Union Busting 101: How Ralph Nader And Bernie Sanders Exploited Their Workers For Personal Gain

Black Lives Matter.

The sign is proudly displayed at a local grocery store/café/deli here in my part of the city. This little hybrid store, one of two in my Boston neighborhood, sits down the street from the local T station, the name for which the city dedicates to its local subway line. It is an unassuming store, tucked in a residential neighborhood that feels more like the suburbs than it does the big city. With a sister location, the flagship store, located about a half-mile north on the main artery through the neighborhood, it's no surprise that this store gets the lesser amount of daily business. But despite these subtle differences in location, both stores share the same products, same management, and same solidarity to the Black Lives Matter movement. 

And both stores are intentionally failing their workers of color.

It was a mere two weeks ago where the roughly 40 employees of these two stores announced their efforts to form a union, continuing the national trend of smaller, community-based stores organizing for better wages and working conditions. These efforts have become a rallying cry throughout the community with local flyers now advocating solidarity with the workers. Despite the appearance of being progressive, the stores' owners refused to support unionization efforts, opting instead to having "an understanding of what this all means" and promising to "give it some thought" before recently declaring that they did not support the decision of the employees to form a union. While the signs in the storefront indicate an understanding of systemic injustice for people of color, that understanding clearly doesn't apply when the owners' bottom line might be impacted by having to pay their employees more and making less money themselves. Hence, while Black lives might matter in principle, they matter slightly less than White lives and, more specifically, White owners' lives, when it comes to being paid a fair and decent wage with decent working conditions. 

Thus is the struggle of the White progressive business owner. While he or she loves to talk a big game about injustice, we often find that there is a selfish tendency to try and maximize, dare I say exploit, labor for the good of the movement. Look no further than the original White progressive, Ralph Nader. Nader made history for his work around consumer protection and advocacy in the 1960s and 1970s so it only seemed natural for him to want to create a system of young and upcoming progressives to continue his work in the decades to come. That is why he would establish U.S. Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG as it came to be called, in 1982 as a way to organize progressive groups and progressive causes. Over the next four decades, Nader would create an interconnected system where fundraising would be outsourced to a separate organization whose employees would call or canvass to earn money for both state and national groups like Environment America, the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club and the multiple U.S. PIRG state groups that had begun to emerge. This separate organization became known as the Fund for the Public Interest, or simply, The Fund. In serving as a third-party fundraiser, The Fund allowed the various state and national groups to focus on policy and advocacy work rather than traditional fundraising. Nader had created a system that where millions of dollars could be raised by young college-aged workers who were willing to join the cause, essentially outsourcing fundraising but doing it internally.

The problem then became paying these workers. This is where Nader decided that he would rather maximize money than maximize the movement. Fund employees were paid minimum wage and were given harsh quotas to meet. Turnover was common. Training was inadequate with new employees being trained and then sent out to canvass without fully understanding the campaign they were expected to pitch. Even directors and assistant directors were paid minimum wage with a quarterly paycheck expected to make up the difference with what their agreed upon salary was expected to be. Nader was banking that The Fund making money was more important than training and nurturing the next generation of political leaders and because of this, The Fund continued its harsh practices that greatly demeaned and devalued their employees. Burnout was common, but more and more money was being raised each year. This was the tradeoff that Ralph Nader was all too happy to make. 

By the early 2000s, the Fund had a reputation as being a "liberal sweatshop" that would engage in both illegal and union-busting activities. In 2002, CALPIRG, the California state affiliate of U.S. PIRG shut down an L.A. office working with Greenpeace due to its early efforts to unionize. A 2006 class-action lawsuit netted former employees over $2 million in missed overtime payments. In 2012, PIRG fired all but one member of a union bargaining team at its Portland, Oregon Telephone Outreach Program (TOP), one of three nationwide offices that did telephone-only fundraising. And in 2019, the Fund opted to shut down a Chapel Hill, North Carolina field office that had recently voted to unionize. It wasn't until December of 2021, nearly 40 years since its founding, that nonmanagerial staff in 20 states came together to form the first true Public Interest Union, comprised of over 200 members and delivering a dramatic blow to the four decades that Ralph Nader and his disciples had dedicated to trying and exploit workers for their own political gain. 

Nader was far from the only politician to abandon the workers he claimed to value and support. In many ways, history will show Bernie Sanders to be a logical extension of everything Ralph Nader stood for, including his abuse of young, idealistic workers. Like Nader, Sanders had committed his career to the working man and like Nader, Sanders has also failed to put his words into practice. In January of 2019, we learned about a culture of sexism and misogyny that existed during Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign where female campaign workers were paid less than the male workers and were openly harassed on the job. Despite being the candidate himself with access to all of those in positions of power on his campaign, Sanders later feigned ignorance when it came to the revelations and accusations the women brought forward, and went so far as to proclaim to Anderson Cooper on a live CNN interview that he was "a little busy running around the country" to have any knowledge about the type of culture that he himself had created. Sanders would eventually have a sit-down meeting with a number of harassed staffers on January 16, 2019 but would do so at the exact time there was a vote regarding Russian sanctions, allowing Sanders to conveniently use the meeting as an excuse for not showing up to vote. 

Sadly, this would not be the last of Bernie Sanders' terrible treatment of his campaign staff. Despite having a national platform in favor of the working-class throughout both his presidential campaigns, when Sanders was faced with the possibility of his own campaign workers forming a union, like Ralph Nader, he actively fought against it. In the May of 2019 while campaigning on a $15/hour minimum wage, Sanders was paying his own campaign staff less than $13/hour to try and maximize profit. After a period of tense negotiations, Sanders agreed to the formation of a union and did a public victory lap to celebrate. However, two days later a staffer from the Sanders campaign filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Sanders had fired those responsible for organizing the union. Two days after that, staffers in Iowa filed a second complaint saying that Sanders' campaign there cracked down on union activity and "refused to bargain in good faith." When push came to shove, Bernie Sanders fought tooth and nail to prevent paying his employees a little bit more and to have better working conditions exactly as Ralph Nader had done in the previous decade. 

It is these examples that prove that actions speak louder than words. That no matter how much you talk about worker justice or how much you profess to support the working-class, if you don't act on it, if you don't act by truly supporting your own workers, then you are nothing but a hypocrite. It's easy to talk a big game, but if you are suddenly threatened by your workers being empowered, if you are threatened by workers having more job security and opportunities for advancement, if you are threatened by the potential of having your paycheck decreased while simultaneously increasing the paycheck for your workers then you are no friend of labor. So stop pretending that you are. Stop liking social media posts about all the recent union victories. Stop attending strikes and showing up "in solidarity" as you like to say. Stop telling all your friends how pro-worker you are. You're not pro-worker, you're pro-you. You're more than happy to exploit your workers so you can have a little bit extra in your pockets. If you're always looking out for yourself at the expense of others, you have no right to call yourself a friend of the working man and woman.

We expect Republicans to be anti-union. But today, we should also be on the lookout for those willing to exploit labor on the left. Sadly, there will inevitably be another Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders somewhere down the road. There will be other local shop owners with a Black Lives Matter sign in the display window that will refuse to support their own workers' unionization. When there is money to be made, there will be choices to be made and there will always be the temptation for those, regardless of political ideology, to cut corners to maximize profit. America was founded on the backs of slave labor after all, a system designed to overwork and undervalue an entire workforce. While slavery as an institution is no more, there will always be those who see their workers as subhuman, part of a social class that is unworthy of rights and respect. They might talk a big game, but it is their actions that dictate how they truly feel about their workers. If they are unable to support their own workers in their quest for better pay and working conditions, then they are on the wrong side of history and they are siding with the same historical oppressors that four-hundred years ago would have been buying human beings at slave auctions and employing them in the fields. If they can't understand that connection, then they don't truly understand the meaning of that sign in the storefront window. 

And they should that that sign down until further notice.