Big Unions Stiff Pledge to Pledge Allegiance

Ralph Nader wants the nation’s twenty largest unions to take the pledge of allegiance. The pledge of allegiance that ends with the phrase – with liberty and justice for all. The unions are being unresponsive.

For years, Nader has been campaigning to get executives of major U.S. chartered corporations to pledge to pledge allegiance to the flag at their annual meetings on behalf of their corporations. To no avail.

Then in June, Nader wrote to executives of the nation’s twenty largest unions calling on them to pledge to pledge allegiance to the flag at their annual conventions.

The AFL-CIO’s Robert McGarrah told Nader last month that he would help reach out to the unions and line them up to take the pledge. But then last week McGarrah wrote Nader saying – “I’m sorry to say that I just heard back from the senior staff here – they will not approve my working on labor union responses” to the letter.

So far, Nader has not heard from any of the top twenty unions he’s written to.

“In an era of corporate globalization at the expense of our economy, serious questions have arisen regarding the lack of patriotism of these corporations that were born in the U.S., rose to profit on the backs of American workers, were bailed out on the backs of American taxpayers, and were saved by the U.S. marines when they got in trouble abroad,” Nader wrote to the union executives.

“Their sense of gratitude to the American people has been expressed by shipping American jobs and whole industries to communist and fascist, serf-labor regimes abroad. By contrast, workers and their unions cannot and would not use such levers of power to leave their country, nor do they possess the privileges of immense power to get whatever they want from Washington, D.C. Unlike giant corporations, they are loyal to this country and its communities.”

You would think that pledging to take the pledge of allegiance to the flag is a no brainer for otherwise patriotic unions and their members. Apparently not so.

And if the unions are actually saying the pledge of allegiance at their national annual meetings, why aren’t they taking Nader’s pledge to pledge?

Especially since if they did, it would compare favorably to the U.S. corporate refusniks?

Nader can’t even get his calls returned.

“Any criticism of the AFL-CIO, like their lack of putting muscle and resources behind the push for a $10 minimum wage puts you on the no return call list,” Nader said. “For example, I used get calls returned from Richard Trumka, Damon Silver and Thea Lee. No longer. But I know that Trumka will return a call from Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of the anti-union, jobs exporting, no income tax paying General Electric, because Trumka sits on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness – the same council which Immelt chairs.”

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