When does the labor start looking at building the party of labor to represent all wage slaves who want to join? We start with the assets we have on hand our dues paying members then when we have the members and money we started electing people who will defend labor wage slaves and see if the Democrats want to join us if so then we would build a 50/50 partnership with one side having 51 percent one year or two and then the other side having the 51 percent for an equal amount of time if they want.
If we win this November we need for the Democrats to show us what they can and are willing to do to educate and grow our labor movement. If they, the Democratic Party, do not back the wage slaves and 99 percent, then we need to promote our unions and tell the wage slaves what we have done and what we can and will do for our fellow working families.
If we have to start a new party so be it, but if the Democratic Party wants to partner with us then good. But, either way labor has to start rebuilding starting with education on our labor and country’s histories.
Former UAW president Walter Reuther once said, First we organize the workers—that is the easy part; then we must unionize them—that is the hard part. A lot of our new younger workers are unaware of the unions’ hard fought struggles. Many think their wages and some with fringe benefits were philanthropic contributions of enlightened management and not the hard won gains wrestled from stubborn anti-union money people.
To overcome this misunderstanding we need to have programs for our working families, such as political education and recreation camps. The churches do this. The rich have country clubs and retreats. So we need to start taking care of our ground troops for in any war the best trained troops with good leadership will win.
So when we win in November we must be ready to keep moving forward because we know when the GOP loses they will just come at us harder. At this time labor is just hanging on by a very thin frayed rope and with the U.S. Supreme Court in the wrong hands we could lose everything with just a few anti-union rulings.
What we need from the court is repeal of the Citizens United and repeal of the Taft Hartley Law and the review of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to tighten up loop holes used by corporations to get around the NLRB.
We do have options:
1). New, third, political Party
2). Partner with the Democrats—50/50 as explained
3). Rebuild our union image and educate our workers
4). Grow our well-trained labor force and see which group comes to us for help then we make the decision in our best interests.
At this time labor is trapped by its affiliation with the Democratic Party. It has little independence of action left, as Hobart Rowan wrote in The Free Enterprise in 1964.
In 1959 Reuther wrote, there is nothing wrong with the American labor movement excepting that we haven’t mobilized it. Is the rank and file ready and if not whose fault is it?
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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