Odderator
Nader talks like a big friend of labor, but his actions tell a different story. In the early 1970s, he treated unionized airline and trucking workers as beneficiaries of government-sanctioned monopolies and pushed the successful drive for deregulation of these industries, with disastrous effects on workers later in the decade.
Closer to home, Nader squashed efforts to unionize workers at his publication, Multinational Monitor, through a vicious campaign of heavy- handed tactics and intimidation. After staffers alleged unfair labor practices and filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board asking for union recognition, Nader changed the office locks (within 24 hours), "gave" the magazine to his closest aides as a free gift, and fired the entire staff, none of whom were ever rehired.
When the fired workers filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, Nadar's aides retaliated with a $1.2 million civil suit, charging that the ex-staffers were trying to "destroy their business." A settlement was reached in which the complaint and suit were both dropped, but from that point on, the Monitor has been a scab publication.
In 1996, former Monitor staffer Doug Henwood summed up Nader this way: "Ralph Nader may look like a democrat, smell like a populist, and sound like a socialist--but deep down he's a frightened, petit bourgeois moralizer without a political compass, more concerned with his image than the movement he claims to lead: in short, an opportunist, a liberal hack. And a scab."