Additionally, regarding the Culinary Union and its antics, they are definitely funny but it's as clownshoe as it gets. Hasn't Zuffa agreed to vote for a unionisation? They just want to vote to be a non public ballot so that voters won't be bullied and intimidated.
Disclaimer 2: I got a lot of my info from the OG News page and we all know it has zero journalistic integrity.
Leigh, much has been made, especially on the UG Blog posts about the culinary union seeking a "card check" vote on whether to unionize as opposed to gathering public signatures or doing a secret ballot. It's not really a case of Kirik shilling as much as not really understanding anything about labor organizing that has led him to call this process "undemocratic."
A card check is, in effect, more democratic than an open petition or open ballot. It's used as a strategy to organize a union when there have been found to be obstructions on the part of management. Organizing a union requires signatures of interest from 30 percent of the bargaining unit (though typically much more are collected) and then 50% + 1 in a ballot to formally certify the union. The issue is that an employer hostile to organizing can intimidate people into not voting or voting their way and evidence has shown in court that Station already has used these tactics.
What a card check does is it allows you to present the 50% +1 of the bargaining unit's union authorization cards to the national labor relations board and have your union automatically certified. The idea being if all those workers signed a card indicating interest, they have already voted. The vote in a secret ballot doesn't require 50% +1 of eveveryone, just of everyone who shows up to vote.
Employers generally control the voting process so they can (and have) use(d) a variety of tactics to suppress turnout or only let people they've influenced go in and vote.
The bottom line is that the Culinary Union and the Station workers were subjected to dirty tricks and despite winning in court, it was tough to get workers enthused about organizing again for fear of reprisals. So the union went after a more politically and economically vulnerable target in the UFC.
Sadly, mma.tv and other sites have basically just posted Zuffa LLC PR documents about the situation rather than doing any decent journalism, mostly because everyone wants the sport in NY.
But the big thing in NY has always been that legislators by and large really don't care about MMA one way or another. They just don't want to upset the few lawmakers who actually do and who have generally been pretty influential. The propaganda campaigns have been remarkably effective.
On one hand, I can't blame the Fertittas because Station was in bankruptcy just a few years ago and that was without a unionized workplace. But their mismanagement and unwillingness to negotiate in good faith is what's keeping MMA out of NY, not some power tripping tyrranical union as has often been mistakenly portrayed.
