Unions hiring homeless for picket duty--with low pay and no benefits

The labor movement for decades has championed itself as the protector of working class.

But when it comes to putting that belief into practice, with their own money, organized labor falls way short, as the Detroit News noticed last week:

In Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta and elsewhere in the country, union organizers are scouring shelters and recruiting homeless people to staff their picket lines, paying just above minimum wage and failing to provide health benefits.

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A demonstrator in Washington, Nicey Howards, said the temporary protesters earn $8 an hour -- just a dollar above the legal minimum wage in Washington -- with no benefits. While she felt the job wasn't ideal, Howards was glad she could earn a little money while looking for something better.

Each week, Howards said, she works 20 hours, the maximum time allowed by the carpenters' union, bringing home $160.

The union organizers allow the hired protesters to take two-minute breaks, Howards said, but dock their pay for the time off.

Complete hypocrites. And it goes all the way to the top. From the same article:

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said he saw nothing wrong with unions hiring homeless people as pickets.

"The fact that the people demonstrating were not members of the union doesn't make much difference," Sweeney said. "What matters is that the carpenters working on the building had no health care and no pension."

When it was noted that the homeless pickets also had no benefits, Sweeney responded: "Our hope is that those workers -- that all workers -- would have health benefits, but that is a bigger issue."

Sweeney is one of the loudest voices criticizing Wal-Mart, that retailers' employees average a dollar more an hour than what the union-hired picketers got, and yes, Wal-Mart offers benefits.

Which reminds me: Last year, the United Food and Commercial Workers hired protesters from a temp agency to picket a Las Vegas Wal-Mart. The temperature was over 100 degrees, one picketer got heat stroke, other picketers suffered from foot blisters. For those, the temps purchased foot balm from the Wal-Mart they were protesting.

And that brings me to this book, Do As I Say (Not as I Do), it's about liberals who preach us on how we should run our lives, then act as hypocrites in their own.

Did you know House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has non-union help working on the vineyards she and her husband own?

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