Union Perspectives

If we depend on courts and lawyers we will lose the battle on union rights. Wisconsin Supreme Court recently handed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a sledgehammer to further destroy union rights. I was told a long time ago by a union organizer that when we left the streets and picket lines and turned over our fight to the lawyers and court system is when we started to losing the battle against the GOP. Long strikes won’t work nowadays for most working families because they do not have the resources to withstand a long battle and the unions don’t have the resources to back our people. What will work is timing our moves like hit and run, old gorilla tactics. One or two days at a time pick targets where we can get the most support, most media and be able to drive our point home on what we want. Timing, planning, good communication and being well-organized is done through people all supporting each other. Even if it does not at the time affect you, but if we work together, we will bui...

Just not in the U.S.A. Big box stores are told by governments that if they want to operate in their countries the stores have to allow unions to exists or form in their stores. For example, Wal*Mart had to allow its stores in South Africa, China, Brazil, Argentina, and even the England to form unions --- everywhere it seems except in the United States. Why is Wal*Mart spending millions of dollars fighting pro-union legislation, when it could be spending that money on its American workers. Why are other countries taking care of their workers, but our country isn’t? What the hell? It looks like these governments are helping their people. Are their workers more appreciated than our people? Like I’ve said before, the corporations can ship our jobs out of country, but they will then ship their goods back to this country to sell. This is when we need to organize. This is our opportunity to organize the big box stores. Our government could help us by passing the Employee Free Choice Act (...

Are we, the working class, nonunion, union, and retirees, ready to start pushing back on the assault on us? Understand that the corporations lead the GOP and will not stop until union and worker rights, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, Social Security and Medicare are gone. The GOP have bankrupt our economy and now think they can force us into cutting our programs. This is not new. The GOP and corporations have never given up on this since Frances Perkins and President Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, passed and signed into law Social Security, unemployment, minimum wage, and the right to organize. At this point in history, union membership had fallen to 5 percent. Today, union membership is roughly at 3 percent private and 30 percent public. In order to increase the union numbers we would need to have card check or Employee Free Choice Act needs to be brought up for a vote, but we need a party strong enough to bring card check for a vote, and to fight for and represent u...

In 1973, 300 corporations banded together to form a group called American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its mission was and is to declare war on the working people. In 2009, ALEC wrote 826 bills throughout the U.S. and saw 115 of those bills passed. ALEC receives 81.7 percent of its funding from corporations. I just do not understand why corporations want a war with the working people when we are the ones who support their businesses. It like eating the seed corn. With that aside, how is it that most of us have never heard of this group. Were we just not paying attention or were we working too hard and did not see what they were doing to us, like what happened in Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and Michigan. They are now 27 states controlled Republican governors and legislatures that subscribe to ALEC’s mission. Now that we understand what they want to do to our jobs and rights may be we, union and nonunion, workers will start collaborating. Members of ALEC worked together to...

Unions are weak in the U.S. because of a labor fragmentation in the character of American liberalism. To counter this fragmentation, labor must make what progress it can with the community and not at the expense of the community. There was a time when leftists of all persuasions saw the unions as the vanguard of social reconstruction. And now our unions greatest danger comes from an explosive division within the working population itself. Walter Ruether observed in 1984, “As unionized labor has become but an island of well-being in a sea of resentful low-wage aspirants, income inequality within the working class that has reached levels unseen for more than two generations.” Corporations have found that years of deindustrialization and wage stagnation has generated a huge reservoir of eager replacement workers whose residual commitment to their working class neighbors had long since been extinguished in their desperate scramble to hold onto their houses, cars and dignity. Maybe we n...

The reason the underpaid, or 39 hours worker with no benefits, needs the card check tool is to bring the worker back to the possibility of getting a union where they work. We used to have a good National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which enforced the labor laws, but over time, just like the tax laws, loop holes were found by the union busters, some who were ex-labor lawyers who went into a very large new industry of busting unions and disrupting elections. They would advise owners to intimidate their workers by telling them they would close their shops or move them. They would fire some, give raises or promotions to others. All this was against NLRB laws, but they still did it. The loop hole was the time it took to set up and execute the election. With card check, the workers only need 51 percent of the workers signing a card stating they would like to form or join a union. The employer and employees would have to sit down and negotiate the conditions for the contract for the worke...

In a previous post I wrote about the GOP’s strategy to go the birth place of union activities and begin dismantling workers’ rights and protections. There is a war going on but unions and progressives aren't paying attention. We’ve seen how the GOP in Wisconsin dismantled public employees’ bargaining rights. Now the GOP is going into Maine, the birthplace of the oldest child labor laws, and seeking to weaken the law that protect children form exploitation. Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, wants all workers younger than 20 years of age to make less than minimum wage. He wants to increase the work week for teens from 20 hours to 24 a week and increase the work hours on a school night from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. The pay would be whatever the employer determined for the first 180 days of employment. After 180 days, the employer could conceivably fire the teen and hire new teens for 180 days again. The common thread is that these two states are birthplaces of the labor laws: public employ...