Union Perspectives

The time is right for unions to organize and rebuild unions that will take the fight to the GOP anti-union/anti-worker machines. We should just look at how the West Virginia teachers won their fight for a wage increase. The teachers were organized, they planned every detail of their walkout in advanced to ensure the success of the walkout. The organizers worked with students’ parents and local businesses to ensure the walkout would not harm those in need. Daycare centers and meals were organized in advanced so the students who were dependent on the school lunches would not go without. This walkout was not just a single school, but the entire state. Had the organizer organized one school, the board of trustees would have beat the school employees back, but organizing the entire state, the sheer number of employees standing together against a single state entity, allowed the employees to win. If union workers follow the example of the West Virginia workers’ wildcat strike or what the o...

Today, we are still fighting for a living wage at a minimum of $15 an hour, when, in fact, it should be $24 an hour had it kept up with inflation. This fight has been going on for a very long time, and nothing seems to change. In 1905—a 112 years ago—the International Workers of the World (IWW also known as the Wobblies) held a convention in Chicago to lay the groundwork for one big union. IWW members were the “shock troops” of labor. Their prime purpose was to make the first breaches in the entrenched industry. They fought and won the free speech fights so they could continue to educate the workers on what should be their right to a safe work place, fair pay and reasonable work hours. Some died exercising this right. These Wobblies traveled the country in search of work, as timber fallers or on farms (they were known as fruit tramps). Many worked to unionize the textile workers, long before the New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Here in 2017, we are still fighting f...

The class war struggle of yesterday and of today are eerily similar. The International Workers of the Word (IWW or Wobblies) believed implicitly that the class struggle was inherent in the very nature of capitalist society. The economic laws of capitalism, the IWW pointed out operated the same in America as in the rest of the world, and American society like all societies was divided into two classes: the exploiters and the exploited. The capitalists and the workers. Every segment of life was viewed by the IWW as reflecting the conflict of the two classes. They ran ads in newspapers for big class picnics, obituaries of dead IWW members, Wobblies spoke of the deceased as indefatigable warriors in the class war, and usually closed their solemn ceremony by saying, “Our duty is not to mourn, but to go on where fellow workers left off, determined to show the ruling class that his work has not been in vain.” In the eyes of the IWW, the capitalism class was the ruling class and the governmen...