How Unions Intimidate Business Owners
It is unusual to find serious coverage of union “corporate campaigns” in the media. A regular contributor to UnionWatch, Dave Bego, who owns a multi-state services company that has fought back the SEIU for years, has worked tirelessly to expose how unions intimidate business owners into permitting unionization of their companies. Here is another such testimonial, from Paul Munsch, the owner of St. Louis Paving in St. Louis, Missouri. He and his employees have faced years of bullying by the union bosses.
Here are some excerpts from his video message:
“A man came up to me and handed me a business card that said ‘Organizer, Laborers International Union of America,’ and he says ‘you’ve got until April 27th to talk to us about how we can improve your business.’ I said ‘not interested,’ and my men went along with me. They were all right behind me.”
“Fast forward to April 27th, we’re working at a shopping mall, all of a sudden six guys jump out, they start videotaping our equipment, videotaping our men, videotaping their cars, their license plates. Then they blew up this 25 foot tall inflatable rat with our name plastered on its chest, blood coming out of its mouth; they all picked up picket signs and started picketing in front of the building.”
“If our company was unionized, we would be dealing with three unions, not one; the operating engineers, the teamsters, and the laborers. The guy who’s on the roller couldn’t pick up a shovel. The guy with a shovel couldn’t get in a truck. The guy driving the truck couldn’t get out of the truck to get on the roller, or pick up a shovel.”
“They would show up at our equipment yard, they would follow our trucks to the job, they would put up pickets, and they would try to embarrass us in front of our customers. Their hope would be our customers would stop using us and we would be forced to sign an agreement with the unions.”
“Almost everything they do makes the skin crawl in anyone who hears this story. And yet everything they do is legal.”
What is particularly disturbing about this video is not just the fact that this company faced relentless bullying by these unions even though the workers wanted no part of unionization. Equally disturbing is the inefficiency that unionization would have forced onto this business. These work rules, which prohibit personnel from cross-training, are more costly than the union’s wage demands, which often are actually lower than what non-unionized personnel already earn. In the public sector, the way unionization introduces costly inefficiencies is paid for by the taxpayers.