David Bego

David Bego has a good story to tell; so it is a shame he didn 19t find 14or think he needed 14a good ghost writer and/or editor (after all, I 19m available), but if you can get past his cringe-worthy prose and typographical errors, his account of the three-year siege against his midsized company by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is well worth reading; however, if you are under the illusion that all labor unions are noble representatives of the working man, then you might also find this book to be a rude awakening. Bego portrays this particular union as a quasi-(or perhaps not-so-quasi)criminal enterprise, essentially in the business of exploiting the very workers it pretends to help. I happen to have met the SEIU twenty years ago when I was an employee of a company that was struck by them, and from my experience with this union, I must agree with Bego 19s estimation of them. They are possibly the most radical, corrupt, mendacious, hypocritical, and violent union in America if not the world (they are, after all, international).

A big difference between my former employer 19s experience with SEIU and Bego 19s is that my old employer 19s business was already unionized by six unions with SEIU being the largest, so the issue was renegotiation of an existing contract. Bego 19s company, Executive Management Services (EMS) is non-union and has been for its entire existence. The SEIU was attempting to gain a foothold that it did not yet have. EMS is a janitorial company, cleaning buildings for various client businesses. It began in 1989 in Indiana but now has branches in 32 other states. It is not the largest company of its kind. American Building Maintenance and a few others are much larger. (Another tangential personal connection: I worked for ABM as a security guard in the mid-1980s.)

The SEIU is much larger and better connected than a company like EMS. No less than President Barack Obama is on record pledging his undying support to the SEIU. He even told them before his election that if they did not call to offer him their input, he would seek it out. (It was either to the SEIU or AFL-CIO that he promised to walk with them on the picket lines; so much for another broken promise.) Even before that connection, the SEIU had plenty of congressmen in its pocket. (In the strike that I witnessed years ago, California representatives Ronald Dellums and the late Tom Lantos harassed my employer 14and I use the word 1Charassed 1D in its full literal sense because I saw a videotape of the session in which they did so. This is not to mention that Rev. Jesse Jackson spent several days on the scene stirring the pot on behalf of the union.) The SEIU is well-funded and has been accused 14even by its own mid-level leadership 14of being focused on increasing membership and dues at the expense of worker welfare.* The money it earns from dues is donated to politicians who then pass legislation that makes the SEIU 19s work easier so that it can get more members and more dues. Dues of about $40 a month can eat into a worker 19s paycheck, especially if his pay is as low as or lower than it was before he joined the union; so one might well ask what benefit the SEIU 19s members really get from belonging to the union. Meanwhile, political activism and a commitment to getting democrats elected and reelected seems to be what the SEIU cares most about. It has inserted itself into high-profile labor disputes even where other unions represent the workers involved. In the early 2011 demonstrations on behalf of Wisconsin 19s Education Association and State Employees unions, the SEIU provided many of the boots on the ground that trashed that state 19s capitol.

In 2005, the SEIU started its 1CCorporate Campaign 1D to unionize janitors in parts of Indiana and Ohio. It first approached employers in a friendly manner and persuaded as many of them as possible to sign a Neutrality Agreement. A Neutrality Agreement is an employer 19s acquiescence to the union, allowing them full access to his employees with a promise that the employer will say or do nothing to dissuade them from joining the union. It is, in fact, a promise to bend over backward. Even if employees ask the employer for raw information, he must refer them back to the union. The Neutrality Agreement also obviates the necessity for a secret ballot to determine whether the employees will have the union. If the union can persuade fifty-one percent of employees in face-to-face meetings to sign a card ( 1Ccard check 1D), then the union is in. Bego points out that the proposed and misnamed federal Employee Fair Choice Act would make this same process possible without the employer having signed a Neutrality Agreement. The problem is that while both a Neutrality Agreement and EFCA protect workers from intimidation by their employers, neither protects them from intimidation by union organizers. Laws protecting workers from employers are fine and good, but their legal protections from the unions are eliminated when an employer signs a Neutrality Agreement. Indeed, Bego cites complaints from employees who were harassed on their way to and from work by organizers, and at least one employee said that organizers told her pointedly that, when the company was inevitably unionized, the SEIU would remember which employees had cooperated and which had not.

A key point is that Bego always urged the SEIU to call for an election to determine his employees 19 preference once and for all, but the SEIU countered that an election would take too long, even though, during the union 19s three-year campaign against EMS, there would be time enough to hold several elections. The SEIU preferred to have Bego sign the Neutrality Agreement apparently because it made the union 19s job easier and because, evidently, they feared that they would lose a fair election.

A devout Catholic, Bego 19s says that he has always tried to be fair to his employees, often paying them about a dollar more than the going rate for janitors in the cities where he operates. He provides benefits when employees became full-time, which he reckons as thirty hours a week. This became a much overlooked irony when the one-size-fits-all contract the SEIU hammered out with other cleaning companies in Indiana and Ohio provided for benefits only after thirty-five hours. Bego sounds as if he might be the ideal boss, but that is not how he was portrayed after he refused to sign a Neutrality Agreement for the SEIU in 2005. After he refused, the union filed complaints against him with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that oversees labor disputes. These complaints did not have to be bona fide. Just having allegations in place made it possible for the union to make press releases and flyers listing the allegations against the company. The complaints had been made, regardless of whether there was any merit in them, just so they could be used in this way. The flyers and chanting marchers became quite colorful as EMS was referred to as 1Ca rat contractor 1D and completely unfounded charges were made such as that janitors had been forced to carry around human body parts. Of the many charges made against EMS during the SEIU 19s Corporate Campaign, subsequent investigation found all but a few minor ones to be without merit. For example, after a surprise Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection found some minor violations, including a single frayed electrical cord, the damaged cord was reported in an SEIU flyer, probably with the union 19s hope that, next to more serious-sounding fabricated and exaggerated complaints, it would not cause readers to think, 1COne damaged cord is the best they could come up with? 1D

The SEIU also targeted Bego 19s customers, picketing not only their buildings but their private homes. At Halloween, the union used children to trick-or-treat these homes with union flyers attacking Bego and his company. The children actually visited Bego 19s own home, where he says that he gave them candy while keeping an eye on the adults waiting for the children in a nearby car. The SEIU also enlisted various organizations in support of the campaign against EMS. For example, Interfaith Worker Justice brought prominent clergy to bat for the union, and Bego welcomed a meeting with them, naively hoping that once they heard his side they might realize that he was not a bad guy. Instead, Father Tom Fox told Bego, 1CWe don 19t care about the facts. All we care about is that unions lift people out of poverty and we want you to be union. 1D This was in spite of Bego 19s attempt to explain to the clergy that EMS already provided workers with a better deal than the cookie-cutter one the union had provided to janitors at other companies. Notably, when Bego demurred at a particular claim made by a Rev. C.J. Hawking, she cried, 1CAre you calling me a liar? 1D Although Bego hastened to suggest that he was not, it later turned out that she was.

A problem with the SEIU 19s case against EMS was that, try as the SEIU might to turn their campaign into a one fought over unfair labor practices, they were really just trying to get EMS to recognize the union as its employees 19 representative. In such a 1Crecognitional campaign, 1D certain practices that the SEIU might be able to get away with if it were already EMS 19s employee union are considered illegal. Trespassing against the buildings of EMS 19 clients (let alone their private homes) is an example. Now, twelve out of 400 local EMS employees either quit or were fired for cause, including theft and poor attendance, and these individuals joined the union protest. All of them then engaged in actions considered illegal under the rules of recognitional campaigns, so when they applied for reinstatement, EMS turned them down. After the SEIU charged that this refusal constituted an unfair labor practice, there was a hearing before an NLRB administrative judge who found in favor of EMS. Subsequently, though, there were moves by certain executive and legislative federal officials to undermine the judge 19s ruling.

Bego 19s primary and rather passive strategy was simply to hold out. One disadvantage of this became apparent: while he expected the union to commit to their campaign for only two years, he was surprised when they proved willing to go for three. His greatest tactical triumph came one fall in the midst of the siege when he lodged his own complaints against the SEIU with the NLRB and then released a press statement pointing out that the SEIU was under investigation. It was the exact same tactic the SEIU had repeatedly used against him from the start. This step turned out to be particularly fortuitous because, as Bego later learned, the SEIU had been about to launch a new attack on him, but his charges put the union on the defensive and made them delay their own maneuver.

In the end, Bego believes that he survived because he ran his business in such a way that he had the resources to wait out the union. Because his company was family-owned, he had no stockholders to be pressured by the union or its various supporters, and he had impressed most of his customers with both the character of his employees and the quality of their work so that these customers tended to stick by him. In some instances, Bego says, a client yielded to union pressure and went with a unionized contractor, only to rehire EMS, either temporarily or sub rosa, because its employees were more reliable than the unionized janitors. Ultimately, then, he relied on his employees 19 willingness to resist the pressure to unionize, to recognize that standing with him ultimately benefited them, and to keep doing the best job that they could under stressful circumstances. He did explain to them on more than one occasion that the union 19s promises, such as the near doubling of their pay, were unrealistic and that the union knew it; but he never had to tell them that the union was willing to use intimidation and violence because so many of his employees were subjected to or witnessed that first hand.

In his last chapter, Bego relates his experience with the Machinists Union, which attempted to unionize twenty of his employees who were cleaning an Ohio steel mill in 2009. An election was set. The union pitched its case to Bego 19s employees while Bego made his case to them as well. Bego complains that, under NLRB rules, he had to document everything that he told his employees but the union organizers did not. (Of course, it turns out to be good for Bego that he can prove whether what he did to persuade his employees was above board.) He also knew that the SEIU would follow this election to gage their own chances in the kind of fair election that they had pointedly avoided. 1CAfter the secret-ballot election, 1D Bego says proudly, 1Cthe vote was two to one against unionization. 1D He adds, 1CHats off to the Machinists Union for conducting the campaign honestly and by the book, unlike the Corporate Campaign process that the SEIU uses to browbeat employees and companies into unwanted unionism. Even better, the machinist representatives were gentlemen when they lost, just as I would have been had I lost. 1D Bego 19s encounter with the machinists ended with a handshake. His encounter with the more aggressive and unscrupulous SEIU appears to have trailed off without either side admitting defeat. Bego seems to be the winner, but perhaps a somewhat bloodied David to the intact SEIU Goliath. Most companies could not withstand what EMS went through. Conscious of this, Bego has become more politically active to try to keep the labor laws as they are and to oppose 1Creforms 1D such as EFCA, which seem to be designed only to make organizing easier for the most predatory unions.

*Bego quotes a California SEIU president, Sal Rosselli, as criticizing Andy Stern, the then-national president of the SEIU, for 1Can overly zealous focus on growth 14growth at any cost 1D that 1Ceclipsed SEIU 19s commitment to its members. 1D It strikes me that I do not remember thinking much of Rosselli 19s commitment to worker welfare either during or after the strike he led against my employer in California. How much worse must Stern be to earn such an appraisal from him?… (meer)