Is the SEIU Above the Law?

The discovery of an SEIU intimidation guidebook has led the Washington Examiner to make the compelling case that the SEIU should not be above the law:

Imagine the outcry if managers of a company trying to fight off a union seeking to organize its employees used the following tactics:

• Stage regular mass visits or sit-ins using paid protesters at the union’s headquarters to prevent its officials from doing their work.
• Organize constant telephone calls to targeted union officials to harass them into backing off their campaign.
• Plant negative stories about the union to jeopardize its relationships with managers and owners of community institutions the union must depend on to maintain daily operations, including banks or credit unions, office suppliers, caterers, utilities, and landlords.
• Use friends and allies in government to generate costly legal and regulatory pressure on the union.
• Plant negative stories about the union and its officials with local media.
• Encourage employees who support management to use civil disobedience tactics to disrupt all attempts by the union to meet with or otherwise communicate with other employees in the workplace or elsewhere.
• Promise informants protection from retaliation for providing “dirt” that can be used to compromise union leaders during negotiations, or embarrass them in public with their friends and families.

Any company engaging in these sorts of tactics would be quickly forced to explain itself before the National Labor Relations Board, which would almost certainly impose a costly sanction after finding the firm guilty of unfair labor practices. As it happens, all of these tactics, and many more as bad or worse, are described by and endorsed in a training manual used by officials of the Service Employees International Union in preparing members for campaigns against targeted companies.