Ohio State Students Only Pawns In SEIU's Unionizing Game

The Service Employees International Union has been waging a long-running campaign against food service provider Sodexo, with the ultimate goal of unionizing the company. SEIU’s modus operandi is if a company doesn’t bend to the union’s will, the smear machine gets cranked up and the company is attacked. In this case, it’s the food service provider for the college football and basketball stadiums. Liberty Chick provides more coverage here.

As pawns in SEIU’s unionizing game, 20 Ohio State University students were arrested for blocking a major campus street, according to the union-sympathizing campus newspaper, The Lantern.

After meeting with the university president, the union pawns claimed he “was rude and hardly let us talk.”

On High Street, the students sat in the crosswalk, facing the potential of being struck by traffic. But, likely in their minds it was justified – whatever it takes to accomplish SEIU’s goal!

The Lantern story reads:

The mission statement for Service Employees International Union is to “improve the lives of workers and their families to create a more just and humane society.” And coordinated chants of “si se puede!” and “yes we can!” echoed the protestors’ collective commitment to those ends.

Collective commitment? How about lemming-like mentality to enable the SEIU in securing more dues-payers? President Obama, call your office: SEIU has stolen your slogan!

The OSU protest is of particular interest to the movement. “Ohio State is the largest university in the country,” Sanchez said. “It has the power to influence others.”

This is standard fare for SEIU and its likes, such as ACORN – go after the biggest and make them the example. Consider a story Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN (and former SEIU Local 1100 head), told in an article entitled, “Leveraging Labor’s Revival: A Proposal to Organize Wal-Mart:”

At the first negotiating session in March 2004 between H&R Block and ACORN in New Orleans, when the parties were trying to settle a series of disputes concerning predatory products being promoted among lower income families, the chief spokesman for H&R Block asked a question that was both straightforward and to the point, “Are we here today because we are the biggest or because we are the worst?” The answer then was easy–because they were the biggest.

In that example, as likely the case at OSU, culpability and “wrongs” we’re ultimately the issue – the size of the institution was.

We’ll have to see if SEIU is successful in organizing the huge corporation. The union’s attacks must certainly be having their desired effect. What also remains to be seen is if critically-thinking students, at esteemed institutions of higher learning such as Ohio State University, will allow themselves to be used as pawns in SEIU’s unionizing game.