TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2009
TESC aids right-wing in attack on Labor Center

EVERGREEN AIDS RIGHT-WING IN ATTACK ON LABOR CENTER

Friends and allies of the Evergreen Labor Center, 

I wish the subject line of this email were not true, but I’m afraid it is. 

You expect as a Labor Center to share in the attacks from anti-union forces that labor unions themselves have had to endure, not only in the last three decades (since Reagan attacked PATCO), but since workers started organizing unions eons ago. You expect to get complaints from organizations like the Landmark Legal Foundation/ Ronald Reagan Legal Center, which last June sent a letter to the state auditor and to the college alleging that public support for the Labor Center serves no valid purpose and should be terminated. 

What you don’t expect is for the administration of one of the most progressive colleges in the country, which has hosted the Labor Center for 22 years, to play into Landmark’s hands by conducting an audit finding us guilty of the very crimes Landmark accuses us of. But this is what has happened. Today, February 19, Maryam Jacobs, the college’s auditor, is mailing a report to Landmark which will cause that organization to dance in their legal suits. They won’t be able to believe their luck. And it won’t be because the audit finds us guilty of stealing money or diverting funds to private accounts. No, there’s none of that, though there are several instances of “exceptions” where we could improve our invoicing, receipt of funds, recording-keeping, and so on. Landmark will be rejoicing because the audit finds our basic work, our fundamental mission, to be illegal and unethical.

The saddest part of this whole episode is that it didn’t have to happen: not the audit, not the part of the audit that focuses on ethical improprieties, not the conclusions the audit comes to. Attached you will find a long response I’ve written concerning the audit’s allegations. As you’ll see if you have the time to wade into it, I find Ms. Jacobs’ findings to be based on faulty assumptions, a skewed interpretation of the law, misunderstandings of what we do (and always have done) at the Labor Center, and, possibly, ideological bias. And as sad as the audit is, it’s also sad that after I prepared that long response and sent it to the President’s and Provost’s offices this past Monday, I was not invited to meet with Maryam Jacobs and President Les Purce to discuss where the audit might fall short. Maryam made only very minor changes in the audit’s findings regarding ethics violations, and the college administration apparently did not rethink the wisdom of sending out a report which might do real damage to the Labor Center and to the college as a whole. 

This was not our first attempt to engage in a discussion about these issues: as I document in the attached response, Labor Center staff had been asking for such a discussion with President Purce for months. For an institution that prides itself on dialogue and reasoning through issues, that is very troubling indeed.

Following are the first two paragraphs of my response to Ms. Jacobs’ report. My whole response is in the attached document. 

This audit saga began with a letter dated June 17, 2008, from the Landmark Legal Foundation/ Ronald Reagan Legal Center to the Washington State Auditor. The letter stated that the Labor Center “…is in violation of Washington’s requirement that public funds must only be used for a valid public purpose.…Rather than a valid public purpose, the Center’s activities are designed to promote a particular political ideology.” The saga – at least this stage of it – ends with the college’s internal auditor finding “…numerous instances that has [sic] the appearance of violating the State Ethics in Service Act and cannot be tied to the Center’s mission. The activities noted include work with and the appearance of support for special interest groups, training and classes pertaining to resisting work of federal agencies, possible political activity as part of a conference, and payment of dues to special interest groups for membership.” In addition, the Labor Center’s new mission “…creates close and strong ties with labor unions …[which] provides the appearance of possible ethics issues.” The College’s internal auditor, in other words, claimed (mistakenly, I believe, as I’ll illustrate below) to find evidence validating one of the very allegations made by the Landmark Foundation: that Labor Unions do not serve a valid public interest and that it is illegal for public employees to do educational work with them. 

The Landmark Foundation does not hide its political intent, and so its letter to the state auditor should have been seen for the ideological document that it is. This is an organization that nominated Rush Limbaugh for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and that asks on its webpage, rhetorically, “Will the federal courts generally, and the Supreme Court in particular, continue down the path of creating new rights out of whole cloth without any support in the Constitution itself -- giving the nation such things as the right to privacy, the right to abortion and the right to homosexual sodomy -- or will it be returned to the republican fold by carefully-chosen and vigorously-defended nominees who are properly committed to the idea of judicial restraint?” Landmark has targeted several other Labor Centers in the country, including those at the University of Massachusetts, Florida International University, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, and Indiana University. They sent a complaint to the California attorney general and the State Department of Finance alleging that the Berkeley Labor Center violated provisions of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure, by hosting a Summer Institute for Union Women and sponsoring a Latino Leadership School and a Black trade union leadership school. They refer to global warming as “hype” and claim that the National Education Association is the “nation’s chief obstacle to substantive education reform.”

In solidarity,

Peter Kardas, Director
Labor Center
The Evergreen State College

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