The Department of Union Busting

These days, it's hard to believe that the Department of Labor was created to promote unionization. Jordan Barab of Confined Space takes a look at how times have changed.

His post is about the cozy relationship between an anti-union lobby group and the Department of Labor.

So what is the Center for Union Facts and why do we care if they've got a close, personal relationship with the powers-that-be over at the Labor Department? I've written a couple of times recently about the Center. According to its website, the Center is "dedicated to showing Americans the truth about today’s union leadership. The real purpose is to fight the labor movements increasingly successful move to card check organizing.

To learn more about the importance of card check organizing, see David Moberg's article in In These Times.

Comments

[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but the new picture of you looks really nice.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Thanks!

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Yes it does. /off-topic

On-topic, whenever the word "facts" or "the truth" is pushed at us these days, I get the same feeling that I get when a senator says "frankly." That is, that whatever else is about to issue forth, the truth will not likely be part of it.

[Jim S.]

I also like the picture. Very fetching.

It saddens me to see the Labor Department come to this. Labor hasn't had much of a voice in federal politics for a long time now, but watching a department created to benefit workers instead shill for the interests of capital is a painfully Orwellian outcome.

I suppose we should be grateful that Secretary Chao hasn't yet come out in favor of permitting management to employ the cat o'nine tails in labor negotiations. Maybe that's what she and Mitch McConnell plan to give their lobbyist friends for Christmas.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

The America of 70 or 80 years ago probably felt that the hammer and sickle, the urban proletariat and the peasant, won out in Soviet Russia. If you ask me, the only thing that won out there was the Russian intelligence community, and in post-Soviet Russia, the intelligence community and the Russian mafia. But if our perception was that the working classes had won out there, then our upper class crushed our own socialist movements so that that wouldn't happen. However, now that the working-class socialist movements have been crushed, our trade unions have been marginalized, and the Labor Department is just carving an epitaph on the stone. Not content with their victory over the working classes' political ambitions, the rich have taken to destroying the middle class here. What will a complete victory for the rich look like? The rich can't survive without a middle class. People can't get rich without customers. And the dollar will be falling soon, so those who are already rich won't be able to fossilize their status. They must diversify, but housing is falling, domestic factories aren't profitable against foreign sweatshops, the dollar is beginning to fall, and the stock market is jittery as well. Bonds are about the only thing certain to rise, but who'll buy US Dollar bonds, when the dollar itself loses value? The next two decades are going to be very funfilled.