politics
My Life as Ralph Nader’s Flunkie is a great account of life working for the man who couldn’t organize 1,000 people in Portland last month. I was ambivalent about Nader (although UO’s OSPIRG was very annoying), but this article drives the point home: Nader is insane.
Perhaps Nader’s greatest hypocrisy, though, is his brutal anti-union actions. Publicly, Nader declares support for organized labor, pronouncing on his campaign website that “the notorious Taft-Hartley Act that makes it extremely difficult for employees to organize unions needs to be repealed.” But he viciously busted attempts of his own employees to unionize.
“The day after we filed for recognition, the locks were changed. I was fired. A few days later, the other people were fired,” recalls Tim Shorrock, who edited the Multinational Monitor, a Nader magazine, in the 1980s. “They went after me in an incredibly vicious way. When they fired me, they asked me for all my boxes back,” including ones Shorrock had brought with him to the job and considered his personal property. Nader tried to have local police arrest Shorrock and sued him, a case later dropped. “It was pure harassment,” Shorrock says – the same type of high-handed pressure Nader condemns in government and business.
