As Black Lives Matter and other social justice campaigns focus more on economic inequality, unions see an opportunity
On February 26, with a pro-corporate majority Supreme Court, a single case threatens to unravel the protections public sector nurses have fought so hard to secure for their patients over the years. “Janus v. AFSCME” is intended to weaken public sector unions by encouraging employees in unionized public sector workplaces to refuse to pay dues — while they enjoy the rights and benefits of a union contract and representation.
The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.
Union leaders hope that by organizing teachers and staff at charter schools, and giving them a voice to advocate for more resources through collective bargaining, the charter model will become less attractive to investors and public officials.
Workers and Democracy: While most workers continue to check their democratic rights at the door of the warehouse, school, and hospital every day, these examples suggest a hunger among workers for organizing around issues of workplace democracy — and point the way to developing a new model for exercising political and economic citizenship.
Nice "trickle-down economics" you've got there.
Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.
"This action indicates an intent to appease employers who want every tool possible to defeat workers’ efforts to form a union, instead of ensuring the fairness of the union representation process," said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
We need to confront the workplace hierarchy directly. That means unions and labor organizing. It means demands for more democratic workplaces, and established institutions and practices for dealing with sexual harassment.
Much has been made in the recent campaign about the alienation of working-class whites from the Democratic Party. Michael Pierce shows this is a path long traveled; Bill Clinton undermined the budding multi-racial labor coalition in 1970s Arkansas.
Spread the word