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 'transfered' 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 at 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