Rep. Carolyn McCarthy nails an anti-union consultant during yesterday’s Employee Free Choice Act hearings. (From the AFL-CIO’s blog):
At the hearing by the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, Jen Jason, a former organizer for UNITE HERE union, trashed unions and their members, while claiming to be a proponent of social justice.
What Jason didn’t say is that she is a high-priced, anti-union consultant until a subcommittee member asked her about it.
Jason left UNITE HERE in the middle of an organizing campaign to go over to the other side as a management consultant—for which her firm was paid $225,000 for the first year.
The website for her firm—Six Questions Consulting—proclaims: “We help management implement long-term union avoidance programs.” Jason didn’t tell the subcommittee that her first client was Cintas—the commercial laundry giant whose employees she had been trying to organize as a UNITE HERE employee a few months earlier.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), a member of the subcommittee, cut to the heart of the matter after Jason told her under questioning how much her firm was paid. McCarthy told Jason:
It seems like you have a conflict of interest on a number of issues.
If you’re not familiar with Cintas, you need to know that Jason is working for the most profitable uniform and laundry company in North America with profits of more than $300 million last year, but whose workers are barely making a living.
In 2003, Cintas workers at plants across North America joined together to demand decent wages, affordable insurance and safe working conditions. According to the UNITE HERE website:
- Most Cintas production workers report earning wages between $7 and $9 per hour, forcing many employees to struggle to support their families on below-poverty paychecks.
- Cintas drivers across the country are suing the company for $100 million, alleging they were denied overtime pay for many years.
So much for supporting social justice.
Somewhat relatedly Ed at the AFT does a labor roundup.
2 Comments:
1 Jackie Bennett
· Feb 11, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Always interesting to follow the money.
2 MichaelB
· Feb 12, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I’ve been impressed with the ads the AFL-CIO is running in support of this legislation. They’re informative and eye-opening accounts of individual workers’ experiences in trying to organize unions. They give the public insight into what dirty tricks go on during organizing drives.
I’ve often wondered why the UFT can’t run similarly substantive ads. Why not take all these hot-shot Fellows and career changers (I’m not being sarcastic – I’ve seen new teachers with very impressive credentials) and have them tell how unexpectedly tough their experience in the public school system has been. It would be a great counterweight to the “get tough on teachers” rhetoric the newspapers always push during contract negotiations. We could actually inform the public about what our jobs are like and, who knows, maybe even make them to want to IMPROVE our working conditions.
Instead, we run those expensive, fluffy, no-substance campaigns like “Have you listened to a teacher today?” What kind of crap is that? We have the money, let’s tell our stories, just like the AFL-CIO is doing.