Month: March 2006

Searching for Comrade Obermeier

On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours. The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work […]

I Want Candy

When I was younger, my favorite treat at the candy shops in the malls was the red licorice shoelace. I’d tie them into knots and gobble them up before I’d make it to the parking lot. I have been craving them for some time, and I think I may never taste them again. The problem is that, a number of years ago, some genius and his focus groups decided to change the formula for the red shoelace licorice, making it taste like Twizzlers. Extensive field research has brought me to the conclusion that all shoelace licorice throughout the malls of America is produced in the same factory, by the same Oompa Loompa gulag, because it all tastes like Twizzlers. If I want a Twizzler, I’ll buy a goddamn Twizzler. I really don’t understand this switch, as a business decision. Why be just like a ubiquitous, multi-million dollar product? Two years […]

Living on in the Archives

History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.” The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American […]

WFP: Now Send a Message to the Senate

From the Working Families Party: No employee of a multi-billion dollar company like Wal-Mart should be forced to go without medical care or forced to resort to Medicaid. The Fair Share for Health Care Act will ensure that large employers provide decent health benefits and level the playing field for responsible local businesses. We’ve got over 50 Assembly cosponsors – now it’s time for you to ask your Senator to cosponsor the bill. Ask your state Senator to sign on to the Fair Share for Health Care Act.

Bill O’Reilly’s Flying Circus

Four years ago, I was a guest on the “O’Reilly Factor,” part of a panel discussion on the income gap. It was a wonderfully surreal moment that, alas, I have yet to repeat. I just stumbled upon a transcript of the show. Below is a pretty funny bit that I believe is short enough that I can legally quote it. Missing here is O’Reilly’s assertion that Cornell University is a socialist plot, “Parade” editor and DNC Treasurer Andrew Tobias inviting me to join the Democratic party, and, finally, Mr. O’Reilly brusquely ending the segment and announcing that Mel Gibson would be next after the commercials. O’REILLY: OK, but here’s the deal. And you ought to know this, too, Shaun, is that for many years, I didn’t make any money. OK? And I lived in my younger time in a very frugal environment. OK? So I don’t believe that the government […]

Newsflash

This just in. After analyzing subpoenaed Google search records, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced that they foiled a new 9/11 Al Quaeda plot involving “blonde hair big tits.” I hope that all you refuseniks and ACLU’ers out there stop and think about what kind of busty, peroxide doomsday your interference might have caused. Have more faith in your government. You’re not even using those civil liberties, anyway.

“…But they don’t mind throwing a brick…”

It’s touching that there are still people in this world who care enough to riot. I first heard about France’s proposed “first job contract” law from some of the French scientists with whom I am working. They’re absolutely pissed off. The law would allow employers to hire first-time workers under the age of 26, and, for the first two years of this job, have no obligation to provide benefits and can fire the employee at any time for any reason. American workers have a similar status when they are hired for the first job, and for their second, third, fourth and tenth up until the day they die. Unless they have a union contract, that is. Where is our outrage?

McLaughlin is Presumed Innocent

In a very troubling development, FBI agents raided the offices of the New York Central Labor Council and the district office of Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, the President of the CLC. McLaughlin has been President of the CLC for two decades, the third of three representatives of IBEW Local 3 who have headed the Council for the entirety of its 51 year history. His files were seized in connection to an investigation of a contractor, Petrocelli Electric, that did business with the city. While McLaughlin’s tenure as President of the city-wide coalition of trade unions is open to criticism (McLaughlin is a skilled politician who has strived for unity in the labor movement; that unity has often been achieved through a lowest common denominator agenda that has precluded bold leadership stands), I have never heard any of his critics accuse him of corruption. To date, there have been no charges or […]

“…the lines sag heavy and deep tonight…”

So, Friday, March 3 is my birthday. I’ll be turning 27. If I were a rockstar, I’d be about to die, but I’m a union organizer so I’ll merely get balder and fatter. I’d like to see my friends, particularly those of you that I have not seen much lately (those of you that I have seen, I’m frankly getting sick of you). Being an extensive party planner, I’m probably just going to go to Botanica at happy hour and hope to see you at some point.