Forwarded message:
Date: Wed Jun 14 11:39:15 2000
From: TRox51@aol.com
Subject: Nader is a union buster
I read the reports about the UAW and Teamsters considering a vote for
Ralph Nader and interviews like Kuttner's 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, he is the only journalist 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.).
Anyone wanting further information, feel free to e-mail me.
Tim Shorrock
trox51@aol.com
To read Doug's Nader report, which includes an account I wrote about the
MM
incident:
http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Nader.html
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