Last week's Public Employment Relations Commission unfair labor practices ruling against Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran was worded with astounding harshness for a government agency. The ruling, on the first of seven pending union complaints, itemized u nfair labor practices like threatening pay cuts for employees who were active in the union; stripping employees of supervisory job duties and titles after becoming active in the union; and virtually banning any employee discussion of union matters in the workplace. The city's prosecuting attorneys have been trying to negotiate a contract for the past 18 months.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who's followed the career of Mark Sidran. The man's contempt for those he has power over--and his slavish affection for people with money--are truly worrisome traits for Seattle's highest-ranking prosecutor . The same priorities have unnecessarily ruined the lives of countless ordinary, bumbling people who've run afoul of the law and been crushed, rather than censured, as a result. (Betcha he doesn't apply the same intolerant standards to his own now-ruled-i llegal behavior.) They're also the same priorities that have led to Sidran's high-profile wars against the homeless, against youth, or anyone else whose existence, in his mind, is a crime in itself.

Also no surprise is the kid gloves treatment local media has given this ruling. Sidran isn't paying a price in the local press, which generally adores him, and which rarely even acknowledges that labor rights exist. (Recall here the Boeing-Press-Releases -As-Balanced-Coverage approach taken during the 1995 Machinists' strike, easily the largest and most successful labor action in the U.S. this decade.)

What is surprising, or should be, is the failure of this state's organized labor to do anything to make an official, up for re-election in a few months, pay a price for engaging in practices stunningly hostile to worker rights. Where the hell is la bor?

The answer, unfortunately, is that labor is just about where it's always been in recent years, trumpeted new reforms notwithstanding: with its lips so firmly attached to the Democratic Party's ass it can't even reach the dropped crumbs. In Seattle, where most every elected official is a Democrat, that means few cross words and no genuine challenge can ever be expected to the local power structure from so-called workers' advocates.

The "new" AFL-CIO considers Seattle, in the wake of the Boeing strike, one of its hottest major cities. It's considering pouring a ton of new organizing money into Seattle as part of its Union Cities campaign.

Unless priorities change, it will be a waste of money--a criminal waste of precious money that more effective organizations and activists (not to mention union members themselves) could desperately use. There is virtually no pragmatic difference at this p oint between the overt hostility toward organized labor of Democrats and that of Republicans, from the very top (President "The Global Economy is My Greatest Accomplishment" Clinton) on down.

The AFL-CIO, inexplicibly, adores Clinton. It adores Democrats like Adam Smith, one of the few "success" stories in its pissing away of $35 million on donkeys last fall, for having ousted Randy Tate. Smith has promptly, and predictably, voted like a Repub lican ever since. (It was also his platform as a candidate, but labor didn't care or object.) Local labor also backed Jeff Coopersmith, the Demo who challenged, and almost beat, Rick White in Snohomish, even though Coopersmith tried to bust a union in his previous job as a King County Prosecutor. Just like Mark Sidran's doing now.

A genuinely powerful and assertive labor movement would roast a two-bit, venal hack like Mark Sidran over an open flame for his sins. Instead, in this most liberal of cities, Sidran knows there's no real political price to pay this fall; it probably gets him bonus points among the people who bankroll him most heavily. Until labor stops putting its money into anti-labor candidates, and wasting huge amounts of its limited organizing budget on high-profile, marquee-for-a-year campaigns (like the current one for strawberry workers) that do little to challenge real power, we'll keep getting politicians and policy-makers that see no costs and plenty of benefits to screwing workers.