Company Takes On SEIU Anti-Business, Anti-Job Extortion

the Largest Food Service Company in the United States is suing SEIU for extortion under RICO (Racketerr Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).

I have to admit, I prefer the Redstate article title to my own: “Sodexo Slaps SEIU Cockroaches With RICO Suit.”

Services Leader Seeks to End SEIU’s Campaign of Extortion

GAITHERSBURG, Md., March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Sodexo USA today filed a civil lawsuit against the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other defendants under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to stop the illegal campaign of extortion that the SEIU has been waging in the U.S. for over a year.

“This is about protecting the Company’s business and the rights of our employees to vote freely about union representation,” said Robert Stern, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Sodexo USA.  “We work constructively with unions every day but the SEIU has crossed the line by breaking the law. We will not tolerate the SEIU’s tactics any longer. Their campaign jeopardizes our Company and our employees’ jobs, and ultimately would rob our employees of their right to vote.”

Sodexo USA has filed the lawsuit seeking to halt the SEIU’s extortionate threats and barrage of unlawful tactics. The complaint alleges acts of SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.

Sodexo USA recognizes the value of union activity and has built positive relationships with more than 30 different unions.  Over 15 percent of Sodexo USA’s workforce is unionized, which is more than twice the national average for the private sector, and the Company has more than 300 collective bargaining agreements.  Despite this positive record, the SEIU has engaged in a vicious campaign to force the Company into broadly recognizing the SEIU to the exclusion of other unions without allowing its employees in the U.S. to exercise their right to vote for or against the SEIU in a federally supervised secret ballot election.

The complaint alleges that the SEIU, in face to face meetings, threatened Sodexo USA’s executives that it would harm Sodexo USA’s business unless they gave in to the union, and then carried out its threats through egregious behavior, including:

• throwing plastic roaches onto food being served by Sodexo USA at a high profile event;
• scaring hospital patients by insinuating that Sodexo USA food contained bugs, rat droppings, mold and flies;
• lying to interfere with Sodexo USA business and sneaking into elementary schools to avoid security;
• violating lobbying laws to steer business away from Sodexo USA, even at the risk of costing Sodexo USA employees their jobs; and
• harassing Sodexo USA employees by threatening to accuse them of wrongdoing.

The complaint, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, seeks an injunction against the SEIU and its locals and executives, as well as monetary damages to be determined by the court.Sodexo, Inc. (www.sodexoUSA.com), leading Quality of Daily Life Solutions company in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, delivers On Site Service Solutions in Corporate, Education, Health Care, Government, and Remote Site segments, as well as Motivation Solutions such as Esteem Pass. Sodexo, Inc., headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., funds all administrative costs for the Sodexo Foundation (www.SodexoFoundation.org), an independent charitable organization that, since its founding in 1999, has made more than $15 million in grants to fight hunger in America. Visit the corporate blog at www.sodexoUSA.com/blog.

Unions invariably talk about standing up for the “little guy.”  But nobody tears down the little guy like unions today:

But workers at the Dana Corporation Auto Parts plant in Albion, Ind., say the card check process has nearly torn the 50-person plant apart after harassment and intimidation from the United Auto Workers union forced them to a secret-ballot vote.

A union organizer came to the plant two years ago to ask employees to join the UAW because the company had signed a neutrality agreement with the union.

The meeting, however, did not go well, according to plant employee Larry Guest.

“He was using real rough language — cursing. It didn’t go over well with the women at all. There were a couple that just got up and left,” Guest told FOX News.

Employees said union representatives approached them in the break room, at the plant doors and even followed them to their cars.

“He was just like an itch that you couldn’t scratch. He just wouldn’t go away,” said employee Rita Murphy.

“After a while we realized he was going to be here morning, noon and night until he got his numbers that he needed,” said Betty Pop.

Dana employee Jamie Oliver told FOX News that she was approached at her home.

“We’re here in a little town and we’re a plant of 50 some people — you know the last thing you need is to have the union coming to your door saying I want your name,” Oliver said.

The union’s relentless approach, she said, eventually wore her down.

“When they approach you every day — every day, every day,” she said, “after a while it’s like ‘Okay. Fine. I’ll sign the card.’”

Unions have become genuinely evil.  And in point of fact, they have been evil for a very long time.  And we have just witnessed this vile behavior in Wisconsin, as the same people who constantly demonized the Tea Parties are showing that THEY are the true demons – even as the Tea Parties try to clean up the massive damage the union rioters left behind.

Right now, public school teachers (i.e., government unionized schools) are threatening an illegal strike in Michigan.  Their claim is that what the state is doing to avoid financial catastrophe will hurt children, so these union thugs want to REALLY hurt children and families by violating the law to shut down the schools so they can force their agenda.

Detroit – where much of this battle is going on – is in ruins.  Some of it looks like a war-zone; other parts have been abandoned for decades.  And these labor unions that destroyed a thriving industrial city and the life that depended on the jobs created by those industries will not stop until they have sucked the life out of every city in America.  That is the legacy of unions today.

All I can say is that if you think the SEIU’s tactics of destroying a business so they can force their union in is good for jobs, you are a serious, serious fool.

More Self-Referentially Absurd Claims Of Fox News Bias

The accusations of Fox News’ bias continue to prove that the real bias is coming from all the other media outlets.

Barack Obama’s Communications Director Anita Dunn came out and demagogued Fox News for not rendering the proper Nazi salute for Obama and the Democrat agenda.  During the course of her spiel, she said:

“They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

It should be pointed out that CNN had actually just FACT CHECKED a Saturday Night Live sketch critical of Barack Obama.  Somehow, the weekly SNL lampooning of Sarah Palin which went on for four months never bothered CNN.

If that demonstration of leftwing bias wasn’t pathetic enough, CNN – the very next day following Anita Dunn’s holding them up as the paradigm of journalistic virtue – attacked conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh with fraudulent quotes as part of a massive liberal slander campaign.  Which somehow they didn’t feel the need to bother to fact check.

In a different forum, Anita Dunn said the following about how the Obama campaign team handled the media [Youtube]:

“But we, um, increasingly by the general election, very rarely, did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control.”

You can frankly only imagine what a snit such people could get in trying to deal with a media outlet that refused to allow itself to be controlled.

A discussion between George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” and Obama senior adviser David Axelrod from yesterday, October 18, continues the trend of the Obama White House demonizing Fox News on other media outlets — no matter how hypocritical it looks:

RUPERT MURDOCH, NEWSCORP: There were some strong remarks coming out of the White House about one or two of the commentators on Fox News.  And all I can tell you is it has tremendously increased their ratings.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: That does seem to be true. Are you worried that your strategy is fortifying your enemy?

AXELROD: Well, I don’t — you know, I’m not concerned. Mr. Murdoch has a — has a talent for making money, and I understand that their programming is geared toward making money. All — the only argument Anita was making is that they’re not really a news station, if you watch — even — it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.

And the bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.

Am I the only one who remembers that George Stephanopoulos was Bill Clinton’s press secretary and spin doctor before suddenly transforming into someone who was incapable of “pushing one point of view.”

By contrast, Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday” – Fox News’ counterpart to ABC’s “This Week” – is a career journalist who came to Fox News after a long stint at ABC.

Moral of the story: the only way for a broadcast media station to NOT “push a point of view” is to hire career Democrat political operatives.

Let us please face a basic fact: the media is absolutely ridden with liberals.  Career MSNBC and CBS journalist Mika Brzezinski had some amazing declarations about the extent to which liberals dominated the networks she worked for.

As yet another illustration of the double-speak dishonesty of the Obama administration, the White House was saying that they were going to start playing nice with Fox News on the very same day that David Axelrod was out further demonizing them.

Even the left is now realizing that Barack Obama is a spoiled brat and a “whiner-in-chief” who has become downright Nixonian in his endless inability to handle any kind of media criticism.

Fox News is actually quite accurate, indeed, according to numerous major independent media studies.

Here’s a recent Newsmax article regarding a recent survey from Sacred Heart University that begins, “Fox News has supplanted CNN as the ‘most trusted’ news source for Americans, a new nationwide poll finds.” Which is another way of saying most Americans completely disagree with you.

That survey reveals how insane the Obama White House is; they are directly attacking and demonizing the news network that Americans trust more than any other.

A study done jointly by the University of Chicago and Stanford University found Fox News to be more accurate than most other news outlets, in addition to finding a dramatic leftist bias in the news media overall.

In addition to that finding, a UCLA study concludes, “almost all major media outlets tilt to the left,” noting that “Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center.”   But apparently many liberals believe that a university located in liberal California in ultra-liberal Los Angeles is somehow a conservative bastion loaded with rightwing bias.

The media was actually so blatantly biased throughout its 2008 election coverage that it is completely accurate to say that we are now in a propaganda state. There is no possible way that Republicans can win in this media climate: whether you look at the Media Research Center, or at the Project for Excellence in Journalism (or again at their more recent study), or at the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Advertising Project, there is widespread agreement with one longtime ABC journalist that the media is dangerously biased.  Pew Research discovered that Americans believe by a 70% to 9% margin that the media is biased in favor of Obama and against McCain. The media now represents a fifth column of government – a propaganda wing – that routinely attacks conservatives and celebrates and defends Democrats and their leftwing ideology.  Democracy itself is going extinct in the country that founded democracy, because no free society can survive such a climate of propaganda.

Just how blatantly biased are journalists?

From Media Research:

89 percent of Washington-based reporters said they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.  Only seven percent voted for George Bush, with two percent choosing Ross Perot. […]

Based on the 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents who returned the Freedom Forum questionnaire, the Washington-based reporters — by an incredible margin of nine-to-one — overwhelmingly cast their presidential ballots in 1992 for Democrat Bill Clinton over Republican incumbent George Bush.

There is overwhelming historic evidence of hardcore leftwing bias throughout our mainstream media, but we’re somehow supposed to ignore the giant logs of bias located in both the mainstream media’s eyes and instead concentrate on the speck of bias at Fox News.

Major studies and surveys of media accuracy have for several years routinely discovered that the media is overwhelmingly tilted to the left. Fox News looks so “Republican” to many only because so much of the media is so utterly and completely “Democrat.”