:: rawblogXport ::

:: Thursday, February 05, 2004 ::

This Little Piggy Whores for Markets by Nick Schou, ORANGE COUNTY WEEKLY
Except for several hundred striking grocery workers and a few dozen police officers, the parking lot of the Vons supermarket near Long Beach’s Traffic Circle was empty on Jan. 28. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Union protest featured music, speeches and chants of "One Day Longer, One Day Stronger!" Nonetheless, more than a dozen strikers and union officials prostrated themselves on the pavement in front of the store entrance—fists clenched in the air—until police carted them off to jail.

No shopper attempted to cross the picket line. And unless you were a striker or a cop, you probably haven’t heard about the protest until now.

The next day’s Los Angeles Times carried nary a word about the demonstration. Instead, Times editors that day ran a joint editorial by Brian P. Simpson, an assistant professor at San Diego’s National University, and Elan Journo, a writer with the rabidly anti-union Ayn Rand Institute.

Under the headline "Union Packs Unfair Punch in Grocery Strike," Journo and Simpson blamed the strike on a U.S. labor law that allows workers the right to strike against their employers. "Why can’t the stores fire the strikers and end the dispute?" the article asked. "Because they are forced by law to deal with the union. That coercive power of the union is a gross violation of the employers’ and workers’ rights."

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