Corporate Front Man: Richard Berman manages the news on key labor-backed bill

[billyoc]

Source: Harper's Magazine

Richard Berman, a prominent lobbyist for the food and restaurant industry, is one of the leading opponents of the hotly-debated Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier to organize labor unions. Berman is the sole owner and executive director of Berman and Company, a for-profit management firm that runs fifteen corporate-funded groups. He holds at least sixteen positions within these interlocking organizations.

Two of Berman’s groups are fighting EFCA: the non-profit Employee Freedom Action Committee and the Center for Union Facts, a grassroots lobbying firm that gathers “information about the size, scope, political activities, and criminal activity of the labor movement.” The two groups share office space and staff.

Berman is not required to publicly disclose financial information about his company. Federal tax returns for his non-profit, the Center for Union Facts, however, show that it took in $2.5 million in 2007, almost entirely from unnamed donors, including one individual who put up $1.2 million. About half of the group’s money was spent on an anti-union print and online ad campaign, and $840,000 went to Berman and Company for “management” services. The Center rails against highly-paid union officials, listing on its website the annual salaries of top officials at the AFL-CIO. The federation’s three highest-paid employees — president John Sweeney, vice-president Linda Chavez-Thompson, and secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka—make about $680,000 combined, well less than what Berman’s company took in to manage only the Center for Union Facts.

The Orlando Sentinel ran an item Monday, “Growing Number of Dems Opposing EFCA,” which cited a political consultant named Joe Kefauver and another local political official — “both longtime Democrats who supported Obama” — as being stern opponents of EFCA, with Kefauver adding that support for organized labor shouldn’t be the only “litmus test for being a good Democrat.” The article was instantly posted on a website run by Berman’s Center for Union Facts.


Read more: http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004998

[edc]

1. How Tragic

This entity that controls the federal government, that I helped finance, that I worked for and voted for is not the Democratic party. It is merely the loyal opposition, in or out of power.

[Samantha]

2. Yes it is -- good word

Part of the reason Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are facing financial difficulties is due to the growing number of unemployed, underemployed, and the employed but underpaid. That is why I am starting to see jobs in the DC area for $5.00 and $6.00 an hour. Unbelievable. One cannot pay his or her taxes in this area on that. No wonder States are going under.

I guess we are suppose to shut up, take these jobs and live 10 or 12 people to a house to survive.

Any Democratic legislator that knuckles under on this should be penalized by other Dems when he or she is up for election.

And the remarkable thing is that this stuff springs from people who criticize us for playing class warfare. We the people are just trying to survive and to insist on a living wage instead of being worked under conditions that reflect the same terms third-world countries are inflicting on their workers.

Al Gore said following the passage of NAFTA the biggest mistake we made when negotiations were ongoing was the failure to negotiate better labor standards with our trade partners. It appears that because we did not, we are left at the mercy of those who want us to work at slave labor wages, off the
clock -- you get the picture.