Cintas & Unions
In January of 2003, the UNITE
union (now UNITE HERE) launched
a corporate campaign against
Cintas because we refused give
up our employee-partners’ right
to decide for themselves whether
or not to join a union. Since
then, the Teamsters have joined
the campaign – a campaign
driven by highly exaggerated
and highly sensationalized misinformation
, false allegations and lawsuits,
staged rallies and media events,
and a series of other typical
union organizing tactics. Their
ultimate goal is to pressure
our company into unionizing 17,000
Cintas employee-partners without
giving them a vote . The unions’ tactics
are not new. They have frequently
used these tactics to – as
the President of UNITE HERE said
about Cintas - “Break the
back” of any company that
doesn’t give in to their
demands.
The unions are doing this because,
over the past 20 years, dues-paying
membership has dropped by 50%
and the unions are struggling
to remain financially viable.
In fact, only 7.8% of American
workers in the private sector
belong to a union – and
this is still declining. Furthermore,
prior to a recent union merger
in July of 2004, UNITE was roughly
a third the size it once was,
losing on average about 6,500
members a year. The recent union
merger was necessary for its
very survival. With factories
closing and traditional labor
jobs moving overseas, the unions
have fixed their attention on
recruiting workers in the service
industry, and Cintas happens
to be the largest uniform service
provider in North America.
At Cintas, we steadfastly
support our employee-partners’ right
to say yes to unionization
and their freedom to say no. We
believe that companies and
unions should never exchange
secret ballots for secret deals.
Today, the unions want to abolish
the government supervised, secret
ballot election process to decide
matters of unionization – the
process that is preferred by
the National Labor Relations
Board and the U.S. Supreme Court.
This process ensures that both
unions and companies play by
a fair set of rules. Instead,
the unions want the company to
agree to a “Card Check
/ Neutrality” method. In
this case, the company would
have to agree to remain silent
(neutrality) while union reps
would be free to collect signatures
from Cintas employees. There
is no supervision, no accounting
for how signatures are obtained,
and no vote for employees who
feel threatened, coerced by union
pressure, or who simply do not
want a union.
As the unions’ true motives
come to light, we think everyone
will see the unions’ allegations
for what they really are. In
the meantime, to ensure that
you can determine the facts from
the union's fiction, this section
of our web site was designed
to separate the truth from the
unions’ lies.
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