This is a crosspost from
AFL-CIO Now.
This just in. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has uncovered a "close and supportive" relationship between Bush's Department of Labor and a front group that purports to provide facts on unions but whose goal is to completely discredit and undermine them.
Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, CREW forced the Labor Department to release documents showing its connections to the group, The Center for Union Facts.
Today, CREW posted 108 pages of documents it received from the Labor Department showing the department's contacts with Richard Berman, founder and executive director of the Center and instigator of sleazey PR campaigns like the one he ran against Mothers Against Drunk Driving on behalf of the alcohol industry.
Berman also is behind the Employment Policies Institute, which SourceWatch, a Project of the Center for Media & Democracy, describes as "a think tank financed by business" that runs websites opposed to increasing the minimum wage and living wages.
SourceWatch says the living wage website:
"...attempts to portray the idea of a living wage for workers as some kind of insidious conspiracy. `Living wage activists want nothing less than a national living wage,' it warns (as though there is something wrong with paying employees enough that they can afford to eat and pay rent)."
CREW sent the FOIA request after The Washington Post reported the Labor Department's Office of Public Affairs publicized the Center and its website to employees of the department as "dedicated to providing information on labor unions and their expenditures." The Union Facts website in fact is an amalgam of distortions.
Because the Labor Department refused to comply with the FOIA request by CREW, the group in April sued the department, compelling it to provide the records. The documents include an e-mail indicating Labor Department public liaison aide Lynn Gibson (formerly with the Heritage Foundation) set up a meeting between Berman and department staff. In another, Gibson tells a Berman staffer she will send e-mails related to his organization to her "network."
The documents include an e-mail to Gibson from a Union Facts staffer transmitting one of the Center's attacks on the AFL-CIO (subject: "Thought you might get a kick out of this: feel free to pass it along"), anti-union blogs and newsletters routinely received by Labor Department staff, as well as an e-mail with a Berman article attacking unions that was sent from a top Labor Department official to other high-level department political appointees.
Claiming privilege, the Labor Department "has withheld e-mail correspondence, including correspondence from Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, that directly refer to Berman and his organizations." CREW will litigate this issue and press for the release of all documents responsive to its request.
Our original information on Berman's funding, which sources say includes $8 million to attack the nation's unions and their working members, indicated involvement by the State Chambers of Commerce National Conference.
Since February, when Berman launched his latest slime group, the organization has bought expensive, full-page ads in newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. The ads include slams against the president of UNITE HERE, whose unions are involved in hotel contract negotiations, so odds are good the hotel industry is chipping in a wad of cash.
Got info on the money trail behind Berman? Let us know at blognews@aflcio.org.