Guess who’s starting to worry about labor protests?
by digby
You know the Big Money Boyz have some concerns when they hire right wing PR firms to pull out the old lazy, dirty hippie tropes to get the rubes on the other side. I wrote a piece for Salon about the history of that moldy tactic and how it’s being applied to today’s Black Friday protests.
Just check this out first:
Read on to find out who’s behind that puerile piece of garbage:
All that’s missing is a bunch of insults about the women having hair under their arms and the men smelling like pigs. Some things never get old. It’s quite clear that somebody has decided to tickle the right wing lizard brain and deploy it service of Big Business again. It worked pretty well every other time, after all.
You will not be surprised to learn that this video was made by a professional PR firm that’s been working on behalf of these corporations to push back the low wage worker’s movement for some time. Lee Fang at the Nation has the scoop:
TheNation.com has discovered that Worker Center Watch was registered by the former head lobbyist for Walmart. Parquet Public Affairs, a Florida-based government relations and crisis management firm for retailers and fast food companies, registered the Worker Center Watch website.
The firm is led by Joseph Kefauver, formerly the president of public affairs for Walmart and government relations director for Darden Restaurants. Throughout the year, Parquet executives have toured the country, giving lectures to business groups on how to combat the rise of what has been called “alt-labor.” At a presentation in October for the National Retail Federation, a trade group for companies like Nordstrom and Nike, Kefauver’s presentation listed protections against wage theft, a good minimum wage and mandated paid time off as the type of legislative demands influenced by the worker center protesters.
The presentation offered questions for the group, including: “How Aggressive Can We Be?” and “How do We Challenge the Social Justice Narrative?”
They could be honest and just announce they are a bunch of greedheads doing everything in their power to keep wages as low as possible so that they can keep more of the money for themselves. But that might not be quite enough to defeat “the Social Justice Narrative.” After all, that narrative in this instance merely says that people should be paid a decent wage and be treated like human beings in the workplace.