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.
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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