Background on this: the SEIU was forced to cough up a copy of its “Contract Campaign Manual” as part of a court case – and it’s an interesting little document. The whole thing reads, as F. Vincent Vernuccio notes in the Washington Times, as a step-by-step checklist on how to manipulate… just about everything, really… in the course of forcing favorable negotiation terms. Mostly because that’s what it actually is.
Lots of people are going to concentrate on passages like this:
Union members sometimes must act in the tradition of Dr. Marin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi and disobey laws which are used to enforce injustice against working people.
or
It may be a violation of blackmail and extortion laws to threaten management officials with release of ‘dirt’ about them if they don’t settle a contract. But there is no law against union members who are angry at their employer deciding to uncover and publicize factual information about individual managers.
…as they should, frankly. But looking at the document itself tells you something interesting about SEIU: it apparently hasn’t had an original thought in its collective head since, I don’t know, about 1985 or so*. Continue reading The Hysterically Outdated SEIU Intimidation Manual.