In Michigan where the economy is already in ruins, the Grand Rapids Press highlights warnings from University of Michigan economist Don Grimes about the nationwide UAW strike:

“It’s not exactly what the state needs right now,” said University of Michigan economist Don Grimes. “You’ve got a train wreck in Detroit and a train wreck in Lansing. It’s like a perfect storm.”

“The workers will be getting $200 a week in strike pay,” he said. “Before, they were earning $1,500 a week in pay.”

A $1,300 per-week pay cut is an awful lot to ask of these workers who have families to support. Meanwhile, GM looks to lose nearly $100 million per day due to the loss of production.

Looks like UAW bosses are hitting everyone where it hurts the most: their wallets.

As the tensions between United Auto Workers (UAW) officials and General Motors (GM) continue, one day into the strike employees around the nation are already feeling the aftershocks of being ordered off the job.

MLive.com reports that GM employee Dan Donlin of Grand Haven, Wyoming went on strike for the first time, along with many of his coworkers at his UAW union local. However, his wife will no longer have a job at the end of the week, his family just built a new home, and his daughter attends school at the state university.

“We built a nice, big, new house five years ago, when interest rates were low,” Donlin said. “Now, I probably won’t be able to afford it.”

“It’s just bad timing for my family.”

While UAW officials negotiate for forced dues, this nationwide strike couldn’t have come at a more challenging time for employees like Dan Donlin.

Forced dues and a forced strike, seems like union officials are attacking employee free choice on all fronts.

Late last week, the fight by Treasure Island Foods grocery workers to kick the unwanted UFCW union out of all six Chicago-area stores officially ended in the employees’ favor.

In July, Wilmette store manager Dan Schalin told a major Chicago newspaper:

"People felt that the union wasn’t looking out for them. They weren’t earning our union dues."

However, as explained last week, decertification elections like those won by the employees in Chicago are uphill battles and no substitute for passing a Right to Work law in combatting compulsory unionism abuse.

Today’s Chicago Sun-Times reports:

The seven-union affiliates of Change to Win labor federation have a long-term goal of organizing 50 million workers.

How do union officials plan to do it” By focusing 75% of their resources on coercive "card check" organizing, a system plagued by workers’ rights abuse. And of course, workers not in Right to Work states could be forced to pay dues or be fired once organized.

According to the report, Laborers union officials alone have already promised gobs of cash:

The Laborers’, meanwhile, have committed to increasing per capita payments by 25 cents per hour by 2009 to fund organizing. That will create more than $100 million a year for organizing to help it achieve its goal of boosting its membership by 20 percent over the next five years, said General President Terence O’Sullivan.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg:

The federation’s affiliates are committing several hundred million dollars annually to organizing, in addition to teaming up on campaigns, said Tom Woodruff, head of the ("Change to Win") organizing center.

If union officials showed a similar enthusiasm for improving their product maybe workers would be soliciting them rather than the opposite.

UAW union bosses are currently threatening to order autoworkers at General Motors plants across the country off the job at 11 am. As per usual when union officials order strikes, expect threats and/or violence against employees who wish to continue working to support their families.

But for all the media attention this strike will receive, one under-reported fact is that high on the list of UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger and the other top union officials’ list of demands is the ability to force nonunion employees into their forced unionism ranks.

The Youngstown, Ohio Vindicator reported in late August that the ability to forcibly organize nonunion employees is a sticking point in negotiations all around the country:

In the current talks, Automotive News reported that UAW officials in Detroit are allowing GM assembly plants in Spring Hill, Tenn., and Lansing, Mich., to negotiate two-tier wage systems. Nonproduction workers would be paid roughly half as much as production workers.

In return, the UAW would organize nonunion suppliers that handle parts sequencing, building maintenance and nonproduction tasks, the trade publication said.

Union sources reported that UAW officials around the country are considering such arrangements.

[emphasis added]

That negotiating demand was echoed again in a September 14th Detroit News editorial that noted “the UAW is still holding to the position that it must have veto power over plant closings and contracts issued to nonunion suppliers in exchange for the other concessions.”

So what do rank-and-file workers think of the fact that union officials are willing to make “concessions” just for the ability to swell their forced dues-paying ranks’ Sadly, many are probably unaware of the union officials’ self-serving demands.

But if they did know, their reaction might be like the one Mike Ivey had when he found out that UAW union officials were holding up a promised pay raise in an effort to force him and his coworkers into the UAW union.

Today’s Detroit News touches on a theme we recently discussed:

Michigan’s unemployment rate in August hit a level not seen in nearly 14 years, as the stagnating job market spurred tens of thousands of working-age men and women to quit the state.

Take a look:

  When is Michigan finally going to wake up and smell the coffee”

Today’s Birmingham News has an excellent article exposing union officials’ hypocrisy when it comes to “threats” against employees.

In Birmingham, United Auto Workers (UAW) union organizer and Honda employee Sheila Boyd recently complained to local media outlets that a letter sent by Honda executives "is trying to threaten us" and claimed that the letter is "just an intimidation tactic.”

So what does the “intimidating” letter say?

The letter, which the Birmingham paper quotes from extensively, merely points out that Honda has never had to layoff a worker in 30 years, something its competitors in compulsory unionism states can’t say.

Simply pointing out how laughable it is to call that letter “intimidation,” would be enough if union propagandists weren’t using such baseless claims as “evidence” that Congress should pass a law mandating coercive “card check” organizing drives. These types of unsubstantiated claims by union organizers were the exact basis for a 2005 study created for the union-funded and –financed lobbying group, “American Rights at Work."

But more to the point is the hypocrisy of union officials to complain about threats and intimidation, when every day they threaten millions of workers with termination, if they refuse to pay forced union dues (like 16 year old Danielle Cookson).

And the UAW has a particularly dubious history when it comes to actual threats and intimidation against employees:

• Responding to actual threats, the National Right to Work Foundation hired round-the-clock private security guards for Thomas Built Bus employee Jeff Ward who was targeted for opposing the UAW’s unionization tactics at his facility.
• At a Freightliner facility in Gaffney South Carolina UAW militants threatened employee Mike Ivey that “things are gonna get ugly” if he didn’t stop opposing UAW organizers.
• In another case the UAW was forced to settle a lawsuit filed against it for its role in a violence campaign against workers at a Virginia plant who refused to walk off the job during a union-ordered strike. A lawsuit in that case charged several union militants with civil conspiracy and other counts for making death threats, shooting out windows, sending obscene mail, acts of stalking, theft of property, and harassing workers on the job to coerce them into quitting their jobs. And in a particularly vivid image of UAW intimidation, 55-year old Sucheng Huang was greeted early one morning with a bloody severed cows head on the hood of her car.

So it turns out that UAW officials have no problem using intimidation and threats against employees. They just don’t like those employees being given any information that “threatens” the union’s ability to force workers into union ranks.

Two individual nonunion groups of contractors are fighting compulsory unionism in Northern Ohio – that is, the right to even bid on a multi-million dollar construction contract at MetroHealth Hospital in Cleveland.

Crain’s Cleveland Business (subscription required) reports:

The issue is important because the county in the next few years could let contracts for major construction projects including a $450 million convention center, a $140 million juvenile justice center, and a $200 million county administration building.

The fight is centered around a so-called "project labor agreement" (PLA) – a contract awarded by the government exclusively to unionized firms for public construction projects. Cuyahoga County officials and the MetroHealth System have used the PLA contract to exclude nonunion companies and employees from undertaking major construction projects within the county.

But when the two nonunion contractors groups filed a lawsuit asking the court for an injunction blocking the enforcement of the county’s PLA, the judge threw it out. The nonunion workers who want to work on the large hospital project have since filed an appeal, as the PLA requires contractors to grant union officials monopoly bargaining privileges over all workers, and likely requires employees to pay union dues or be fired.

When interviewed, a lawyer for the county made it clear that contractors will be subject to discrimination before being granted any public work in Cleveland. Crain’s Cleveland Business continues:

“Our position is it’s up to the union and contractor to determine the terms," said David Lambert, an assistant prosecutor who heads the county prosecutor’s civil division.

Asked whether that stance forces nonunion contractors to become union shops, Mr. Lambert replied, “That’s life in the big city.”

This is just another reason why PLAs sacrifice employee free choice and forcibly impose unwanted union representation and compulsory dues on employees.

Wouldn’t you want to know if union officials illegally obtained your personal information?

That is the question raised in a motion filed today by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys in Philadelphia, PA. And the answer is not only would you want to know, but employees who have had their personal information illegally collected by union organizers have a right to know.

The legal filing is the latest in the ugly saga of UNITE union officials’ efforts to force employees into the union, like it or not. The motion was filed in a case brought by a group of Cintas employees against UNITE for having union organizers cruise parking lots collecting license plate numbers and then unlawfully using the plate numbers to access DMV information about employees that had been targeted for unionization.

Having found that union officials did illegally abuse the rights of over 1,500 Cintas employees by violating the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) of 1994, the judge has ordered that the union pay damages to employees.

But also revealed in the case is that all total, union officials conducted more than 13,700 DMV searches, meaning that more than 12,000 workers still don’t know that their rights have been violated, and that union organizers unlawfully obtained personal records for the purpose of making “house calls” on the employees. According to court records, these records were illegally accessed in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.

And so far these employees are still in the dark about the violations, despite the fact that the union may owe them millions for the violations of their privacy.

And these home visits that resulted from the information were anything but gentle. Organizers used the information to gain access into employees’ homes where they would then agitate the employee into signing a union card. And as a former union organizer for UNITE during the Cintas campaign recently testified to Congress, signing a card has nothing to do with support of the union:

Frankly, it isn’t difficult to agitate someone in a short period of time, work them up to the point where they are feeling very upset, tell them that I have the solution, and that if they simply sign a card, the union will solve all of their problems. I know many workers who later, upon reflection, knew that they had been manipulated and asked for their card to be returned to them. The union’s strategy, of course, was never to return or destroy such cards, but to include them in the official count towards the majority.

And according to the testimony, when not harassing workers at their homes the UNITE organizers were busy trying to agitate workers in other ways, such as getting them fired:

Ernest Bennett, the Director of Organizing for UNITE at the time, told a room full of organizers during a training meeting for the Cintas campaign that if three workers weren’t fired by the end of the first week of organizing, UNITE would not win the campaign.

With such tactics there is no doubt that the employees targeted by UNITE are owed an apology. And while they might never get that, they should at least be told that union organizers broke the law to violate their privacy.