The Service Employees International Union has suspended it’s vice president — the top official in its “Fight for $15″ movement — Scott Courtney, after allegations surfaced that Courtney had sexual relations with several female workers who were then promoted.
According to a spokesperson for SEIU, “questions were raised … relating to our union’s ethical code and anti-nepotism policy.” Those questions had to do with an alleged affair Courtney was having with a female junior employee at SEIU. The relationship, according to reports, was one of several going back years — and the women who slept with Courtney, Buzzfeed News reports, were often promoted within the organization.
“I suspended Executive Vice President Scott Courtney from his assigned duties as an officer of SEIU on Monday,” said SEIU’s president, Mary Kay Henry. She added that the suspension will continue while SEIU’s general counsel pursues a full investigation.
Courtney got married this past weekend, so the suspension’s timing is both ironic and terrible.
According to Buzzfeed, Courtney’s allegedly lecherous behavior was an “open secret” among the Soros-funded union’s employees, and cast a long shadow over SEIU’s “Fight for $15” campaign, which focused on raising the wages “of a low-wage, largely female fast-food workforce” (and also on unionizing fast food workers in a bid to expand SEIU’s membership and number of dues-paying members).
That’s right: the union that claimed to be fighting for the rights of hard-working women to earn a fair wage at a part-time fast food job may have been tolerating a serial sexual harasser within its ranks, putting its own female workforce at risk.
Charming.
The SEIU, like Harvey Weinstein, the other newsmaking alleged sexual harasser, is a major Democratic money machine. In 2016 alone, the SEIU contributed more than $39 million to mostly Democratic campaigns, easily ranking it among Democrats largest fundraising vehicles. Dems won’t like having to give that back if it’s revealed SEIU covered for sexual harassment within its ranks.
And it might have: most of the victims, Buzzfeed says, only spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from their union superiors for exposing the danger to women lurking in the union’s ranks.
If the investigation finds evidence of wrongdoing, SEIU will have to begin a long and arduous process to remove their executive vice president. Unions have a habit of protecting their own, and SEIU is no small union.