JULY 22, 2008 - In a repeat of what has become an all too familiar scenario, SEIU has begun a new campaign to take over EAA. SEIU is invading the privacy of EAA members and agency-fee payers by calling them at their homes using the same illegally obtained listing of members’ names, addresses, and phone numbers that they used in 2001. Our members fully recognized in 2001 that, for a 150% dues increase, SEIU offered much less effective representation and loss of local control, a situation that is far worse now. Our members decisively defeated SEIU on its (lack of) merits. As before, SEIU is being aided by the same small group of EAA malcontents who cannot stand their own inability to convince and control our members.

SEIU has begun attacks on other unions throughout the United States and is under fire from many of its own members for their strong-arm techniques and top-down unionism. SEIU has become the ultimate “employer union”. Please read the article "Company Unionism" at this link, servingemployersinsteadofus.org, which identifies SEIU’s real priorities as voiced by its own president Andy Stern: 1. Cutting labor costs for employers, 2. Guaranteeing labor peace, 3. Protecting employers from regulation, 4. Heading off real healthcare reform, and ending employer health costs, 5. Saving CEOs from progressive unions.

The SEIU paid organizers, many brought in from outside Los Angeles, are trying to harass members into signing an “interest card” just to get rid of the annoying organizers. They are lying to our members by stating that the signing “does not hurt anything” or is “only to obtain more information”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Once your signature is affixed to an interest card, it cannot be retracted. The interest card is then used to file with the ERB for a representation election, a process that requires a considerable amount of time and your dues money. Signing one of these cards is signing away many of the benefits you currently enjoy with EAA, including:

• Signing away your low and fair dues structure – the lowest of all City unions. SEIU’s dues are 150% higher! That is 2.5 times your current dues rate!
• Signing away your fully democratic and open elections.
• Signing away your local autonomy without interference from a national organization with its own agenda. SEIU has merged locals into giant mega-locals to diminish local voices and representation, and appointed non-elected officials to run the new locals.
• Signing away your ability to set negotiating priorities and instead making yourself subject to back-room underhanded deals made by people outside California.
• Signing away a union where you know your Board from the workplace. City employees are only a small percentage of the members of SEIU’s so-called “local”.
• Signing away representation by effective labor representatives who represent members’ cases of merit to final conclusion, demonstrated by the fact that EAA has filed far more “Unfair Employee Relations Practice” claims than SEIU despite representing about the same number of City employees.
• Signing away local labor representatives available in the workplace. SEIU is adopting “member service centers”, i. e. call centers, warehoused far from the workplace, where workers must call to get help from their union. This approach is much like the ones we love so much from various companies’ no-help desks.
• Signing away local benefits such as the EAA dental, vision, acupuncture, and chiropractic plan, scholarship program, and the Holiday Target Gift Cards provided by your Board of Governors.

The best thing each member can do is tell the SEIU organizers “NO” and “to go away and leave you alone”. To assist you, EAA will post a series of articles about representation and SEIU. All articles will be initially posted on our home page and subsequently saved on individual page with titles and links to all previous articles. We will additionally provide links to articles on the subject from various sources.

The actions of SEIU are contrary to the concepts of union togetherness and mutual support and are a direct violation of the “no-raid pact” signed by every union when it becomes a member of the County Federation of Labor. Instead of trying to grow the labor movement by recruiting new union members and supporters from those not fortunate enough to be represented by unions, SEIU takes, by any means, members successfully organized and represented by others.