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.
On two occasions in 2011, approximately 30 Our DC protesters descended on the congressional office of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The first of those two December efforts was part of a “Take Back the Capital” campaign orchestrated by union officials and coinciding with an Occupy DC rally.
A source told the Daily Caller that while African-American and Hispanic protesters sat in McConnell’s office, two Caucasian women from Our DC directed the protesters from the hallway. The staffers called reporters, operated laptops and posted messages to Twitter.
That event was promoted through a “99% in DC” website, which Internet Web server records indicate was managed by the union. But Our DC activists were quick to advise local media outlets not to confuse them with the Occupy movement.
Still, Washington activists themselves reported on an “Occupy K Street” rally later that same weekend in which Occupy DC and Our DC groups marched side by side.
Other protest events organized by Our DC have targeted House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf.
In the months since Occupy DC began growing in numbers and influence, Our DC has cooperated with that movement at several protest rallies.
One was the “National Day of Action for the 99%,” which shut down portions of the Francis Scott Key Bridge connecting Washington, D.C. with the state of Virginia.
Another was the series of demonstrations against the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. At that event, Our DC members wearing the group’s t-shirts carried “We are the 99%” signs alongside Occupy DC protesters.
A YouTube video titled “Occupy CPAC” shows an “Our DC member speak[ing]” through a megaphone in front of several “99%” signs.
Another video, shot at the same location and published by The Huffington Post, shows a giant “Occupy United” banner in front of protesters waving identical “99%” signs.
The SEIU’s connection to Our DC and other local groups is clear. An SEIU-tied Washington, D.C. law firm incorporated each of them. The founding board members are solely SEIU executives and organizers. In each city the founding addresses match those of SEIU locals.
For example, the legal name of the Los Angeles group “Good Jobs LA,” is “Good Jobs, Safe Communities LA.” It is registered with the California Secretary of State at the Sacramento headquarters address of SEIU California.
The street addresses listed on many of the websites themselves, however, do not correspond with SEIU locals.
At least one of the websites, “One Pittsburgh,” provides a list of 14 “coalition partners,” including the NAACP, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, and locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers and an Ironworkers union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The SEIU is among that list, making its role appear minor.
The Daily Caller previously reported on a similar tactic employed in February by the United Auto Workers, which sought to distance itself from a “99% Spring” campaign scheduled for April. Planning documents described that union as one participant of many, even though the documents were being distributed from an unprotected portion of a UAW Web server.
Many of the Internet domain names for the groups’ websites were originally registered through an anonymous proxy service. But records compiled by Robtex.com, a website reputation management firm, reveal that all of their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses link back to a main SEIU Web server.
An IP address is a unique number assigned to an Internet-connected computer or computer network.
The principal IP address of the SEIU’s main Web server reveals an inventory of 69 Web domains representing union and advocacy groups throughout the United States. All of the sites corresponding to the city-specific SEIU front groups are on that server.
Most of their websites have similar visual designs and appear to be based on the same template — a template that The Daily Caller was able to identify on an unprotected SEIU server.
As 501 (c)(4) non-profit organizations, the SEIU-related groups are tax-exempt, meaning they do not pay federal taxes on their income. Their donors, however, are not entitled to deduct their contributions on their own income tax returns.
While the Occupy movement abhors corporate secrecy, demanding that Wall Street firms and banks open their books, the new SEIU network is marked by a lack of transparency that runs afoul of best-practice standards established by the non-profit and philanthropic communities.
While the union is creating non-profits that mask its relationship to the union, the world of mainstream charities has been moving toward greater openness.
Daniel Borochoff, the president of CharityWatch, a national watchdog group that evaluates charities for donors, says the SEIU and its offspring are dishonest.
“I would call it lying by omission. By leaving stuff out that’s relevant, it’s a passive way of not telling the truth,” he told The Daily Caller.
“If this union is playing a major role in the governance, policy and politics of the organization, it should not be hidden. It should be up-front about this,” Borochoff added.
For attorney Jeff Hurwit, the groups’ secrecy is contrary to the principals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“If you’re calling for openness and transparency and to organize it in way that’s secretive, that’s hypocritical,” he told The Daily Caller.
Hurwit is a principal in the Boston-based law firm of Hurwit & Associates. Nationally, his firm represents more than 2,500 non-profit organizations.
While he is sympathetic to the cause of Occupy Wall Street, Hurwit said secrecy has no place in the movement. “Who are the stewards of your organization, the trustees, the directors, so there would be confidence in your organization?”
SEIU is a well-endowed labor union with national reach, receiving dues from more than 2 million members, mainly workers in the service and hotel industries. Its annual budget exceeds $209 million. In 2011 the union spent more than $1.5 million just lobbying Congress, according to records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Carl Horowitz, who directs the Organized Labor Accountability Project at the National Legal and Policy Center, said creating new organizations out of whole cloth is a time-tested labor union strategy.
“Unions very commonly disguise their motives behind some seemingly innocuous nonprofit citizen group — some concerned, ad hoc grassroots group of citizens who are simply concerned about jobs, their neighborhoods, their country,” he told The Daily Caller.
“Deep down, when you look at who’s providing the money and the leadership, it’s directed by a union. This is their style.”
The organization’s name — “Our DC” — suggests a home-grown organization based in Washington and created by its citizens.
Incorporation papers obtained by The Daily Caller, however, show that its legal address is in Gaithersburg, Md. — the headquarters address of SEIU Local 500. That union office is about midway between the nation’s capital and Baltimore, Md.
The Our DC website does not identify its board of directors, officers, staff, funding or union affiliation. It does provide the street address of SEIU’s national headquarters — not its legal address in Md. — in small print.
Our DC was incorporated in April 2011 as a 501(c)(4) non-profit by SEIU lawyers, according to legal documents obtained by the Daily Caller. Those papers show the original Our DC board consisted of David Rodich, Valarie Long and Beth Myers. Rodich and Myers both work for Maryland Local 500, Rodich as executive director.
Long is the SEIU’s executive vice president. She was previously vice president of the massive SEIU Local 32BJ, based in Washington. That local organizes more than 120,000 property service workers, including janitors, doormen, window-washers, building superintendents and security officers.
Despite the use by Our DC of “99 percent” rhetoric usually identified with the Occupy movement, Rodich and Long both receive comfortable six-figure salaries. The Center for Union Facts reports that Rodich was paid $146,000 in 2010. Long’s 2010 salary was $155,000.
The Center also discloses that Kendall Fells, the executive director of Our DC, is an SEIU employee. His SEIU salary in 2010 was $102,400.
The SEIU used the law firm of Trister, Ross, Schadler and Gold to legally incorporate many of the local community groups. The firm was responsible for incorporating the groups in Houston, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington.
Michael Trister, the firm’s principal partner, is a well-known labor lawyer. In 1998 he wrote a federal election law manual for union lawyers.
The union frequently uses his firm as litigation and regulatory counsel. In October, for example, Trister law partner Laurence Gold submitted comments on New York’s campaign finance law on behalf of SEIU Local 323BJ in New York City.
Trister is listed on Our DC’s incorporation papers as one of the three formal incorporators. The other two are employees in his law office.
Trister did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to criticism from Charity Watch, other non-profit watchdogs differ with the SEIU’s choice of assembling front groups to wage their battles.
The Charities Review Council, an independent resource for donors, advises nonprofits to list their board of directors on their web site for public inspection along with financial information.
The Council on Foundations agrees and indicates that all nonprofits should “avoid any conflict of interest in its operations and, where possible, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict.”
Independent Sector, which represents 600 nonprofits, is also tough on public disclosure of ownership and board members. “A charitable organization should adopt and implement policies and procedures to ensure that all conflicts of interest, or the appearance thereof, within the organization and the board are appropriately managed through disclosure,” the watchdog says.
Hurwit concluded that the SEIU operation violates these ethical rules, and more.
“What really gets me,” he said, “is when someone tries to come and take over like this kind of thing, [and] then is not open, transparent or even truthful,”
Our DC spokesman James Adams declined on three separate occasions to discuss with The Daily Caller anything related to his organization. The SEIU also did not return phone messages left with its communication department.
The organizations — including This Is Our DC; Good Jobs, Great Houston; Good Jobs, Better Baltimore; Detroit’s Good Jobs Now; Fight for Philly; One Pittsburgh; Good Jobs LA; and Minnesotans for a Fair Economy — employ “flash demonstrations” and other tactics to deluge their political targets with protesters, sometimes numbering in the hundreds.
TheDC first reported Monday on the secretive ties between these organizations and the SEIU. Their elaborate and sometimes lavish protests, some with expensive-looking production values, advance the giant labor union’s interests without exposing the SEIU directly to criticism from the public.
Since Monday, TheDC has identified another organization in this network: “Working Washington,”whose Seattle-based website mentions nothing about its SEIU ties. That site, however — like those of the other front groups — is hosted on a server that TheDC traced back to the SEIU.
In keeping with the SEIU’s pattern, Working Washington’s corporate registration filed with the state government in Olympia, Wash. lists Secky Fascione as its registered agent. On her LinkedIn profile, Fascione identifies herself as an “Organizing Coordinator at SEIU.”
The union’s connection to its localized network is clear. An SEIU-tied Washington, D.C. law firm incorporated each group. Founding board members are SEIU executives and organizers, and the organizations’ founding addresses match those of SEIU locals in each city.
TheDC’s investigation has also revealed numerous instances of these groups working in concert with local offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In November 2011, Good Jobs LA, a Los Angeles-based SEIU front group, joined forces with Occupy LA to demonstrate outside Bank of America locations. The Los Angeles Police Department sent riot police to the scene. Eventually twenty protesters were arrested.
A month earlier, Occupy Pittsburgh joined with the SEIU-linked One Pittsburgh to protest outside the district office of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. The demonstration was billed as an anti-Wall Street event, but with SEIU’s influence it became a protest against Toomey’s “no” vote on advancing President Obama’s American Jobs Act legislation — a failed bill that would have benefited unions.
The Pittsburgh City Paper reported that Corey Buckner, a 24-year-old member of One Pittsburgh, said that while Occupy Pittsburgh and his organization aren’t formally connected, the two movements — in the reporters’s words – “go hand-in-hand.”
“We’re all here for the same thing,” Buckner told the newspaper.
More recently, on Feb. 3, 2012 Occupy Baltimore partnered with MoveOn.org and the SEIU-connected Good Jobs, Better Baltimore for a protest at a Wells Fargo bank branch.
“Make Wall Street pay — move your money to a credit union,” said MoveOn.org’s Mary Hill at the protest, according to the independent news outlet Baltimore Brew, which noted the presence of representatives from “Good Jobs, Better Baltimore, 1199 SEIU, 32BJ SEIU and Occupy Baltimore.”
Kristerfer Burnett, whom Baltimore Brew described as “a community organizer for Good Jobs Better Baltimore,” said the protest was the beginning of a campaign by what she characterized as a coalition of community organizations.
The SEIU, in general, opposes commercial banks that employ non-union labor and favors credit unions, many of which are operated for the benefit of labor unions themselves. The union maintains extensive negative online profiles of nonunionized banks, including Wells Fargo.
Partnerships between Occupy groups and SEIU-founded organizations extend to other parts of the United States as well. In mid-December 2011, a group of activists from Houston traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in several days of protests organized by Occupy groups and the SEIU-linked This is Our DC organization.
The “Texas Liberal” blog reported that week on an activist who “traveled to Washington with Occupy Houston and Good Jobs Great Houston to take the fight for economic fair play and the 99% to our elected officials and to the offices of the big lobbyists.”
Describing an Occupy DC blockade of Washington’s famed K Street where police arrested 62 demonstrators, the activist wrote that “[t]he first human chain was made up of union members, including a Houstonian with SEIU.”
Fight for Philly, another SEIU-founded organization, participated in the same weekend-long protest event. “Join thousands of 99%-ers who are coming to Washington, DC December 5-9 to take back the Capitol from corporate control,” its website announced.
“It’s time for the 99% to be a visible, peaceful presence on Capitol Hill. We’ll be offering free bus rides from Fight for Philly HQ to Washington DC. By day we’ll show up at Congressional hearings and the offices of K Street lobbyists, and by night we’ll crash in church auditoriums, union halls, and in tents around the Capitol.”
Spurred on by its December success helping to galvanizing anti-capitalist protesters, including Occupy groups, This Is Our DC dispatched several hundred angry protesters in February to a Marriott hotel in Washington to “confront” attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The protest was organized by the SEIU front group, but billed in many places as an Occupy DC event.
“Several hundred protesters have traveled from [sic] to D.C. from cities like Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York,” a press release from This Is Our DC read. “The demonstrators first came together at the Take Back the Capitol week of protests. At CPAC they stand together again demanding a nation that works for everyone, not just the 1%.”
The protesters wore new T-shirts, satin jackets and baseball caps printed with the “Our DC” logo. Their leader, John Butler, led the group in well-rehearsed chants. As they marched, their cadence was punctuated with a group of snare drums.
“What does democracy look like?” Butler asked through a bullhorn. “This is what democracy looks like” the group thundered back.
YouTube videos show the protesters at the end of their march lining up near buses to receive box lunches.
In the summer of 2011, This is Our DC staged what it called a “circus” on Capitol Hill, an event that coincided with an OccupyDC demonstration. The group arrived with clowns, hula-hoops and activists wearing multi-colored wigs, all aimed at mocking Republican House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Working Washington put its allegiance with the Occupy movement more succinctly, with an October 2011 online article titled “Occupy Seattle, We’re With You.”
The article quoted a Working Washington activist who had just returned from a trip to participate in an Occupy Wall Street protest. “I see democracy in action at these Occupy events,” she said. “This is what democracy looks like.”
Circuses and occupiers aside, the SEIU shadow groups’ typical tactics involve unannounced “flash” protests apparently designed to disrupt and intimidate.
Good Jobs, Better Baltimore provided a vivid example on October 26, 2011, when the faux community group pretended to be an independent group of citizens — one that suddenly massed to target the CEO of a company that has angered the SEIU by failing to employ unionized employees.
The Baltimore group sent protesters, unannounced, to the corporate offices of Constellation Energy to target its CEO.
In a press release identifying itself as a “grassroots group,” Good Jobs, Better Baltimore said it “descended on Constellation headquarters in full Halloween spirit with a 30 piece marching band and five foot jack-o-lantern to confront CEO Mayo Shattuck III.”
The protest was a public objection to what Good Jobs, Better Baltimore said were “false promises” about a proposed Constellation merger with Exelon. Instead, the group proposed what it called “an $810 million community workforce proposal that could create more than 1,000 new green jobs in Baltimore” — a program that would benefit SEIU-affiliated union workers.
In the summer of 2011 the Baltimore group filed a petition with the Maryland Public Service Commission to oppose the merger. In its filing, it said it was “a non-profit coalition of community groups, labor organizations and churches devoted to public policy, education and advocacy.”
There was no mention, however, that the SEIU had incorporated it in April 2011. The group’s corporate filings with the state of Maryland list 611 North Eutaw Street in Baltimore as its address — the same building that houses the union’s Maryland lobbying arm, called “1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East Maryland-DC Division”
A document obtained by The Daily Caller shows that those filings, formalizing the group’s incorporation, were submitted to state authorities by Vanessa Bliss. The Center for Union Facts, a non-profit watchdog, identifies Bliss as a “lead organizer” for SEIU.
In Pittsburgh, the SEIU-linked “One Pittsburgh” organization used intimidating tactics against workers and a company CEO to express its opposition to ExxonMobil’s purchase of two Pennsylvania-based shale oil drilling companies.
“EXXON, WE’RE COMING AT YA,” the group’s web site screamed in June 2011.
As part of their flash demonstration, a group of 300 One Pittsburgh activists suddenly descended on a local Exxon gas station and its unsuspecting workers. Panicked employees called the Pittsburgh police, who had to forcibly move the demonstrators from the property.
“Organizers said the franchise station, which is not owned directly by Exxon, was chosen for its symbolic value,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. “Nervous employees called Pittsburgh police, who arrived to herd crowds off gas-station property.”
One Pittsburgh called the confrontation “a success.”
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, “Fight for Philly” used flash demonstrations at three Wells Fargo locations.
Last month on Valentine’s day, a roving band of Fight for Philly activists tried to enter a downtown Philadelphia Wells Fargo branch. Security officers blocked the doors.
“Officers then stood firmly in front of the doors, not allowing us to even step foot inside the building,” the organization complained a week later. “They even went as far as to lock two out of three main entrance doors and check the IDs of individuals who were trying to enter the building.”
Even in the absence of Occupy-affiliated colleagues, the SEIU’s networked astroturf groups have demonstrated a great deal of creativity.
On Feb. 15 the SEIU group Minnesotans for a Fair Economy brought 200 people to the Minnesota state capitol to protest a voter ID bill. Activists pasted $1 bills over their mouths, charging that they were being silenced by the proverbial 1%.
On the same day — but 1,200 miles to the south — about 200 members of Good Jobs, Good Houston suddenly appeared in the lobby of El Paso Corporation, a natural gas pipeline company. The protesters began playing a game of dodgeball in the lobby.
Good Jobs, Good Houston contended the company was dodging its taxes. El Paso Corporation, however, is in dire financial straits due to the collapse of natural gas prices. Its tax deductions for 2011 exceeded its taxable income.
The use of front groups is not a new phenomenon within the labor movement. Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Foundation, told TheDC that the SEIU has turned to the tactic to promote its messages because the labor movement itself is experiencing increased hostility from the public.
“Faced with an American public that is increasingly opposed to union bosses’ agenda that puts union politics ahead of taxpayers and individual worker rights,” Semmens contended, “the SEIU’s response is to create more front groups to provide the illusion of support for their big government agenda.”
Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog, adds that, whatever the reason for the SEIU’s new tactical toolbox, intimidating both workers and management is hardly legitimate.
“Any political organization that uses intimidation as a tactic is more appropriately akin to ‘Thugs R Us’ than to the tactics of a legitimate political movement,” he told TheDC.
Carl Horowitz, who directs the Center’s Organized Labor Accountability Project, told TheDC that the SEIU’s network of fake community groups is a sign of weakness.
“Why would a major union of over 2 million people put their own people on a board of non-profit organizations that seem to spring out of nowhere and that almost no one has heard of?” he asked.
“Obviously they’re in trouble.”
The Daily Caller has reached out repeatedly to the SEIU for comment. The union has not responded.
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