Obama's Favorite Union Heavies

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American Spectator:

Unions thrive on workplace conflict. The AFL-CIO, for example, sponsors a "Bad Boss Contest," which awards the employee who submits the best story about a horrible boss a "seven-night vacation escape" from his or her workplace travails. But aggressive union tactics are no laughing matter, as a recently unveiled playbook distributed by one of America's biggest unions reveals.

Over the last decade, aggressive campaigns against employers have enabled the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to grow into one of the country's biggest labor organizations. Now, its campaign manual -- which the union recently had to file during discovery in a federal court proceeding -- offers an unprecedented glimpse of how the union operates. It's not a pretty picture.

The SEIU manual instructs union activists on how to conduct a "corporate campaign." This consists of a union pressuring an employer to give in to worker demands by employing aggressive methods, including generating negative media coverage, filing complaints with regulators, and disrupting relationships between businesses and their customers, vendors, and lenders.

A union conducting a corporate campaign will often enlist the help of third parties sympathetic to the broader progressive agenda -- environmental activists, consumer groups, "human rights" advocates, and the like. For instance, an environmental group sympathetic to the union might accuse the company which the union is targeting of polluting, while the union itself might go after the firm's access to capital by attacking its creditworthiness.

The SEIU manual instructs union activists how to disrupt their employer's operations, undermine company profits, and even harass managers at their homes and in their communities.

It also encourages workers to lower their productivity, stating, "In many cases, the most powerful worksite tactic is for members to do only what they are required to do by the union contract and no more." If reducing productivity is not enough, SEIU then calls for personal attacks on managers, encouraging workers to make "life more difficult for them as individuals," through such methods as leafleting outside of their homes and at community gatherings.