Tag: SEIU

Top Contender to Take over Massive Union Has Repeatedly Been Accused of Union Busting

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April Verrett

The presumptive heir to the position of president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has had employees under her command complain of union-busting tactics and retaliation, according to a report from the Center for Union Facts.

April Verrett, the current secretary treasurer of the SEIU and the former president of SEIU Local 2015, is a top contender to replace the current outgoing president, Mary Kay Henry, according to the report. In both positions, Verrett was reportedly part of the management that faced off with SEIU employees, who had organized separately from the SEIU, about working conditions and contract negotiations.

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Commentary: SEIU Resorts to More Influence Peddling in Pittsburgh

RealClearWire

Two years ago, hell-bent on getting its hooks into the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) –  the largest private workforce in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania –  SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania effectively bought the Pittsburgh mayor’s office.

In November, the union intends to pay more than twice as much to consolidate its monopoly over the region’s chief executives by adding the Allegheny County executive’s office to its collection. And it’s employing the same winning strategy to do so: spending bucketloads of someone else’s money.

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Democrats Maintain Control of Pennsylvania House With Boyd’s Win

Bradley Vasoli

Democrat Heather Boyd defeated Republican Katie Ford in a Delaware County-based special election on Tuesday to occupy the seat recently vacated by Democratic Pennsylvania state Representative Mike Zabel. 

Democrats held a one-seat majority in the chamber since the new legislative session began last autumn, but Zabel jeopardized his party’s hold on the House when he resigned in response to allegations he made untoward sexual advances toward multiple women.

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Gov. Shapiro’s Pennsylvania Budget Proposal Rewards Union Donors

Bradley Vasoli

Unions donated copiously to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) during last year’s gubernatorial campaign and they’ll reap a handsome reward if the legislature approves a particular item in Shapiro’s proposed budget. 

The Fiscal Year 2023-24 spending plan includes a $1,274,000 initiative to increase by one-third the number of labor law compliance investigators at the commonwealth’s Department of Labor and Industry. The text of Shapiro’s proposal expresses concern that more labor cases need to be probed and that businesses need more education on workers’ right to organize. 

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Pennsylvania House Republicans, Union Want Zabel to Resign over Harassment Allegations

Bradley Vasoli

Pennsylvania House Republicans and a union representing many social-service workers are calling on state Representative Mike Zabel (D-Drexel Hill) to resign over allegations he sexually harassed one of that union’s lobbyists. 

Andi Perez, the political director of the Pennsylvania and Delaware Division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is accusing Zabel of inappropriately touching her and not immediately relenting after she backed away from him. 

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Pennsylvania Republican House Leaders Discuss Speaker’s Stalling Reconvening of Session, Failure to Investigate Harassment

Bradley Vasoli

Pennsylvania state House Republicans on Monday excoriated their Democratic counterparts for failing to reconvene and failing to start investigating sexual-harassment allegations against a Democratic House member. 

Republicans have blasted Speaker Mark Rozzi (D-Temple) for dragging out the process of finalizing operating rules and bringing the House of Representatives back into session. The speaker, whose party holds a majority of seats, initially said he would only agree to allow legislation to be considered once the House voted on a measure allowing adults victims of sexual abuse to sue their alleged predators despite the statute of limitations. The House passed such legislation last week. 

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Wisconsin Senator Baldwin Proposes Tax Increase for Corporations With Overseas Locations

Bradley Vasoli

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) is urging fellow members of Congress to pass a measure to raise taxes on corporations with operations in low-tax foreign countries. 

The legislation, called the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would effect American participation in a global minimum tax, a major Biden-administration policy priority. In 2021, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen joined 130 nations to negotiate a framework to equalize corporate taxation so companies could not escape high taxes in their home countries. Two months ago, all 27 member states of the European Union agreed on a plan for their involvement in such a system. 

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Titans Promote Community Benefits Programs to East Bank Stadium Committee, Advocacy Group Pushes for Formal Agreements

Laura Baigert

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – At the Wednesday meeting of Metro Council’s specially formed East Bank Stadium Committee, members heard from the Tennessee Titans promoting their recently introduced community benefits platform and an advocacy group that recommended formal agreements for the communities that are to be served.

The Titans announced their ONE Community benefits platform just days after the joint announcement with Mayor John Cooper that the parties reached an agreement for a new football stadium.

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Major Government Unions Lose over 200K Members

The Center Square

The top four public labor unions in the U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of members since a 2018 Supreme Court case that ruled government employees could not be forced to pay a union to keep their job, a new report shows that.

The Commonwealth Foundation released the report, which found that the top four public labor unions – AFT, AFSCME, NEA, and SEIU – lost nearly 219,000 members altogether since the Janus v. AFSCME ruling.

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Progressive Groups’ Aggressive Targeting of New Naturalized Citizens Helped Break Turnout Records in 2022 Primary Election

Rachel Alexander

Arizona continues to have increasingly large numbers of registered voters participating in recent elections, with a record turnout of 34.92 percent of all registered voters casting a ballot in August’s primary election. Part of the reason for the high turnout may be due to the increase in naturalized citizens, whose population climbed by 63,857 new Arizonans between 2016 and 2020 alone, with many of them registered to vote by progressive advocacy groups.

Almost half – 28,864 – were born in Mexico.

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Lawmakers Propose Enhanced Enforcement of E-Verify in Pennsylvania

Bradley Vasoli

Two Pennsylvania state lawmakers indicated this week they’re authoring legislation to enhance the effectiveness of a web-based system used to confirm workers’ legal U.S. residency.

In 1996, the federal government established the E-Verify system as a voluntary five-state pilot program to ease employers’ ability to check the immigration statuses of their new hires. It was expanded for use in all 50 states in 2003 and is administered by the Department of Homeland Security.

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Three Major Unions Sue Michigan Over New Labor Laws

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Three of the country’s largest unions sued the State of Michigan on Thursday over new union regulations, which they called “anti-worker.”

The United Auto Workers (UAW), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) sued the state over new laws, according to a joint statement. In July, the four-person Michigan Civil Service Commission (MCSC) approved the law changes in a 3-1 vote mandating that union workers manually reauthorize their union membership every year.

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Crom Carmichael: The ‘Tree of Evil’ Began When JFK Signed an Order to Allow Federal Employees to Unionize

Julie Carr

  On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy and guest co-host Crom Carmichael discussed the relationship between the government union leaders and the Democrat party and disclosed that the party receives over a billion dollars per election cycle. During the course of the show, Carmichael expressed the growing control that the government is seeking over ‘we the people’ and the true motives of the Democrat party. Coining the phrase, ‘Tree of Evil’ he went on to stress that he was very concerned about the push for government unions and described their leaders as thugs. Leahy: We’re in the studio with our good friend Crom Carmichael. Crom, I had a story I wrote at Breitbart the other day. I’ll just read the first two sentences and that will lead us to our next topic: Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat from Florida is one of only eight federal judges in American history who have been impeached by the House of Representatives. Convicted by the US Senate and removed from office. No federal judge has ever been impeached over an alleged incident for which…

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Public Sector Unions Make Up Half of All Union Membership

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Washington DC

by Richard McCarty   Public sector unions have long exploited taxpayers by pushing for higher taxes, higher spending, and generous benefits and extravagant pensions for government workers while opposing measures to hold bureaucrats accountable. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which gave government workers a choice of whether to belong to a public employee union, has started to erode some of these unions’ excessive power. Yet much work remains to be done to make government bureaucracies more efficient and responsive to elected officials and to the public. Although the public sector is much smaller than the private sector, public sector union members make up nearly half of all union members. In fact, of the nation’s 14.8 million union members, there are 7.2 million public sector union members and 7.6 million private sector union members. The near parity between public sector union membership and private sector union membership is only possible because the union membership rate is more than five times higher in the public sector than in the private sector: 34.4 percent of the public sector is unionized while only 6.5 percent of the private sector is unionized. The five largest public employee unions, which claim to represent several million current and former government workers, are the National Education Association…

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Storm Clouds Gather Over Nation’s Largest Union as Legal Protections Fall Away

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SEIU

By Richard McCarty   The nation’s largest union had a run of good luck during the Obama years, but the last couple of years have been rough for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). For those not familiar with the union, SEIU claims 2 million members and is composed of janitors, security guards, child care workers, health care workers, bus drivers, social workers, grad students, and adjunct professors, among others. During the 2016 election, SEIU vainly spent millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton. Weeks after Clinton lost, SEIU Texas declared bankruptcy, and SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry announced the union must plan for a 30 percent cut in SEIU International’s budget by the start of this year. SEIU Texas filed for bankruptcy because it had lost a lawsuit and been ordered to pay $7.8 million to Professional Janitorial Services. The union had been angry that the company’s president refused to waive a secret-ballot unionization election so it had unfairly and maliciously attacked the company causing it to lose clients. Last summer, SEIU International bailed out SEIU Texas and confidentially settled the case. Elsewhere, due to allegations of sexual harassment, three SEIU employees have been fired, two resigned, and another was suspended over the past year. Of these six employees,…

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SEIU Endorses La Raza Affiliate Conexion Americas’ Education Policy Director For Nashville School Board

Chris Alto
Gini Pupo-Walker

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 205 has endorsed Gini Pupo-Walker for the Metro Nashville School Board: ‘Gini has extensive experience in the school system and outside of it and will bring great leadership and professionalism to the board,’ said SEIU member Lilldeus Russell, a paraprofessional in MNPS. ‘She has consistently been an advocate for equity in our schools and we need more voices like that on the board.’ Pupo-Walker serves as the Education Policy Director for Nashville-based Conexion Americas, an affiliate of UnidosUS (formerly known as the National Council of La Raza). Conexion’s founder and co-director, Renata Soto, has had a long-standing leadership role with UnidosUS serving first as vice-chair of the board in 2012, until she was elected as chairman in 2015 when the organization was still named La Raza. She remains listed as Chairman for the 2017-2018 slate. In 2016, Conexion Americas launched the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC) which Pupo-Walker leads, tying GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd even closer to Soto and her Nashville organization. Boyd’s own education non-profit Complete Tennessee is listed as a State Partner on the TEEC website and Conexion’s Renata Soto serves on the Complete Tennessee Board. Mauricio Calvo, executive director of Latino Memphis serves on Boyd’s Complete Tennessee…

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President Trump Moves to Protect Home Care Workers from Union Shakedown

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senior citizen health care

By Richard McCarty   The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has proposed rolling back an Obama-Era regulation that allowed union dues to be deducted from Medicaid checks. If the proposed regulation takes effect, only deductions specifically allowed by law, such as court-ordered wage garnishments or child support payments, will be permissible. Of course, any caregivers who wish to join or stay in a union could still do so. They would just need to make arrangements to pay their dues, which could easily be done by authorizing the union to draft money from their bank account. For years, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has skimmed money off of Medicaid checks sent to in-home personal care workers. Many of these people care for relatives or friends and did not want to join a union. In Minnesota, 27,000 caregivers were unionized after an election in which fewer than 6,000 voted and SEIU received less than 3,600 votes. Unsurprisingly, some had no idea when the unionization election was being held and were surprised when they noticed that money had been deducted from their Medicaid checks without their authorization. Of course, SEIU does little for…

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