Scout or Scab? Union Threatens Legal Action Over Scout Who Cleared Trash

Nick Balzano, president of the Service Employees International Union’s Allentown chapter, may have picked the wrong target for a threat of legal action by the union. Balzano threated the city with a grievance filing after Boy Scout Kevin Anderson, 17, says he cleared a walking path in an east Allentown, Pa. park so people could walk along the river. That should have been a job given to union employees, Balzano, claimed, and is threatening a legal filing.

The union was complaining that 39 SEIU members were recently let go by the city, which then allowed this scout to earn his scab badge. He is quoted as saying that the union would be “looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails … There’s to be no volunteers.”

Anderson is a member of Boy Scouts Troop 301 of Center Valley and worked for more than 200 hours creating the 1000-foot path in Kimmets Lock Park along with fellow scouts, friends and parents. He is a junior at Southern Lehigh High School.

I think that the SEIU should insist on the garbage be put back and Anderson charged under National Labor Relations Act as a lesson to any scouts who would try something horrific like this again. Indeed, the federal government should look into how scouts have been supplanting cross-guard employees by helping elderly citizens across streets. The menace of scab scouting must be confronted before every footpath in America is cleared.

Below may (or may not) be a picture of the confrontation between the scouts and the union:

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