SEIU Shows No Restraint Despite Restraining Order

John Ransom - SEIU Shows No Restraint Despite Restraining Order

While the rest of us spent the week worrying about what to do to get the U.S. economy going again- with job creation being the biggest issue- those All-American job killers, the various chapters of the SEIU, were up to their usual games of making sure Americans didn’t get paychecks or fair play.

Let’s look at this week’s “hit” parade:

According to the Washington Post a “judge ruled this week that the Service Employees International Union improperly coerced workers caught in the middle of SEIU’s high-stakes turf battle with a breakaway union in California, potentially invalidating a 2010 election involving 43,500 employees” who work in healthcare.

At issue was a competing union’s claims that the SEIU used coercion, intimidation and threats improperly to foil elections that would have helped the other union. Apparently, when you run a union there is a right way and a wrong way to threaten the workers you represent.

“SEIU has been promoting itself an as advocate for labor law reform and workers, and against coercion and intimidation, but no institution has done more to coerce and thwart workers about which union they want to join,” said John Borsos, vice president of the breakaway union via the Post.

A little further up the road, in Washington state, the SEIU was slapped with a restraining order this week when hospital employees tried to call a strike against Olympic Memorial Hospital.

At issue is the long-standing prohibition against public service employees going out on strike and disrupting vital services such as police, firefighting and hospitals. The right to strike had been agreed to in a previous agreement, but since that agreement expired, the common lawful prohibition against public workers going on strike still stands.

“In issuing its order, the Court found that if SEIU members were allowed to strike, the hospital district would ‘suffer actual and substantial injury,’” reports the Sequim Gazette.

Yeah, but that would be nothing to the “actual and substantial injury” that would have been suffered by the patients.

“We are pleased with the Court’s decision on this matter, as it protects our patients,” said OMC CEO Eric Lewis.

Apparently when you run a union there is a right way and a wrong way to threaten the patients your workers are supposed to care for.

In Buffalo, New York workers at a nursing home walked off the job a few days ago because management asked workers with less than six years of service to pay ten percent of the premium for single-employee coverage. Wages were slated to increase and contributions for family insurance plans were to remain the same, says local radio station WBFO 88.7.

Apparently when it comes to threatening the elderly and the infirm, unions can do just about anything they want.

And don’t expect the SEIU assault on America to slacken either.

The union just put $500,000 into a fund with some Hollywood big-shots, including head of Dreamworks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, to try to bolster Obama’s reelection chances.

What a great combination: unions and Hollywood people who play “let’s pretend” for a living.

Maybe now all the threatening, coercion and intimidation can take on a more creative hue.

Maybe Katzenberg can bring us SEIU in 3D.

Oh wait.

No need to animate that. It’s already being done.