To be a labor organizer under the ‘slave labor act’ otherwise known as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946, the ideal organizer should have the essential talents of a variety of occupational specialties.
He or she should be part missionary, part salesperson, part politician, part counselor, part teacher, part psychologist while also being connected and be part lawyer. This is what is needed to be done. United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes ruled on the National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp 301. In his ruling, he said, “Long ago we stated the reason for labor organizations. We said that they were organized out of the necessities of the situation that a single employee was helpless in dealing with an employer that he or she was dependent ordinarily on his or hers daily wage for the maintenance of themselves and their family; that if the employer refused to pay him the wages that he thought fair, he was nevertheless unable to leave the employer and resist arbitrary and unfair treatment, that union was essential to give laborers the opportunity to deal on equality with their employer.”
All union members needs to learn labor law and all members should be on-the-job organizers when working along side of nonunion trades people, like electricians, plumbers, sheetmetal, drywall and so on. Talk to the nonunion workers about what unions are all about. Then give your nonunion co-workers contacts to the union electricians, plumbers organizers and so on.
Then maybe those union people will do the same when they are working along side nonunion sheetmetal or plumber workers. You can even stick up conversations with people when standing in line at a store. If they give you the standard, ‘I’m not going union,’ then ask them why they don’t want the protection and security unions offer employees.
If these ‘innocent’ conversations were held, the trade unions could put hundreds of organizers in the work place at very little costs, and even find people who are good organizers. This is another way to keep union membership up, save our pensions and get more union work with project labor agreements.
The trade workers need to sit down and plan this out with training our apprentices and journeymen.
The Right is actively and continuing to take these rights away, and with an unbalanced ideologue Supreme Court making finals decision against the rights of citizens in favor of corporations, union organizers need to fight the hell to keep what we have.
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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