Unions Can't Rest

Labor must always be on the offense so we must never rest. There should never be time that we are not organizing for new members and shops. This is a 24-7, 365-day a year job that unions must commit to in order to beat the destructive nonunion GOP corporations wishing to destroy the union way of life. Every town with a labor counsel should be the headquarters for organizing for all unions at one time. We started a program called Labor Cities. Maybe we should look at that program again. Unions need to work on a ‘work-life’ balance, like a four-day work week with full pay. Workers need to stop and think about how they are selling their time one hour at a time and time is the greatest resource that we have in our lives and on this earth. Corporations want to exploit this resource as cheaply as they can get without regard to the hardships on the workers. Corporations are not your friends. Remember the billionaire class. They have a different set of rules for themselves and expect everybody else to accept this yet they follow a different set of rules that allows for them to exploit others. How many of you can buy huge swaths of land in Hawaii, California and New Zealand or own two million areas like Ted Turner or 420,000 acres like Jeff Bezos, or like the venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tech giants spending $1 billion forcing families off their land so they can build a megacity near Travis Air Force Base. In my neck of the woods, Red Emmerson is the largest land owner after adding 175,000 acres in Oregon to his 2,411,000 acres to his California company, Sierra Pacific Industries, a logging empire. At what time will they have enough—when we end up living in the streets? Some unions need more members who understand unions, they need to be educated. Let’s do this one city at a time at the labor halls. There are lots to talk about and we can get our own table and invite who we want to the table. This way we will not be on the menu.