The Democratic Party lost from the top down. The Party is decimated and everyone who was a part of the Party’s demise should be fired or replaced. Labor should now understand that no one person or party is going to ride in on a white horse and make them whole again. Labor will have to do it themselves with good, strong leadership that comes from the ranks and is supported by the workers not just because it is their turn to get the job.
Labor must now start to educate the workers on the good of unions. They must organize, organize, organize, and rebuild their membership, but in order to have jobs for the workers. Unions must work to get Project Labor Agreement on school boards, city and all prevailing wage jobs for any work with government money, which falls under the Davis-Bacon Act.
This means that there must be union advocates at the meetings when jobs are put out to bid. If the rules are followed, there is no reason that union shops should not get the work. It just takes work from the union and their members. More work equals more members needed, which equals power for the unions, and more business for the union shops. When a union shop is making money and the non-union shops see this then unions an have the chance to grow by organizing the unprotected workers.
Any change will have to be done by us, the two parties have shown their disdain for the working class and to reward them with our votes in hopes they do the right thing is ludicrous, it is the definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The days of Democrats and Republicans ever supporting us with better labor laws, such as card check or better National Labor Relations Board support, are over. When the support is gone, we will either sink or swim in the next four to eight years. So all unions need to get together and quit being greedy.
If we do find an advocate like Bernie Sanders, support him or her, but don’t rely on any one person or even a party again. We should put our money where it will do the most good—in organizing.
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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