Union leaders who jumped the gun on the 2016 election thinking the Democrats and Hillary Clinton would win and take charge of the U.S. Supreme Court will now pay for their very bad decision. Also, the leaders of some of the union leaders did not understand the feelings of their members on where their support lay, which was with Bernie Sanders.
Labor went to court with three cases on labor arbitration agreements, which now will lose in the right-leaning Supreme Court and end up being the law of the land. In another case, the Court will decide whether public employee unions can collect fees from non-union members. If we lose this case, we can kiss the relevancy of labor unions goodbye. The law will bankrupt the unions and the loss of union membership will be catastrophic.
These Court cases will be the Justice Department vs the National Labor Relation Board, which is a federal agency, will oppose each other in Court. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, this will be a first in her 25 years on the court and it looks like a five to four victory for the employers, and their non-union businesses.
This will radically tilt the landscape in favor of corporations if workers lose here. This was just such a bad decision on labor’s part and will put labor behind for the next ten years or until we are smart enough to elect labor friendly people.
What we need to remember is that the U.S. Supreme Court can giveth and taketh away. We must never let our guard down again by being overly confident. This has cost us dearly. The anti-union Republicans take a case to court, if they lose in one court they appeal to the next and ask the court to pass on judgment so the case can get to the Supreme Court and become law of the land. This means another lesson we need to learn is to not take a case to the Court until you have a good chance to win. If you lose, it can be forever (Law of the Land).
The survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union work force. In a survey, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. So, as an old sheet metal organizer, I say we need to go all out in organizing while the soldering iron is hot, to use a sheet metal workers tool. We should organize all workers no matter where or what kind of work they do. All workers have the right to belong to a union and all should support each other. If you, in your work place, do not know how to form a union, then do what Napoleon’s military adopted adage, ‘Jump into the battle and then figure it out.’ One of the best ways to organize is worker to worker and plan it out over a meal or coffee and talk to other union workers to see what would work best for you and also what unions are winning at this time. Just go for it. When things are in disarray, like the shit show in Washington, D.C., they might not even know what you are doing until it is too late for them to push back aga...
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