inkbluesky

the sweater dilemma. if only most problems were this much fun.

Labor and the New Congress: A Strategy for Winning 

OK so someone doesn’t like organized labor and wants to maintain the economic and cultural balance in favor of corporations. Not an especially moral POV, but still one that an individual is entitled to. That person and their corporate sponsors vere way off course when they think that winning the argument is so important that the most egregious smears are a substitute for having a better argument,  Labor and the New Congress: A Strategy for Winning

No “Need” for an Election?
To see what labor is up against one merely has to open the newspaper—the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times will do—and read one of the advertisements put together by the shady lobbyist Rick Berman, now executive director of the mysteriously funded Center for Union Facts.

The ad has three pictures: of Kim Jong-il, identified as the North Korean “leader”; of Fidel Castro, also identified as a “leader”; and of Bruce Raynor of UNITE-HERE, identified as an “American Union Leader.” Above their pictures is the quote “There’s no reason to subject the workers to an election” and below the pictures of these three men, the query, “Who said it?” It was Raynor, of course, now made to seem clearly in league with the communist dictators. Says Union Facts: “American workers reject unions in almost half of all secret ballot elections. Find out how union leaders are forcing people to pay dues by trashing democracy.”[1]
Center for Union Facts, “When Voting Isn’t Private: The Union Campaign Against Secret Ballot Elections,” p. 4, at www.unionfacts.com.

Likewise the Human Resource Policy Association sums up employer opposition to the labor-liberal push for card checks and employer neutrality: “The secret ballot election process . . . guarantees confidentiality and protection against coercion, threats, peer pressure, and improper solicitations and inducements by either the employer or the union.”[2]
H R Policy Association, “Mistitled ‘Employee Free Choice Act’ Would Strip Workers of Secret Ballot in Union Representation Elections,” p. 2, at www.hrpolicy.org.

Raynor tells his side of the story in a December 21, 2006, online article in American Prospect, where he offers readers a tragic tale of thwarted hopes and smashed solidarity at Goya Foods in Miami, one of the largest Hispanic-owned companies in the United States. In 1998, workers at Goya voted by overwhelming margins for representation by UNITE, not once but in two separate NLRB election contests. The board certified the union, but company management stalled negotiations, fired key worker activists, and bribed others. UNITE filed scores of complaints with NLRB after which the general counsel charged Goya with twenty-three separate textbook violations of U.S. labor laws, including the usual threats of job loss and plant closings, interrogation, discrimination in work assignments, and the firing of at least four union supporters.

Mr. Berman must worship at the Alter of Irony. It is he that is acting like Kim Jong-il, maintaining power by any means. The original Prospect link isn’t working, but I found a reprint here.

Little Tiger buddy wallpaper

Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals 

Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached.

….In such depression, gifted children typically try to find some sense of meaning, some anchor point which they can grasp to pull themselves out of the mire of “unfairness.” Often, though, the more they try to pull themselves out, the more they become acutely aware that their life is finite and brief, that they are alone and are only one very small organism in a quite large world, and that there is a frightening freedom regarding how one chooses to live one’s life. It is at this point that they question life’s meaning and ask, “Is this all there is to life? Is there not ultimate meaning? Does life only have meaning if I give it meaning? I am a small, insignificant organism who is alone in an absurd, arbitrary and capricious world where my life can have little impact, and then I die. Is this all there is?”

The term gifted shouldn’t just be a designation for the next great physicist or mathematician. They could be the next Emily Dickinson, or the next great building or software designer. I make that point because satellite schools for the gifted tend to measure “gifted” qualities in a quantitative way by test performance.