Sacramento, California (September 22, 2005) – A group of California teachers and professors today filed a statewide class-action lawsuit in federal court against the state’s largest teacher and faculty unions seeking to bar union officials from forcing more than 350,000 California educators to pay significant dues increases earmarked for political electioneering during this year’s special election.

Filed by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, the civil rights suit seeks to enjoin the use or further collection of a $60-per-teacher mandatory dues increase imposed by California Teacher Association (CTA) union officials and a 10 percent mandatory dues increase imposed by California Faculty Association (CFA) officials that are earmarked for efforts to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ballot propositions.

Since September 1, CTA union officials have written checks to several campaign committees totaling $23 million from a loan that is secured by guarantees of higher compulsory dues paid by educators as a job condition. Earlier in the summer, CTA officials announced another $22 million in expenditures.

Like many public servants, the six named plaintiffs object to paying for union political activities with which they disagree, so they asked the Foundation for free legal assistance. They seek an order certifying their suit as a class action for all CTA members and nonmembers, and all CFA nonmembers. The educators also ask for an injunction to block the use or further collection of the special dues increase and an order that every teacher and professor be given notice and allowed to obtain a refund, plus interest.

“Union officials are shamelessly fleecing rank-and-file educators to finance a political agenda that many educators oppose,” stated National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason. “No one in America should be forced to join or pay dues to a union they do not support. This case demonstrates how egregiously union officials abuse the special privileges they have obtained under California law.”

In the Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson (1986), the high court ruled that public employees have due process rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to be notified, as potential objectors, of how their forced union dues are spent, and how to prevent the spending of their dues for non-collective bargaining purposes. However, the CTA and CFA unions have failed to give educators any opportunity to object and have rebuffed those who have objected.

To prevent the further violation of their constitutional rights, the teachers ask that the forced dues be placed into escrow, because, as Foundation attorneys note in their complaint, “Once the employees’ money is spent, contrary to their wishes, to affect the outcome of ballot propositions… the employees’ First Amendment rights are irretrievably lost.”

For more information, contact Justin Hakes at (916) 844-4264 or Stefan Gleason at (916) 844-4265.

Atlanta, Ga. (September 21, 2005) – National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have filed charges on behalf of a telephone worker against his employer, BellSouth Telecommunications, and its union for forcing him to wear a union logo as a job condition. In doing so, company and union officials are directly defying a 2005 U.S. Court of Appeals decision which ruled that their policy is unlawful.

In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously overturned a controversial Clinton-era National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that approved the practice of forcing both union and non-union BellSouth employees to wear union insignia on their work uniforms or be fired from their jobs. After issuing its decision, the Court of Appeals took the rare step of ordering the NLRB to pay attorneys fees because their erroneous decision had not been substantially justified.

In defiance of the appellate court’s ruling, Communications Workers of America (CWA) union officials continue to insist, despite the objections of BellSouth employee Gary Mullis, that he wear their logo as a condition of employment. Mullis, who is not a member of the CWA union, was informed in May by BellSouth that he would not be allowed to refrain from wearing the union insignia. Mullis objects to wearing the logo because the union pursues political objectives that do not represent his views. His charges seek the prosecution of the company and union for unfair labor practices.

“Workers should not be forced to be walking billboards for union officials who seek to trample their own freedoms,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “The repeated abusive actions of the CWA hierarchy and BellSouth management raise serious questions about their integrity and respect for the law.”

The appellate court’s 3-0 decision overturning the unlawful policy concurred with Foundation attorneys’ arguments that provisions of the National Labor Relations Act embodied a “right to refrain from wearing union insignia.” The court rejected union and company lawyers’ claims that the display of the union patch alongside the company logo on the uniform was so integral to the “public image” of BellSouth that the mandate superceded the individual rights of workers.

The court noted that there was no evidence that the union patch projected a positive image to customers, and that it could, in fact, signal a negative image to customers who could conclude that strikes and service interruptions were more likely to occur. However, regardless of what image was projected to customers, the court explained that proper analysis should have been what the requirement signaled to employees – that the company and union expect employees to be union members. The court ruled that this restrained and coerced employees in the exercise of their right to refrain from union membership.

Sacramento, California – Thursday morning, September 22, a group of California educators will hold a press conference to announce the filing of a statewide class-action lawsuit in federal court seeking to bar union officials from forcing more than 350,000 California educators to pay significant dues increases earmarked for political electioneering during this year’s special election.

For more information, contact Justin Hakes at 916-844-4264 or Stefan Gleason at 916-844-4265.

Phoenix, Arizona (September 19, 2005) – With the assistance of National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, five Arizona employees of Dex Media, the official publisher of the yellow page and white page phone books, have filed a racketeering lawsuit against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union Local 1269, Qwest Communications subsidiary Dex Media, and two Dex employees who are union officials.

The lawsuit, filed today in U.S. District Court alleges an elaborate scheme in which the employer, the IBEW union Local 1269, and IBEW Local union agents working for Dex, engaged in systematic violations of company policy and collective bargaining agreements in order to give preferential treatment to union officials at the expense of Dex’s advertising sales force. Because of a complex performance-based pay system used for workers selling advertising in its publications, union agents have not only used their power to create labor strife for their own personal profit, but they have also cheated other workers out of earnings. In effect, the ill-gotten commissions the union agents improperly received raised the bar against which the other workers’ compensation packages were determined.

By knowingly aiding the union agents as they repeatedly broke company rules to increase their performance-based pay, Dex allegedly bribed the union agents to act against the workers’ interests. Some of the methods used to increase the union agents’ compensation include reassigning to the union officials accounts that should have gone to other workers, giving the union agents “double commissions” for sales made by other workers, and allowing the union officials to regularly sell “group ads” allowing their customers to have better ad placement than would normally be warranted, all practices explicitly forbidden by Dex written policy.

Because of the pattern of illegal activity by Dex, the Local 1269 IBEW union, and the union’s agents, the suit lists five counts for violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and two counts for violating the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The RICO statutes are best known for having been used to prosecute criminals for Mob and gang activities.

“Union officials appear to be stealing from the very workers they claim to represent,” said National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason. “As long as workers are forced against their will to be represented by unions in monopoly bargaining with employers, the power wielded by union brass will continue to allow greedy union officials to sell out workers.”

The workers ask the court for injunctions to stop Dex from continuing to bribe union officials with undue compensation, and ask for financial compensation for the workers whose money was effectively stolen from them by the IBEW Local 1269 union agents’ corrupt actions.

Columbus, Ohio (September 1, 2005) — The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed an unprecedented lawsuit in federal court against the State of Ohio and a State agency for systemic discrimination against employees who object to union affiliation and the payment of dues on religious grounds. DOJ filed the suit after National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys brought repeated civil rights violations by State agencies to the attention of federal prosecutors.

An earlier charge, filed by Foundation attorneys on behalf of Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) employee Glen Greenwood had already led to a finding by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that the OEPA and Ohio Civil Service Association (OCSA) union were guilty of religious discrimination against Greenwood who has sought to redirect his union dues to a charity and away from a union he believes to be involved in immoral activities. Despite the EEOC finding, the State’s agencies and OCSA union have maintained their practice of denying religious objections to the payment of forced dues from employees who are not members of certain State-approved churches.

The DOJ suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio names the State of Ohio, the OEPA, the Ohio State Employment Relations Board, the OCSA union, and the Ohio Department of Administrative Services as defendants.

Citing Greenwood’s case, the DOJ determined that the policies of Ohio represent a “pattern or practice” of religious discrimination against State employees in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Under Title VII, employees may not be forced to financially support a union if doing so violates the employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs. To avoid the conflict between an employee’s faith and a requirement to pay fees to a union he or she believes to be immoral, the law requires union officials to accommodate the employee – most often by designating a mutually acceptable charity to accept the funds.

“The unprecedented involvement by the United States Justice Department in a case of this nature demonstrates the seriousness of the abuse that Ohio employees face when they make conscientious objections to union membership,” stated Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason.

As a devout Presbyterian, Greenwood believes that supporting this union violates his sincerely held religious beliefs because of the union’s support for abortion on demand and special rights for homosexuals.

However, in March 2004 Greenwood received a letter from the General Counsel of the Department of Administrative Services denying his request on the basis that he did not belong to a “qualified” church that had a specific doctrine against union affiliation by church members.

Springfield, VA (August 31, 2005) – Spokesmen from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation will be available for comment and interviews on and around Labor Day about the recent AFL-CIO dispute, politics, workers’ rights, union organizing, and other issues relating to organized labor. The Foundation is a non-profit, charitable organization that provides free legal aid to victims of compulsory unionism abuse

Foundation spokesmen have been interviewed frequently on national television and radio programs, including The O’Reilly Factor, Special Report with Brit Hume, CNBC’s Closing Bell, and CNN. Their writings frequently appear in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and numerous other publications. They are prepared to comment on or debate any issues related to the following:

• How the recent dispute among Big Labor officials during and after the recent AFL-CIO convention may signal an ominous new threat to employees’ freedom of association;
• Big Labor’s war on the secret ballot election process for choosing whether to unionize, increasing use of coercive “card check” organizing campaigns against workers, and “corporate campaigns” against nonunion companies;
• How Big Labor’s political agenda is out of step with many rank-and-file workers’ views;
• How union officials seeking to unionize private airport security screeners may undermine national security while reversing Bush administration policy;
• The growing support for job-producing Right to Work laws that make union membership strictly voluntary;
• Examples of abuse resulting from forced union membership, union violence, violations of religious freedom, and other violations of employee individual rights;
• How teacher union officials have contributed to a decline in public education quality while blocking efforts at reform.

To schedule an interview or for information, call Justin Hakes at 703-770-3317.

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (August 18, 2005) – A Michigan Court of Appeals agreed with arguments made by lawyers for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation that imposing monopoly collective bargaining on Brother Rice High School, a private Catholic school, would entangle labor laws with the religious freedoms of the teachers and the school itself.

Three judges issued a joint “per curiam” opinion this week overturning a precedent-setting Michigan Employment Relations Commission’s (MERC) ruling that Catholic schools somehow fall under Michigan’s compulsory collective bargaining laws. If the MERC had not been overturned, union officials were expected to forcibly unionize numerous other religious institutions.

The dismissal of the claim by the Michigan Educators Association (MEA) is a victory for both religious independence and teacher freedom. The MEA was targeting teachers at the Brother Rice High School for forced unionization. The Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief for the Acton Institute, a religious liberty public policy group, in support of Brother Rice.

“It would be unconscionable to force religious schools to bargain with union officials who have an agenda that runs afoul of the teachings of the Catholic Church,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “At the same time, teachers should not be forced to accept the representation of union officials whose agenda they may believe to be morally reprehensible.”

The Foundation brief demonstrated that Catholic Church doctrine and the ideology of the MEA union are incompatible, and that Michigan state law was not written in a way to include Brother Rice in the jurisdiction of union representation and state regulation.

Ultimately the appeals court agreed that Michigan state law should be interpreted so that parochial schools are not placed under the jurisdiction of state labor laws.

Foundation attorneys argued that giving MERC oversight of collective bargaining agreements could lead to the MEA using collective bargaining to highjack the religious teaching process and allow the MEA’s radical political agenda to influence the religious instruction given by Brother Rice teachers. Additionally, because hiring practices at the school necessarily involve religious beliefs, an MEA victory would have meant that the state would be forced to pass judgment upon church doctrine to determine whether the school’s refusal to bargain over certain terms of employment is legitimately based on religious belief.

Washington, DC (August 17, 2005) – National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix today wrote to President Bush expressing “deep concern” over the bureaucratic reversal of Administration policy regarding the forced unionization of airport screeners under Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) oversight.

Until recent days, the Bush Administration had long been on the record against granting monopoly bargaining privileges to union officials over airport security screeners, citing national security concerns.

Mix’s letter to President Bush questions the new position taken by TSA in a leading National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case considering whether privately employed security screeners under a pilot TSA program may be forcibly unionized under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The Chief Counsel of TSA pointedly wrote that the Aviation Transportation Security Act “does not prohibit privately employed screeners from engaging in collective bargaining” and wrote that “TSA does not take any position” as to whether union officials should be granted monopoly bargaining power under the NLRA.

Mix urged President Bush to correct the TSA bureaucracy’s sudden change in policy, explaining that it not only opens the door to violations of employee freedom of association, illegal strikes, and even the possibility of terrorist infiltration of unions, but it also contradicts TSA’s earlier directives.

A 2003 directive from TSA head Admiral J.M Loy made the administration’s position clear, stating that he would not allow union officials to engage in monopoly bargaining over screeners employed by TSA due to national security concerns. And yet TSA pointedly refuses to take a position as to whether screeners employed by private companies, but supervised by TSA, may be subjected to the monopoly bargaining of union officials.

The National Right to Work Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief this month in the controversial NLRB case at issue, known as Firstline Transportation Security, in which union lawyers are attempting to persuade the Board to allow the forced unionization of screeners. The Foundation’s brief responded to a June order by the NLRB to reconsider a decision by one of the agency’s Regional Directors to apply the National Labor Relations Act to private airport screeners working at the Kansas City International Airport.

Foundation attorneys argue that granting Security, Police and Firefighters Professionals of America (SPFPA) union officials the special privilege to force airport screeners into union collectives and, ultimately, to collect compulsory union dues, would both undermine national security by destabilizing security screeners’ work environment and infringe on workers’ freedoms. The Foundation points out in its brief that, because wages, training, supervision, and working conditions of private screeners are overseen by TSA officials, no traditional “collective bargaining” could take place.

The Foundation also chronicled threats to national security from illegal strikes, work slowdowns, or even terrorist infiltration of a union to allow a bomb or hijacker to be sneaked aboard a plane.

Gaffney, S.C. (August 12, 2005) – Facing embarrassing prosecution by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for unlawfully blocking an employee wage increase to coerce Gaffney-based Freightliner/Daimler-Chrysler workers to support unionization, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union and Freightliner today agreed to end the unlawful practices.

UAW and Freightliner officials inked the settlement agreement with the NLRB after the NLRB’s General Counsel issued a formal complaint in response to unfair labor practice charges brought by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys for Freightliner employees. The NLRB issued a consolidated complaint earlier this week against both the union and Freightliner which was followed by the issuance of subpoenas that might have uncovered additional evidence of illegal union and company collaboration.

The settlement requires company and union officials to post conspicuous notices throughout the Gaffney facility that union officials will not accept unlawful assistance from Freightliner in future unionization attempts, and that no future wage increases will unlawfully be withheld at the behest of union officials.

“UAW officials raced to cover their tracks once they realized that the government was serious about holding them to account for coercing employees,” stated Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Union and company officials have worked hand in glove to try to turn Freightliner workers into union dues payers.”

Freightliner employees David Roach and Mike Ivey originally asked their Foundation attorneys to file charges in 2003 after UAW officials vetoed the long-scheduled and promised pay increase, and effectively required a freeze on pay raises at the Gaffney plant, apparently until such time as the employees agreed to unionization. The UAW union and Freightliner had a so-called “card check” or “neutrality” agreement that required the company to actively assist the UAW in its efforts to obtain signatures from employees on union authorization cards.

In their charge found to be meritorious by the NLRB General Counsel, employees alleged that they “have been and are being threatened that they will get no raises unless and until they agree to unionization by the ‘company union’ known as the UAW,” even though the union enjoys little support from rank-and-file workers.

In fact, approximately 70 percent of the plant’s employees had even signed and submitted a petition stating that they reject union affiliation and prefer to negotiate directly with company officials over wages and benefits.

The NLRB complaint alleged that the company and union engaged in unlawful and coercive conduct that interfered with employees’ rights to refrain from concerted union activity. NLRB prosecutors alleged that not only was the withholding of a pay increase unlawful, but also that the granting of the pay increase at a later time after telling the employees that it had been authorized by the union was similarly unlawful.

Washington, DC (August 10, 2005) – The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation recently joined the battle to keep private airport security screeners free from compulsory unionism by filing an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Union lawyers are attempting to persuade the federal labor board into taking the controversial step of allowing the forced unionization of screeners.

The brief responded to a June ruling by the NLRB to reconsider a decision by one of the agency’s Regional Directors to apply the National Labor Relations Act to private airport screeners working for a firm called Firstline Transportation Security operating at the Kansas City International Airport.

In creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, the federal government also created a pilot program involving private airport security screeners at five airports throughout the country. All other airport screeners are federal employees, and TSA officials have, citing national security concerns, exercised their discretion not to grant union officials monopoly bargaining power over any of these federal employees.

“This new union scheme is really about raising more forced union dues revenues,” said Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason. “Aside from violating workers’ freedom of association, history tells us that interjecting forced unionism into such sensitive areas could have severe ramifications for Americans.”

Foundation attorneys argue that granting the Security, Police and Firefighters Professionals of America (SPFPA) union officials the special privilege to force the airport screeners into union collectives and, ultimately, to collect compulsory union dues, would both undermine national security by destabilizing security screeners’ work environment and infringe on workers’ freedoms. The Foundation points out in its brief that since wages, training, supervision, and working conditions of private screeners are overseen by TSA officials, no traditional “collective bargaining” could take place.

Additionally, the brief lays out the heightened possibility of national security breaches, such as illegal strikes and the potential for terrorist infiltration of the union. Sixty years ago, the courts and Congress learned that Communist operatives had infiltrated numerous unions and manipulated those organizations for subversive purposes – including orchestrating strikes against defense-related plants at the behest of the Communist Party. More recently, Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) cited concerns about “an increasing number of instances” where American institutions are being infiltrated by radical Islamic forces.

The brief also documents that government union officials have a long history of ignoring strike prohibitions and engaging in illegal strikes with tragic consequences. For instance, firefighter union strikes have resulted in dozens of deaths, strikes ordered by teacher union officials have led to hundreds of thousands of students being forced out of classes, and illegal so-called “blue flu” job actions (where employees simultaneously call in sick) orchestrated by police union officials have endangered lives.