More On The United States Department of Union Busting

Take a look at Jordan Barab’s riff on the Department of Labor documents revealed by the CREW Freedom of Information lawsuit. [We first looked at the development here.] He illustrates how national labor legislation, such as the Wagner Act [which established the National Labor Relations Board] and the law which established the Department of Labor, would have to be rewritten to be consistent with the conduct of Bush’s Department of Labor. Here is a section of the Wagner Act, interpreted by Bush’s Department of Labor:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by endiscouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting preventing the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating dictating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection subjugation.

Barab’s piece helps place in context Eduwonk’s suggestion that the documents simply show a rather unsurprising ‘business as usual’ in the Bush administration. Without a doubt, anyone who is shocked that the administration of Rove, Cheney and DeLay would establish a close, supportive relationship with professional union busters has had to have been comatose for the last six years. But that should not be a reason to pooh-pah what was done. Consider what the reaction would be if documents were made public that revealed a close, supportive political relationship between the Department of the Treasury and its Secretary, on the one hand, and individuals and organizations who sought to eradicate private property and corporations, on the other hand. Consider all of the outrage at political alliances with “anti-democratic extremists,” at the Department “being in bed” with those whose politics of “class warfare” sought nothing less than the elimination of the other class. Yet this is exactly what has been done here, except that it is directed at labor, not business.

Antonucci of Intercepts wrote to complain about the original Edwize post in the comments section to it. Suffice it to say that there is a point where we agree with Antonucci’s commentary: the more readers actually know about his anti-union work, the better fit they are to judge it.

Take Antonucci’s explanation that his blog simply ended up in these Department of Labor documents because they were picked up by the newsletter of the innocuous sounding State Policy Network, the State Labor Policy Exchange, “which DOL evidently passes around.” What he leaves out of this explanation is the little fact that the State Policy Network is an arm of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation [EFF], one of the most notorious anti-union foundations in the United States. The State Policy Network is listed on the EFF web page as one of its projects; its purpose is to network similar minded anti-union state foundations from around the United States.

For a taste of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, go to its home page: the very first headline accuses a NEA Washington state affiliate of “keeping” a teacher from “supporting” a charity “opposed to sex trafficking of women and children.” Right next to this story is a picture of John Stossel, who is headlining their upcoming conference. One could go on with a myriad of other illustrations, but we won’t belabor the point here: you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to decipher this picture. Evergreen Freedom Foundation is a professional anti-union operation.

Union busting is not the only thing EFF has in common with the target of the Freedom of Information law suit which inspired the original post on this subject, Richard Berman and his various anti-union fronts, such as the Orwellian named Center for Union Facts. Both refuse to engage in the most minimal transparency regarding their own operations, even while they take advantage of the transparency provided by unions. Both Evergreen and Berman refuse to divulge the identities of their funders. In a decision on an Evergreen law suit against Washington state teacher unions, Washington State Supreme Court Justice Philip A. Talmadge wrote: “We know nothing about the EFF. It chooses to utilize the courts for what may be a political agenda, and yet we know nothing regarding the individuals or organizations that make up the EFF or provide financial support to it. Perhaps a healthy dose of ‘public disclosure’ so vigorously sought by these organizations would be usefully applied to their own activities as well, so the public will know who supports and funds them when they purport to be acting in the public interest.”

Reports [see here and here ($)] in the Washington newspaper the Olympian and by Media Transparency [see here] indicate that over half of the EFF’s annual budget was subsidized by just eleven individuals, and that one-third was supplied by out of state foundations. Using the reports of these foundations, the Olympian and Media Transparency were able to identify as EFF funders the Walton Family Foundation [the Wal-Mart foundation], the Sarah Scaife Foundation [that sponsored a great deal of the most scurrilous journalism around the Clinton impeachment, including the charge that the Clintons had murdered Vince Foster] and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation [prominent in ultra-conservative causes and in campaigns for school vouchers and privatization].

EFF did include reports on a few union blogs in its round-ups circulated by the Department of Labor… in the category of “opposition,” just in case anyone wondered why they were including them. Antonucci’s Intercepts does not wear that badge of honor.

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