[mobglob-discuss] Ralph Nader: anti-union, anti-worker

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Vicious Anti-Union Nader Mistreats his Employees

Nader has a long history of union-busting and worker abuse.

Nader pays salaries "from $13,000 down" while amassing million$ which he
then invests in Occidental, Monsanto, and Raytheon -- weapons makers,
monopolists who overcharge the poor for needed medications,
Frankenfoods...."

David Sanford writes:

Ralph talks big about democracy and even unions. But when his own
workers at one of his magazines, Multinational Monitor, got fed up with
cruel working conditions and started agitating for a union of their own,
Nader busted the union with all of the hardball techniques used by
corporate owners across America. Workers at Public Citizen, another
Nader group, also tried to form a union because of 60 to 80 hour work
weeks, salaries that ranged from $13,000 down, and other difficult
working conditions and were blocked by Nader, who remains unapologetic
to this day. Nader says "I don't think there is a role for unions in
small nonprofit 'cause' organizations any more than ... within a
monastery or within a union." 

When ringleader Tim Shorrock filed the union recognition papers, Nader
immediately transferred ownership in the Multinational Monitor to close
friends who ran an organization ("Essential Information") that Nader had
set up. When Shorrock showed up for work the next day, he had been
fired, the locks were changed, and management called the police to
charge him with theft (of his own work papers.)

That charge was thrown out of court, but management fired the two
supportive editors and sued the three of them for $1.2 million, agreeing
to drop the intimidation suit only when they dropped their NLRB
complaint. All of these actions are straight from the hardball
anti-union playbook, and Nader makes no apology. 

According to Nader, "Public interest groups are like crusades--you can't
have work rules, or 9 to 5." Shorrock, with his "union ploy," became an
"adversary" according to Nader. "Anything that is commercial, is
unionizable," but small public interest organizations "would go broke in
a month," Nader says, "if they paid union wages, offered union benefits
and operated according to standard work rules, such as the eight-hour
day." Remember that Nader's well-funded organizations were amassing tons
of extra money that Ralph has been playing the stock market with during
all these events. 

Like many Washington politicians, Ralph Nader's groups have long taken
advantage of earnest young ambitious workers, with two differences;
Nader was more controlling and paid far less. In 1976, many were paid
$5,000 per year and only a few at the top made as much as $20,000.
(Nader's organizations refuse to release information on what they pay
workers.) Meanwhile, Nader required daily logs of everything the workers
did from 7am to 9pm, plus monthly summaries of these logs. If you didn't
turn in your logs, you didn't get paid.

Nader often called workers after midnight or on sunny weekend days, with
instructions, or just to test their willingness to work hard. When a
revolt over working conditions broke out in the Congress Project and
students demanded a group session with Nader, he contemptuously
scheduled a meeting at 7:00 am, believing that few would show up. 

9 marriages of staffers broke up under the pressure, including John and
Nancy Esposito's, Mark Green's, Sid Wolfe's, and Davitt McAteer's.

What makes this meanness worse is that Nader claims to be defending
workers -- for example in opposing the GATT treaty -- and that his
organizations have a huge surplus of money, accumulating millions of
dollars with which Ralph has played the stock market.

"How can we go out and try to save the world from people when we're
grinding people to death all the time?"

-- John Esposito, original staffer at Nader's Center for the
Study of Responsive Law

"Nader strikes me as conforming to the stereotype people have of
sociologists and politicians: they bleed for the poor and downtrodden
but mistreat their maids."

-- David Sanford 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tim Shorrock wrote:

To my friends in the labor movement:

I read the reports about the UAW and Teamsters considering a vote for
Ralph Nader and think - I must be living in never-never land. 

Ralph Nader fired me and two other editors from Multinational Monitor in
1984 for trying to organize a union in our shop. You can look it up in
the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review and Labor Notes.

I was fired the day after we filed our union recognition papers with the
NLRB. In the hours that followed, Nader 'transferred' ownership of MM to
Essential Information run by John Richard (who would become his H.R.
Haldeman if by some stretch Nader was ever elected prez) and let them do
the dirty work, which included trying to get the cops to arrest me for
allegedly 'stealing' my own files.

Myself, my two fired colleagues and John Cavanagh of the Institute for
Policy Studies, our closest supporter, were then sued by Essential
Information for trying to 'destroy their business,' a pure harassment
tactic designed to make us shut up about what happened.

And now the guy has the balls to say his key campaign theme will be
reforming US labor laws so its easier for workers to form unions? Simply
amazing for a man who has used those laws to prevent his own workers
from organizing - and MM is not the only place he's done it.

To Doug Henwood's credit, Left Business Observer is the only publication
on the left to raise this issue; The Nation, Mother Jones and other
'leftie' pubs have refused to run a word about Nader's anti-union
tactics - not even a letter to the editor (I still cherish a note I
received from The Nation's Victor Navasky after I sent in a letter about
my Nader experience - 'Why don't you write something about
multinationals instead?'  the courageous Vic asked me when I sought to
add some truth to an Alexander Cockburn column in fulsome praise of
Ralph.).

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Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
--
In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht