SEIU Intimidation Manual Undermines Employers

     

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest labor unions in the country, is reported to have released a 70-page manual, the "Contract Campaign Manual" on "Pressuring the Employer," which encourages union members to use coercion and scare tactics to intimidate managers and corporate authority figures in the private sector.

According to Vincent Vernuccio of the Washington Times, the manual explains how "outside pressure can involve jeopardizing relationships between the employer and lenders, investors, stockholders, customers, clients, patients, tenants, politicians, or others on whom the employer depends for funds." Further, the manual blatantly encourages members to engage in unlawful activities, as it suggests, "Union members sometimes [should] act in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi and disobey laws which are used to enforce injustice against working people."

The manual was discovered in the process of a lawsuit filed by the food service company Sodexo. In an effort to unionize more than 80,000 employees, the SEIU launched a massive campaign to defame the company’s reputation and harass and threaten tens of thousands of Sodexo employees – and the intimidation tactics union members evoked are an illustration of the sinister methods documented in the manual.

Corporate threats and bullying are nothing new from big labor, as they comprise a vindictive mentality that union leaders hold against the private sector. In March, The Blaze exposed prominent SEIU leader Stephen Lerner, who attempted to collapse financial giant JP Morgan Chase. Lerner planned a strike on the mortgage industry with the intent to "destabilize" the U.S. economy and, with government assistance, restructure the financial system into a unionized empire. In Lerner’s own words: "There are extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement."

Back in the summer of 2009, a video was released showing SEIU members Elston McCowan and Perry Molens brutally assaulting Kenneth Gladney (in wheelchair, photo above), a man selling "Don’t Tread on Me" buttons and flags outside a town hall event in St. Louis, MO. The two union members were charged, but acquitted last week by a St. Louis County jury. Disheartened with the verdict, Gladney lamented, "I couldn’t beat them; I didn’t have the resources they had. They had all the money in the world and the backing … I’m just an average man."

On the first day of the trial, union supporters let loose to intimidate Gladney. The defense argued that McCowan and Molens acted out of self-defense, even though the videotape clearly revealed otherwise. With the perpetrators each over six feet tall and weighing over 200 pounds, while Gladney, a cancer survivor, about 5′ 6" and weighing only 130 pounds, the idea that Gladney instigated the fight is unfounded.

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