LIUNA Pays $12M to Bust a Union

by | Oct 6, 2011 | Labor Relations Ink

A disclaimer up front – no one is suggesting this is the most fiscally responsible or effective (let alone legal) means to remain union free!  But if you’re the newly appointed management of LIUNA local 183 in Toronto, and your new staff has just completed an end run around you to representation by SEIU, and no one holds you accountable for how you spend millions of dues dollars, and because you do God’s work labor laws really shouldn’t apply to you, then paying off the entire newly unionized staff to quit just might seem like your best next move.  Neither SEIU nor LIUNA would discuss terms of the staff buyouts. However two sources familiar with the terms confirm that Local 183 would be paying out between $10 million and $12.5 million to departing staffers with individual buyout packages ranging from $30K to almost $400 thousand dollars. As always, nothing brings out union hypocrisy like a staff union drive, especially when SEIU is involved on either end of the dispute. Here, on the one hand you have LIUNA international president Terry O’Sullivan declaring SEIU is “not welcome in any way, shape or form” in his workplace (something he doesn’t technically get to decide, by the way) and SEIU local 2 is nothing but “a cheese-eating rat.”(So there!)  And on the other hand you have SEIU sure to walk away with some tasty bite of union cheddar in exchange for abandoning to their night terrors the new LIUNA staff members coming in. LIUNA described the drive and SEIU contract as “a travesty of trade union democracy and an outrageous interference” by SEIU Local 2 in LIUNA affairs. And never to be outshone in the travesty of trade union democracy category, LIUNA local executives then went on to force staffers, at risk of losing their severance packages, to hold a protest against their own new union at SEIU offices in July. “How can you trust a union that fires its own staff for getting organized,” asked Maria Da Silva, a veteran worker who lost her job in the purge.  Better yet, how could anyone want a union that would squander millions in members’ dues just to keep their own workforce union free?

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