 A few months ago, Gerd-Liv Valla, the leader of Norway's Trade Union Confederation (LO), was considered the most powerful person in the country.
Today, she was forced to resign in disgrace, for having harassed a subordinate, former LO international secretary Ingunn Yssen. When Yssen made public the allegations against her former boss, it started a media frenzy, followed by denials and counter-attacks from the union boss that only made the situation worse for herself. Publicly hissing "I am no pussycat" lead to widespread derision and ridicule, with critics pointing out this excuse would never have been accepted by the trade unionists if offered by a private sector manager.
The powerful LO sekretariat (yes, that is what it's named) took the unprecedented step of announcing full support to Valla and at the same time appointing a special independent investigative panel to find out if Valla had violated Norway's worker's rights law, itself a product of LO's work. Today, the report from the panel of legal experts came in, saying Valla's treatment of Yssen was harassment well beyond the limits accepted by law. Valla had publicly and privately humiliated and derided her subordinate over a longer time, lawyer Jan Fougner's committee concluded.
Valla resigned while making a number of angry attacks on essentially everybody else, regretting nothing except not resigning when the sekretariat appointed the investigative committee. She blamed the media, the committee and just about every other Norwegian alive. She did nothing wrong.
Valla's past affiliation with extreme communist groups, among them one of the few that actually was pro-Stalin even into the 1980s, has been well publicised, also that she never expressed any regrets about her past support of mass murderers. She being appointed to the powerful leadership position despite all this can to some degree be attributed to the democracy deficiency in the trade union movement, where effectively the cadres appoint each other to the top positions.
When this conflict between hard-line feminist Yssen and Stalinist Valla erupted, I expressed that it's too bad both can't lose. But I guess, in a sense, this is what has happened.
5:11:24 PM 
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