As Labor Struggles, Have the Big Rights and Liberties Groups Like the ACLU Deserted Unions?

[marmar]

The Daily Banter / By Mark Ames

As Labor Struggles, Have the Big Rights and Liberties Groups Like the ACLU Deserted Unions?
While labor is under powerful battering from conservatives, a strong case can be made that they aren't being supported by some of our most prominent human rights groups.

June 25, 2012 |


Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.

It must be confusing and a bit daunting for those deep inside the labor movement, all these progressive mood swings. At the beginning of this month, New York Times’ columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about having a “V-8 Moment” over the abandonment of labor unions, an abandonment that was so thorough and so complete that establishment liberals like Nocera forgot they’d ever abandoned labor in the first place!

The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself. While progressives and labor are arguing, sometimes viciously, over labor’s current sorry state, one thing progressives haven’t done is serious self-examination on how and where this abandonment of labor manifests itself, how it affects the very genetic makeup of liberal assumptions and major premises.

So I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic or issue that it covers. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/labor/156006/as_labor_struggles%2C_have_the_big_rights_and_liberties_groups_like_the_aclu_deserted_unions_/

[madrchsod]

1. union`s are no longer in vogue to the intellectual left

i`ve read more than a few articles berating or "advising" union leadership and their members. since my wife is the people chair and treasurer of her union i take a dim view of the intellectual left`s criticisms of unions and their problems. maybe they should get off their lofty perch and come down to earth and see what my wife has to put with from the company and her fellow workers.

[Blue_Tires]

2. Well, the ACLU did shill for Citizens United

under the guise that unions would have no restrictions on "political speech"...Despite all the people trying to tell them, the ACLU refused to believe that billionaires would outspend unions 20-1 to install politicians who would pass the harshest labor regulations since the 19th century...