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.
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...
Comments
Post a Comment