Tag Archives: patricia smith

Actor Jimmy Smits, Obama’s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America union and Democratic Socialists of America member Dolores Huerta have recorded Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) directed at workers “documented or not.”

In the video, the three DOL spokespersons announce the Department’s selective enforcement of U.S. laws as they explain that DOL intends to use its resources for both “documented” and “not” documented workers.  But, the real plan is to force all workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment.

U.S. Labor Sec. Hilda Solis’ 30-second script:

I’m U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, and it is a serious problem when workers in this country are not being paid every cent they earned.

Remember every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly whether documented or not.

So call us it is free and confidential at 1-866-487-9243

We can help.

Here is how this works.   Undocumented workers call the DOL hot line and say that they are being unfairly paid by Employer X.  Armed with this information, DOL investigators call Employer X and say they have evidence that Employer X has hired so-called undocumented workers and that it may have wage violations. The DOL investigators suggest that some type of remediation needs to occur, and then DOL will likely offer a list of options, any combination of which may be used:  multiple substantial fines, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigation, Wage & Hour investigation, IRS audit, and possibly imposition of a union contract to help prevent future calls from DOL.

The last option may be used as an escape clause to prevent investigations and/or fines.   (During the 1990’s when the Clinton Administration ran DOL, an employer was promised that the Wage & Hour investigation, NLRB charges, and other issues would go away if he signed a contract with SEIU.  Eventually, this led to a dismissal of one high ranking Clinton appointee after an inspector general investigation and a congressional investigation.)

This is another step in the Obama Administration’s continuing shakedown of employers in an attempt to entice them into agreeing to force their employees into unions.

With the legal costs associated with multiple federal agency investigations and the risks of heavy fines, Employer X could be forced out of business.  Under these conditions, Employer X might begin to believe that sacrificing his workers’ rights and forcing them into a union is an option worth taking.

Why should we suspect the Obama Administration’s involvement in this type of shakedown?  Besides the fact that the Wage & Hour Division was used by the Clinton Administration in an attempt to force unions upon employers in the past, there is more recent evidence that indicates that this is occurring now:

• In a November 2008 e-mail, ACORN outlined a special project, or shakedown operation,  comprised of SEIU, UFCW, AFSCME, Teamsters, and the Building Trades unions along with “Legal Aid, NELP, Greater Boston Legal Services” and “dirty money hungry lawyers to suck every dollar out of the employers.”  ACORN’s Ross Fitzgeraldreferred to it as Wage and Hour Centers.  (note: DOL’s Wage and Hour Division put together the Smits, Solis, and Huerta PSAs above.)*
• Quoting the ACORN e-mail: “We see it as a useful tool for [ACORN] offices to have, and bring to different Unions and pitch partnerships that use the Wage and hour center in a way that fits the unions organizing targets. We see this as the only way to get to the informal sector in an EFCA scenario.”   Later the memo refers to this plan as the ACORN — Worker Justice Center concept.
• According to the ACORN memo, SEIU, a substantial Obama political supporter, was eager to get this program off the ground: “Houston, Dallas – SEIU Local 1 has asked if we can specifically target janitorial contractors for litigation in the Dallas and Houston markets. This will be a contract that can hopefully lead to a recognition affiliation and shared dues arrangement.”  Click here to read the e-mails.
• In New York, ACORN was not needed to organize the harassment and shakedown of employers and employees because NY taxpayers funded the operation under the direction of Patricia Smith and Lorelei Boylan through a program called NY Wage Watch that provided a similar service to the one outlined in the ACORN email. Rather than tracking down “money hungry lawyers,” Smith used the power of the state of New York to shakedown employers – much more efficient in terms of costs and time than the ACORN plan.
• Now, Boylan (Wage & Hour Administrator) and Smith (Solicitor of Labor) are in the U.S. DOL and have created a nationwide federal program  like  NY Wage Watch that is running full steam ahead.  DOL likely has targeted employees unencumbered by forced unionism in every significantly sized city in America.
• Wage & Hour whistleblowers have let it leak that they have been ordered to give tips from union officials priority.

These DOL videos provide another peek inside DOL under the Obama Administration.  Sec. Solis and her forced unionism allies intend to use the power of the federal government to force documented and undocumented workers to expand the ranks of SEIU and other unions at the cost of individual worker freedom and choice.  Congress should defund these forced unionism programs; stop Sec. Solis from using the Wage & Hour Division to intimidate workers; and specifically exclude payments to or contracts with unions as a condition of settlement or negotiation with an employer.

* ACORN=Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now; SEIU=Service Employees International Union;  UFCW=United Food & Commercial Workers Union;  AFSCME=American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Teamsters=International Brotherhood of Teamsters union; Building Trades=AFL-CIO Building Trades Organizations;  NELP=National Employment Law Project

In their first year in office, the Obama Administration has re-made the U.S. Department of Labor into the Department of Organized Labor, working hard to make certain that those who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in office get a return on their investment.  While many dismiss the importance of the Department of Labor, virtually every person in America is directly touched by the rules and regulations that this federal bureaucracy creates and enforces, so changes at the top have real consequences for every working American.

As we evaluate the impact of the past year on the nation’s workforce, it is worthwhile to remember the accomplishments of President Bush’s Secretary of Labor, Elaine L. Chao.

When Secretary Chao left office, workers were safer in their workplaces than at any time in history, the Labor Department was focused upon encouraging private sector job creation, and created an enforcement environment that successfully protected workers from employers who egregiously violated the law while providing the necessary education to limit inadvertent violations.

Secretary Chao put an emphasis on clarifying workplace regulations to make it easier for employers to know the rules of the game.  Her efforts led to overtime requirements being more clear-cut for employers while explicitly guaranteeing overtime protections for blue collar workers, police and fire fighters, EMTs, construction workers and others.

The Labor Department under Secretary Chao brought transparency to the spending of Big Labor through regulations which for the first time shined a light upon labor union expenditures.  These reports revealed the massive labor expenditures supporting ACORN’s efforts,and were used by LA Times reporter Paul Pringle in his Polk Award winning series that brought down the SEIU powerbrokers in the California SEIU.

This emphasis on transparency and private sector education and empowerment was geared toward preparing America’s workforce for the 21^st century, all the while protecting the taxpayer by achieving cost savings in the Department’s discretionary budget of 19 percent in real terms since 2001.

The Obama Administration’s agenda is very different.

The first order of business has been rolling back those pesky union transparency regulations that allowed watchdog groups, the media and union members to know how union dues are spent.

Next, rather than getting out of the way and allowing the private sector engine to create jobs, the Obama Administration is hiring hundreds more OSHA and Wage and Hour inspectors with their job descriptions revised away from helping companies comply with the law to strictly writing citations for as much fine money as can possibly be warranted.

Believe it or not, in spite of record lows in workplace injuries, OSHA inspectors are now financially incentivized to write citations with heavy fines encouraged.  This is akin to making a police officer’s income directly related to how many tickets he/she writes.  If you have the misfortune of getting pulled over, you know that it is going to cost you big time.

Continuing on the enforcement front, it is instructive that President Obama’s appointee to be the top lawyer in the Department is Patricia Smith who currently serves as the head of the New York State Department of Labor.  In New York, Smith created a program that empowers unions to conduct wage and hour inspections of employers – typically, non-union employers.  This powerful coercion tool is conducted under the guise of ensuring that employees are treated fairly, but actually allows a union to target employers for organizing programs using this threat as a cudgel against that business.

The theme of expanding private sector union membership permeates the entire Obama labor agenda from the recently announced deal on the health care bill which exempts union members from paying a tax on what is deemed to be Cadillac health care insurance, to the Orwellian named Employee Free Choice Act that strips employees of secret ballot union elections, to Obama appointees changing union election rules that have stood for 75 years in order to help unions organize Delta Airlines.

This emphasis on expanding union membership, even at the expense of job creation, can be seen in one of the Administration’s early acts – to require Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for federally funded projects.  PLAs require scale union wages be paid on all federally funded construction at an estimated cost of between 16-18%.

That’s shovel ready money that is employing fewer workers for the taxpayer dollar – all to force work into union shops and increase union dues payments.  Rather than employing more workers in this time of economic crisis, Obama instead has chosen to employ fewer people per taxpayer dollar in order to ensure that union dues payments go up.  Of course, the poster child for PLA projects is the notorious Boston Big Dig that ran billions of dollars of cost overruns while having to redo much of the work due to poor workmanship.  Of course what else can you expect when using union labor is more important than getting the job done.

PLA’s are not the only example of this Administration putting union membership ahead of job creation.  Amazingly, one of the requirements for consideration to receive a piece of the $100 million in “green job grants” was a partnership with a union affiliated group.  While union affiliation has nothing to do with whether or not a job is green or not, these grants are structured to force companies competing for these grants to employ union labor and at the least give labor affiliated organizations a piece of the pie.

At this writing, the 60 vote filibuster proof Democratic Senate was predicted to go down in flames in Massachusetts.  As a result, regulators, appointees to the National Labor Relations Board and Administrative Law judges are likely to be at the forefront of employment policy.  One name stands out as perhaps the symbol of the changes that we are likely to see in the Obama Administration – Craig Becker.

The Wall Street Journal calls Becker, “labor’s secret weapon”.  So who is he?

Becker is a yet to be confirmed appointee who would be the deciding vote on the National Labor Relations Board – the decision making body on the rules and validity of union organizing elections.

Instead of being a fair arbiter, Becker has advocated for extensive restrictions on employer communications with employees preceding a union organizing vote.  He has gone so far as to call for employers to be barred from attending NLRB hearings about elections, and not allowing employers to  challenge results even when evidence of union misconduct is present.  If confirmed it is likely that Craig Becker, not Hilda Solis, will have the lasting impact  on labor relations whether Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act or not.

You might ask yourself, why is this Administration feverishly working to tilt the employment playing field dramatically toward the unions at the expense of real job creation?

The answer may be found in those very union disclosure reports that the Obama Administration doesn’t want you to see.

Big Labor is broke and desperate.  Declining membership combined with hundreds of millions in political expenditures to elect this Administration and Congress have left them on the financial ropes.

To understand the severity of their situation, you only have to go to the Wall Street Journal which reports that the AFL-CIO has more liabilities than assets, and a key member of their Finance Board worries that, “insolvency may be just around the corner.”  Further, Number One White House visitor, Andy Stern’s SEIU’s, is in severe financial trouble with his pension plans upside down and the union’s liabilities totalling almost 80% of its assets, and Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters faces a pension disaster as its Central States Pension Fund teeters on ruin with an asset to liability ratio of only 43%.  In short, Big Labor’s finances are worse than a Wall Street mortgage derivatives fund in 2008, and like Wall Street, they are looking for government to bail them out.

Big Labor has bet their entire future on this Administration and this Congress.  Not able to compete in an environment where workers are safer than ever before, and there is a big screen in every living room, Big Labor needs the rules changed in order to survive, no matter the harm done to America and to workers across our nation.

With the unearthing of a memo detailing an ACORN scheme to use “dirty money hungry lawyers” to force “employers to open up negotiations” and its plan to create “a model for [union] organizing” that “building trades [unions] do not have,” ACORN almost assuredly fits the federal definition of a labor organization under federal law 29 CFR 401.9.

But, the detailed scheme gets even better and closer to the line that makes ACORN a labor union.

ACORN’s bombshell talks about an arrangement to “share dues” with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and opens up a whole new array of issues between these newly discovered Siamese twins.

Add in ACORN’s plans to create union organizing partnerships with other labor unions and Big Labor funded auxiliary organizations, and it becomes a tautology that ACORN is a big part of Big Labor.

These are the details of a scintillating e-mail between ACORN operatives.  While ACORN and SEIU big-wigs who are dreaming all this up may pass it off as just wishful thinking; the facts show something different.

Right now, ACORN files labor organization financial reports for SEIU 880 and SEIU 100 with the U.S. Department of Labor.  Other exposed relationships like the New York Teachers’ Union bosses – ACORN coordinated organizing effort illustrate an ACORN and Big Labor coordination, and a relationship that may have already crossed the line.

But wait, there is more!

On top of this, ACORN plans to use low-wage earners to shakedown employers to build its and Big Labor’s monthly income.  The ACORN plan is to gather these workers together like pawns in a chess game and then use them to create leverage against employers.  There is no plan to fix existing “problems;” instead, ACORN is simply going to use the leverage to force employers to begin deducting forced union dues from these workers.

The exposure of this ACORN forced unionization plan reveals the importance of the U.S. Senate vote on President Obama’s Solicitor of Labor nominee Patricia Smith, because she actually integrated ACORN-type organizations and labor unions into the State of New York wage and hour enforcement division.  Her New York Wage Watch Program has come under fire because it essentially “deputized” Big Labor officials and allowed them to use the power of the State to intimidate employers for union organizational purposes, similar to the ACORN e-mail plans.

Certainly, employers who fail to comply with the law need to be brought into compliance.  However, the antiquated multilayered jurisdictionally variant labor laws can create violators out of the most upright employer.  Especially, when courts can decide decades old employment practices are invalid and thus change employment rules overnight.  ACORN’s scheme would force employers to be on the defensive rather than working for solutions that will best help its past and current employees.  ACORN’s legal agitation approach is designed to create fear and anxiety between the employer and the employee.

ACORN is Big Labor

ACORN plans contained in the exposed e-mails provide enough information to satisfy this federal definition of Labor Organizations:

Labor Organizations are defined as “any organization of any kind so engaged in which employees participate and which exists for the purpose, in whole or in part, of dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours, or other terms or conditions of employment.”

When can we expect Labor Secretary Solis and/or the U.S. Labor Department Inspector General to begin investigating ACORN’s blatant disregard for the 1959 the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act?

More revelations of ACORN-SEIU special relationships?

In the ACORN e-mails, National Field Director for the ACORN Community Labor Organizing Center (ACLOC) Ross Fitzgerald specifically mentioned SEIU in the shared dues scheme.  Is that because ACORN already has a shared dues structure with SEIU on other projects?

“Houston, Dallas – SEIU Local 1 has asked if we can specifically target janitorial contractors for litigation in the Dallas and Houston markets. This will be a contract that can hopefully lead to a recognition, affiliation and shared dues arrangement.”

The ACORN e-mails disclosing this odd relationship may not end with the SEIU labor union, but likely extends into other labor unions and government funded legal service operations as well:

“Boston – GBLS [Greater Boston Legal Services, Inc.] wants to do wage and hour to ID informal truckers with the Teamsters. Same partnership as created the Childcare association. Mimi has great relationships with labor there.”

It appears that ACORN already has found some “dirty money hungry lawyers” to force “employers to open up negotiations” in Boston.  The Greater Boston Legal Services, Inc. is a government funded organization.  Also, it appears that ACORN already has a Teamster partnership model that it can use.  It might be worthwhile to find out more about this “partnership” that created the “Childcare association.”

These e-mails are revealing, and should stimulate intense discussions regarding ACORN’s many different angles used to create its programs and more importantly revenue stream. With its organizational structure labyrinth and “partnerships,” will the real ACORN ever be fully exposed?  Certainly not if politicians who believe they owe their political fortunes to ACORN and Big Labor are in charge of any investigations.  But, this is no reason to stop trying.