Blowback

It wouldn't be the first time organized labor got into bed with organized crime, but the unions licking their chops to get a piece of the action from prostitution might be biting off more than they can chew. Taking a lesson from the SEIU nursing home scandal a few years back, CLUW and other AFL-CIO affiliates might want to think twice about the blowback -- let alone ethics -- of making their bed with the capos.

If for no other reason, at some point the membership of San Francisco's labor union women in the hotel and restaurant service industries, for example, might take issue with union bosses using their dues to lobby for legalizing an industry that traffics other immigrant women of color (and girls) to be held in bondage as prostitutes. While it may be a lucrative attraction for bolstering union coffers, the morality of unions abetting crimes against humanity, in the city where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, somehow seems out of synch.

San Francisco's working women might want to talk about that.