The time is right for unions to organize and rebuild unions that will take the fight to the GOP anti-union/anti-worker machines. We should just look at how the West Virginia teachers won their fight for a wage increase. The teachers were organized, they planned every detail of their walkout in advanced to ensure the success of the walkout. The organizers worked with students’ parents and local businesses to ensure the walkout would not harm those in need. Daycare centers and meals were organized in advanced so the students who were dependent on the school lunches would not go without.
This walkout was not just a single school, but the entire state. Had the organizer organized one school, the board of trustees would have beat the school employees back, but organizing the entire state, the sheer number of employees standing together against a single state entity, allowed the employees to win.
If union workers follow the example of the West Virginia workers’ wildcat strike or what the old International Workers of the World (IWW) called a Wobble. The wildcat or Wobble takes the pressure off unions and keeps the unions from being sued.
How did these West Virginia teachers win when so many walkout strikes have failed throughout the years? It was well planned, like a battle, as outlined in the book “Art of War.” To build support for a long strike there must be a good public relations program set up to take care of the workers and those effected by the strike, in this case the students, who depended on the school lunches.
The organizers contacted churches, specially the Church of Nazarene, which gathered donations from stores, farmers, restaurants, strikers and other workers and dozens of volunteers. This kind of operation was organized in every county across the state of WV. It was a class of people with the courage to rise up, fight for what’s right and they won.
It looks like Oklahoma is next up with its 41,000 teachers, and 36,000 have already signed up to do a wildcat strike. Oklahoma state workers and teachers will stand together. The entire state could someday turn into a countrywide walkout over inequity and inequality.
If other workers are thinking about something like what WV did and Oklahoma is preparing to do, a good book to read and study is “Bread Upon the Waters” by Rose Pesotta. Other books worth reading and studying is “The Iron Heel” and “The Dream of Debs” by Jack London.
Labor is back.
Have FBI agitators infiltrated our labor unions like the FBI did during black rights movement, feminist movement, and anti-Vietnam protests to sow the seeds of division between the factions and Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed—to control and disrupt our labor movements from the inside? We don’t know at this time, and is anyone in the media or government looking into this? The war on labor and the effort to drag us back to serf wages is coming from within the White House with some labor union and MAGA members. Corporations are padding their accounts and of one greedy man instead of its workers. The war on labor is and will be fought between corporation titans and labor, and at this time the corporations will use the White House, courts and the FBI and even those at Homeland Security and I.C.E. against us. Labor must educate our members on how counter and what tactics are being used by the corporations and government against labor and the average person in general. How many people have lost...
Comments
Post a Comment