Targeting younger workers has been part of the AFL-CIO’s strategy since Richard Trumka took over the reins of the AFL-CIO in 2009. Elizabeth Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s Secretary Treasurer, has been spearheading the effort and is hosting the “Next Up: Young Workers Summit” in Minneapolis later this week.

The summit was announced back in March on the Communist-run People’s World website:

The AFL-CIO’s new young workers advisory council is taking charge of the movement to invigorate the labor movement – and make its leadership more youthful – says Liz Shuler, the federation’s secretary-treasurer.

One key step, she said, will be a second “Next Up” summit for young workers and activists, to be held in Minneapolis-St. Paul from Sept. 28-Oct. 2.

Shuler has led the effort to make labor’s leadership younger and look more like its members.  The first summit, in D.C. last year, drew approximately 300 delegates from around the country.  Shuler hopes for 800 this time.

According to the AFL-CIO’s blog on Monday:

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will headline a panel, along, with AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler at the second annual AFL-CIO Next Up Young Workers Summit beginning later this week (Sept. 29-Oct. 2). Since taking office in 2009, Solis, the daughter of union members, has changed the direction of the Labor Department from one that favored employers to one that protects working people.

Hundreds of young working people, including organizers and students from across the country, will meet in Minneapolis Sept. 29-Oct. 2 for the summit, part of the AFL-CIO”s efforts, led by Shuler, to reach out to working people under age 35.

While not calling the conference courses Saul Alinksy 101, the attendees of the summit “workshops” will apparently be learning the basics of Uncle Saul’s community organizing tactics:

2:00 – 3:30

CORE WORKSHOPS

1. Union 101
2. Using Social Media
3. Message Development*
4. Organizing 101: One-on-Ones
5. Building Young Worker Groups

OTHER WORKSHOPS

1. Robert’s Rules of Order
2. Union 101 for Non-union Workers
3. Inoculation Trainings**
4. How to Organize on Campus
5. Basics of an Organizing Campaign

3:45pm – 5:15pm

CORE WORKSHOPS

1. Union 101
2. Using Social Media
3. Message Development
4. Organizing 101: One-on-Ones
5. Building Young Worker Groups

OTHER WORKSHOPS

1. Infusion: Art and Organizing
2. Immigration 101***
3. Public Policy 101
4. Organizing in a Global Context****
5. Comedy Through Activism

For your bemusement, the entire “draft agenda” is here.

* Message Development is the identification of workplace issues and determining how best to exploit them with employees so as to convince employees that the union is the answer to whatever the issue.

** Inoculation trainings in union-organizing parlance means teaching would be organizers how to counter employers’ messages by telling employees what the employer may tell employees before the employer tells the employees, there by “innoculating” the employees from the information.

***Immigration 101 is essentially training on how to convince ‘undocumented immigrants’ to unionize despite the fact that they are in the U.S. working illegally.

**** For Organizing in a Global Context, go here, here and here

With over 9% officially unemployed, it does boggle the mind how a Secretary of Labor of the United States can blindly devote so much of her energies (and taxpayer dollars) by pandering so blatantly to those who excel at making job creation impossible more difficult.

Whether it’s trying to create hit lists for union bosses, or attending union organizing “summits,” it is difficult to recall a cabinet official from any administration so utterly and singularly beholden to a special interest.

Even though Solis never actually joined a union or had the ‘privilege’ of paying union dues, going out on strike, or being downsized from a union job, she does boast that her parents were union members, her demonization of business on behalf of union bosses is unparalleled.

Unless, of course, it all boils down to a simple and age-old premise: Reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Then again, it could just be the simple fact that Solis’ allegiance is based on the large amounts of union money union bosses have showered her with over the course of her career.

Meanwhile, as the summit in Minneapolis takes place later this week, taxpayer dollars will likely be used by a high-ranking Obama administration official to curry more favor with union bosses and show ’solidarity’ in the union effort to rebuild their treasuries on the backs of Americas youth.

What a country.

_________________

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

Cross-posted on LaborUnionReport.com.

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Or it’s Cloward-Piven time.
Fight! Fellows! – fight, fight, fight!
Or it‘ll be our behinds!

I imagine you are aware of all those greedy capitalists in Moscow, Wisconsin, demonstrating so they can keep working in collusion, to siphon public money for their power hungry interests and their own bank accounts.

Sorry for the bad typing; make that government workers, in Madison. “Kill the bill!” they shout and likely spit when they do.  The name of it is the Budget Repair Bill, but much of the Marxstream media call it Gov. Scott Walker’s “anti-union bill.”

Fightin' Bob La Follette, progressive to the ends of his hair

I live forty-some miles northwest of Mad City, in the town where the nation’s first Progressive Party presidential candidate, Robert La Follette married his leftist, feminist wife, in 1881. Yeah, 1881. Politically precocious, we are, here in Badgerland. “Fighting Bob” learned his social justice from U. of W. president, John Bascom, who came from Massachusetts’ Andover Seminary (essentially of the same United Church of Christ denomination as the so reverent Jeremiah Wright).   Those Congregationalists stem from the Puritans, whom, as the name implies, had a soft spot for utopianism and legalistic perfectibility.

Progressivism, but also unvarnished Marxism made inroads very early here in Wisconsin, including within the state and region’s labor movement.  In 1904, the University of Wisconsin became the home of John R. Commons, one of the first progressive incrementalists, a label which tends to cover radical interests of unknown lengths.  He was called the spiritual father of Social Security and he specialized in union studies.  He was also one of America’s progressive eugenicists.

Barry Obama’s hero, Harold Washington was not America’s fist socialist, big city mayor.  That distinction goes to Emil Seidel, elected as Milwaukee’s Marxist boss in 1910, the same year that Victor Luitpold Berger was elected America’s first socialist representative in Congress.

Socialsts tried and convicted, 1919

It was Berger that gave union leader Eugene Debs a copy of Das Kapital and won him over to Marxism.  Debs became the Socalist Party’s candidate for president in 1912, with Mayor Seidel his VP candidate.  However, their Socialist Party of America chose not to run their own candidate for president in 1924, eagerly backing La Follette, instead, much as confessed socialists backed Obama, in 2008.

The Department of Justice was on to Berger and he was tried and in 1919, convicted of rather tenuous charges under the Espionage Act of that time.  Four others were also convicted for their own doings.  Yet, Berger continued to be a political celebrity in Wisconsin.

Those names are just the tip of the top of the iceberg. Extensive information on the Wisconsin front on the Marxist war against American freedoms is available in numerous books and at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, where they have a curious pride in their collection.  Compiled, it is enough to satisfy the appetite of one much more skeptical than our state’s own Sen. Joe McCarthy.

With numerous socialist operations headquartering in neighboring Chicago and with the influx of European immigrants, at or shortly after the turn of the Twentieth Century, the state became saturated with a small but stubborn and increasingly subversive minority of Marxists.

Concomitantly, the University of Wisconsin became a center for the weakly meandering but strongly stated thoughts of discontented, dead Germanic and Jewish intellectuals, hanging out at the atheistic ends of the enlightenment through industrial ages.  During the Vietnam War, the U. of W. at Madison was among the hottest of the SDS hot spots, suffering a murderous bombing along the way.  Many more Marxists than the infamous Joel Rogers intellectually infest Wisconsin and it’s university system to this day.  Pardon, make that through this day (tenure) and despite their thirst for abortion, many of them breed red diaper comrades.

Wisconsin is also on the vanguard of the subversion of America’s churches — yes churches.  It was Saul Alinsky’s revolutionary model to feed neo-Marxist community organizations, drawing from radicalized resources planted within churches and synagogues, along with trade unions (as well as the cash cow foundation and political party structures already blueprinted by his time).  And, long story short, we have the Gamaliel Foundation ¹ ² (which, in Chicago, employed Barack Obama) plus Alinsky’s own baby, the Industrial Areas Foundation, both flourishing here, like woodbine.  Their roots thrust especially into Wisconsin’s dominant Lutheran (especially ELCA) and Catholic churches, plus many others. (Links, their own sites: Gamaliel Foundation; Gamaliel in Wisconsin – WISDOM; Industrial Areas Foundation; IAF’s Common Ground in southeastern Wisconsin: ELCA’s “Organizing Networks” — neo-Marxist Roman Catholic entities are legion, pardon the Biblical expression.)

What a state, as Yakov Smirnoff would say.

And get this. Before our early apostle of Marxism, Victor Berger, became a politician he was a newspaper editor and… a school teacher. What Mark Twain would say is, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

And now we have teachers and other government workers, some likely third and fourth generation Marxists, calling in, sick to demonstrate and getting doctor’s excuses on site.  Some teachers have even dragged high school students along, though according to interviews, many fail to understand why they have come.  One is confident these students are not quite taught the revolutionary aims of those clued-in union bosses, community organizers, and progressive politicians who follow the Alinsky and Cloward-Piven models.  It remains controversial, to try to overload America’s governments with so much debt they collapse and turn the swollen ranks of the government-dependent into a panicked and frustrated mob, nationwide and significantly more ginned up than is seen now, in Madison.

And how many of the majority in the Wisconsin legislature understand this is the goal?  It is hard to say, since charges of McCarthyism await any who would mention it.

To the debate, the union bosses have trucked in the throw weight of notables such as Richard Trumka, communist collaborator and head of the AFL-CIO; more rhyming with history.  Corporate shake-down artist, Jesse Jackson has been at it long enough to rhyme with his own.

But something unparalleled in American history, the Neo-Marxist Organizer in Chief, himself, Barack Obama pushes the protests, while building the ranks of the pampered proletariat through his personal and even sorta’ presidential operation, Organizing for America.  And, the putative president has warned the vetted Governor Walker against an “assault on the unions.”  Of course he has.

At, HeartlandRevolution.com, we see that numerous other state capitols have been targeted for little Cairos-in-the-heartland, including Columbus, Ohio and Eugene Debs’ own Indianapolis, IN.   So fitting that it all begins here, where the force is strong, but the prog pickings may be a bit thinner, elsewhere.

Here is my take, this winter, no snow and no bluff.  We are in a contest of global collectivism vs. our American sovereignty and liberty that will carry on in the rhymings of history, to make for a saga of the ages.  So on, Wisconsin, in it.

]]> http://biggovernment.com/awilliams/2011/02/22/why-wisconsin-warning-history/feed/ 106 http://biggovernment.com/wthuston/2010/11/08/obamas-nlrb-appointee-says-unions-need-to-be-voted-in-quicker/ http://biggovernment.com/wthuston/2010/11/08/obamas-nlrb-appointee-says-unions-need-to-be-voted-in-quicker/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:47:08 +0000 Warner Todd Huston http://biggovernment.com/?p=193053 Now that the election is over and we’ve seen in stark light the rebuke that Obama has received, many are wondering if he’ll moderate his far left agenda. But a few movements in the Labor Dept. will disabuse anyone of the notion that Obama intends to drop his left-wing agenda.

Leave it to an Obama appointee to the National Labor Rights Board (NLRB) to want to push votes to install unions in the workplace on an accelerated schedule. I guess all the payoffs and special favors that Obama and his cohorts have given to labor unions in these two of the longest years any president ever had have not been enough.

On Oct. 21, NLRB Member Mark Gaston Pearce said that the time period between filing and the holding of elections for new union representation in a company should be “as brief as possible.”

Of course, this shortened election period is nothing but a sop to Big Labor and intended to hurt businesses that might try to put up a fight against the encroachment of unions.

As Jay Summer of the Labor Relations Counsel website says:

Regardless of Pearce’s stated rationale for interest in a shortened election period, if implemented, the shorter the election period, the less opportunity an employer has to exercise free speech rights and educate employees. The result would be a workforce making a decision whether or not to unionize relying only on what facts the union organizing them chooses to disclose, even if misleading or incomplete. Combined with electronic voting which would almost certainly depress voter participation, the almost certain result is a dramatic increase in unionization. This, of course, was the primary goal of EFCA’s card check proposal.

Naturally it’s all just a piece with Obama’s campaign to give unions paybacks, payoffs, and special favors to pay them back for the millions that they gave to him to run for president. It is also another example of Obama’s essential anti-business ideology.

Pearce was a recess appointment made by President Obama in March of 2010. His appointment expires in 2013.

Meanwhile, in yet another example of Obama’s war against business (and subsequent helping hand to jobs-killing unions), Obama’s Dept. of Labor announced that the Bush “culture of noncompliance” is over and Obama plans to crack down on those evil businesses that have gotten away with things for so long.

Obama Labor Solicitor Patricia Smith told attendees of a conference at Suffolk University Law School that the Labor Department would launch a new era of tougher enforcement of labor laws.

Smith heaped scorn on the pro-business Bush practices.

They relied on trickle-down enforcement; it doesn’t work any better than trickle-down economics. [As a result of reduced enforcement] many employers developed a “catch-me-if-you-can” attitude. Our challenge is to change that attitude.

You can just hear the left-wing ideology underpinning her rhetoric, can’t you?

Smith said that the Obama Labor Dept. intended to increase criminal prosecutions of businesses for perceived violations of labor law.

As we can see Obama’s anti-business crusade continues a pace with his other left-wing policies. He intends to use his power to shape regulation to go around Congress and our elected officials and push his extremist agenda anyway.

For the past four years, the highest profile Big Labor Boss was Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern.  Stern has deliberately parlayed his controlling style as that of a New Labor Boss, and he has painstakingly worked on the SEIU “purple brand.”  And yet, Stern and the SEIU union have failed to live up to the New Labor Boss identity that he claimed in his New York Times Magazine and CNN/Fortune Magazine articles.

Stern tried to separate himself from the herd of “old-styled” labor bosses in several ways, most noticeably with his dress.  He conscientiously wore his beloved SEIU purple with its slight pinkish hue.  Apparently, Stern is trying to replicate for his union what brown does for UPS.

Stern’s limitless purple attire led some to refer to him as the Lavender Labor Leader.  And recently, SEIU’s Anna Burger looked very chic in her purple suit as Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) grilled her about SEIU’s relationship with ACORN.

Whatever color of scarves, suits, or hats Andy Stern decides to wear, you cannot deny his influence with the White House, U.S. Congressional King Pins, the Democrat National Committee, and ACORN among others.  But, has Stern’s smash-mouth organizing and relationship to ACORN begun to turn SEIU’s purple into black and blue? You bet it has!

Clearly, ACORN’s partnerships with SEIU and other Big Labor outfits has begun to drag down SEIU’s image.  SEIU has decided, now that ACORN is damaged goods, to cut ties for now.  But, that will be very difficult because ACORN and ACORN’s training programs are totally interwoven into the purple fabric that makes up SEIU.  

From 2005 through 2008, SEIU spent $9 million on ACORN training programs and contracting out ACORN organizing services.  SEIU even hired ACORN founder Wade Rathke to command SEIU national organizing programs.   The ACORN listings below illustrate that the SEIU-ACORN relationship is much deeper than SEIU may want publicly known:

ACORN is not the only Brand Destroyer for SEIU

But, SEIU cannot blame its deteriorating image solely on it incestuous relationship with ACORN.  The “New Labor Boss” Stern has failed to live up to the image he created.

New Boss Stern is the same as Old Big Labor Bosses that Robert F. Kennedy described in his book, “The Enemy Within.”  Those Old Bosses would consolidate power and control over local unions by placing and threatening to place locals into trusteeships (Taking over operations of a local union and ousting of the elected union officials).  In addition, these bosses would cut deals with employers that allowed union members to be paid below contract rates.

Local SEIU officers  have claimed that Stern aggressively eliminates local autonomy via trusteeships and approved payoffs (e.g.An indictment alleged that in exchange  for payments, SEIU local president Danny Iverson’s resigned so that Stern associate Debra Timko would became president.); and, at least one SEIU contract allows an SEIU contracted employer to pay below contract rates (of course, workers are still forced to pay SEIU union dues and fees for its representation):

“In any instance where the Company signatory hereto desires to submit a bid to perform unit work at a building being serviced by a contractor not a party to a collective bargaining agreement with the union which would cover the work in question, it is agreed that the wage and fringe benefit provisions of this Agreement may be waived …”

Stern’s internal self-serving tactics have resulted in minimal public image damage because most of these actions primarily involve SEIU internal politics.  However, internal struggles combined with SEIU’s ruthless corporate campaigns and associations with groups like ACORN are causing even mainstream columnists like Kathleen Parker to question why anyone would want to be associated with SEIU.  She wrote:

While everyone in Washington is suddenly pretending they’ve hardly ever heard of ACORN, they might want to pretend they’ve never heard of the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest unions.

Since the 1990s, SEIU used ACORN-type tactics in so-called “corporate campaigns.”  As previously mentioned, ACORN trained SEIU organizers, and ACORN founder Wade Rathke spearheaded SEIU national organizing campaigns. 

During these corporate campaigns, SEIU coordinates personal attacks against employees, customers of targeted employers, and the employers.  SEIU organizers systematically increase their attacks with assistance from outside pressure groups in accordance with SEIU’s corporate campaign stratagem. 

Here is the real kicker in SEIU’s corporate campaign; SEIU’s harassment is not designed to force the employer into allowing employees a secret ballot union representational election, but SEIU pressures employers to sign away employees’ opportunity to have a secret ballot election.  That’s right; SEIU developed the corporate campaign to prevent employees from having a secret ballot election. 

SEIU, along with its partners ACORN, Justice for Janitors, Interfaith Worker Justice, and others stage disruptive demonstrations, place derogatory ads, hand out offensive flyers, send defamatory letters, and pressure politicians.  SEIU organizers have even used children to hand out nasty flyers as they trick-or-treat.  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 for the privilege of having a job. 

All of SEIU’s in-your-face activities in numerous communities across the country has dramatically begun to weaken SEIU’s own brand. 

Here’s three quick true life SEIU corporate campaign sagas that span across America over two decades:

1. In the 1990’s, Sacramento’s Randy Schaber endured an SEIU four-year battering of his company and his employees.  SEIU’s attacks on Schaber included coordination with a Clinton Administration Big Labor appointee inside the U.S. Department of Labor that resulted in a Congressional investigation, headed by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, documenting SEIU’s corporate campaign and the removal of the SEIU insider. 

2. In Indianapolis, David A. Bego, author of The Devil at My Doorstep, had an SEIU organizer tell him, “we enjoy conversation, but we embrace confrontation,” shortly before SEIU goons began to ratchet up the pressure.  Bego’s book provides a concise description of his three-year SEIU ordeal, and details of hard-to-believe ACORN-modeled intimidation.  SEIU even had trick-or-treating children handout out offensive flyers in Bego’s and a customer’s neighborhood. 

3. Houston’s Brent Southwell story, as posted on BigGovernment.com by Bret Jacobson, repeats Schaber’s and Bego’s stories but with his own twist.  Southwell filed suit against SEIU claiming, among other things, that a top SEIU organizer “has stated directly to Professional Janitorial Services (PJS, Southwell’s company) that SEIU wants ‘to kill’ PJS.”  Certainly, this SEIU organizer was not concerned about the welfare of PJS employees.  The lawsuit against SEIU is currently ongoing.

Conclusion

To borrow a phrase from ACORN’s Wade Rathke, no matter how you shake and bake it, a nationwide campaign that embraces confrontation and irresponsible personal attacks will eventually stick to the SEIU brand.  Constantly filing unsubstantiated accusations with enforcement agencies and then using these SEIU-generated unsubstantiated claims to force politicians to act eventually hurts the credibility of the accuser. 

Remember the childhood story of the boy who cried wolf?

In the end, SEIU’s smash-mouth, no-holds-barred organizing, internal power struggles, and associations with the likes of ACORN have irrefutably begun to bring down Stern’s SEIU purple brand.

.