All workers need to have and study a book about labor history, what worked and what did not as written in the book “Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology” by Joyce L. Kornbluh. She outlines how workers fought for the right to unionize, and safe workplaces that the GOP are working overtime to erode.
When I Was going to night school on the GI Bill, a person in my class, who was a human resource worker at Point Mugu Navy Base in Oxnard, CA, told me why the antiunion people were beating labor’s ass on most fronts in the work place was because the union-busting people studied labor history and used it against workers. They knew what worked and didn’t work and acted accordingly.
Most labor people don’t know their labor history. If you don’t know yourself you will lose half of your fights. If you don’t know your enemy you will most likely lose all of your fights.
In Kornbluh’s book, she shows how education of the workers during the 1800 and early 1900s on the tactics unions used, like direct action, the general strike, sabotage, soapbox militants, and free speech campaign during the 1908-11916, and how they won their fights. The price they paid for the win, included death.
Joe Hill, an IWW man, was a thirty-three year old Wobbly writer killed by a five-man firing squad in Utah State Prison on Nov. 19, 1915, and for what? Trying to make life better for the working class. There was the 1912 Bread & Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. These are a couple of examples that labor people all over the world should be studying and learning for their fights in Hong Kong, France, UK, and Puerto Rico, and those here at home. There is a fight to save the airline and auto unions.
The trade unions are not exempt from this fight to survive. The GOP wants to decimate union training for new workers. The workers’ unions have won a lot for their members and some have given their lives when fighting for what we have and for what we get.
My Last Will
by Joe Hill
My will is easy to decide
for there is nothing to divide
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan—
moss does not cling to rolling stones
My body?—oh!—If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduces,
and let the merry breeze blow
My dust to where some flowers grow
Perhaps some fading flowers then
would come to life and bloom again
This is my last and final will
Good luck to you all
He also said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”
This man paid with his life. What are you willing to pay with?
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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