If you asked a bunch of heroin addicts if they like heroin, the vast majority would probably answer in the affirmative, right?
The same would probably hold true of you asked a puppy if she liked Puppy Chow. She would likely wag her tail happily and drool all over your foot.
Yet, this seems to be the methodology that former union organizer-turned-SEIU-activist-turned Cornell University professor Kate Brofenbrenner uses every time she issues another study claiming that all sorts of employer misconduct occurs during union campaigns. Then, predictably, Ms. Bronfenbrenner’s cohorts in the union movement, upon publication of her biased studies, use her biased claims to push the delusionally-dubbed Employee Free Choice Act.
For years, Bronfenbrenner has unapologetically based her studies on interviews with union organizers or, as in the latest example, lead organizers—hardly an unbiased source. However, since she has the gravitas of an allegedly prestigious university behind her studies, she is deemed to be credible.
Unfortunately, Bronfenbrenner’s studies are rarely scrutinized by anyone in the media and, in fact, are usually used by the propaganda pushers at American Rights at Work as all the more reason to pass the hallucinogencially-named Employee Free Choice Act.
In her most recent case, it is ARAW (along with the union-funded Economic Policy Institute) who paid Ms. Bronfenbrenner for her “research.”
[Note: Not surprisingly, the “non-partisan” EPI’s Board of Directors reads like a “who’s who” list of top union bosses.]
In Bronfenbrenner’s most recent re-incarnation of her study, Bronfenbrenner (according to the New York Times) based her study “on a random sample of 1,004 unionization elections from early 1999 to late 2003 and relied on a review of National Labor Relations Board cases and documents, as well as surveys of 562 lead union organizers.” [Emphasis added.]
Unremarkably, the NY Times, does not challenge the data as biased.
Since roughly a third of the data gathered came from union organizers (people employed to sell unionization to workers) and was funded by the union-supported American Rights at Work and the Economic Policy Institute, it should be no coincidence that Bronfenbrenner’s study makes all sorts of claims of employer misconduct.
However, it does make one wonder why anyone in the media would take this woman’s research seriously at all.
After all, it is sort of like having Viagra-maker Pfizer pay for a study on the best drug to create wood, while only asking Viagra users. A weak analogy, you say? Well how’s this?…
A study like Bronfenbrenner’s to support the job-killing Employee Free FORCED Choice Act is akin to asking Kool-Aid makers to taste test Kool-Aid, then telling the world that, sure enough, Kool-Aid tastes like Kool-Aid.
It’s too bad so many otherwise rationale people will drink the Kool-Aid and repeat this tripe without a closer examination of the ingredients used to make its claims.
