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Redstate
Fast
Food No More: How The SEIU
& Union Front Groups Want To Occupy Your Big Mac
By Labor Union Report
August 15th, 2013
With
union bosses once again
clamoring that they are ‘in crisis,’ union bosses are looking to expand
their
membership into areas that have been traditionally immune to unions.
For
the last several months,
union-supported fast food workers have been staging “impromptu” strikes
throughout the country.
Like
the union-supported Occupy
movement before it, the fast-food workers’ efforts are being
coordinated by
media-savvy professional organizers employed by the Service Employees
International Union, a union front group called ROC (Restaurant
Opportunities
Center), as well as an assorted array of pro-union politicians and
“community
activist” groups.
In
actuality, however, the entire
fast-food effort is part of a four-year old plan cooked up by the
Service
Employees International Union (SEIU).
So
far, the union-funded protesters
are demanding raises to $15–more than twice the minimum wage–under the
slick
campaign slogan “Fight for $15.” However, the true aim of the SEIU and
its
allies is to unionize the industry and it appears the SEIU is about to
launch a
full-out blitzkrieg fast food joints across the country.
Based
on an interview with
Salon.com, it seems that SEIU boss Mary Kay Henry, using typical
Marxist logic,
is trying to alter the world of the french-frying proletariat and
bourgeoisie.
“It’s
more about, ‘How do we shift
things in the entire low-wage economy?’” she claims.
Henry
was joined by SEIU assistant
to the president for organizing Scott Courtney, who said to expect “a
big
escalation” from fast food workers in “the next week or 10 days.”
…“The
story is leverage in and of
itself.” And “the fact that workers are taking these risks I think is
our
leverage.”
Where
does that leverage lead?
Could the endgame be a deal where corporations agree to pave the way
for union
negotiations and the union agrees before formal bargaining to carve out
some
parts of the country or cap the potential increase in labor costs? “It
could be
something like that,” said Courtney. “I think anything you know about
traditional collective bargaining is possible,” said Henry, “and then
things we
haven’t imagined.” She added that innovations may be necessary to
address the
franchisee structure of the industry, in which fast food corporations
set the
business model – and reap substantial portions of the revenue — but
don’t
directly employ many of the workers. Could that franchisee structure
itself be
vulnerable to political or legal challenge? “Yeah, I think there’s a
lot of
areas,” said Courtney. “But again, it’s brand-new” and “certainly not
fleshed
out.” [Emphasis added.]
While
Courtney claims “it’s brand
new,” the reality is the SEIU’s strategy is only an altered version of
its 2009
blueprint:
Initiate
a focused experiment in
one or two metro areas to test the organizing theory and bring
resources to
bear on a limited geographical target…
Read
the rest of the article at Redstate
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