Unions and Workers on the Move!

[dykeumentary]

Originally Posted by Kobi

This isn't striking me as exciting. This is striking me as very scary.

I understand the ploy. Using an economic disaster as an excuse
to bust flailing unions. Using economic errors in judgement, unbridled
economic greed to take away hard earned gains.

Yet, the underlying issue to me is simply redistributing wealth
and creating a wider gap between the haves and have nots.
And the current pawns in this is public workers.

It seems to be diverting attention from excess in upper classes
to focusing on a contentious tangible that is less threatening.

It would be an error to focus a response to what is being
touted as the issue. It would be more helpful to refocus
attention on what is really being done in the bigger scheme
of things.

Failing to do so is bringing a new and unpleasant reality to
everyday life for everyday people.

The more those with power and power can divert attention from
themselves, their excesses, their schemes.....the easier we make it
for them to impose their ideas and ideals on the mass public.

I hope you'll do me the favor of explaining what you mean in this. What is your fear protecting?

"bringing a new and unpleasant reality to everyday life for everyday people" reads as if everyday people haven't been suffering for quite some time now. Maybe we just have different ideas of "everyday people"??? For workers to simply ask that owners make agreements with them, then honor those agreements -- should be a basic human right.

The underlying issue in the "public worker union thing" is that "public work" can not be outsourced to a call center in Southeast Asia, nor outsourced to a dangerous factory on the US/Mexico border. Corporate owners have been sending (or threatening) to send jobs overseas for decades now. But can your pre-schooler's day care be outsourced to India? Can your trash collection be outsourced to another country with few labor protections? Nope, it can't. So "public sector" workers are the last pocket of labor that has any leverage to bargain with corporate owners, because they *have* to be here.

So for a government to say that those kinds of workers are discouraged from bargaining collectively for their wages and conditions is the last straw before corporations control absolutely everything. (Rembember last year when corporations were granted the right to spend unlimited funds on supporting political candidates?)

So we have two choices: be scared, or be energized that maybe the majority of US citizens, who actually are workers, might be starting to stir and see that we have power to get the life promised us in the founding of the US, to "promote the general welfare and ensure the blessing of liberty..."