In all adversity there is a window of opportunity, a window the University of California’s student researchers crawled through during the pandemic to unionize. Throughout the UC campuses, almost 15,000 student researchers signed authorization cards to join the already 80,000 other academic workers across the country who unionized with the United Auto Workers.
The time is right for trade and factory workers to ask for a union to receive better, fair wages, benefits and safety. These simple workers’ rights were why the UC student researchers unionized. They were doing the work but had no rights or protections for that work, they struggled to pay rent or buy necessities, so they were essentially working as indentured servants.
At this time there is a shortage of workers. You can tell businesses and corporations are getting desperate when they offer potential workers anything from an iPhone to thousands of dollars as sign on bonuses. It will get better for workers when out country starts rebuilding and union trades will have shops kicking on doors for trained people or a way to train people, which the unions have capacity to do.
Then the corporations and the factories will need more people to make and deliver the things needed to rebuild our infrastructure. To the corporations and businesses, this won’t only be about money, it will be about people. The winners will be those who hire the best trained workers, and how many they can get to grow and recover from the years of neglect at the hand of Republicans.
This could be the holy grail of organizing for workers and unions and the UC student researchers are at the forefront of this trend. Typical of non-union businesses, the students were doing the work, but others were benefitting from their efforts.
I would love to be back organizing for my union. This is a once in a lifetime chance for all unions, and we should be all supporting each other. We went from 12 percent unions in 1930 to 35 percent in 1945. Today, it is 10.8 percent. It is time to rebuild and top those numbers and aim for at least 50 percent for all workers.
Remember, as the UC student researchers are showing, there is a lot more to infrastructure than roads, bridge and power.
There are three phases of a general strike and unions must plan for one. Those three phases are: 1. general strike in an industry 2. general strike in a community 3. general national strike We need to move away from being on the defensive and move toward a good offensive. The American Federal of Labor (AFL) could not have held a general strike if it wanted to because they had thousands of different contracts that expired at different times of the year. This was done deliberately so that there is no consolidation of power for a general strike. Also, nowadays, there is no law agency that will support labor, except the National Labor Relations Board (NLBR), which has been under attack and in decline for years. This leaves the burden of change up to unions, and unless unions work together, little will change. We essentially have a combination of job trusts, which are not as strong as contracts, and the courts can break easily because the NLBR will be further weakened and essentially elim...
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