The blogger "labor union" that isn't

[Omaha Steve]

http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/08/07/blogger_union/

The blogger "labor union" that isn't

There's an Associated Press report flying around that looks into what would seem to be a strangely indulgent activist effort -- the fight by some progressive bloggers to form a labor union. The story is full of quotes about how such a thing could never work. Curt Hopkins, founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, tells the AP, "The blogosphere is such a weird term and such a weird idea. It's anyone who wants to do it ... There's absolutely no commonality there. How will they find a commonality to go on? I think it's doomed to failure on any sort of large scale."

And here's how Tom Blumer over at Newsbusters ("Exposing and combating liberal media bias") reacted to the affair: "Maybe I'm missing something, but when you want to form a union, isn't it sort of necessary that there be a mean, oppressive employer, or a group of them?" Nobody really employs progressive bloggers -- so if they're going to collectively bargain, who'll be their target?

Good points, Tom -- except it turns out you're barking up the wrong tree. Susie Madrak, proprietor of the blog Suburban Guerrilla and the AP's main source for its story, is not calling for a labor union for bloggers. She understands that bloggers aren't employed by anyone, and that consequently collective bargaining wouldn't work. What Madrak is organizing, instead, is very different: a kind of grass-roots insurance pool to pay for health emergencies of progressive bloggers -- people without whom, she says, Democrats would not enjoy the political success they're now seeing.

Madrak's fight was inspired by the death last month of Jim Capozzola, one of the founders of lefty blog the Rittenhouse Review. Madrak, who calls Capozzola her "fairy blogfather," argues that if he'd been a Republican, Capozzola would be alive today. "He would have been in a well-paid think tank job, living the high life (He did, after all, have a masters degree in foreign policy,)" she wrote recently in the Huffington Post. "Most importantly, he would have had health insurance for the past six years."

Instead, Capozzola "didn't have enough money to go to the doctor while he was waiting for his health insurance to kick in," Madrak told me in a phone interview today. "By the time his benefits started up he had an infection that was really bad. The drugs they treated him with kept his blood from clotting. He hit his head, and he died from a brain hemorrhage."

FULL article at link.