Unions new slogan should be “Organize or Die.” We must be stronger by the 2024 elections because we don’t know for sure what the outcome will be. When we are striking or organizing, our workers will see the need to vote and vote for people who support workers. They see this when on the picket line or when working for a union they will vote for and to keep a union. This is when workers understand what is at stake and who their friends are.
So, in the 2024 election, workers will have a friendly president and government or they will have a president who will turn government on unions and its members. Either way, now is the time for all unions and its members to come together least for this year.
Unions that have problems with other unions have got to set aside their differences and issues at least for this year or we could very possibly lose our unions and the security unions provide to the workers. On the other hand, if union workers prevail in 2024 with the election of a Democratic president, Congress and Senate, we will be stronger with people in high places that support us and we can grow even stronger with more members in more unions.
According to Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in President Clinton’s cabinet, during President Biden’s presidency, the number of workplace strikes in this country hit a 23-year high last year. The number of workers on strike increased nearly 300 percent from 2022. “It’s a historic moment for the labor movement. Workers are done letting billionaires and corporations hoard all the wealth and power,” Reich said.
If Democrats take the elections, we can push for better pay, single-payer healthcare with no out of pocket costs, better pensions and a four-day work week, just to name a few improvements, and put us in line with other industrialized countries.
This is perhaps the most important election of our lives, because, if the Republican candidates win, we will lose the country we know and love and any progress workers have made so vote wisely. Get out and vote.
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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