Michael Moore Supports Unions – Kind of

(Warner Todd Huston/The Union Label) – With the spotlight on Wisconsin’s union thugs rampaging across the state, one wonders why it took propaganda filmmaker Michael Moore so long to put himself in front of the news cameras to take some of their publicity for himself. But this weekend, Moore finally glommed onto the cameras making himself out to be a great supporter of the union’s efforts in the Badger State. Once again, though, Moore proves to be a hypocrite. It was Moore, after all, that excluded using union workers in one of his recent films. Some supporter of unions!

Filmmaker Moore attend a recent Wisconsin pro-union rally and regaled the crowd with an address saying, “Madison is only the beginning.”

“We’re going to do this together. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up,” Moore told the protesters, who have swarmed the Capitol every day for close to three weeks.

Oh, he’s a great supporter, right? But let us drift back only a few years to 2009 when he was filming his last bomb, Capitalism: A Love Story. During that production we found that Moore didn’t hire union stagehands (the IATSE) for his film.

According to his agent, Ari Emanuel, Moore claimed that he used non-union labor because the stagehands union doesn’t “respect documentary filmmakers” or some such thing.

It made the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) mad enough that they refused all the free tickets Moore tried to offer them when the movie debuted. Yet here are these teachers in Wisconsin now falling all over themselves because Moore came publicity seeking in front of them. For shame that their institutional memory is so shallow, eh?

That wasn’t the only time that Moore made a film snubbing union workers, either. Back in 2000 Moore directed a music video for the band Rage Against The Machine and non-union workers were also used in that production.

Just last year Moore made a stir by stealing the work of a newspaper and re-posting the entire thing on his own website as if it was his own work. He even took the video produced by the Knoxville News Sentinel, took the paper’s logo off it, then reposted it as if it was his own work.

Moore has long been an opponent of copyright protection and thinks that everyone’s work should be free.

In any case, Michael Moore is a supreme hypocrite, typical of a liberal, saying one thing and doing another.