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DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Mon Mar 31, 2014, 01:29 PM Mar 2014

Exclusive: “Fox and Friends” poster child accused of bullying employees over safety risks

Fox held this company up as a victim of Obama's pro-union bullying — but workers say network's got it backwards

JOSH EIDELSON

A janitorial company painted by “Fox and Friends” as the victim of attempted pro-union government coercion has in fact been coercing its own employees to hide safety risks from the government, employees charged to Salon.

“I felt this wasn’t good, to have to lie,” janitor Ana Parada told Salon in Spanish. “Because I wanted someone to know what was happening.”

Parada’s employer, the Texas-based Professional Janitorial Services, was praised on last week’s “Fox and Friends” by Fox legal expert Peter Johnson for defying what he suggested could be a government “protection racket.” After host Steve Doocy asked “Is the government quietly blackmailing companies to unionize?,” Johnson asked if “we have a situation in this country now where big federal government is putting its arm around” the Service Employees International Union, to “say, ‘Hey, this is a pretty good union here. Maybe you should hook up with these folks — and if you don’t hook up with these folks, non-union business, maybe OSHA’s going to be coming down your smoke stacks big time.”

At issue in Fox’s outrage segment — and stories about PJS in National Review and the Daily Caller — is a year-old letter issued by an OSHA official to a health and safety specialist from the United Steelworkers union, who had asked whether workers alleging safety issues in a non-union workplace could designate someone from a union to participate in an OSHA investigation as a “personal representative,” or as “walkaround representative” who accompanies an inspector on a workplace visit.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/31/exclusive_fox_and_friends_poster_child_accused_of_bullying_employees_over_safety_risks/