Global efforts continue by SEIU to convince everyone they should be able to raise a family on McDonald’s entry level wages. Hoping for a global minimum wage revolt, instigating by organizers has taken place all over the globe:
In Europe, Lorenz Keller, who works for the Swiss trade union Unia, said that members from his group were protesting outside several McDonald’s branches in Zurich and would soon start actions in Geneva.
Banner-waving activists in New Zealand were the first to hit the streets Thursday, as they protested outside a McDonald’s in Auckland.
In the Philippines,young protesters held a singing and dancing flash mob inside a McDonald’s on Manila’s Quezon Avenue during the morning rush-hour.
In Japan, where protests were planned in 30 cities, co-organizer Manabu Natori failed to find a Ronald costume in time, but was encouraged by the public response to a protest for a higher minimum wage, held outside a downtown Tokyo McDonald’s.
The use of Occupy style techniques are no coincidence:
One U.S. Chamber of Commerce official says the protest is a sham. “These union-produced, made-for-media protests have repeatedly failed to gain support from more than a handful of actual workers,” said vice president Glenn Spencer, in a statement.
For workers and organizers of the strike, the media attention on a global basis is huge.
“The Occupy Movement is not dead,” says Witold Henisz, management professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m forecasting a period of tension and political activism over what’s fair and what’s right.”
SEIU has continued to take advantage of Occupy techniques and contacts in their continued efforts:
The local groups look spontaneous, traveling under names with an appeal to average citizens who merely want to make a positive difference in their communities. Examples: “Good Jobs, Great Houston”; “Good Jobs, Better Baltimore”; “One Pittsburgh”; “Fight for Philly”; and “Minnesotans for a Fair Economy.” Nobody could be “against” good jobs – that’s why they are such useful fronts.
Pollock cited a Seattle group, “Working Washington” as an example. This group is registered with the State of Washington as a corporation, with one Secky Fascione as its agent. Fascione’s LinkedIn profile lists her as an “Organizing Coordinator at SEIU.” Then there is cited the case of the Los Angeles-based “Good Jobs LA.” Its legal name is “Good Jobs, Safe Communities LA.” The California state registry lists its address as the same as the SEIU’s state headquarters.
A Washington, D.C.-area group, Our DC, takes this disingenuous mode of behavior to an extreme. Incorporation papers reveal its legal address to be not in the District of Columbia, as its name suggests, but in suburban Gaithersburg, Md. Its address is the same as SEIU Local 500. And its website, while not providing the names of directors or officers, does provide the street address of SEIU national headquarters. Pollock went ahead and obtained documents pertaining to the group’s April 2011 incorporation, discovering that its three-member board of David Rodich, Valarie Long and Beth Myers were anything but amateurs. Rodich and Myers are well-compensated salaried employees of SEIU Local 500; Rodich, in fact, serves as executive director. Long, meanwhile, is executive vice president of the Service Employees and formerly had headed the New York City-based SEIU 32BJ, which represents more than 120,000 janitors, doormen, security guards and other building service workers along the East Coast. The executive director for Our DC, Kendall Fells, is also an SEIU employee. The dots have a way of connecting.
Have no doubt about where this is really coming from:
The strike’s organizer says that the fast-food giants have the money to pay reasonable wages. “At the end of the day, there is more than enough money to pay these workers $15 an hour,” says Kendall Fells, the 34-year-old organizer of Fast Food Forward, who marched with protesters in New York on Thursday. Two-thirds of the the workers are women — and most of them have children, he says. “They’re just trying to support their families and makes ends meet.”
Fast Food Forward is financed by Service Employees International Union, a union group with more than two million members.
When you watched the Colbert report and saw guest Naquasia LeGrand, opining about her low wage and high cost of living, keep in mind that she was specifically recruited by SEIU sponsored Fast Food Forward, run by Kendall Fells:
When LeGrand was first approached by organizers of the group Fast Food Forward, her grandmother told her to stay away from unions. Her life has been a whirlwind since. She started organizing small fast-food protests and flash strikes in the city, and eventually in more than 100 cities across the country. A newspaper profile of her led to the Jan. 16 appearance on “Colbert,” and that led to her trip to Washington.
Last month, LeGrand was invited along with other fast food workers to watch as Obama signed an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay $10.10 an hour. “I don’t care if I was in the back, I was in the White House with the president in front of me!” she said.
She also attended the House Democratic Retreat in Cambridge, Md., and spoke at a workshop on raising the minimum wage moderated by Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota.”Movements will throw up leaders,” Ellison said. “This low-wage worker movement has thrown up Naquasia.”
No, not really. Naquasia was not an organic result of a grassroots movement, but a specifically recruited pawn for SEIU.
The Daily Caller did a series on this effort back in 2012, illustrating the many different names and websites used, yet all operating under SEIU. Fast Food Forward is just another to add to that list.
The politically aggressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has quietly created a national network of at least eight community-organizing groups, some of which function alongside the Occupy Wall Street movement, a Daily Caller investigation shows.
Incorporated by the SEIU as local non-profits, the groups are waging concerted local political campaigns to publicly attack conservative political figures, banks, energy companies and other corporations.
Each local group has portrayed itself as an independent community organization not tied to any special interest. But they were founded, incorporated, and led by SEIU personnel.
The individual activist groups use benign-sounding names including This Is Our DC; Good Jobs, Great Houston; Good Jobs, Better Baltimore; Good Jobs Now in Detroit; Fight for Philly; One Pittsburgh; Good Jobs LA; and Minnesotans for a Fair Economy.
In reality, they are creations of the wealthy and influential labor union, amounting to a secret network of new SEIU front groups.
Patrick Poole of PJ Media exposed the same SEIU sponsored techniques in late 2013:
UPDATE2: So who is “Good Jobs Nation”? Jonathan Adler points me to this Washington Post article that explains:
The group formed about six months ago as a coalition of like-minded labor groups. Its funding comes largely from unions, including the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Farm Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, according to organizers.
So they were, in fact, a SEIU rent-a-mob.
Entry level fast food jobs requiring no previous experience or skills were never intended to raise a family on, and it is disingenuous for SEIU to convince the workers otherwise. As many of us can recall, those are the jobs we took in high school to get our foot in the door, save money for our first car, or put some funds aside for college, so we could learn the skills for a job that actually could support a family. However, in the devastating economy that the Progressives have reigned over, you have to blame someone for a lack of decent paying jobs. You surely can’t let people think it is the current leadership at fault. And gain thousands of new union paying members at the same time? It’s an SEIU dream come true.
Equalizing entry level wages to a level that would enable people to raise a family is called the “redistribution of wealth”, or as Progressives prefer to call it, “income equality”. Other terms you may have heard for it in the past would be socialism or communism. There is no incentive for self improvement, it is not a free economy, it is not freedom in any way and it does not work. But it does ensure votes and new union members.
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