Is there a, um, provider for this kind of thing?

It's a little old, but still interesting, so I'm going ahead with this. (And don't worry, there's a Labour Day post coming, but it requires some looking back.)

The Washington Post reported this in July. Unions have long been opponents of outsourcing, and naive little me had assumed that picket duty is a kind of badge of honour. You WANT your employer to see you out there in the streets, yelling things about the company's inability to negotiated. Right?

Well not necessarily so, if you're Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters. It appears they've outsourced picket duty to less employable folks. At $8 (US) per hour, the union will put individuals willing to walk the picket line from shelters (homeless or otherwise) or transitional houses.

To be fair, this one part of the labour movement isn't the first to think this up--environmental and anti-war activists I believe are the ones we can credit for the brainwave. There is SOME sense to it, after all: if you want a bunch of really angry people to make some noise, you might as well find somebody who's got a LOT to be angry about.

But War and the Environment are different from the world of Work. For one, the Defense Minister doesn't really know who anyone on that protest is, and at least you could argue that so long as the participants in an environment protest are citizens, then they have a reasonable justification in being there, paid or not.

But no matter how big an employer is, management and executives KNOW who their employees are. You see them everyday, and even if there's thousands of them in one company the culture will often give you subtle cues as to who in your workplace really belongs there.

Now wouldn't it be a terrible risk to have management realize your picket has no employees in it? There's a blow to the credibility if ever there was one.

To say nothing of the value of $8 an hour. As Tina Shaw from the House of Ruth women's shelter put it, "It's about the cash...We're against low wages, but I'm here for the cash." Oh, the irony is almost too much, given that I haven't had coffee yet.