McHenry County Blog

Public employee unions have long accomplished through legislation what they could not achieve at the bargaining table.

Think teacher pension increases.

And union organizing used to involve actually talking to workers.

But, Democrats like Governor Rod Blagojevich allowed unionization of, what, 49,000 day care workers by executive order. No messy contested vote once the state employees’ union, AFSCME, pulled out of the election against Service Employees International Union—not coincidentally, Blagojevich’s biggest campaign contributor.

Now unions like the SIEU want hospital employers like Advocate Health Care to just sign over their employees.

That’s right.

No messy democratic election supervised by federal authorities.

Just the signature of the CEO on a piece of paper and all of the designated health care employees would be dues paying members…and getting more dues is what union’s are all about, right? Who wouldn’t want to avoid the difficult job of organizing, if one could?

Tom Balanoff, the SIEU’s Illinois president was even appointed to Blagojevich’s original Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. He didn’t stay long, but wasn’t that part of the SEIU’s stategy to put pressure on Advocate from every direction possible?

Evoking the Governor’s name as a way to induce hospitals to organize is certainly not beyond the SIEU’s pale.

Just picket the homes of the hospital presidents.

And sic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn on organizing targets Advocate and Resurrection Health Care Corporation for charging poor patients to much.

Its called a corporate campaign and it consists of a systematic assault on the reputation of a corporation designed to undermine its relationships with such key stakeholders as its customers, shareholders, regulators, bankers and the general public. For details, click here.

I was reminded of how unions and the SEIU specifically use their allies in government to do their dirty organizing work for them by the Chicago City Council’s vote today to impose salary and benefit minimums on so-called “big box” stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Target.

I saw the SEIU tee shirts in the audience.

Why wait for the super stores to enter the market place with new employees to try to organize and, again, not a coincidence, provide competition for the unionized Jewel and Dominick’s stores whose employees already pay dues?

Just get your minions on the city council to make it tough on the folks you want to organize.

36 of the alderpersons do not hold outside jobs in private enterprise or anywhere else.. They are full-timers (like I used to be as a state representative). Being government employees—even elected ones--does not yield a particularly representative group of citizens, even in Chicago.

Besides the relative few jobs per store, don’t what one former Democratic state representative called “alderthings” think their constituents might like to be able to walk to a place where they can buy groceries, soft and hard goods cheaper than elsewhere in Chicago?

Guess not.