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 What might the NFL Players Association and Cooper Tires have in common? As we have reported, Cooper Tire locked out their employees when the union stalled contract talks, and the NFL experienced a similar circumstance last summer. The Courier.com quoted LRI President Phil Wilson on the strange “show of support:”
“If it was NASCAR drivers saying, ‘We won’t use your tires,’ that might make a difference,” said Wilson. “But I don’t think Cooper will negotiate based on what a bunch of football players think.”
It is an interesting display of the seemingly growing trend of unions showing cross-support for each others corporate campaigns, boycotts, pickets and other actions.
  
 LRI president Phil Wilson is again quoted in the Christian Science Monitor series more closely examining the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
“One should not assume that because some group doesn’t have a visible leader or leaders it’s not still being led, says Phil Wilson, president and general counsel of the Labor Relations Institute in Oklahoma.
‘It’s common practice for professional organizers, particularly union organizers to agitate and manipulate people into action in ways that make it all seem ‘grassroots’ and thus more valid or authentic,’ Mr. Wilson says. ‘As an added bonus, without a visible leader there is no one to examine more closely or attack.’”
LRI president Phil Wilson has been quoted in the Christian Science Monitor on the role of labor unions in the Occupy Wall Street protests.
| “While it is (intentionally) unclear for how long or how much unions have been involved in planning, supporting and funding the current Wall Street protests, there is little doubt that their fingerprints are on it either directly or through front organizations,” says Phillip Wilson, president of the Labor Relations Institute. “What we know for certain is unions will now be openly providing the organizing and financial support a large sustained protest needs.” |
Seems we got the dander up of one of the Philly.com writers with the release of our Poster-Proof kit. The kit is designed to mitigate the fallout of having to post the new NLRB poster informing employees of their “right to organize.”
Meanwhile, Labor Relations Institute, an Oklahoma-based group that counsels companies on union avoidance, has responded by offering a $995 “Employee Communication Package.” It includes several DVDs and a laminated counterposter to hang next to the NLRB poster and tell “the rest of the story.”
“Judo uses the momentum and energy of your opponent against him. This is the concept behind our Poster Proof Plan,” the group’s website says. “Don’t just take the hit. Pivot in a way that puts you in the stronger position!”
 McKnight’s Long Term Care News & Assisted Living contacted LRI president Phil Wilson to get his perspective on the challenges facing the industry. An August webinar led by Wilson, Rising Storm in LTC, highlighted dozens of issues converging in the LTC arena, making it a highly-charged environment susceptible to continued union organizing pressure.
“If you look at next year,” Wilson says, “you’re going to see brutal political campaigns, possibly a second recession but certainly not any dramatic [economic] growth, long-term care will stay under the same pressures it’s been under, and more and more people are going to be in nursing homes.”
 E-Commerce Times interviewed Phil Wilson on the end of the Verizon strike and the potential ramifications.
“This settlement is clearly a loss for the CWA and the IBEW,” Wilson commented.
“The unions have substantially reduced their leverage in negotiations,” he said. “Verizon is very unlikely to believe that the unions will strike again based on this settlement. While I am sure Verizon wanted to stop the service disruptions and bad publicity from the strike, they clearly proved they were able to continue operating during the strike.”
Read the entire article here.
 SEIU seems to have a full plate, as the NLRB just announced an order that will lead to a re-run of the huge Kaiser election in California. The election involved 43,000 employees, and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) charged SEIU with election improprieties that the NLRB upheld. The election was originally between no representation, representation by the incumbent United Healthcare Workers (part of SEIU), and the SEIU breakaway, NUHW. An administrative law judge ruled that SEIU improperly coerced workers caught in the middle of the high-stakes turf battle between SEIU and NUHW.
 SEIU launched a seven-figure media campaign in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Virginia, targeted at African-American and
Continue reading SEIU Watch
You may have often seen the Daily Kos as a source for stories covered in INK. The liberal blog has now launched a new sub-blog titled “Daily Kos Labor.” This new venture describes as its purpose
“to re-inject the voices and concerns of workers into economic coverage. In this, Daily Kos Labor pushes back against the trend of recent decades, in which, as corporations and their Republican allies have waged a class war against the middle class, the voices of working people have fallen out of the story the media tells about work, business and the American economy.”
The July 20th announcement on The Daily Kos put it this way:
“We’re obviously not ashamed to call a spade a spade, and Daily Kos labor will focus heavily on this New Class War. Additionally, we’ll integrate much of this work with our activism efforts, to give
Continue reading When Liberals Attack: the Launch of Daily Kos Labor
 Connected Planet interviewed Phil Wilson to gain some insight into the filing of Unfair Labor Practice charges amid the strike by the Communication Workers of America against Verizon. As Phil explained, “They’re both arguing that the other side is not bargaining in good faith,” and the filings were basically saber rattling.
Phil described the typical process, and clarified that the usual NLRB process takes a month or two to investigate accusations of the sort embodied by the ULPs, but that strikes against U.S. telcos have generally lasted only a few weeks. It is typical that once they come to an agreement on contract terms, they will drop the charges against each other.
Three artists, an attorney and two citizen art lovers are still hoping for a jury trial in their suit against the state of Maine for denying them what they are describing as their First Amendment rights to look at a mural. (And we are not making this up.) The mural broadly reinterprets and glorifies the state’s union history while vilifying Maine employers. Current Republican governor Paul Lepage claimed the mural was offensive to business and had it removed and stored in a “climate controlled undisclosed location” in March as all holy union hell was being unleashed in Wisconsin. And before any dust could settle, the Daily Kos was calling the Lepage Administration the “American Taliban”, the mural had its own Facebook page (in exile) and Maine moderate Republicans were cowering in the glare of unchained union wrath.
 The Not So Funny Side of the Maine Mural War
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What might the NFL Players Association and Cooper Tires have in common? As we have reported, Cooper Tire locked out their employees when the union stalled contract talks, and the NFL experienced a similar circumstance last summer. The Courier.com quoted LRI President Phil Wilson on the strange “show of support:”
The Not So Funny Side of the Maine Mural War