Mainstream media did not give ACORN a pass

You don't have to be a raving Republican to question the antics of ACORN organizers and recruits, as has been in the news of late.

A couple years ago, I reported on efforts by the activists to ramp up support on the San Francisco peninsula. Something seemed a little off about the group to several reporters at the San Mateo County Times, where I worked, so I took a look at who the group was and what it sought to accomplish. Here's a snippet:

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now makes a big noise when it pops into new cities, vowing to help low-income residents get better traffic safety, cleaner streets and more overall attention from local governments.

Sometimes the group is welcomed as a refreshing voice of the people, many of whom wouldn't otherwise join the public debate. Other times, ACORN stirs the pot so much that it becomes the center of attention instead of the problems it highlights.

In Daly City, the group is being checked into by police after some residents complained to the City Council about door-to-door soliciting for new members. Mayor Maggie Gomez said she worried about the group signing up members to have a minimum $10 a month deducted automatically from their accounts.

"Seniors easily give their credit cards over and what have you," she said. "We're concerned about our citizens, you know, we just have to make sure our citizens aren't taken to the cleaners."

David Sharples, an organizer for the San Francisco-based nonprofit that is looking for office space in South City, likened the membership fees to union dues or church-group donations.

"We're not committing elder abuse," Sharples said. "We're bringing people together in the community to get power in numbers in order to win real improvements in their neighborhoods."

Gomez said some of the issues ACORN has raised are already on the radar of local homeowner associations. A push by the group for a new Bayshore supermarket is beside the point because the city has been planning to build exactly that near the Cow Palace for years, she said.

"They're reinventing the wheel is what they're doing," Gomez said, adding that she plans to meet with Sharples soon to clarify the group's mission. "Why would citizens have to pay dues to voice something they can come to the City Council and speak freely about?"

An earlier article I wrote focused on ACORN's effort to clean up the Crocker neighborhood in Daly City and a futile effort to address supposed speeding in San Bruno:

One recent ACORN push that didn't work out was a campaign in San Bruno for a new traffic light at Sixth and San Bruno avenues. City staffers said a pricey new light is not warranted three blocks from an existing light at Third Avenue and two blocks from the Highway 101 interchange.

City Manager Connie Jackson said allegations by residents of cars going 90 mph on San Bruno Avenue and claims of high accident rates there were unsubstantiated. But she said the city will consider other traffic-safety measures besides a new light in the vicinity.

ACORN garnered criticism last year from local officials who felt ambushed by the group, known for collecting $10-a-month fees from members and charging ahead with protests instead of exploring all the options with local governments.

"I feel that if you are an activist, you learn the rules first, and then you respect them," said longtime San Bruno activist and ACORN member Alice Barnes. "I feel that ACORN is learning how to move into City Hall and deal face-to-face with officials rather than bushwhacking them on the street."

By the way, my favorite moment on a recent edition of Sean Hannity's angry white man program was when contributor Juan Williams chastized him for attacking lil ol' ACORN with such vehemence instead of going after Blackwater, the military contractor, for ripping off the government at a far vaster financial magnitude.

Because they protect the country, Hannity replied. Yes, and they rip off the country at the same time -- kind of a patriotic/anti-patriotic two-fer, I guess.

Latest missives for the Baton Rouge Business Report

I am up and running in Louisiana as a full-time, bona fide journalist (health benefits still TK, but god forbid I want some bureaucrat telling me what to do). This go-round, here's what I concocted:

• A report on hiring trends in the Capital Region titled Hitting the bricks, in which one homecoming job transplant says: "I was ready to get back. To tell you the truth, I missed the heat."
  
• A survey of social networking in the real estate biz titled Not the hard sell, in which one agent describes the ebbs and flows of selling online, saying she gets 1,000 hits or more for a Youtube video of her broken elbow, but "then I post a nice real estate tip and get 50 hits."
• A look at the "cultural economy" initiative in Louisiana from a dollars-and-cents perspective (I didn't even mention music!) titled Planting the seeds, in which a gallery owner and arts booster says: "We really aren’t a secondary sector. We see ourselves as an economic engine for the state of Louisiana."

I worked hard on all this -- so if you find a typo, my editor did it.

And seriously, what is up with this asinine GOP ranting about "bureaucrats in Washington" telling me what health care I can get? Don't they know the bureaucrats who tell me what health care I can get now are incorporated outside of D.C.? To wit.

Few takers at anti-union card check press conference

I wrote a brief article on a press conference on the Employee Free Choice Act for the Baton Rouge Business Report, but the longer version didn't make it to the BRBR Web site, so here it is; the original blurb is here.

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Few takers at anti-union card check press conference

By Todd R. Brown

A few local business leaders decided to rally Wednesday against a possible revised Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize and would mandate a government arbitration process.

“It will devastate small business as we know it,” says Patricia Felder, co-owner with her husband of Felder’s Collision Parts and a Baton Rouge Area Chamber board member. “I’m certainly not anti-union. I’m very anti-forced union.”

The event, attended by the Business Report and a local TV news crew, attacked the card-check provision of a federal bill to let organizers gather a majority of signatures from a company’s employees in order to declare a union.

“Everyone is going to know how you voted,” says Jim Patterson with the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, calling the free choice act “a coercion of workers into the union fold.”

Alvin Bargas, president of Associated Builders and Contractors’ Pelican Chapter, agreed, saying, “A person’s vote is his private business. People tend not to put their private business in the public. They may not ‘vote’ their true conscience.”

Julie Cherry, secretary treasurer of the Louisiana AFL-CIO, counters that National Labor Relations Board data shows “there’s been far, far more employer coercion than union intimidation … in all reports and in those deemed to be credible. The person who has the money usually has the most power and the most ability to coerce.”

She says workers already have the right to conduct a majority signup campaign with their employer’s blessing; otherwise they are compelled to do a secret ballot after 30 percent of employees show support for a vote.

Felder says if a federal bureaucrat gets to handle the arbitration in a dispute with workers, then “he makes the decisions. I’ve lost control of my company.”

Further, Patterson says the act would fast-track the process for agreeing to an initial contract between workers and management, giving both sides less time to bargain before arbitrators take over and make a binding agreement that would last two years.

“There’s a lot of fear out there about what that means to the employer,” Cherry says. “We see it as an incentive to sit at the table and bargain reasonably.”

She pointed to the example of Avondale Shipyard near Westwego, where workers won a union vote in the early ’90s but had to “jump through hoops and over hurdles” while the employer allegedly stalled the contract process, appealing the election for six years and taking another year to agree to terms.

Patterson said several times at the rally, which was moved unexpectedly from the Holiday Inn to the Crowne Plaza hotel next door, apparently without notice, that “there will be those out there decrying how business treats workers” during the Labor Day weekend.

Yet Cherry says she only knows of one relevant pro-labor event, a parade Monday from the Piggly Wiggly in Baker, La., to the civic center for a picnic, sponsored by the Baton Rouge Central Labor Council.

She says there are several revisions to the free choice act pending but that there likely will be no timetable on the bill until the health care debate is settled.

Union members canvassed and campaigned for Barack Obama in the fall based on his support for the act at the time.