatory ads, hand out offensive flyers, send defamatory letters, and pressure politicians…. All of these actions are designed to irritate everyone in the community and hopefully focus the unrest on the employer, not SEIU. And, in the end, it’s all about money – union dues extracted from workers….

I saw this firsthand in 2004, somewhat from the inside.

I became involved at that time with SEIU, which was trying to keep Advocate Health Care from building another Chicago area hospital in addition to the nine it already owned.

I as a pro-life activist opposed to Advocate’s expansion because it committed abortions; SEIU did because Advocate’s 25,000 employees weren’t unionized. SEIU recognized Advocate as “metropolitan Chicago’s leading private provider of health care and its third largest private employer,” according to an SEIU flyer – a very big fish. Advocate currently carries the distinction of “one of the top 10 health care systems in the United States.”

I met SEIU organizer Joseph Geevarghese at a public hearing held by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. I was picketing outside and he was packing the place with Advocate malcontents ready to hog the mic during public testimony. Soon, SEIU would be financially supporting our pro-life efforts.

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