[UPDATE] Scare “tactics”

May 20, 2006 | Category: California, Journalism School

The Associated Press reported yesterday on Al Gore’s withdrawal from the Berkeley climate change forum (see original post below).
As always AP played it straight and simple:

Former Vice President Al Gore became the latest Democrat to pull out of a speech at the University of California, Berkeley to avoid crossing a picket line for university janitors, landscapers and cafeteria workers.

Gore was scheduled to deliver a talk next Tuesday on global warming but canceled to honor a picket threatened by members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees over wages and pension contributions.

The article went on to list the other Democrats who withdrew from Berkeley appearances at AFSCME’s request: Howard Dean, Dennis Kuncinich, state Senator Liz Figeroa, Assemblywoman Carol Liu and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (a man saint-like in his support for the university system’s students and workers).

Here’s what the wire didn’t say: According to conversations I’ve had with university people who’ve tried to accommodate AFSCME, as soon as the union threatened to picket Nunez’s commencement address, the speaker got them on the phone with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promptly promised them a 4% pay increase (the “last minute proposal” mentioned in an earlier AP report). They rejected it. They were later offered the opportunity to paste literature on every seat in the auditorium where Gore was to speak, plus five-minutes at the podium ahead of the VP’s appearance—hundreds of media and sympathetic Berkeleyans served up on a PR platter. That, too, they rejected.

The union website says a five-year veteran of the UC Berkeley janitorial force earns $11.54 an hour, while he or she could be earning $18.30 at a nearby community college [link]. That’s shameful of the university. It’s bullshit, in fact.

But bullshit might also be what that five-year janitor might be saying about the union’s strategy for getting his wages increased. Rejecting an offer of help from the Speaker of the Assembly? How else is this supposed to be solved? With a mop fight in front of the Chancellor’s house?

I really don’t understand. It’s like protest is booze, and the union is a bloated homeless person so drunk and full with it that he turns up his nose at an offer of food. (See alcoholic ketoacidosis.)

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About the Author

Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.