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WAR OF INDEPENDENCE by Tim Shorrock
RALPH NADER has convinced many leftists that he is a champion of workers' rights who, if elected, would push to end "union-obstructing labor laws" and strengthen trade unions. Progressives who think his campaign could elect Bush, he says, are "frightened liberals" who can't see that Bush and Gore are cut from the same right-wing corporate cloth.
As someone who worked for Nader on international corporate issues during the 1980s, I find these claims both laughable and hypocritical. In my experience, Nader was a union buster, a terrible employer, and, when it came to the political right, a coward who was more than happy to sell out his editors and friends for the sake of political expediency.
This may come as a shock to Noam Chomsky, Susan Sarandon, and the many other thoughtful people who support him. But if they and thousands of others who oppose corporate domination of trade, the death penalty, and economic inequality, think that voting for Nader will reinvigorate progressive politics in this country, they should take a careful look at his record as an employer and his actions in the 1980s. They will find that their man is both flawed and unprincipled -- and the only presidential candidate who has successfully busted a union.
I WORKED FOR Nader from December 1982 to May 1984, when I was fired for what I considered to be very unfair reasons: Fired first over an editorial dispute at Multinational Monitor, a monthly publication founded by Nader, and then, fired again, after Nader had given me a three-month grace period, for organizing an independent union with two other editors. In the months that followed, Nader and his aides carried out a reprehensible campaign of harassment against me and my colleagues, designed to silence our voices and stifle our campaign to get our jobs back.
All of this occurred against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan's Washington, when progressives who took stands on labor, multinationals, and U.S. foreign policy were often the brunt of sharp attacks from the right.
My troubles with Nader came to a head in April 1984, after nearly two years of acrimonious disputes over wages, hours of work, lack of equipment, and other issues dear to the heart of any worker.
That month, the Monitor, in conjunction with Mother Jones magazine, and a Berkeley think tank reported that the FBI was investigating allegations that Bechtel Corporation had violated federal anti-corruption laws by bribing South Korean officials to obtain lucrative nuclear power contracts. The article made national news for almost a week because two figures in the Reagan administration, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, were senior executives with Bechtel when the alleged violations occurred.
But late one night, as we were preparing to release the story to the press, we discovered that the New York Times was about to scoop us. Concerned about losing a story nearly three years in the making, we called Nader to get his clearance on several lines of text concerning Shultz and Weinberger he had questions about (the story had already been cleared by his libel lawyers). Nader chose that moment to throw one of his legendary tantrums.
First he screamed at my associate editor for accepting his collect call. Then, he flatly refused to speak to me, hung up, and refused to accept any more calls. Caught in an impossible situation and facing a deadline, I decided to release the story anyway, the action that got me fired for the first time. But a few days later, a calmer Nader told me I could stay on for another three months while he sought a replacement.
At that point, I should have walked out the door. But at the urging of many supporters of the magazine, our staff organized a committee of trade unionists, subscribers, and activists to convince Nader to keep me on as editor and discuss the issues that led up to my firing. Nader, in direct contradiction with his usual organizing principals, refused to meet with them or even acknowledge their existence.
That was when we decided to seek collective-bargaining rights and form a union. But the day after filing our papers with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the locks on my office were changed and I was fired by Nader aides John Richard and Russel Mokhiber. (Richard remains today the publisher of the Monitor.) A few days later, my coworkers were laid off. The magazine, we were told, had been transferred from Nader's control to Essential Information, another Nader organization.
But firing me apparently wasn't enough for Nader and his crew. Soon I got word that Nader wanted me to return all my files. Because they were files on Asia I'd collected over a period of years and brought to the magazine, I refused. Within days I got a call from an embarrassed detective with the D.C. police. Incredibly, Nader and his aides had turned me in for stealing -- charges that were quickly dismissed by the court. Demoralized but determined, my coworkers and I kept up the fight, first by filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB and then going public by taking our story to the Washington Post.
The publicity -- another tool in the Nader lexicon -- sparked another angry reaction. The next thing I knew, Nader's hatchetmen had filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against me, my fellow editors and one of our supporters from the Institute for Policy Studies. Suddenly we were unemployed and facing the prospect of finding lawyers to defend us against Nader (which turned out to be impossible in D.C., where every public-interest lawyer has some kind of connection to Nader).
Eventually, a settlement was reached: We dropped the NLRB case; they dropped the lawsuit and paid us our legal fees and several weeks of back pay. It was a small victory for us, but the damage had been done. Using the same tactics as the corporations he scorns today, Nader defeated our organizing drive. No union was ever formed at the Multinational Monitor, which remains union-free like the rest of the Nader empire.
WHICH BRINGS me to Nader's attacks on "frightened liberals." Well, it takes one to know one.
I took the editor's job at the Monitor after ten years of experience in journalism, the antiwar movement, and union-organizing, believing that the magazine could become an important voice in the growing national debate about deindustrialization and corporate power that was flaring in the early years of the Reagan administration.
But my vision was completely out of step with the political environment in Washington, where human-rights and environmental advocates were in a state of shock over Reagan's destructive policies and the Cold Warriors at the AFL-CIO were just beginning to understand the terrible impact that Reaganomics would have on American industry and jobs.
The malaise was deeper still in the consumer lobby, which had enjoyed unprecedented access to power during the Carter administration. When I went to work for Nader, I found him and his aides paralyzed with fear at the power of the New Right. Instead of defiant, principled activists anxious to fight the conservative storm, I found a bunch of young, Ivy League white men trying to figure out how to present their old consumer-rights message in new bottles -- that is, as carefully as possible.
That fear manifested itself about three months into my job when Human Events, a notoriously right-wing newspaper, ran a crude exposé of Nader's alleged ties to the "far left." Written by Cliff Kincaid, the story linked Nader to the Institute of Policy Studies ("a collection of radicals, Socialists and Marxists") and reported I was a socialist because, in an interview, I had favored "public decisions about major economic policies" and opposed having "our CIA train the Korean CIA to unleash its violence against Korean worker groups to keep their wages low so American multinationals and Japanese multinationals can come in and exploit Korean workers."
The words were all mine, but the inferences were Kincaid's. But did Nader stand up for his editor? No way. A week later, I was stunned to see a follow-up story in the next issue of Human Events, under the headline "Nader Disavows Views of His Editor." Without even informing me, Nader had instructed an aide to call the newspaper to say he "does not approve of the views expressed by Tim Shorrock" and claim that the Monitor was "an independent publication over which Nader holds no control." Why I stayed after that I'll never know, but it set the tone for the rest of our relationship.
In 1984, long after I had been fired, I finally realized how gutless and craven Nader had been during this episode. In an interview with the Colombia Journalism Review, Nader said he was angered by the Human Events article because I had characterized the Monitor "as socialist, which limits its readership and also is not true." In other words, Nader not only failed to check with me to see if Kincaid's quotes were accurate, but he had issued his apology without even reading the article.
Now, with many of his followers too young to even remember the Cold War mentality of the 1980s, Nader sounds like he's been on the frontlines of the labor movement and the Left since day one. But when it comes to his own workers, Nader has no respect for labor laws or the right to organize. And when issues of foreign policy were matters of life and death, Nader never, ever took a stand on any issue -- Central America, the Middle East, even Vietnam. Is this really the man the Left wants to claim as its standard bearer?
Tim Shorrock is a freelance journalist who has published widely on labor, U.S. foreign policy in Asia and South Korea. His writings have appeared in The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The Progressive, and many other publications.
FEED contacted Ralph Nader and the Monitor for this article. Neither cared to comment