May 17th, 2005 | | Posted in Uncategorized
The Service Employees International Union has angered a number of African American House members by protesting Wal-Mart’s involvement in a Congressional Black Caucus fundraiser.
The conflict between two mainstays of the Democratic Party began after Anna Burger, SEIU secretary-treasurer, wrote caucus members “to express our disappointment that the Congressional Black Caucus has given Wal-Mart an opportunity to fashion a false image as a friend of African Americans and of working people generally.”
SEIU and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sponsored an April 27 caucus fundraiser. The union has criticized Wal-Mart’s personnel practices as anti-labor.
Caucus member Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.) described the letter as “presumptuous.”
“The attitude of the letter was that somehow we were allowing someone to do this as though we had no free will or common sense,” he said. (more) (emphasis mine)
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Welcome to modern-day political enslavement, Wynn!
When I read this article, it actually gave me some hope for the Congressional Black Caucus. At least on this issue, many of its members decided to pass on the “kool-aide” of the Liberal agenda.
I cannot defend any reports that Wal-Mart has been using sweatshop labor to make some of it products. If this has truly happened, then Wal-Mart does need to be reprimanded like any other company that indulges in this practice. On the other hand, these sweeping accusations that Wal-Mart underpays its employees and overprices it health benefits (employee-sponsored health care by the way is not guaranteed by law–it is just an added benefit for being an employee of the company) are nothing more than trumped-up allegations fueled by those who want to bring in the socialist organization — The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU– into the Wal-Mart business structure.
Before I get into the background of the SEIU, let me just say that as long as Wal-Mart continues to provide jobs (many of them), and low prices to low/middle-class communities, Liberals should not hold their breath if they think that black folk are just going pass on this store for a more expensive choice that oftentimes is further away from the local community. Try convincing a low-income family that they should pay more for their groceries. So far, the only options that have been put on the table from the anti-Wal-Mart crowd has been to increase our spending on welfare (another program that is not backed by the Constitution and is a huge cost to the taxpayer). In other words, deny the poor the opportunity to work for a living and to eat the same food that everyone else eats.
This is what I do not get about Liberalism. All along they claim to represent the poor and underserved throughout the world, but in the end no sound solution is ever given. In the meantime, all they have succeeded on doing is making the poor mad.
You will find that most people who have a general distaste for Wal-Mart either don’t have kids, or make enough money to do their shopping elsewhere, or both. Listen to the rhetoric from these folks regarding this issue and you will think that most people that work in Wal-Mart do so against their own will. This assumption shows just how out of touch from the real world these individuals really are.
I recently came across an article that provides us with some history behind the SEIU. Here are some excerpts:
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“Democrats created the laws that have allowed unions to impose themselves on unwilling workers, get away with using violence and threats of violence to enforce their power, and extract involuntary “dues†from worker paychecks. In order to keep buying this privileged power from government, Unions kick back many millions of dollars in extorted dues to Democrat lawmakers, governors and Presidents.”
“The result is a money-laundering operation in which leftwing politicians appropriate money for themselves, using friendly labor unions as the middle-men intermediaries who expropriate it from workers. Nearly 40 percent of union workers today are registered Republicans, but a sizeable chunk of their wages is taken and used to elect Democrats.”
>>Ask any public school teacher what happens if they elect not to be a part of the union
“The current president of the SEIU is Andrew Stern, a former New Leftist who came out of the University of Pennsylvania. One of the eulogies given at a Democratic Socialists of America memorial after the death of DSA co-founder Michael Harrington gave tribute to “the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU….†Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy which was formed by SDS radicals Heather and Paul Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement….”
>>For you history buffs out there, the SDS or Students for a Democratic Society later morphed into the anti-establishment terrorist organization The Weathermen.
“SEIU began as a Chicago-based janitors’ union. It was Stern, using New Left tactics of the 1960s with Sweeney’s approval, who shut down parts of Los Angeles with a “Justice for Janitors†strike that blocked not just one company but city streets as well. These workers, at Stern’s direction, wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in the clenched fist that symbolizes Marxism.”
“But Stern’s ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss Andy Stern. Stern’s current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether. ”
>>Now here comes the interesting part of this tale…
“SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call “Corporate Campaigns†or the “death of a thousand cuts.†Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.”
“The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted NO to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker’s neck – and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.”
“…In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as “Union Democracy.†(rest of article)
>>article written by Lowell Ponte
>>inserted comments by me.
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Most unions know that in order to gain black support, all they have to do package their message in such a way that reflects the “little guy versus the big white rich guy” approach. Sadly, instead of investigating the true motives behind this alliance with the black community, many black Americans simply do not take the time to find out this information like what I have just shared with you.
At one point in history, unions were a much needed entity because many industrialist like Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie who literally sanctioned a no holds barred approach to production. This included things like daily threats if a person did not work hard or fast enough, random terminations, and very few wage controls. The unions of today are nothing more than a mere shadow of their predecessors. I think any red-blooded American would agree that workers need to have rights to protect them from potentially abusive employers. But at the expense of being raped financially by the very organization that claims to look out for the workers’ best interest, I think not.
So the next time you hear of this Wal-Mart debate, you now have a general idea of who is behind it–not the employees or customers, but unions–who care nothing about either group.
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