Please peruse this scary article that a reader of this blog sent to me:
Earlier this month, Mitt Romney received fawning press from the right wing media for turning out hundreds of coal miners to stand behind him during a speech on his energy plan in Beallsville, Ohio.
“To win Ohio, [President Obama’s] got to win eastern Ohio, and he’s got to get the votes of the people in these communities all around us here, and you’re not going to let that happen, because you’re going to keep our jobs,”Romney said that day.
It turns out that the coal miners did want to keep their jobs — in fact, that’s the only reason that many of them bothered to show up for Romney’s event. A group of employees at the Century Mine where Romney held his event recently complained to WWVA radio host David Blomquist that they feared they would be fired if they didn’t attend the Romney rally. Making matters worse, management did not pay the employees for the day because they were outside listening to Romney speak instead of working in the mine.
“Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time,” the employees told Blomquist on his radio show. . .
Furthermore, the employees claim that “letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events.”
On Monday, Blomquist gave Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore a chance to defend his company on his show. Moore essentially confirmed the allegations.
According to Moore, the company “communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.” It seems that Moore may not fully understand the meaning of the word “mandatory.”
Sorry for the long quote but I believe it is important to see the situation as fully as possible. If this is true, then I have to say that it is quite scary. This is precisely what Russia’s President Putin and his party “United Russia” do to guarantee good turnouts for their political rallies.
If this is what Romney’s campaign does before Romney even gets elected, then what should we expect once he is in power? Oh, Soviet Union, here we come. As if the bailouts were not enough to give us all a scary reminder that Soviet practices are alive and well, here is the good old Soviet tradition of taking people off work and sending them to political rallies they had no interest in. But then the USSR, at least, never withdrew the salary for the days missed by employees because of such events.
I want to hope that the information provided in the article is not true. Does anybody know anything about this event?
Don’t watch the following video if you are not prepared to feel very, very sad:
Clarissa's Blog 
This was national news and got all sorts of discussion/exposure.
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I don’t have television so I only discover things when I either see them in my blogroll or people are kind enough to send me links.
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You don’t follow any newspapers?
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I subscribe to magazines: The Nation, The London Review of Books, the National Geographic, and the Smithsonian (on my Kindle.)
I used to subscribe to the NYTimes, but I got too frustrated with its many idiocies.
If people want to recommend good newspapers, I’d love to hear the suggestions!
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Obviously I think it is a stupid waste of money to make workers attend a political rally, but I will defend on principle the right of owners to waste their money. (Even if workers were not paid specifically to go, it would still cost the company as they would need to compensate workers somehow to stop them from leaving.) Mandatory and force mean two different things. Force means violence. Remember no one has any intrinsic right to have a job. I think there is a solution that we can all agree on. We must strip the company of all favors it receives from the government, which indirectly supports such a foolish waste of resources.
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In my culture, we have this saying we use to respond to this kind of argument. Whenever one shares something offensive or traumatic that was done to them, a group of people drawls, “But at least they didn’t slash you with a razor across your eyes!”
Yes, things could have been much worse. But we can’t expect the workers not to feel the insult because at least they weren’t killed in the process. Right now I’m upset with somebody who has behaved like a total jerk to me. But at least she didn’t slash me with a razor, so yip-dee-doo! I’ll just stop being a cry-baby and get over it, right?
Only today you felt harassed by a comment, yet people should not feel harassed by the threat of losing their livelihood? Double standard, my friend. 🙂
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In such a situation like this the boss and the employees are not in equal positions of power. The employees do not have a realistic ability to back up any threat to quit. However, the boss certainly can back up any threat to fire them. Since the boss has more bargaining power than the employees, their threats to “Go to Romney rally or I’ll (say) fire you” can actually be carried out. The employee’s threat to “If you make me attend the Romney rally I’ll quit” cannot be carried out. Therefore, the carrot and stick the boss is wielding actually is coercive, because the employee is being forced to attend the Romney rally at threat of poverty due to job loss.
Know of one way to get around this? Support redistribution and a minimum income. By giving a guaranteed minimum income to everyone, it makes job loss less severe. Hence, if glibertarians like you took their beliefs seriously, they’d support redistribution and a GMI because this allows employees to have a realistic chance of carrying out threats to quit if they are mistreated/threatened/harassed/coerced by asshat bosses.
But as I recall, you’re against it.
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“glibertarians”
– I need to write a separate post on this beautiful play on words. 🙂
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People quit their jobs all the time. Workers go on strike, a concept I support as long as no violence is used even against strike breakers. Having to go to a Romney rally is a great reason to go strike. The real issue is not whether workers and owners are in an equal situation, I agree with that in the larger sense they are not, but whether they are closer in their levels of power to each other, considering that neither wields a monopoly on violence, or to the government, which does.
It is funny that you talk about the redistribution of wealth in that as Clarissa can tell you, just last night I sent her an email in which acknowledged that any move to a more libertarian society would require in practice a redistribution of wealth in some form of the rich buying off the rest of society. So I am not against redistributing wealth in principle; I simple object to using government in order to do this.
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I have no problem calling what was done to these workers harassment. I would even go so far as to say that what the company and by extension the Romney campaign did was worse than the name calling I get from some of your commentators. The workers at this company have every right to be annoyed both at the company and at Romney and join me in not voting for Romney for clearly being way too in bed with big business. Does this release me from the charge of a double standard?
Ultimately, though, this story is simply another good example of how we construct narratives very differently. Your narrative seems to be big business has power over workers so we need to even the playing field. My narrative is that big business is incompetent and annoying, but even at its worst is not a threat to anyone’s physical health and safety as even the best government is.
Feel free to expel me or allow me to secede from the Union any time.
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“Does this release me from the charge of a double standard?”
– Absolutely. 🙂 I apologize for suspecting you of having a double standard.
“Your narrative seems to be big business has power over workers so we need to even the playing field. ”
– Now you are putting words in my mouth. I don’t even know what “evening out the playing field” might look like in this context. What I wanted to do in this post is discuss how Romney’s campaign is using similar political technologies to the ones employed by Putin. I find the similarity curious and I remarked on it. I don’t really have any suggestion to offer here other than “let’s stop trying to be so similar to the USSR.” 🙂
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I think we are on the same page in not trying to be Putin. It was not my intention to put words in your mouth. That is why I said that it “seems” that you think this way. I honestly try to interpret what you say so that I can develop a sense of what your worldview is from your perspective as opposed to simply calling you a “pinko-commie,” “flag burning,” “America hating” liberal. Such a view might be personally very comforting, but like religion, it all to easily traps a person into an ideological bubble in which they can never learn from anyone outside of it.
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Yes, pinko-commie is a word that needs to be added to the most recent post. It is absolutely beautiful! 🙂
I don’t think there is need to interpret what I say. Understatement is not my forte, to put it very mildly. 🙂 I always say exactly what I want to say and then repeat it.
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I find it strange that a literary scholar would say that. How could your field exist without interpretation? How is your discussion of other people not an interpretation? Even to quote someone is to interpret as you are declaring some lines to be more definitive than others.
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“I find it strange that a literary scholar would say that. How could your field exist without interpretation? How is your discussion of other people not an interpretation”
– I’m not saying texts shouldn’t be interpreted. I’m saying that my writing – only mine, not other people’s – suffers from a lack of understatement. It’s a flaw that I work on but still not very successfully. What can I say? Nobody is perfect. Reviewers keep pointing this out and I still can’t make it work. I blame autism. 🙂
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Well, here’s the report from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an old and respected newspaper not knowing for trading in rumor – http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2012/08/coal_miners_lost_pay_when_mitt.html
Re required political rallies, theoretically your right in US is to advocate, vote, etc. on your own political beliefs and preferences, not be coerced into rallying against them, for instance by an employer. And political participation is supposed to be voluntary.
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The comments are a little scary: “Let me get this straight, Romney visited a coal mine. And it had to be shut down for security purposes.
Doesn’t this happen to every place of business that Obama or Romney visit? If so, why is this news? ”
“So they lost a days pay. Big deal! I lost $500 in extra banking fees this year as a result of the Dodd/Frank Act that Obama signed. That’s over 2 weeks pay for me. I’m set to make $10k this years so I am not exactly rich. There are no jobs. Thanks Obama for nothing.”
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Sometimes I think certain factions in the US miss the days of the Cold War so much (because, see, we had a “simple” mission and a supposedly easily-defined enemy) that they’re resurrecting it here.
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America and Zimbabwe are very similar in all sorts of ways:
“In Harare South, which is home to many housing co-operatives and is under Zanu PF’s Hubert Nyanhongo, many home-owners who spoke to this paper said they would like the new policy to assure them of property security.
“We have been in trouble for not attending ZANU PF rallies with threat of evictions being mooted for failure to comply. So the national housing policy should quickly address the situation here because some of us fear losing our homes.
“With the elections looming there is the possibility of ZANU PF cowing people into submission by threatening us with eviction again,” said a man, who only identified himself as Trevor for fear of victimisation.”
http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/news/zimbabwe/60386/will-new-housing-policy-address.html
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This is not a surprise. Bribery, coercion, and impersonation go a long way in filling photo-ops with a “real people” background. Remember the “real people” Republican Congressional aides’ riot outside the Florida recount building in the 2000 Presidential election. (Aides were instructed to “Dress like working class people”). As far as fundraising is concerned, many companies make it clear that higher salary employment is contingent on forking over money to the company owner’s favored party or candidate. Due to computerized open records and due to the practice of bundling, the employee can’t just say, I gave the limit already, and is not really free to donate more than $199.99 to the other party or candidate.
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“many companies make it clear that higher salary employment is contingent on forking over money to the company owner’s favored party or candidate”
I am such an innocent, it turns out … this actually shocks me.
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