Unions Will Save America, Workers Are Fed Up 🇺🇲

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Wed Oct 18, 2023, 10:33 AM - Edit history (1)

- Leeja Miller, 2023.
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Unions are democracy in the workplace. We have unions to thank for the 40 hour work week and the weekend (instead of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week).

- National Labor Relations Act/NLRB (1935), National Archives. Also known as the Wagner Act, this bill was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 5, 1935. It established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers in the private sector...https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/national-labor-relations-act

The targeting of organized labor and public interest groups by business interests increased after the effective social activism of the 1960s when Americans opposed the Vietnam war and made demands for minority and women's rights and consumer and environmental protections. This period of democratization was countered by the implementation of The Powell Memorandum (1971), a major business plan to fight the 'Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.'

-'How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began,' The Powell Memo, Robt. Reich https://robertreich.org/post/703554534532923392

The Memo called for increasing the number of business lobbying groups, the creation of powerful think tanks and gaining influence over US media and education. By the 1980s, anti union activity was heightened by President Reagan's firing of Patco employees, air traffic controllers who were on strike. War on unions.

- 'When Reagan Broke the Unions,' NPR, 2019. On August 3, 1981, air traffic controllers all over the United States went on strike, threatening to shut down the skies and paralyze the country. But then President Reagan fired them. This is the story of the most important strike in recent U.S. history, a strike that changed the trajectory of American labor...https://www.npr.org/2019/12/13/788002965/episode-958-when-reagan-broke-the-unions

[RKP5637]

1. I hope so. We are backsliding from many of the past accomplishments. n/t

[appalachiablue]

2. Exactly, a real struggle given the powerful opposition but Americans must try. Change

is imperative. The damage to America from inequality, dysfunction, the declining middle class and threats to democracy is massive.

[Warpy]

3. Demographics were a large part of it

because we old Boomers started to see long lines of people for a handful of jobs as a matter of course once Nixon got in and started screwing us over.

Birth control in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s sucked. Families were 3, 4, 5, 6 kids. Once the pill came in, families started to decrease in size. By the time my cohort hit breeding age, fertility dropped like a rock, most of my friends have 2 kids, maximum. That's why there aren't lines of people waiting for those half dozen shelf stocker jobs at Walmart. Boomers are aging out and trying to figure out how to live on Social Security checks or dying from the sheer futility of the effort.

I've been in serious union fights and employers always play dirty, the last thing they want to do is deal with workers who have a little power of their own. Most fights don't result in strikes, the worst that happens is arbitration.

There will be strikes now, employers have been in the catbird seat since the 70s, getting everything their way except conning us into showing up to work for the sheer pleasure of it, none of those nasty old paychecks to deal with.

Unions, it's the only way. I've had union and nonunion jubs and union jobs were better without exception, even the low paying, dead end jobs. We had that tool taken away from us because we were so numerous, we were disposable. You're not. Time to stand up for your rights as workers, citizens, and human beings: unionize that sucker.