The price and the results. From 1995 to 2000, unions increased their payments to the AFL-CIO by 25 percent, reports David Moberg in the Nation (September 3). The payoff may have been more in politics than in organizing: “While the number of nonunion voters shrank, labor boosted the union household share of the vote steadily from 19 percent of the electorate in 1992 to 23 percent in 1996 and 26 percent in 2000….Federation officials believe that they opened Al Gore’s eyes by exposing him to workers who had suffered reprisals from their bosses because they tried to form a union and consequently plan to ‘Algorize’ every politician who seeks union support.”
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I’ll have the diesel dressing on the side, please. In a June report entitled “Food, Fuel, and Freeways,” the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University used USDA figures to calculate the distance produce shipped by truck to the Chicago terminal market from within the continental U.S. had come. “Produce arriving by truck traveled an average distance of 1,518 miles to reach Chicago in 1998, a 22 percent increase over the 1,245 miles traveled in 1981.”
Wanna sell Great Lakes water to the world? Oops–we’re already doing it. “The state of Michigan took a fateful step Wednesday, Aug. 16, when it gave the Perrier Group of America permission to pump 200 gallons of groundwater per minute from central Michigan and sell it nationwide,” write Patty Cantrell and Andrew Guy in the “Michigan Land Use Institute News” (August 20). Perrier will soon beef up its take to 400 gallons a minute, which is more than a Canadian company would have used in its 1998 proposal to haul water in tankers to Asia. Cantrell and Guy write, “The fact that Perrier will take water out of the ground and sell it in individual bottles, rather than pump it out of the Great Lakes and haul it in tankers, makes little difference. Policy makers and scientists know that Great Lakes groundwater and surface water are the same resource.”
