The sheet metal unions are losing the war against nonunion sheet metal shops: Local 36 lost five shops; Local 170 lost two; and Local 18 lost three. We should be adding union shops and members not losing them. Are sheet metal unions giving up on organizing union shops and acquiring new members?
I live in northern California, specifically Shasta County, north of Marysville, in the jurisdiction of Local 104. There are now no union shops north of Marysville. The nonunion shops number about fifty to sixty shops and that is a lot of union work lost. We, in Shasta-Trinity counties, just passed a $138 million school and union college prevailing wage jobs and no union workers received any of the $138 million in jobs.
I have never seen any union reps on the jobs, checking prevailing wages or talking to the nonunion workers about unionizing. It appears like sheet metal unions have just given up the entire northern section of California, where the nonunion shops will just get stronger and keep edging toward the big cities, and start taking work from unions in the Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles areas.
We will always lose in a defense battle so we must go on the offense in order to win. We are now dying little by little, day by day, and then we have unions raiding each other, which weakens unions as a whole for a short-term gain. This must stop. We cannot simultaneously go to war with the nonunion and ourselves and expect to win or even just stay alive.
The future of our unions are in our hands and it is do or die.
It’s open season the unions and we’re letting it happen. This is happening as the young people are fighting to unionize shops in the retail, fast food, ride-share, coffee shops and everything in-between. These young workers understand that in order improve overall working conditions, they have to work together and organize.
The kids are making us look bad.
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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