One Utah

Over at mydd, Matt has a great post about unions.

I’m quoting his entire first paragraph because it strikes me as so very right:

Whenever I spend time with people in unions, I get a very different picture of what this country looks like.  The political establishment spends a fair amount of time theorizing about messaging and how to effectively market to what appears to be a center right country focused on bread and circus.  And certainly that is one way to look at America, one you can justify with polls and media buys.  But there’s another massive country out there, one that is very left-wing and is simply missing the trust to be involved in our politics.  This is a very smart country, with citizens who really know what is going on.  By and large, our voters just don’t believe they can make a difference, and so they don’t vote.  Unions change that equation quite radically.  It’s not just that they raise wages, though they do.  It’s that they allow people to find dignity in work, a spiritual connection in cooperating with their coworkers.  Like blogs, actually, unions provide a space for people in a community to come together and organize for the common good.

Matt concludes:

The biggest impediment to freedom is not the government, or even the Bush administration.  It’s ourselves.  When we let our government wiretap us, or when we let our employers read our email, we are making it easier for the politically empowered to manipulate us and take away our freedom and that of our children and grandchildren.  And those who want to take our property and our dignity also want to rob our children and grandchildren.  Unions, and blogs, are about standing up for ourselves and saying no to abuse.  They are about moving beyond cynicism to empowerment.  There’s a kindred spiritualism here, a real common movement.  Now we just have to figure out how to work together.

My grandfather was a member of the welder’s union here in Utah.  He and my grandmother were deeply involved in community - bowling and golf leagues, church and political campaigns.  Every election for most of my childhood, my grandparents had candidate’s signs in their front yard.  They also voted Democratic in every election.  My grandmother described herself (to me at least) as an FDR Democrat.  In recent decades Unions have been neglected and abused, attacked by Republicans and corporate special interests and America has paid the price for losing the influence of organized and motivated average Americans. 

Unions are often organized along trade lines - welders, carpenters, grocery store workers.  A few years back, the checkers in my local store all wore their union buttons.  Unions provide perhaps the only real mass movement against corporate abuses and runaway corporate power.  Companies like WalMart are notorious for using brutal union-busting tactics, then paying their employees minimum wage, forcing them to work unpaid overtime, denying them benefits.  WalMart employees who try to ogranize unions tell stories of showing up for work and discovering their schedule was changed in overnight - and they were now 4 hours late and had an official write up for it.  The goal is to keep employees atomized, disconnected so they can’t effectively bargain with their employer to be treated with dignity.  Unions counteract such tactics by empowering employees to build connections with one another, by levelling the playing field between corporations and workers.

Support for unionization is one of the most important aspects of the progressive movement.  Unions like SEIU are pioneering new ways of organizing workers and harnessing their power.  I don’t think it is coincidental that as unions have declined, corporations have staged a buyout of the Republican party and the federal government.

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Democracy, Economic Exploitation, Economy, Equality, Political Corruption. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.