The sheet metal unions are losing the war against nonunion sheet metal shops: Local 36 lost five shops; Local 170 lost two; and Local 18 lost three. We should be adding union shops and members not losing them. Are sheet metal unions giving up on organizing union shops and acquiring new members?
I live in northern California, specifically Shasta County, north of Marysville, in the jurisdiction of Local 104. There are now no union shops north of Marysville. The nonunion shops number about fifty to sixty shops and that is a lot of union work lost. We, in Shasta-Trinity counties, just passed a $138 million school and union college prevailing wage jobs and no union workers received any of the $138 million in jobs.
I have never seen any union reps on the jobs, checking prevailing wages or talking to the nonunion workers about unionizing. It appears like sheet metal unions have just given up the entire northern section of California, where the nonunion shops will just get stronger and keep edging toward the big cities, and start taking work from unions in the Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles areas.
We will always lose in a defense battle so we must go on the offense in order to win. We are now dying little by little, day by day, and then we have unions raiding each other, which weakens unions as a whole for a short-term gain. This must stop. We cannot simultaneously go to war with the nonunion and ourselves and expect to win or even just stay alive.
The future of our unions are in our hands and it is do or die.
It’s open season the unions and we’re letting it happen. This is happening as the young people are fighting to unionize shops in the retail, fast food, ride-share, coffee shops and everything in-between. These young workers understand that in order improve overall working conditions, they have to work together and organize.
The kids are making us look bad.
In 2026 unions worldwide must educate and expand their memberships or face certain death. We need to educate our workers to understand that the republican party does not care about, does not deserve their support or votes and only cares about the billionaires. The GOP is their enemy and not their friends. The GOP and billionaires are the workers’ enemy. They want the workers’ sweat and blood for as cheap as they can get it. These greedy people and their insatiable appetite for more leaving us with much less will not stop until we’re forced to work for scraps and fighting each other for the pittance. They will not invite you to golf with them or go hunting or to dinner with them. In fact, they are always in pursuit of ways to destroy our unions and the way of life we’ve obtain by being union. One way they are doing this is to use the court system, especially the lop-sided Supreme Court, to take away our union rights and to get more states to vote for The Right to Work, which leaves work...
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