:: rawblogXport ::

:: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 ::

CWA President, Stung by Kelber's Criticism, Expelled Him From Union Without a Hearing
There are reasons why Bahr would like to damage Harry Kelber's reputation. It was Harry, who was the first labor journalist to expose a scandal involving 27 current and former national union officers, including Bahr, who, as directors of Union Labor Life Insurance Co. (ULLICO), approved an insiders' stock trading scheme in which many of them profited for a total of more than $7 million. Bahr, under pressure, had to return more than $24,000 in profits to the insurance company.

Kelber has ridiculed Bahr's defense of the AFL-CIO's undemocratic convention voting rules, by which incumbent members of the federation's executive council are re-elected again and again, without opposition. Bahr, the AFL-CIO's point man on this issue, repeatedly argues that the current voting procedures are fair and representative, while opposing the democratic "one delegate, one vote" rule. "As my student, Morty Bahr learned very little from my lectures on union democracy," Harry says.

But what really angered Bahr and other AFL-CIO leaders was Kelber's publication of a new pamphlet, "10 Ways to Reform an Undemocratic AFL-CIO." Here, for the first time, was not only criticism of the AFL-CIO leadership, which they never bothered to respond to, but a plan for reform which it was hard to ignore.

Many union members see Bahr's decision as a crude attempt to banish Kelber from the labor movement in the hope that as an "outsider," his influence as a critic of the AFL-CIO leadership would diminish. If the expulsion stands, it will certainly have a chilling effect on rank-and-file activists, they say.

posted 7:30 AM :: reference link :: 0 comments ::

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