Union Perspectives

Are we, the working class, nonunion, union, and retirees, ready to start pushing back on the assault on us? Understand that the corporations lead the GOP and will not stop until union and worker rights, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, Social Security and Medicare are gone. The GOP have bankrupt our economy and now think they can force us into cutting our programs. This is not new. The GOP and corporations have never given up on this since Frances Perkins and President Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, passed and signed into law Social Security, unemployment, minimum wage, and the right to organize. At this point in history, union membership had fallen to 5 percent. Today, union membership is roughly at 3 percent private and 30 percent public. In order to increase the union numbers we would need to have card check or Employee Free Choice Act needs to be brought up for a vote, but we need a party strong enough to bring card check for a vote, and to fight for and represent u...

In 1973, 300 corporations banded together to form a group called American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its mission was and is to declare war on the working people. In 2009, ALEC wrote 826 bills throughout the U.S. and saw 115 of those bills passed. ALEC receives 81.7 percent of its funding from corporations. I just do not understand why corporations want a war with the working people when we are the ones who support their businesses. It like eating the seed corn. With that aside, how is it that most of us have never heard of this group. Were we just not paying attention or were we working too hard and did not see what they were doing to us, like what happened in Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and Michigan. They are now 27 states controlled Republican governors and legislatures that subscribe to ALEC’s mission. Now that we understand what they want to do to our jobs and rights may be we, union and nonunion, workers will start collaborating. Members of ALEC worked together to...

Unions are weak in the U.S. because of a labor fragmentation in the character of American liberalism. To counter this fragmentation, labor must make what progress it can with the community and not at the expense of the community. There was a time when leftists of all persuasions saw the unions as the vanguard of social reconstruction. And now our unions greatest danger comes from an explosive division within the working population itself. Walter Ruether observed in 1984, “As unionized labor has become but an island of well-being in a sea of resentful low-wage aspirants, income inequality within the working class that has reached levels unseen for more than two generations.” Corporations have found that years of deindustrialization and wage stagnation has generated a huge reservoir of eager replacement workers whose residual commitment to their working class neighbors had long since been extinguished in their desperate scramble to hold onto their houses, cars and dignity. Maybe we n...

The reason the underpaid, or 39 hours worker with no benefits, needs the card check tool is to bring the worker back to the possibility of getting a union where they work. We used to have a good National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which enforced the labor laws, but over time, just like the tax laws, loop holes were found by the union busters, some who were ex-labor lawyers who went into a very large new industry of busting unions and disrupting elections. They would advise owners to intimidate their workers by telling them they would close their shops or move them. They would fire some, give raises or promotions to others. All this was against NLRB laws, but they still did it. The loop hole was the time it took to set up and execute the election. With card check, the workers only need 51 percent of the workers signing a card stating they would like to form or join a union. The employer and employees would have to sit down and negotiate the conditions for the contract for the worke...