[lbo-talk] blog post: Scabbing at the Huffington Post

[Doug Henwood]

> Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2011/07/15/scabbing-for-the-huffington-post/
> I have a Facebook friend who is a prominent liberal activist and writer. He tells us on his website that “My labor experience dates back to working as a staff organizer in Las Vegas for the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (HERE) International Union starting in 1988, then serving on the Executive Board of UC-Berkeley’s Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE/UAW) in the early 90s, serving as an appointee to the Berkeley City Labor Commission for a number of years, organizing a labor-environmental network (the California Network for a New Economy), organizing community support for labor struggles in Northern California, and serving in the national legal department of the Communication Workers of America. This past year I worked in a union-side labor firm in New York City.” Recently he wrote a series of articles on “Google and the costs of lost privacy.” These appeared on Huffington Post. To help publicize his work, he put a reference to them on his Facebook page. I was surprised to see that he was writing for Huffington Post when there is a boycott by writers and labor unions against the online newspaper. When I told him so, he took umbrage, posting that there was legitimate disagreement among “labor folks” about the Huffington Post boycott and that “labor folks” like Dean Baker, Robert Reich, and Jared Bernstein were not honoring the virtual picket line around the newspaper.  Besides, he said, this isn’t a strike or boycott called by the workers at Huffington Post, the implication being that this isn’t really a labor dispute whose picket line must be honored. . . .

I'd suspected that this unnamed person was Nathan (or, as Max Sawicky put it, Nathan!) Newman, and I was right. Citing your resume to justify scabbing in the present - scabbing done voluntarily, not out of economic necessity - is pretty debased. I wonder how Nathan is defending Obama these days.

Doug