The State of Our Unions
A Look at Seattle's Deep, Bloody Labor History—and Its Uncertain Future
all images courtesy everett public library
THREE OF THE STRIKERS Among the 74 Wobblies sent to prison were Axel Downey, 17, the youngest of the protestors; John Downs, 28, one of the men beaten by Everett authorities in Beverly Park in October 1916, an event that precipitated the violence in Everett; and Thomas H. Tracy, 36, a Teamster, charged with killing deputy Jefferson Beard but acquitted in court.
T he saying around Everett in 1916 was that you could tell shingle weavers by their missing fingers, lost regularly to the unguarded saws of the town's mills. You might also have been able to tell them by their "cedar asthma," contracted from the dust that blew upward from those same saws and into countless lungs, some of which stopped working as a result.
The shingle weavers were on strike that year, a consequence of both their difficult situation and a larger boom in organizing in the state's early industries. Though they had mixed feelings about it, they were supported by the Industrial Workers of the World—known commonly as the Wobblies, committed to overthrowing the employing class—who had taken up the shingle weavers' cause in part as a means of promoting their own, more radical agenda. Throughout the summer and fall, teams of Wobblies came to Everett to engage in free-speech demonstrations and were arrested and beaten by the local police—once with clubs and whips. By November, incensed at the rough treatment of their union brothers, some 300 Wobblies decided to board boats in Seattle and head for Everett. They are said to have sung a battle cry called "Hold the Fort" along the way: "We meet today in freedom's cause and raise our voices high/We'll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die/Hold the fort, for we are coming, union us be strong/Side by side we'll battle onward, victory will come."
Stranger Personals
The Verona, the first boat of Wobblies to arrive, was met at the Everett waterfront by the Snohomish County sheriff and a couple hundred deputized citizens. "Who is your leader?" the sheriff shouted, according to historical accounts. "We are all leaders!" the Wobblies shouted back. Someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire. When it was all over, two sheriff's deputies and at least five Wobblies—the official number, though the actual number might have been as high as a dozen—were dead. Several union bodies floated in Port Gardner Bay, other union bodies (74 of them) were taken to jail, and the Everett Massacre, as it was called, entered into state union lore, alongside numerous other clashes and strikes and organizing drives that make up Washington State's deep union history.
It's a history that includes just about every single line of bodily labor that our region has ever seen: the cigar makers, the brewers, the maltsters, the newsboys, the cooks, the barbers, the waiters, the waitresses, the meatpackers, the X-ray technicians, the nurses, the truck drivers, the airplane makers. That history has grown increasingly remote, though. In recent decades, the businesses that defined the new Seattle economy—Starbucks, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, Microsoft, the biotech companies of South Lake Union, the Google branches in Fremont and Kirkland—have been able to grow huge sums of money out of the labor of nonunionized workforces. In addition to non-union-produced lattes and non-union-produced web browsers, a major product of this new Seattle is an increased number of citizens who have only an abstract awareness that this is, or used to be, a union town.
I n January of 2000, I returned to Seattle from college and walked straight into a union. That year, union membership in Washington State stood at 18.5 percent of the workforce, way down from the 44.5 percent of the workforce that was unionized in the mid-1960s. The drop is in keeping with a long, nationwide decline in union membership—a trend that now has union leaders lobbying intensely for the labor-friendly Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for American workers to form unions. I had been hired on at the Seattle Times as a "three-year resident," essentially a long-term paid intern. Like most of the newspaper's staff then and now, residents at the Times were members of the local branch of the Communications Workers of America, a group that traces back to a federation formed by telephone operators in 1947.
Theoretically, I had the option of declining a union membership at the Times. But I had no problem with being in the union. Part of my job would be working with older reporters and copy editors, almost all of them proud union veterans. To not join their project of bargaining collectively for better wages and benefits would be a slap in the face to them. Plus, I liked the union-negotiated salary I'd be earning: about $25,000 the first year if all went well.
Ideology, in other words, had little to do with my becoming a Communications Worker of America. Joining was in line with my politics, sure, but the greater motivator was that it just seemed to be what was done in the place where I had landed. Over the course of that year, I paid $320.32 in dues to my local branch, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. This money was deducted straight from my paychecks, just like federal income tax and Social Security payments. By November, the dot-com bubble had burst, and this union membership that I'd figured would probably be of neutral-to-no consequence led me into tense meetings at the Seattle Labor Temple on First Avenue (a place I'd previously never known existed), a raucous strike vote (I voted in favor), and then, finally, a 49-day stint on the picket line.
The issues were standard and somewhat timeless, the same basic complaints that have motivated union workers in Seattle ever since the Seattle General Strike of 1919—the first mass civic work stoppage in U.S. history—idled the streetcars, raised the ire of vigilantes who went out looking to round up "reds," and caused then-mayor Ole Hanson to pronounce a defining contest between "Americanism" and "bolshevism" (the former, it turned out, won). In 2000, we at the Times wanted essentially what the shipyard workers who triggered the general strike wanted back in 1919: better wages and benefits, a larger share in the profits our employers were earning. By the time we began passing out picket signs, I'd come to value my labor—and the notion of solidarity—a bit more highly than when I signed on, and agreed with the union's demands: a $3- to $4-an-hour wage increase over a three-year period, plus an end to a two-tier pay system in which suburban reporters received less money than downtown reporters. There were some additional demands concerning health-care and retirement plans, but as a young and healthy person I paid virtually no attention to this.
I was 23. In the back of my car, I carried a red, white, and black "On Strike" sign affixed to a wooden stake. I drove it around far more than I held it aloft. Part of me didn't like being involved in a large, top-down, slogan-chanting group—a common reaction among reporters, who tend to be suspicious, cynical, hard-to-herd types. But another part of me was excited about being involved in something bigger than myself. It felt dangerous and powerful and table-turning. One day the rumor mill reported that a striker had shouted "scab!" at Times publisher Frank Blethen—and maybe even spit on him—as he was crossing the picket line. Polite Seattle types were aghast; union-forever types felt emboldened. The staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, also part of the newspaper guild, was on strike with us, making parallel demands of their newspaper's owner, the Hearst Corporation. All told, we were more than 800 people passing around union placards, temporary-job tips, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and bargaining-session gossip.
What we had launched was, as the New York Times noted, "the first newspaper strike in this heavily unionized town in 47 years." What none of us realized then was that the industry we were demanding more from was on the verge of a huge change that would make our strike look, in retrospect, poorly timed and even more poorly executed. Neither did we have a clear-eyed view of the long change that Seattle itself was undergoing. True, relative to the rest of the country, this region is still heavily unionized; a 2008 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics placed Washington State fourth in the nation in terms of union density. But it's nothing like it used to be. Today's nonunion programmers, espresso makers, and lab-coated gene manipulators didn't—and would never—shut down the city in solidarity with striking newspaper workers (or striking Boeing employees, for that matter) in the way that Seattle's trade unions collectively shut down a far less high-tech version of this city in 1919 out of solidarity with striking shipyard workers.
T here's no way I came out ahead financially on the Seattle newspaper strike. Over those 49 days, I lost about a month and a half's worth of wages from the Times: roughly $3,000. During the same period, I received $2,000 in strike pay from the newspaper guild and roughly $500 from other odd jobs. Net loss: $500.
Plus, when the strike was settled, the wage increase we'd "won" was exactly the same as what the Seattle Times Company had been offering us before the strike: $3.30 an hour over six years (instead of our demanded $3 to $4 an hour over three years). A lot of pain for the same, slow gain. The two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health- insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent—outcomes the union described as a "victory." But for a healthy young city resident like me, those gains were of little consequence. I was certainly happy for those helped by what we'd all "won," and I was grateful for the time I'd spent standing around the burn barrel and arguing in the union hall with people I'd previously known only in an on-the-job context. But the atmosphere at the Times after the strike was strained and unpleasant; I'd lost a work environment that I hadn't realized was exceptionally nice. Over the next year and a half, I paid $671.46 in union dues (further increasing my net financial loss from striking), and after a series of discouraging events that have since been explained to me as a consequence of my enthusiastic work for the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record, I decided to try a different way of doing journalism, and I quit.
A union, I learned on the picket line, can be a powerful thing. But it is not an inherently good thing, as some of the standard rhetoric on the left often suggests, and a union strike must be understood as a radical proposition—as radical as the idea of confronting an armed sheriff's posse on the Everett waterfront or shutting down the entire city of Seattle or picketing the Boeing plant after World War II. To launch a successful strike, workers must cede their individualism and commit to a radical form of collective disruption, the act of shutting down their employer's means of production. They must also have broad support. They cannot expect to win otherwise. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild had among its striking members the white-collar journalists, advertising salespeople, page designers, and circulation workers of the Times and P-I. It did not, however, have the blue-collar printers and delivery people. Those delivery drivers were Teamsters, and most of them declined to strike with the newspaper guild. Hence the papers got printed and delivered, and their increased wire copy and decreased original content and nonunion temporary staffing didn't matter one bit. Word was that people actually called the Times newsroom during the strike to say they appreciated having thinner papers and fewer stories; it made them feel less overwhelmed.
This was humbling. And it taught me that we had not only overvalued our labor as journalists but had also overestimated the depth of pro-union feeling in this supposedly pro-union town. We'd missed the actual change beneath the window dressing of standard Seattle sentiment. Sure, certain city officials declined to give interviews to nonunion reporters during the strike, and some people canceled their subscriptions (including my parents, who dropped the Times in protest of Blethen's adversarial posture toward his strikers). But one would assume that in "heavily unionized" Seattle, newspapers with picketing employees wouldn't have been able to find a person in town who wanted their product anymore—even if most of the Teamsters were still willing to drive it around—and that this would have forced management to make concessions. Not so. The union was reluctant to even suggest people cancel delivery, and the vast majority of subscribers stayed.
Seattle's dailies went almost straight from the strike into the downward spiral of lost revenue and increased internet competition that last month claimed the 146-year-old print edition of the P-I. This same spiral currently threatens bankruptcy (or worse) for the drastically downsized Times, now staffed at a fraction of its prestrike levels. Along the way, the pages of the two shrinking newspapers chronicled the changing union landscape. In 2001, Boeing moved its headquarters out of town, saying it was looking for a "business-friendly environment." Production plants remain in the area, and so does the tradition of aerospace-worker strikes, but things are different. A Boeing machinist strike in the fall of 2008, which ended up coinciding with the Wall Street collapse and widespread recognition of the current recession, had mixed results and took 52 days to resolve. About a third of the Weyerhaeuser workforce is unionized, but the timber workers don't fight management like they used to. Public-employees unions—from teachers to Metro bus drivers—have lately been stymied in their attempts to raise their pay because of severe budget cuts related to the economic slump. While Washington's shrunken union density has been on the rise since the 1980s—due in part to the success of the Service Employees International Union in organizing workers in the health-care and public-service sectors—in the long view, it's still way down. Between 2007 and 2008, union density in this state reversed course and dipped slightly because of the recession, from 20.2 percent to 19.8 percent.
Unions are paid tremendous lip service as a positive social force. They can be and are rightly lionized as a huge, helpful presence in this city's industrial and blue-collar past. They are idealized by certain members of the left who still believe that unquestioning pro-union sentiment is the sine qua non for liberal identification. But they are not quite the feisty power brokers that they used to be. Even stalwart union defenders, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Joel Connelly, have largely abandoned the all-encompassing commitment to solidarity. Connelly took a cut in benefits to join the new, union-free online P-I and says he is "torn" about whether he'd prefer the operation be unionized. "Deeply believe in unions as agents of social justice and defenders of the middle class," Connelly wrote in a recent e-mail. "But the 2000–2001 strike was horribly organized. We were denied vital information at the time of the strike vote, i.e., whether Teamsters would back strike. It had a destructive impact on journalism in Seattle."
"Things have changed," admitted Rick Bender, president of the Washington State Labor Council. "Tactics are changing. You don't see the strikes being used as much as they were in the early days of the labor movement." Still, he said, if Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009, the legislation that labor leaders are pushing for to rebuild union strength and numbers, "you're going to see some changes." Today there are 60 million people in the U.S. who would join a union if they could, Bender claims, citing recent union polling.
An open question, however, is whether unions make sense anymore in certain industries where they have long had footholds. Newspapers are a prime example. The Times is now the only union publication in town (except for the Daily Journal of Commerce, which has two union employees), and lately the main role of the Times' union is to help its members decide how to absorb the 12-percent cut in employee-related expenses that the Times management said it needs to make in order to keep the paper solvent. (On April 9, guild journalists at the Times voted to do this through furloughs and a halt to wage increases.) A case could be made that the P-I—now in the midst of a painful, rapid reorganization due to the internet—would have been more nimble and successful at adapting if not for the presence of a union, which can prolong major decisions, reward seniority over merit, protect useless employees, and even thwart desperately needed changes. Of course, to make that case one would have to show that the newspaper's executives had long ago hatched brilliant plans for meeting the challenges of this era, only to have those plans foiled by a recalcitrant union. There is no evidence for this. Newspaper executives in general share as much of the blame for the current state of their businesses as anyone else, and so it's not surprising that their union workers are currently grateful for the clauses in their union contracts relating to seniority, severance pay, and buyouts.
In the seven years since I left the Seattle Times, I've done all right as a solo bargainer. This isn't proof that individual workers everywhere are capable of representing themselves without the help of a union, but it's a strong counterbalance to my strike experience. Meanwhile, I've watched with sympathy as the collective bargainers who remain at the Times suffer through group pay freezes, group layoffs, and other cutbacks.
On April 10, city hall hosted a sparsely attended forum on the
future of news publishing in this city. A number of unemployed former
P-I journalists were there, and two of them spoke about the new
online-news ventures they hope to launch. "There are important voices
that the community has lost that I think it is important for us to
keep," said Kery Murakami, a former columnist and newspaper-
guild
shop steward at the P-I. He was talking about the voices of his
former coworkers, now out of work—and out of the guild. He did
not once mention the idea of unionizing his new venture, nor did anyone
else with a bright idea for the industry's future. 
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I don't know if organized labor can make a comeback or not, but I do know that the death of organized labor has not been accompanied by grand successes for the lower and middle classes.
The article portrays unions the way most of Americans seem to think of them: as dinosaurs that were once great, but that don't work enough to risk fighting for. That in itself is self-fulfilling prophesy.
As for all those new little entrepreneurial newspaper start-ups, the lack of unionization isn't going to help them much. Letting a million blogs bloom is not a recipe for success of either high-quality journalism or well-paid newspaper workers.
Nice article, if a bit overly personalized mix of history and anecdote. Usually the Stranger is more amusing and less thoughtful. Perhaps a few ex-union refuges from more serious defunct papers will add a further layer of complexity to "Seattle's only newspaper."
Unions are what the membership votes to make them. Show up to your monthly meetings, do your own research on the issues, speak out . . . but for the sake of all that's holy, stop feeding the "post-union" rhetoric. Instead of taking away the union from the journalists, we need to be organizing one for the IT workers.
The article begins with reference to shingle weavers' characteristic injuries and illnesses. While employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are less likely to be at risk of these types of disabiling conditions, that does not mean that injuries, illnesses and deaths (largely preventable) do not still occur on the job. They do occur - often among immigrants who don't speak English and who have little political sway, if any. Preventable injuries and deaths occur, in part, due to the decline in union participation rates and the subsequent decline in unions' political influence.
I agree with the original Some Guy, that the union movement needs some reform. Bringing workplace health and safety back into the national focus should be part of this effort.
That doesn't mean unionizing is always successful in this struggle. As Sanders points out, solidarity movements need to be extremely well organized to make gains contra extremely well organized corporations. Participants also need to recognize that those gains will likely be small. This is better, however, than an alternative of having no voice or collective bargaining position against one's employer.
How unfortunate that Sanders did not learn about these wider contexts and facts during his union activity, or chose not to include this information in his article.
Those interested in union activity regarding our big corporations, check out Starbucks workers' unionizing activities here: http://www.starbucksunion.org/
And Boeing's IAM District 751 here: http://www.iam751.org/
Why is a companies success the work of a CEO and when a company is in trouble it is because there is a Union ? A Union is the Workers that make all companies work.
I like seeing articles about labor in our papers. thanks.
First off, Eli is using his own experience to make major projections about an entire social movement. This is always problematic, and I think several people’s comments have already covered it pretty well. The news industry is a highly specialized case. The last 40 of massive news consolidation, de-regulation and changes in technology have had a much bigger impact on employment than have unions or strikes. I guarantee it. More importantly, his criticism of the Teamsters and other Seattle citizens not supporting the strike is probably off-base and poorly researched. If he dug deeper, he would find that the Taft-Hartley act of 1947 makes it illegal for separate unions representing different bargaining units to go on strike in support of one-another. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was low Teamster support for your action because it was ILLEGAL. Furthermore, city officials not giving interviews and a large cancellation of subscriptions makes it sound like there was actually pretty broad community support.
One area where Sanders is right on the money is his criticism of union leadership. They probably made a huge mistake by not mobilizing broad support or getting people to cancel subscriptions. But this is a political problem stemming from the union itself and not an issue with the idea of organized labor in general. In fact, I would bet that most of the issues in your article are in fact political. The union had corrupt or inefficient leadership that didn’t want to rock the boat (political problem). The Teamsters didn’t strike because it was illegal (political problem). Certain labor journalists aren’t as committed to solidarity as they once were (political problem). In fact, it ALL comes down to politics. The law matters. Democracy matters. Who’s in power and who supports them matters.
This brings me to my most important issue. Sanders has neglected to mention labor’s overall political trajectory. History has seen several dramatic changes in union density crossing decades at a time. The 1919 Everett Massacre was NOT the first major example of union collective action in US history. In fact, it was far from it. The Knights of Labor was an industrial union operating in the 1870s-80s. They had branches in every state and convinced hundreds of thousands of members to join numerous national-level railroad and longshore strikes. The KOL collapsed in just a few short years though, largely owing to political problems. The Wobblies featured so heavily in Sanders’ article were a massive, national-level industrial union that collapsed specifically because of government repression. There was a multi-decade gap between the KOL and the Wobblies and another one between them and the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. When the KOL and the Wobblies collapsed, thousands of US journalists saw it as the death knell for organized labor.
Finally, Sanders only selected cases that support his points. It’s true that labor has been on the decline since the mid 1960s. It’s also true that membership is down in numerous Washington unions. But Sanders’ left out powerful unions like the teachers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and he barely discussed the SEIU. They are arguable the three most important and powerful unions in our state and all of them have been doing quite well in recent years. They have used new organizing strategies, improved democratic practices (with some exceptions in the SEIU) and militant action to increase their membership and political voice. A well-rounded and “balanced” view of Washington labor would include them.
2009 is an incredibly important year for labor in Washington state. It is the 90th anniversary of the Everett Massacre and the Seattle General Strike, the 100th anniversary of the Spokane Free Speech Movement, The 75th Anniversary of the 1934 strike creating the ILWU and the 10 year anniversary of the WTO protests. Washington unions are working hard to make this a powerful year for labor. It is also a time of “political opportunity structures”. The massive recession, election of a relatively pro-labor President and congress and creation of the Employee Free Choice Act all may provide interesting and dynamic opportunities for labor unions to improve their membership and political powers. Mr. Sanders article doesn’t seem to understand any of this. Instead of following the direction of most labor journalism (which is increasingly admitting that a return to labor power is overdetermined), it instead sounds like Bush era apologist screed placing the blame on workers and unions and letting employers off the hook. What? Is someone trying to organize the Stranger or something?
Thanks for listening.
superamerican
Or he's George W. Bush waking up after a three day bender.
It's only people like that, after the last six months of mass layoffs, that could seriously say "unions are not necessary now".
The rest of us know who's on our side, and we know it ain't the boss.
Yes, unions have a lot of problems(I'm in the IBU, the maritime wing of the Longshoremen)but if you want to know what life is like without them, try coming in five minutes' late after you've been up all night with a sick kid when you live in a NONUNION state. Or try getting sick.
If you work for a living, unions are no longer necessary like LUNGS are no longer necessary.
The strike was a mistake for a lot of reasons. But it should be pointed out that the Guild was led into the strike by leaders brought in from outside the state, not Liz, who has done a remarkable job putting a fractured union back together following a divisive strike and a decaying industry. I don't envy her, but she's doing everything she possibly can to keep unions representing newspaper workers.
Could you remind me -- which union does the Stranger's staff belong to? And the rest of the employees, such as drivers?
Joe Hill
The labor movement--an institution that sometimes works within unions, sometimes without, lacks a modern critique of power in the workplace, and in many cases, such has led to many unions as a labor relations mud-flap for human resources. While future union leaders learn about the surplus value of labor, and internationals recruit college kids--rather then rank and filers--to be officials and organizers, managers are learning about organizational behavior and refining "team" concepts, which trumps anything the economist Marx had to say in the modern workplace.
Forget TV, the "media", and the "corporations" that "keep us down". The REAL propaganda is in the design and structure of the workplace, controlled, designed and administered by management, psychologists, and HR respectively, where unions are merely one of many "outside" risks to be managed. This last bit is the real reason for the decline of unionism. It happening in your workplace, union or non-union.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washin…
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/feature…
THAT is the story we need to hear, because it explains why the labor movement cares so much about things the public generally doesn't understand, ie the Employee Free Choice Act and the Worker Privacy Act. The Stranger has done next to nothing to explain or support either of these bills. It could do much, much more.
It did not, however, have the blue-collar printers and delivery people. Those delivery drivers were Teamsters, and most of them declined to strike with the newspaper guild. Hence the papers got printed and delivered, and their increased wire copy and decreased original content and nonunion temporary staffing didn't matter one bit.
Which is bullshit on several counts, and Eli should know better than to post it where those of us who walked the line might read it.
In the first place, the printers -- except for a couple of scabs -- all were CWA members. They honored the strike throughout. How in hell could you not have remembered that, Eli?
The members of Teamsters Local 763, which did not honor the strike, were strongarmed, mostly against their will, into staying in by their now-thankfully former Secretary-Treasurer, Jon Rabine, who was in Blethen's pocket. Rabine paid for this with his job. He was ousted in the regularly scheduled election, which occurred during the strike.
Teamsters Local 174, which represented the "big truck" delivery drivers, honored the strike and walked the picket lines with the Guild. Even after their Secretary-Treasurer Bob Hasegawa (now state Representative in the 11th District) was ousted in 174's election, his successor, Scott Sullivan, who had been considered a Rabine ally, kept his members on the lines.
The poster above who suggested that some Teamsters might have stayed in because to support the Guild would have been illegal is just plain mistaken. That provision of Taft-Hartley would not have applied here.
Guild solidarity fell short of what it might have been because for years Times management had been buying off the higher-paid, higher-prestige bylined reporters with preferential treatment in their "star system." A goodly number of them scabbed or otherwise undermined their co-workers during the strike and thereafter.
Many of these spineless bastards are still around and still think their shit doesn't stink, but we haven't forgotten them.
And by the way Eli, had you stuck around till the end of your three-year internship and stayed with the Times, you would have gone to work immediately at fourth-year scale because a certain Newspaper Guild shop steward in the newsroom hounded management across the table to be fair to the interns. Otherwise you know where you would have started? First-year scale, that's where.
Unions at their best stand up to bullies in management and do not back off. Unions are a reflection of the society at large and should not be held to any higher or lower standards.
This article disappoints me, Eli. I thought more highly of your abilities before I read this. Try to improve, will you?
Many workers in such situations, especially white collar unions, fail to fully realize that unions are democratic organizations. They fail to participate in the process beyond paying dues and complaining. Their union often is run by a "good old boy" entrenched power base which, more often then not, is not interested in progress or reform but in maintaining their power. Entrenched union leaders do this by making participation in process of removing them from office as difficult as possible by having a small number of union members, who do participate, conspire with them to manipulate the by laws and union rules in such a way as to favor them in maintaining their power.
Having said that, I do believe the concept of negotiating for better working conditions by using a bargaining agent union is still as valid today as every. Workers must see it though, and be willing to throw off their chains. They must be ready to fight not only corporate power but stagnated outdated union leaders to reform and remake the labor movement. Comments about the decline of unions and the growth of corporate power running parallel to the decline in wages and working conditions and the middle class are evidence of the need for unions and things like the employee free choice act.
I think that a number of large well established unions are mostly bureaucratic organizations with leaders protecting their self interests first rather then fighting for workers. This is one of the main reasons unions have become ineffective for the mass of workers in modern society. Workers see through the sham and cannot for various reasons gather the motivation necessary to clean house. Meanwhile labor leaders continue to say all the right things.
This combined with suppression of union activities by a series of corporate controlled governments have severely weakened protection of union activities and rendered the labor movement somewhat impotent when it comes to attracting or organizing workers.
The final nail in the coffin maybe the self-centered nature of workers in today's society. They seldom see themselves as having anything in common with their fellow workers. They often are more interested in climbing on the backs of other workers in order to reach a management position. It is often too late before they comprehend that the company uses this type of ambition to divide and conquer rather then reward. In the end they may understand that working at a company where your a member of a democratic and well run union should be a destination not just a stop along the way. I think that one lesson I learned in life is that happiness is possible simply by becoming a worker amongst other workers, and NEVER thinking you should ever accept poor wages or working conditions if you are willing to fight back.
Nobody ever got any 'gifts' of 8 hour days, decent wages, safer conditions by meekly accepting what the bosses offered. The meek shall inherit the dearth.
Problems arose as the vast majority sucked down the 'free-market' Kool-Aid, and now all have been poisoned. The truth is, it's the same poison the greedy market scammers were peddling a century ago. Anyone who pointed out the huge holes in the Golden Fleece got labeled a heretic, or worse.
Of course the greediest, scummiest, most unscrupulous always benefit most under a winner-takes all deal. Hearst and Rupert Murdoch are prime examples: once entrenched with an empire of propaganda machines, they are nearly impossible to dislodge, as they wield disproportionate influence in all debates, including any attempt in the U.S. Congress seeking to regulate commerce and prevent dangerous monopolies.
The phoniness of the resulting rigged "free market" is becoming clear to even the most brain-dead Kool-Aid guzzlers now.
That strike succeeded because Dave Beck and his Teamster goon squads decided to back it all the way. They shoved William Randolph Hearst's union-busting past right up his ass...couldn't have happened to a nicer Nazi sympathizer.
The good ol' IWW are trying to organize Starbucks. They're doing it in NYC, it needs to go national.
Here's a link(Yeah, I know, Wobblies using the Web, ha ha funny, but this is life and death shit, folks):
http://www.starbucksunion.org/taxonomy/t…
So get yer latte at a LOCALLY-owned shop and stay the hell away from Big Mermaid!
"an injury to one is an injury to all".
These corporate scumbags think they can get away with limitless greed scams by giving workers a phony speech and calling them "partners" while paying starvation wages, demanding unreasonable schedules, and unsafe working conditions. Americans need to know the ugly truth behind all the PR spin BS that rich hypocrite employers pump out 24/7...
Those determined Starbucks workers and IWW organizers showed grit and courage in kicking Schulz/Starbucks ass in court and the NLRB...these workers set a fine example that should be emulated nationwide. People like them are the main reason there is still hope that fairness can someday be restored in the American economy.
A far better method for increasing wages across the board would be through government mandated minimum wage regulation.
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