Discussion for article #240154
Glad to see this here. But some of us haven’t “forgotten.” A lot of us remember and are still fighting.
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These days, actually taking a day off from work or even your lunch break can be considered a radical idea.
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Anti-unionism is rooted in race-baiting from the right wing. The myth that unions destroy “work ethic” by paying people to do nothing is a hoax, exemplified by the GOP support for a court clerk in Kentucky who refuses to do her job, yet insists on drawing $80.000/year and the GOP states it is her right to do so.
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Totally understood, and much appreciated!
Ben
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Thank you for writing the article. As Bruce Phillips said “The Long Memory is the most powerful weapon we have.”
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This Instrument kills fascists.
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Actually, This machine kills fascists; Woody put it on his guitar after recording Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues. I prefer Pete Seeger’s homage from the head of his banjo, This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
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This will make your head spin! There’s been a hell of a lot of change in six decades!
Today’s Republicans and their corporate owners honor The American Worker quite differently:
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From History.com in their excellent piece on the origins of Labor Day:
[ In the late 1800s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution
in the United States, the average American worked 12-hour days and
seven-day weeks in order to eke out a basic living. Despite restrictions
in some states, children as young as 5 or 6 toiled in mills, factories
and mines across the country, earning a fraction of their adult
counterparts’ wages. People of all ages, particularly the very poor and
recent immigrants, often faced extremely unsafe working conditions, with
insufficient access to fresh air, sanitary facilities and breaks. ]
Damned if that doesn’t sound like a wish list culled straight out of the Republican Party platform for 2016.
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Labor Unions today isn’t what it once were, because people are buying this “zero-sum-game” garbage pushed by people who enjoy union busting.
“Why should Jon have a union and a $20 an hour job when I can’t?” People ask.
Unions bad, evil, boogabooga!! This is the kind of horse dung packaged and sold by The Walton Family and by tens of other corporations who started treating people like chattel in the 1980’s with the “Temp job” craze.That was the “entre” to people being told they don’t need a union to get work. Sure, you get work, but you get treated like a wind-up toy who is always the first out the door when some bean counter decides to “downsize” your backside.
What the people need to be told is “Come on and join the Union and you’ll have that $20 an hour job too.”
But the truth is that the unions are no where in sight. I can remember Hoffa, Reuther, Meany, and Lewis, all of whom I met.
For all his flaws, if he were kicking today, Jimmy Hoffa would be standing in front of the biggest of these “Big Box” stores burning shoe leather to sell the Teamsters Union to the “Wally World” workers who don’t make enough money to shop in the stores in which they work.
But where are the Union " Leadership" these days? In the old days, you could just rattle off who was in charge of every major Union in the US. Workers could do it, and believe you me, so could management.
Now?
Quick, and without using the Net,
Who is the head of the UAW?
Who is President of the AFL-CIO?
Or the ILWU?
Who is the head of the UMW?
(And why the hell are they still allowing miners to die underground while management cries “It’s not our fault, please don’t fine us a few miserable thousands of dollars for each life we snuff out. Safe working conditions cut into our profits.”) What would Yablonski say?
I’ll save you the time. Most of you have no clue.
Unions bad, boogabogga!!
And That, in a nutshell is the entire problem.
Time was that when management messed with some small union local, it could lead to a nationwide slow down, or even a strike by the entire Union, Nationwide.
Now, I know who all the men are, whom I’ve asked about above.
The last time I saw any one of them on National TV was Dick Trumka.
Now, I’ll admit something about which I have no clue.
Where are the others?
Bound and gagged someplace? Too busy counting PAC money?
They might as well be.
Cause they sure aren’t on the line anywhere.
No, folks, I knew real Union men (and women)
These are not them.
And meanwhile, it’s the working men and women of America who suffer.
Everyone is looking in the wrong place for an answer to what became of the Unions.
The answer starts, and always will, with workers. But there has to be someone ready to meet them on the same side of the line.
It will take the same kind of guts Hoffa had to get the Unions back to where they ought to be.
I’ll be honest (as usual) and say that there seems to be a shortage of guts someplace.
Welcome to America in the glorious 21st century!
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Remember who was President in 1956 (Eisenhower) and think for a minute how far his ideas (The RICH should pay for WW2 with a 91% top tax rate! He supported Truman’s integration of the Military, and his “Open Skies” proposal to allow the Soviets to fly over the USA.) would get in today’s Republican Party.
Conversely, it was ALSO the time of Joseph McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan ratting out all his co-workers in the SAG to cover his own ass.
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Ah, foiled by wiki. I knew it was Woody, and it was at a time of open warfare across the Fascists.
Pete always was a bit wordy.
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Pete was a pacifist above all else. Woody was a much more direct guy.
My sources were David King Dunaway’s How Can I Keep From Singing (his biography/oral history of Pete) and Woody’s autobiography Bound For Glory. Bound For Glory originally appeared in 1943 and it predates Woody’s battle with Huntington’s disease. It should be as reliable a source as any about Woody (always remembering that he was first and foremost a story teller).
(Can you tell that I idolize those gentlemen? Less than a handful of the personal heroes of my youth made it to this point in my life [not on Medicare, but looking at it] essentially unscathed. Pete and Woody are among them.)
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And some of us are union members! (AAUP here.)
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“Right to work” state here 
Have to be satisfied with working with Scholars’ Network.
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Been there, done that. Right to work is as big an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp or military intelligence.
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Yes, it is. But somebody gotta provide quality teaching for the kids in the Red States.
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