My Life as Ralph Nader's Flunkie
By Charles Pekow
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 27, 2004
Ralph Nader believes an independent candidacy should “generate more understandings and support for major new directions for our country.” His website says these new directions include “repeal of laws that obstruct trade union organization by millions of workers mired in poverty by wages that cannot meet their minimum family livelihoods.” The site prescribes “a living wage for tens of millions of workers making under $10 an hour.” But the perennial leftist candidate, whose name will appear on the presidential ballot for the third consecutive time this November, has not played by the same rules he strives to make binding for corporations and private businesses. In fact, when the minimum wage rose, he once cut back on the hours his technical staff would work. Despite the millions of dollars he commands, he historically paid his professional staff less than minimum wage. Nader, who told Business Week during the last campaign that he offers staff “unlimited sick leave,” ordered staffer George Riley to take a two-week leave of absence to work on a political campaign, refusing him to pay for the time. When I worked for Ralph Nader in 1980-81, he paid us $8,000 a year, hardly enough to get by on even then. We could scarcely afford the time to spend money, though, because Nader expected staff to work around the clock...."
"...Though Nader claims he wants to fight discrimination, he and his staff asked me my age, religion, sleeping habits, family tree, medical history and a lot of other highly personal questions in violation of District of Columbia’s employment law. In a Washington Post commentary, Sidney Wolfe, long time director of Nader’s Health Research Group complained that the government was forcing him to collect medical details on his employees that he did not want to know. This is strange, because he asked me all sorts of medical questions he had no legal right to ask about during our interview...."
"...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that “the notorious Taft-Hartley Act that makes it extremely difficult for employees to organize unions needs to be repealed.”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...."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13141
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