Nathan Newman wrote:
>Well, a new corporate outfit has launched an anti-union site called
>unionfacts.org -- and quotes by Robert Fitch are featured
>prominently on the front page. Go Fitch.
-Yes, duty commands us not to talk about the history of organized -labor in the US over the last century. Some bad people might use the -truth to bad ends, so best to ignore it and keep cheerleading! -The collusion between the Hawaii Public Workers Union leaders and the -corporate thief Peter Wong is exactly the sort of thing Fitch writes -about. You've got a pot of union benefit money, a corrupt manager, -and "consulting" fees to union leaders and their relatives. Funny you -should see only the corporate crime and not the union participation.
Of course there is corruption out there but most unions don't have these problems. Why harp on the handful that do?
Even the example you give is more complicated. Here you had one union leader who skimmed off $200,000 and got indicted for it. He didn't make millions off the deal and, while he is no doubt to blame for picking Wong for the deal, even the indictments don't accuse him of being involved directly in the Peter Wong fraud.
The issue is not cheerleading but making criticisms of unions with some sort of strategy. Does Fitch's book actually help clean out corruption or just give conservatives more rhetorical ammunition to attack honest unions? I'm a big fan of Teamsters for a Democratic Union because they attacked corruption with a very specific organizing plan, so that it was reformers not the rightwing that gained from their work. If there strategy had been poor, the result of the challenges to the Teamsters would have just been a GOP trusteeship of the Teamsters International and, no doubt, a liquidation of most of the union.
I'm all for strategic criticism of allies but when you do it, you should have a real plan on how your rhetoric will improve the situation, not just help the enemies of those allies.
And it still comes down that I'm unimpressed with the numbers on union corruption. Unions control hundreds of billions of dollars directly and negotiate for trillions in dollars in benefits-- and all the union corruption folks come up with are pretty penny-ante frauds that would disappear into Ken Lay's sofa cushions.
In the context of those trillions of dollars, the fact that some 0.01% of the deals involve some underhanded deals is not some systematic union corruption, but the tail end of the bell curve of human nature. Assholes exist and given a certain number of deals, some assholes will take advantage of them. But the numbers just don't reveal a overall union movement with chronic corruption problems.
-- Nathan Newman