One big union, the dream of the Industrial Union, International Workers of the World (IWW); Eugene V. Debs said in a New York speech on Dec. 10, 1905, that the industrial workers are organized not to conciliate, but to fight the capitalist class … the capitalists own the tools they do not use and the workers use these tools they do not own and this is where the power is … no workers no one to use the tools. This is one reason one should never sign a contract, which gives away the workers’ ultimate power of withholding their labor when and where it will be advantageous to the toilers.
An IWW poet wrote, “In our hands is placed a power greater than their horded gold; Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold; we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. For the unions make us strong.
On April 23, 1910, another IWW member wrote, “With other of his class he built the road. Now o’er it many a weary mile, he packs his load chasing a job, spurred on by hunger’s goad. He walks and walks and walks and walks and wonders why. In the hell he built the road.”
This is what happens when some worker works for years at a company and then the company moves overseas or just sells out and takes the profit and leaves the workers with nothing. These are things that need to be changed, but change only comes if we fight for it.
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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