Threatened by cops for handing out pro-union leaflets

[DetlefK]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/unionizing-in-the-south-video_us_57893980e4b0867123e13a29

Three Teamsters stood outside the gates of a company called XPO Logistics on June 10, passing out flyers along the side of the road. When a truck left the XPO facility near the Port of Savannah, the Teamsters ― wearing orange blaze safety vests ― would flag them down, hand them a piece of paper about the union campaign and answer any questions. Then the drivers went on their way.

The practice is known as leafletting. It’s a way for unions to inform workers of their rights and to let them know the union is trying to organize their workplace. Leafletting is legal, as long as organizers don’t do it on company property. Since the Teamsters were stationed in a public right of way on the side of a road, they assumed it was fair game.

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As the Teamsters later learned, someone from XPO called the police to report them. When two officers arrived, Ben Speight, one of three organizers, explained to them that he and his colleagues were merely passing out fliers.

But the police said they were impeding the flow of traffic ― even though the public road dead ends at the company gates, and there was no traffic other than the occasional truck leaving the facility. The organizers only stepped into the road when a trucker waved them over to accept a leaflet, Speight said.

“You might wanna consider doing something else,” one officer said, according to the bodycam video the Teamsters obtained through a public records request. (A condensed version of the videos is above; the full versions can be viewed here and here.)

The video shows Speight asking where the union members could legally pass out leaflets, and an officer’s response suggests the encounter was about more than traffic flow.

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“You smell that?” he then asks rhetorically. “You smell that?”

“The paper mill?” Speight responds, clearly confused.

“No. Fresh air,” the officer says. “We want to make sure everybody can continue to breathe fresh air.”

The Teamsters took that as a suggestion that their union organizing was fouling the air and wasn’t welcome in the 7,600-person city of Port Wentworth. They are now weighing a lawsuit against the city, considering what happened next.

After discussing amongst themselves, the two officers decided to take down the organizers’ information and issue them warnings for being pedestrians in the roadway. The officers asked Speight and his colleagues, Jerome Irwin and Kedrix Murray, for their names, addresses and phone numbers. When Murray asked why the police needed their phone numbers, one of the officers grew agitated.

Murray asked for one officer’s badge number, and the cops decided a warning was no longer sufficient.

“We’ll settle this in court,” one of them said.

The warnings were changed to court summonses. In the “remarks” section of one citation, an officer wrote “picketing drivers to become union.”

[A HERETIC I AM]

1. In the right to work states, the laws protect the company...

NOT the workers