Wages and safety should be the owners’ responsibility: pension, healthcare, and seniority on the job should be the unions’ responsibility. If unions had the responsibilities of pensions and healthcare and a union member has to move to another area, their pension and healthcare follows them. With this scenario the power shifts to the member and union and not to the corporation or government entity.
If the corporations or government control the pensions and healthcare, this gives them a wedge issue to use to split the single workers and family members or the new workers against the workers about to retire. If all unions, like the Building Trades, took control of their pensions and healthcare (healthcare might not be the issue now that it once was) it would take away the talking points about how unions are responsible for bankrupting companies and government entities with huge pensions, which nonunion workers don’t have. It is the pensions and healthcare that is used to turn public opinion against unions and is what wins the elections for right to work state laws, which kills unions.
You cannot be in partnership with your capitalist enemy and win. You must always stay an arm’s length away to have a clean vision of what is happening—the old forest for the trees thing. The big win for the wage slaves at this time s to win the $15 to $16 an hour fight. They then should start their pension and healthcare plan fight. The timing is right for this fight and those fighting can use the Building Trades model. The wage slaves need to understand that the very things they are being denied are freely given to the executive officers, who do little of the true work.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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