ANOTHER POLITICAL RANT

The elections are long over, and the people are beginning to see what sort of crop will come from the seed that has been soon. I can see at least one weed for working people here in Florida. The incoming State Senate President recently remarked in regard to the former state senate: "The overall body was moderate. It was very sympathetic to unions.” Sympathy to unions is thought of as a bad thing. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why working people support these reactionary politicians who actually work against their best interests. Unions have been the protectors of working people. Without unions there wouldn’t be five-day work weeks, overtime, and other basic protections for working people.

Now my thinking on the subject is biased. Although I have never belonged to a union, my Father was a union man, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; my father’s father was a union man, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; and my mother’s father was a union man, Flat Janitor’s Union.

I am convinced that unions have provided the balance that makes capitalism work. I have seen what happens to employees in some non-union settings: they are treated like dirt. They are regarded as mere commodities, expenses to be controlled. If business had seen their employees as the valuable resource which allows the company to make money instead of a necessary evil, unions might never have been needed.

And it was American Labor Unions that stood up to the attempts of Marxists to subvert labor into supporting the communist movement. Unions have supported this country against its enemies.

Unions are not faultless. They were (and still are) slow to realize that the management they had to deal with had no stake in the survival of their companies. With the golden-parachute deals, CEOs could bailout of a company and still be ahead of the game. So what if a business lost money during a strike, the management wasn’t going to lose out.

The power of labor has diminished as manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the U.S. They really needed to see how the job market was changing and to encourage members to train for the new, technological fields that have emerged. That’s not a traditional function of unions, but it would have helped their members and perhaps opened new areas for organized labor.

Nevertheless, unions greatly improved the life of working people. I am, therefore, suspect of politicians who make anti-union comments. What have they got against working people banding together for better conditions and compensation? And why do working people vote against their own best interests.

I’ll probably lose some friends or get nasty comments about this blog, but dog-gone-it, it’s time for the decent people who do most of the working and paying to get a fair shake. They aren’t going to get it from politicians who try to undermine the ordinary working person.

Wayne


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