Case could affect union tactics
Janitors group calls it a free speech matter, but the company says SEIU went too far
A state court jury could decide as early as Tuesday whether an aggressive organizing campaign by the Service Employees International Union went too far when it accused a Houston cleaning company of systematic labor law violations, a verdict that could affect the tactics unions employ to sign up members and negotiate contracts.
The case, involving Professional Janitorial Service and the SEIU’s efforts to organize the company’s workers, pits what the union says are its constitutional rights to free speech against the company’s claim that the union’s unfounded charges that it broke the law drove clients away and cost it millions of dollars. The four-week trial, which ended Thursday with closing arguments, put the union’s hardball tactics under a microscope and forced the SEIU for the first time to defend those methods in front of a jury.
“They know they are busted for the first time ever,” John Zavitsanos, the Houston lawyer representing the company, told the jury. “You’re it. The 12 of you can stop it.”
For years, companies have complained about the SEIU’s aggressive campaigns to pressure them into recognizing the union and negotiating contracts, campaigns that often included a barrage of regulatory complaints against companies, reports of rampant problems at the firms, and protests to disrupt business and keep the spotlight fixed on the target. Other companies have sued SEIU before but have settled before they went to trial, according to evidence and testimony in the case.
In 2011, for example, the international food, maintenance and cleaning company Sodexo sued the union under federal racketeering laws, accusing SEIU of unleashing “an avalanche of malicious attacks” to extort concessions from the company during a campaign to organize 120,000 Sodexo workers. The lawsuit, filed in Virginia, was settled before it went to trial.
The Houston case stretches back more than a decade, when SEIU launched its “Justice for
Janitors” campaign here, organizing workers at the city’s five biggest commercial cleaners and negotiating contracts with them. Professional Janitorial Service, the sixth largest, refused to recognize the union without a vote, by secret ballot, of its workers.
SEIU went on the attack, accusing the company of forcing employees to work off the clock and firing them for union activities, then spreading the allegations among the company’s clients, according to court documents. The union also used its connections with politicians and pension funds, which invest in commercial real estate, to steer cleaning contracts away from Professional Janitorial Service, according to court documents.
And each time a large property management company agreed to drop Professional Janitorial Service, union officials celebrated, according to emails introduced into evidence.
The Labor Department did not find any evidence of widespread wage violations at Professional Janitorial Service, and the National Labor Relations Board dismissed unfair labor practice charges brought by the union. In 2007, the company sued SEIU in state District Court in Harris County, alleging that the union engaged in a smear campaign to ruin the company’s reputation and business. The company is seeking $5.3 million in damages.
The jury began deliberations Thursday afternoon and will resume Tuesday.
In closing arguments, the union’s lawyers said that SEIU might have used tough tactics that could be seen as heavy-handed, but the union still had the right to use them. Union officials exercised their rights to free speech when they made the unfair labor practice charges, which were based on interviews with workers and other evidence, the lawyers said.
“We took on the monumental task to organize minimum wage workers who live in the shadows, who eke out a living in this country,” Craig Deats, an Austin lawyer representing the union, told the jury.
But Zavitsanos, the company’s lawyer and a partner at Houston firm AZA, argued that union’s attacks went well beyond free speech. They were part of a calculated strategy to harm the business simply because Professional Janitorial Service would not give in to the union’s demands, he said.
What the company endured, Zavitsanos told the jury, came straight from “the playbook,” the union’s “Contract Campaign Manual.” The manual, which was introduced as evidence, lays out how union leaders can file complaints with regulators, challenge government-issued permits and approach lenders with damaging information about employers.
To ramp up the pressure, the union can then issue embarrassing reports to the media, elected officials and community leaders, according to the manual, first written in the 1990s and updated a decade ago with an introduction from SEIU international president Andrew Stern.
“Key management officials may find that they or their staff are unable to do their normal work because they must spend so much time responding to the union campaign,” according to the manual.
The goal was to “bury them in legal bills,” Zavitsanos told the jury. “It never stopped. Day after day, month after month.”
Philip Durst, another lawyer representing the union, responded in his closing argument that the case was not about the union’s manual.
“There was not one shred of evidence that anyone in Houston knew about it or used it,” he said.
Vonne Harris, one of two alternate jurors excused from the panel at the end of testimony, said she became puzzled by the union’s organizing strategy as she listened to the case unfold.
“If the union was strictly interested in the well-being of the workers,” said Harris, who manages her husband’s accounting office, “why would it try to put the company these workers are working for out of business?”