Labor groups say 'sham unions' undercut other organizations to the benefit of themselves and employers

GINGER ADAMS OTIS

At a time when unions are under assault by everything from pension-busting employers to the right-to-work steamroller, they also have to fight off an enemy within — unaffiliated, employer-friendly rivals called “sham unions” by traditional labor organizations.

Take the Brooklyn-based “League of International Federated Employees.”

It has exactly one local, LIFE 890, and a history pockmarked by complaints to the National Labor Relations Board.

Major labor organizations charge that groups like LIFE 890 are in it more for themselves than to protect and promote workers' rights.The “sham” model, they say, is to make deals with employers that subtly undercut the contracts of stronger unions, putting more money in the pockets of owners while paying lip service to the ideals of organized labor.

They’re usually found in small companies inside a union-heavy, big-city business.

LIFE 890, for example, found its niche in New York City’s waste management and cartage businesses, a longtime Teamsters stronghold.

But you don’t need the Teamsters or the AFL-CIO to set yourself up as a union, says Arthur Schwartz, a veteran New York City labor lawyer.

“You need two members, a tax ID, you draw up a constitution and some bylaws, and that’s it — you’re a union,” Schwartz says. “You don’t even have to have a bank account.”

There is no shortage of company owners who would rather not have a big-union shop or carry the cost of their pension plans and other benefit programs, says Schwartz, who sees “a definite cottage industry in these non-AFL-CIO affiliated unions, where the top leaders give themselves pretty enormous salaries — and in many cases, they also set up a union health fund, and they take a salary as head of that, too.”

Like some of its client companies, LIFE 890 is a family business.

John Mongello Jr. is its principal officer. His father, John Mongello Sr., was once listed as its secretary-treasurer and later its vice president.

According to the latest publicly available tax records, Mongello took home a salary of more than $197,000 in 2014 — and another $90,000 in rent for his union’s headquarters, a Brooklyn brownstone owned by an LLC set up by Mangello and his wife Kathy.

Their daughter, Jessica Gambino, was also making $72,000 in 2014 as a manager of the LIFE 890 benefit plan.

Groups like LIFE 890 favor small workforces because that makes it relatively easy to manage elections, says Teamsters lawyer Mike Manley: “You don’t have to get too many people to go along with the game plan, in order for it to work.”

Even so, taking over a union shop doesn't come easy.

LIFE 890’s latest target is Teamsters Local 813 at a Queens company called Planet Waste. The owner, Tom Tolentino, indicated he had high hopes his roughly 15 hired hands would vote out Local 813 and bring in LIFE 890 during an election called for March 22.

He told the Daily News in a March 12 interview he might have to close up shop if he couldn’t get out from under the Teamsters’ pension plan. He insisted, though, that his workers were free to vote however they chose.

The Teamsters wound up filing a litany of complaints against Tolentino with the NLRB, accusing him of trying to stack the deck for LIFE 890 through “unlawful assistance and support.”

This included claims Tolentino hired five new workers just ahead of the election, allegedly to throw it in favor of LIFE 890.

One of those new hires was named Polito Chiclana — and his last name rang a bell with the Teamsters.

Polito Chilcana, the new worker at Planet Waste, told colleagues he is Dina Chiclana's nephew.More than 10 years ago, the Teamsters had charged LIFE 890 with doing the same thing — hiring new worker-voters before elections at two other companies they were trying to raid. According to an affidavit submitted to the NLRB, a woman named Dina Chiclana had hired new workers at both firms with the promise, “Vote for Local 890, LIFE, and you guys will have jobs forever.”

In the 2006 case, the NLRB said the Teamsters waited too long to challenge the eligibility of specific employees, so its claims were dismissed.

In the current case at Planet Waste, the NLRB said it saw “prima facie” evidence to support Local 813’s claims and canceled the March 22 vote.

Then things really got nasty. Tolentino's lawyer, Steven Horowitz, dredged up a 2011 sexual harassment complaint against Local 813 President Sean Campbell. Filed by a former union employee, the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and no admission of guilt from either Campbell or the union.

That didn’t stop Horowitz from sending Tolentino an email calling Campbell a "sexual predator." The lawyer told Tolentino, "Feel free to show this to the employees."

Tolentino did just that — at least according to the defamation suit that Campbell has since filed against him.

No new date for the Planet Waste election has been set.