Why are the building trades not organizing? At this time when there are and will be lots of prevailing wage jobs starting. This is the time to go after non-union trade workers to get new members, which will turn into more union shops or out non-union shops out of business since they will not have trades people, who will work for them.
We need to keep our money for organizing, and tell the politicians we will give you votes but not our money until you are elected and do something, like better fund the National Labor Relations Board and vote for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act or PRO Act.
The trades people need to stop giving up on the rural part of the country, like the Democrats have done, retreating and holding up in cities with larger populations, which turned out not to be as effective a strategy as they thought it would be. All it did or does is slow the bleeding. So we, labor and labor friendly political people need to go back to the counties, like in far northern and eastern California.
At this time, every non-union worker is starting to organize for a better life and we need to support them and ride the wave now for the wave will only last for the next two years or so. This will take some hard work, strategic planning, and some good, tough, forward-thinking leadership.
The goal is to retire and leave our unions better than when we joined it.
At this time, we have the parties of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Green Party, but when you look at a map of red and blue states, you will see that the blue is Democratic, and is the same as union labor areas, and the red areas are GOP leaning areas are anti-union/anti-labor. The Democrats and labor have given up on the rural usually red parts of the country. This needs to change. Labor and the Democrats need to get in the fox hole together and fight for a living wage, healthcare, pension and safety laws for workers in these depressed areas. This will involve educating the workers in these areas to understand what’s in their best interest and counter the indoctrination they’ve undergone to vote against their own best interests.
Remember there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them, even in the red states. We want the workers to have a good union. We just need to show up.
The survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union work force. In a survey, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. So, as an old sheet metal organizer, I say we need to go all out in organizing while the soldering iron is hot, to use a sheet metal workers tool. We should organize all workers no matter where or what kind of work they do. All workers have the right to belong to a union and all should support each other. If you, in your work place, do not know how to form a union, then do what Napoleon’s military adopted adage, ‘Jump into the battle and then figure it out.’ One of the best ways to organize is worker to worker and plan it out over a meal or coffee and talk to other union workers to see what would work best for you and also what unions are winning at this time. Just go for it. When things are in disarray, like the shit show in Washington, D.C., they might not even know what you are doing until it is too late for them to push back aga...
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