Union Perspectives

Labor unions need to recruit fighters, and educate them about union history. We don’t just need more membership, we need educated fighters who understand how politics work, how politicians and corporate media manipulate what the working people are told. They need to understand the GOP and the Democratic parties and who supports these politicians and who donates money to them. The Art of War says you must understand your enemy as well as yourself in order to win any fight against that enemy. This is the time for union members to think critical thinking skills, to examine what they are told and to critique systems of power, culture and political assumptions; to ask the broader questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. The unions formerly concentrated on the class struggle, and in those days unions filled its leadership with people who sought broad social and political changes and rights for the working class, but now these positions have been transformed into n

Workers need to understand that fear is a potent weapon in the hands of the powerful elites. In his book, Death of the Liberal Class, Christopher Hedges writes, the fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism was used to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech, habeas corpus. In the name of anti-communism, the capitalist class, terrified, of the numerous labor strikes after WWII, rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 along with a Congressional override of President Harry Truman’s veto. It was the most destructive legislative blow to workers until NAFTA. It was fear that in 2001 after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Bush administration were allowed to push through the Patriot Act, engaged in extraordinary rendition, and establish offshore prisons where we engaged in torture, which was against our code of conduct. Fear has led us to embrace the endless wars in the Middle East. It is the cowardice of the liberal class leaves the group prone to manipulati

Why have the Democrats and unions abandon the workers and people in rural areas thereby handing the GOP these areas and mid-west? On the union side, there is still strong union in the rural country, such as medical field, teachers, state workers, city, count and federal government employees, fire departments, law enforcements, and special districts, like water districts. Then these union members vote for the GOP. This is the failure of the union leaders’ fault for not teaching the employees what the unions are about and their history. And the Dems stay mostly in the large cities. They should be working with the unions in the rural areas and the mid-west to get people registered to vote and find good union leaders to run for elected positions, such as city councils, county board of supervisors, water or fire or school boards. Are we just afraid of losing or are we lazy and grab at the low hanging fruit instead of working for the votes and members? If we just give up on these areas, the