TheAgitator.com
Ralph Nader’s Sweatshops
Friday, July 17th, 2009One of the dirty little secrets in politics is just how terribly labor activist groups treat their own labor. The latest example, reported by The Daily Beast, is Ralph Nader’s Fund for the Public Interest. Nader’s groups have been guilty of this for years.
Several years ago, I ran a short-lived blog to catalog the silliness of Morgan Spurlock. One of those posts looked at how everybody’s favorite lefty whipping boy ACORN actually went to court in California to exempt itself from the minimum wage. What’s particularly amusing is that to make their point, they actually used free market arguments against the minimum wage. Oh, and they were doing all of this so they could employ more workers to campaign in cities across the state for a proposal to higher, city-wide minimum wages.
A pretty awesome exercise in cognitive dissonance.
As a former employee of a Nader spin-off group, I can attest to the grueling hours, appallingly low pay and skeletal health benefits that even long-time employees get. As a member of the toothless “employee committee” I fought for better pay and conditions, and when that failed, I started agitating to unionize. At that point my position was eliminated, supposedly for budgetary reasons — though everybody got the message that troublemakers would be disappeared.
The term “sweatshop” has a terrible connotation, but the fact is that factories with what we would consider poor working conditions are an improvement over life on the farm.
The implication is that all workers in so-called sweatshops are slaves, but the vast majority of factory workers choose such jobs as superior to agricultural jobs (or not having a job).
The term for factories in which people have the choice to work or not should never be the same as a place where people are actual slaves. Using such ambiguous terms, equivocating between the presence or absence of liberty, only cedes the starting ground to the collectivists.
Personally, I think all left-wing activist groups should be forced to unionize by law. Well, I mean I would think that if I could actually stomach any law that forces unionization on anyone.
“A pretty awesome exercise in cognitive dissonance.”
Maybe for us, but not for them.
When the ends justify the means, there is no dissonance.
Steve, you should be careful about the context when comparing the “voluntary” choice between factory and farm. In many cases, farming has been made more difficult by misguided policy that attempts to create surplus labor and trap it in orbit around manufacturing centers. For example, by subsidizing energy- or capital-intensive corporate farming that puts small farms out of business (sometimes even coupled with state-sanctioned use of force). Or you can levy taxes and require payment in cash, which forces people to move away from barter and traditional arrangements and into cash jobs. You can get a taste for this in Diana Davis’ _Granary of Rome_, a history of French colonial acquisition of Algeria.
I was enough of a sucker, 17 years ago, to work for one of these groups…he is right on in the article.
I think I lasted all of three days, one of which was mercifully cut short by a howling rainstorm. Today I just think of it as the liberal version of a Mormon mission, with the difference being that I was able to see what was going on, wise up and walk away.
If I could go back and write checks to the 3-4 people who gave me “donations” I’d gladly do it.
I love a little hypocrisy in the afternoon. What was the link about the ACU again?
This is such weak bullshit. Apparently none of you have worked for a living or you wouldn’t be mewing about being forced to join a union. I was a union carpenter for thirty years so I know something about actual work . The same people who sneer at carpenters making twenty-seven dollars an hour couldn’t or wouldn’t work that hard at any price. This Daily Beast story smacks of Clinton/Obama/DNC smear shit to me., like hiring people to put false signatures on Nader’s petitions so they could challenge them. Learned that shit along with gerrymandering from the Republicans, did they? I’m sure they planted these little snots to begin with, but they still want to pretend they’re in the tradition of Mother Jones. Parsons and the Wobblies. Think those guys got minimum wage? What a fuckin’ joke. Oh by the way get a job at something else besides sniching and kissing ass. Carpentry is like sports, talk don’t get it. Either you can do the work or you can’t.
typo=snitching
Megan McArdle wrote about her awful days working for PIRG here and elsewhere.
Sorry Alex, — re you’re having no boss— I’d forgotten you’re a libertarian, which means trust fund baby who wants to be liberated from any taxes on the loot mummy/daddy ripped off from the masses._