It is past time for all unions and want-to-be unions to quit shooting each other in the foot. All we have to do is look back in history and see what we did wrong and what our leaders at that time did some of which still haunt us to this day.
For example, one of the leaders was George Meany, head of the AFL/CIO at the time, gained control over the unions. Looking back we should have embraced Walter Reuther of the UAW. Reuther saw that we had to bring all wage slaves up to a living standard whether or not they were unionized, and we workers had a good chance with Eugene McCarthy when he ran for president. McCarthy was pro union, more than any other candidate except for maybe Roosevelt. But the unions decided to support the GOP.
How did this work out for us? Hell, we even had labor unions vote for Ronald Reagan and then Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union's contract even after they voted and spent money on his election. Still the unions have not learned for the postal workers gave $40,000 plus to Darrel Issa so again how’s that working out for them as he is now trying to shut the postal service and busting their union. Issa is just a modern day equivalent of Berry Goldwater, who pushed for a bill sponsored by Democrat Philip Landrum and Republican Rep. Robert Griffin, which placed a restriction on secondary boycotts and union picketing (signed 1959).
Now here we are in 2013 still doing the same dumbass things, such as union fighting each other and spending money and energy on defending what they already have and history has shown that defense will sooner or later lose. We must go on the offense. All unions and all nonunion workers and all the people who don’t have jobs at this time must tap into the retired resources, who have time and experience to join the offense against the oligarchies’ money.
When people think of organized labor what comes to mind is people in business suits who control vast sums of money and spend their time among other powerful elites. Perhaps the problem is that our wage slaves are not hungry anymore. For decades we fought for bread, but now we have bread and cake, but for how long? A 1957 Gallup poll had labor at a 76 percent positivity rating, but by the middle 1960s approval rate had fallen to 50 percent, and would continue to fall to this day.
We have no support behind us or in front. We are stuck in the middle and getting squeezed, and yet we, the unions, are still fighting each other over a smaller piece of the union pie. We just try to steal union members from each other when we should be trying to make a much larger union pie. Just last week at a Workforce AFL/CIO conference, I heard the restaurant ROC people are having problems with union people who are trying to organize the fast food workers. What the hell? Don’t you think the restaurant lobby, which is much larger and more powerful than the National Rifle Association, is thinking that we are a bunch of dumbasses as we fight amongst each other?
The AFL/CIO and the labor federation should go all in for minimum wage at $15 and help the “have very little” and “the have not” form unions. If we don’t know our labor history how are we supposed to win?
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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