Anti-Worker Campaign Run by Exec Who Slammed Mothers

by Tula Connell, Feb 14, 2006

In 1893–1894, when Charles Merritt, president of the Danbury, Conn., Chamber of Commerce, faced a strike by workers at his local hatter’s plant, he instructed his 12-year-old son to stay up all night with a gun pointed from a high outpost on his house in case any of the workers came by.

While the methods of attack may have changed, it looks like the Chamber of Commerce still holds a deep fear of America’s working people.The State Chambers of Commerce National Conference is helping fund what union sources say is an $8 million campaign to attack the nation’s unions and their working members.

Full-page ads published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal Monday accused unions of bankrupting firms and, in a bit of street theater that drew little attention, inflated a baby dinosaur in front of the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C. (With the AFL-CIO located across Lafayette Park from the White House, a dinosaur didn’t raise any eyebrows.)

The so-called Union Facts campaign is a project of the Center for Union Facts, run by Richard Berman of Berman and Co. Berman has made his name by slamming Mothers Against Drunk Driving in a vicious project on behalf of the alcohol industry and ran another back-stabbing campaign on behalf of a company that made ALAR, a pesticide used on fruit that is especially harmful to children and which has since been banned.

The centerpiece of Berman’s anti-worker campaign is a website that purports to show the “facts” on unions, but which offers twisted distortions. For instance, in posting union staff salaries (which already are publicly available from the U.S. Department of Labor), the website does not distinguish between salaries and travel expenses, inflating salaries so that AFL-CIO union field reps who are reimbursed for travel and lodging look like high-paid officials.  The attacks comes as the union movement is stepping up work to expose corporate greed, pass Fair Share Health Care bills in 33 states and bring to light employer coercion when workers attempt to organize unions.  As founder of the Employment Policies Institute Foundation, which has argued against raising the minimum wage, and a labor lawyer with the chamber in the 1970s, Berman has a long history of hatred against workers who seek to tap into the American dream and make a living that will support their families, send their kids to school and offer secure retirements.

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