The Devil at My Doorstep

by David Bego

  Stern, Dingow, and other SEIU officials would have those criticizing EMS for its non-union stance think otherwise. And this was one of the chief bones of contention when I first met with Dennis, a fellow I enjoyed and respected and would continue to like and respect over the course of our dealings. After our first meeting, I sent him an e-mail telling him it was great to meet a good old Catholic boy from Cleveland like him, because in the spirit of cooperation, I wanted to maintain a good relationship and see if there was anything to be gained by EMS’s involvement with the SEIU. Later, the e-mail system caused hard feelings when, prior to discovering a problem on his end, Dennis became upset, thinking I hadn’t returned his e-mail messages to him. To clear things up, we held a second meeting where I brought along my legal counsel, and he invited his boss, Peter Hanrahan, SEIU’s Region 3 President. As the aroma of good food swept through the dining room, we chatted about health care cost and other matters, but I soon realized Dennis had the impression I was going to sign the Neutrality Agreement. I wasn’t, however, and I made my intention quite clear. He returned to Cleveland very displeased, and instead of corresponding with me, he sent e-mails to our attorney. In September 2006, Dennis’s frustration peaked and he sent a scathing e-mail. Accusations abounded with the bottom line being,

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  If Dave Bego expects special treatment he is about to have a very rude awakening. If your [legal counsel’s] advice to your client is that they can weather the storm so to speak, then so be it. Mr. Bego has had at least three months to make his considerations. We will give him thirty more days. I do not find it amusing to see a smile on his face every time we speak of some other contractor we have engaged in our targeting when his accounts remain incident free. I believe in conversation over confrontation [but] the conversation must produce results though; when it doesn’t then it may require confrontation. If Mr. Bego believes that his salesmanship is so much better than everyone else, he has much more to gain than to lose. That is his choice now.

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  Basically, Dennis was giving me 30 days to sign the Neutrality Agreement, or else. This was confirmed by another e-mail in early October where he wrote: “Where are we? We need an answer, not more time. Both Pittsburgh and St. Louis are waiting to hear from me. Both are prepared to run campaigns as we are in Indianapolis. We ask for a relationship, and if you want that then let’s move this forward. Regards, Dennis.” My response was short and to the point: “Dennis, I appreciate all the time and hard work you have dedicated to supplying information requested by EMS. After review of the information provided, EMS does not feel it is in the best interests of its employees to pursue this relationship at this time. Best Regards.”

  Despite being at loggerheads with Dennis, pre-war negotiations with him had provided insight into what their next steps would be. But when I walked around our offices, or at home in the yard where I could think clearly, I kept returning to something Dennis said when we first met. As I said, we had enjoyed a fairly amicable lunch up to the time where Dennis started pressing me again about signing the Neutrality Agreement and I indicated that was not going to occur. His face turned a bit red as he looked away, and then he said six words that triggered the start of a three-year war —“We like conversation, but embrace confrontation,” almost the exact phrase Stern had used in his book, one that Dennis had obviously read.

  Realizing that the SEIU would take action against EMS, our employees, and our customers, I had to restrain myself from making a scene. Instead, the goodbyes were short and curt, with Dennis still somehow believing I would change my mind. As he and Stern soon discovered, I wasn’t about to.

  The Assault

  ALL THE WHILE, STRONG INDICATIONS THE WAR WAS ABOUT TO BEGIN had occurred with split-second precision.

  The SEIU union soldiers were ready to pounce on EMS and I knew it based on an August 21, 2006 incident at Market Tower, one of our downtown Indianapolis clients. Here the first of hundreds of “incident reports” would be chronicled, ones filling two large-notebooks by the time spring 2009 approached. If I were going to war with SEIU, then we were going to keep accurate records every step of the way. If we couldn’t outmaneuver the enemy due to their unlimited financial resources and political clout, perhaps we could “out-organize” them as I had the sneaking feeling Mr. Stern and his SEIU colleagues had never faced a tenacious opponent, one that was going to fight them for as long as it took to destroy their willingness to fight causing them to leave us alone. This way, our employees’ rights to freedom would be protected; my one and only goal in taking on the monster SEIU.

  As reported by one of our building managers, an employee named Roberto was walking into the Market Tower building when a union organizer approached him. He gave Roberto a card and began asking questions about wages and the hours he worked. When Roberto provided no information, the organizer asked for his card back stating, “I don’t want anyone to find out that the union was around.” As he left, he told Roberto he could visit his house if he wanted to know more about the union, but Roberto told him he was “happy working for EMS.” Three days later, the same organizer appeared and confronted a fellow named Luis near his car parking space. Luis brushed him off, but the organizer hung around for a while before leaving.

  Such incidents made me certain it was time to create a battle plan to combat the ensuing SEIU tactics. Doing so was completely against everything I stood for, as I had created EMS to be a “below the radar” company with little fanfare in the public eye. We never asked for publicity nor relished it. Instead, we were what I would call a “quiet” company that simply went about its job with efficiency and enjoyed staying out of the newspaper headlines. Modesty and humility are two characteristics I applaud in people and we sought to run EMS with those qualities in mind. Above all, as I always told my management colleagues and employees alike, we were in a “relationship business,” and this meant securing solid relationships with all of our customers. We wanted to be honest, professional, and take care of customers with a sense of urgency.

  But, with SEIU lurking at the gate, I realized a plan was necessary. With this in mind, I knew we had to prepare our employees and our customers for what might lie ahead as the war escalated. Once we completed this task, we could organize the forces at our disposal, management colleagues who had worked with me over the years when any sort of crisis occurred. We would add to them a crack, specialized legal team familiar with labor issues. Then with our army in ready-mode, would fend off the enemy at every turn even if it meant media exposure and several rounds of battle at the NLRB trying to convince them EMS was the good guy and the SEIU was the bad guy.

  This was necessary as EMS customers in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Ft. Myers and Jacksonville, Wichita, and Tucson, would soon be receiving anti-EMS letters condemning us on every front. For a time, we could not figure out how SEIU had obtained a list of our customers to the extent of wondering if we had a “mole” in our midst supplying the information. But finally we discovered the truth—SEIU had secured a copy of our company newsletter, one published for the benefit of employees. Complimentary customer letters were featured, and the union had used those names to send their mailings.

  Every day when I awoke, I was ready for another boxing match. Sleep didn’t come as easy as before, as I watched with interest for SEIU’s next moves. On January 3, 2007, after the holiday break, the SEIU’s Local 3 representative Rebecca Maran left her business card at the Sallie Mae building in Indianapolis. Then flyers were handed out at the end of the month proclaiming, “EMS, the janitorial company contracted at Market Tower, has threatened and tried to intimidate janitors who have stood up for better working conditions.” Specific allegations included: “Threatening and intimidating janitors to coerce them from exercising their rights,” “Interrogating janitors in violation of their protected rights,” and “Retaliating against janitors for participating in protected activity.”
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  On February 9, four to six union protesters appeared on the sidewalk in front of the building. Later on, we discovered that when SEIU could not round up enough EMS employees to picket, they created an interesting, if downright deceiving, alternative. We knew because one of our facility managers, unable to recognize a man on the picket line, asked him “Are you are a member of the union?” He replied, “No, I’m from the Wheeler Mission [an urban homeless shelter] and they paid me to come down here and picket for the day.” Because apparently the man was paid in cash, there was no record of his being used as a dupe while all the while causing those watching the demonstration to believe EMS employees or union organizers were backing the campaign. Four days later, the campaign intensified. An SEIU organizer violated EMS’s employee Fred’s right to privacy by visiting his home where the organizer attempted to convince him to sign a union authorization card. Fred refused, but this didn’t alter my feelings of anger over him being disturbed at home. Fred was a good employee and he didn’t deserve to be treated in such a shabby way.

  On April 6, I wrote to our “valued customers” expressing my knowledge that they had “received written propaganda being circulated in various forms by the SEIU.” I told them, “Because of the widespread and malicious nature of this propaganda, I wanted to take the time to respond to these false accusations and tell the truth about the SEIU and the company’s response to these actions.” After explaining that the union had launched a “campaign of harassment against EMS” in order to “smear the company’s reputation in an attempt to try to convince our customers to stop doing business with EMS,” the letter informed customers that SEIU’s intent was to “pressure us into signing their Neutrality Agreement,” which, in turn, would relinquish my employees’ rights to a secret-ballot election. This, I explained, would force me to remain silent on union issues and require that I provide confidential information about the employees. Information I knew would be used to pressure my employees into signing union cards against their will.

  Because I wanted the customers to know the truth, we listed 10 bullet-point factors affecting the SEIU attack. Among them were the fact that we valued the employees, and provided “excellent employee training to our management staff” so as to “treat all employees fairly regardless of whether they support unionization or not.” We pointed out the competitive wage and benefit page as well and added, “EMS provides high-quality equipment and chemicals through our own high-quality supply company while placing continued emphasis on employee safety.” Mentioned also was our assurance that despite the SEIU claims to the contrary, EMS employees have never been asked to handle human body parts and will never handle them in the future, a reference to the university fiasco. I told customers “there is absolutely no merit to any of the union’s allegations against the company,” before closing with, “It is unfortunate that the SEIU has decided to engage in this malicious campaign against EMS, and we regret any inconvenience you may have been caused.”

  To bolster our cause, we then sent a copy of an article by national radio talk show host Lowell Ponte about Stern and the SEIU. A portion read:

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  SEIU and its political, media, and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call “Corporate Campaign” or the “death of a thousand cuts.” Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious e-mails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine . . . The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees.

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  To my way of thinking, Ponte nailed it listing the exact tactics being used against my beloved company. Hopefully his strong words and my explanations made our customers as upset as it did me as the “cabal of attackers” kept up the pressure day after day.

  To further inform customers as to the lies being told about EMS, we sent them a page called “EMS: Janitors for Truth.” Discrepancies galore were displayed indicating the false SEIU claims.

  Regarding my need to alert field employees to the anticipated attacks, a speech I gave at the university was symbolic of the information I wanted to disseminate. I first gave the audience a bit of my background informing them I was anything but anti-union based on previous experience at union companies and plants. I told them about EMS and how we started with nothing, not one customer, and had grown over the years, thanks in large part to their hard work. Turning to the SEIU, the explanation was given that it might be perceived as a union, but in fact it was a business with its main goal to collect union dues. And the only way to collect more dues was to organize more workers by telling lies about companies like mine that treated employees with respect and paid fair wages with fair benefits. Believing they should understand why the SEIU had targeted our company, I presented the facts involved before emphatically stating, so there would be no question of my intent: “I can tell you our stance will continue to be that we are not going to allow this pressure to change our mind. We are not going to sign a Neutrality Agreement that eliminates employees’ right to a secret-ballot election.”

  Then I hit them with some numbers. I explained that, for instance, inside the St. Louis beltway, a union contract included a top starting rate of about 6 dollars and 75 cents per hour. Outside the beltway it was about 7 dollars and 25 cents per hour. Because Cincinnati was about the same size as St. Louis, we expected the rates to be similar. With these numbers rolling around in their heads, I then told them what they already knew—that they were making more than that with the chance to better it based on job performance and time spent employed by the company. “What happens then,” I asked, “if the union negotiates a rate of 7 dollars and 25 cents per hour for everyone? Do those making more have to make less again?” The answer, “Yes, this could occur.”

  As I watched the employees, it was easy to tell what I was saying was contrary to what union organizers had told them. Continuing, I made it clear that EMS was committed to doing the best we could for our employees anytime we bid on a job by trying to attain the best wages possible. I said that sometimes we were more successful than others, but that we tried to show the customer it was in their best interest to pay the employees more from a productivity, quality, and longevity standpoint by being fair.

  Realizing the workers had heard of sky-high 12 to 15 dollar-per-hour promises, I told them I doubted this was possible. Maybe such wages could be paid in larger cities, but not in Cincinnati. One of our employees, quick to understand the intent of my words, cut me off and commented that such pie-in-the-sky wages might occur in Chicago or Pittsburgh, but not in Cincinnati where the cost of living was lower.

  Having given them the financial lowdown, I turned to the Neutrality Agreement and what signing it meant for EMS. I told them why we would not sign it, and to watch out for guarantees SEIU made to them because they couldn’t follow through because their whole platform was a house of cards. Questions from the workers focused on such topics as wage differentials between different cleaning companies, the employee handbook section outlawing MP players and I-Pods (dangerous for the workers in case of emergency), union contact was their right, and no interference would come from EMS—matters like that. I closed with a “Thank you,” hoping I had at least driven home our side of the argument.

  Meanwhile, my daughter Kelly met with employees1 at the Sallie Mae building in Indianapolis. She let them know the lowdown—that demonstrations may occur. Kelly said the employees were certainly free to talk to union organizers, but that the SEIU’s intent was to persuade workers to sign cards so the union could represent them. She cautioned them to not believe all the promises the
union made. As she spoke, new employee handbooks were passed out and each employee was required to sign a receipt of acceptance for record keeping purposes. These handbooks explained our rules and standards of conduct. Kelly then reviewed EMS’s union-free policy, also explained in the handbook, before asking if there were any questions. When there were none, the meeting was over. She was pleased with the exchange of information and felt confident the workers were as well.

  Despite Kelly’s and EMS’s good intentions, less than a month later, SEIU filed charges against her alleging threatening remarks and intimidation. Two employees, one who had a poor attendance record and eventually had to be dismissed, and the other, a fellow who threatened both an EMS supervisor and manager with bodily harm in front of a security guard and was dismissed, led the charge. Having my daughter as the target of such an attack caused me to cringe and made me wonder whether the fight was worth it. Kelly a competitor in the mold of her dad looked forward to the day when she could defend her reputation in front of the NLRB. Thankfully, she was ultimately vindicated when an Administrative Law Judge of the NLRB found no merit to these allegations.

  The conflict with SEIU at Sallie Mae was particularly disturbing as workers were earning a higher wage even on the third shift. This was unusual. In many SEIU contracts shift differentials do not exist as the union simply lumps together all hourly workers and classification wages. This propagates sameness and suppresses individualism and self-determination, a major union goal. Why? Because keeping everyone equal reduces friction—important as the union does not have to spend time resolving differences.

  Regardless, the two young people who were influenced by the SEIU to file affidavits charging violations in the meeting against Kelly had been prompted during a dinner after work where union organizers displayed their impressive buttons and exaggerated what was going to occur if the workers joined. I’m sure the one fellow who had attendance problems listened and swallowed the union horse phooey with full effect. His attacking us was particularly disturbing as he didn’t have a car to drive to work and an EMS supervisor picked him up out of the kindness of his heart. Many times he was late for the pickup, but none of this information surfaced when the SEIU grandstanded by fling the charges. All they cared about was making us look bad even though we had strong procedures in place regarding the firing of anyone; human resources had conducted a full investigation before this occurred. The reason? From the day I created EMS, I was determined that every employee regardless of age, race, religion, national origin, disability or other characteristics, would always be given a fair chance and due process. Procedures were put in place early for a fair discipline procedure. More importantly, we took away the final decision to fire an employee from the managers in the field. We did this to protect workers from bad or unfair managers, incomplete investigations, personality differences, or other extreme circumstances. I believe these procedures along with a commitment to hire and train good managers is the reason why over the years we have had very few EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) complaints and have always been vindicated in those claims.