Bob Herbert: For those who don't understand why supporting unions is in their own best interest

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.daytondailynews.com/opinion/columnists/bob-herbert-unions-need-to-recapture-their-long-lost-vision-808148.html

Bob Herbert: Unions need to recapture their long-lost vision

5:15 PM Monday, July 12, 2010

In April 1968, the same month that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers, the president of the powerful Auto Workers union, Walter Reuther, traveled to Memphis to give the strikers critically needed financial support.

The sanitation workers were black. In his biography of Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein noted that the check he handed over to the strikers was the largest outside contribution they would receive. Some officials at the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit were taken aback. “But Reuther forged ahead,” Lichtenstein wrote, “offering an impassioned defense of interracial solidarity.”

Three-thousand delegates to the UAW convention later that year heard Reuther say: “We laid $50,000 on the line to demonstrate we meant business. Who helped us back in 1936 and 1937 when we were being beaten up and shot at, when our offices and our cars were being blown up by the gangsters hired by the corporations?

“Who helped us? The coal miners ... the clothing workers ... as long as I am identified with the leadership of this great union, we are going to extend a hand of solidarity to every group of workers who are struggling for justice.”

Reuther believed that solidarity and a commitment to social and economic justice was the very essence of the union movement. If you want to hear a heartfelt restatement of those beliefs for the early 21st century, a period in which the union movement is in great distress and the living standards of working people have seriously declined, listen to the soft-spoken new president of the UAW, Bob King. snip

It was the fact that workers were organized in the auto and other manufacturing industries that sparked the creation of a large American middle class. Those well-paying union jobs allowed working families to buy a home, put their children through school and build better lives.

The wages from those jobs fueled the consumer demand that powered America’s economic success.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Sad that something so self-evident needs to be argued for.

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. A day or so ago, I sat and listened to a blue collar guy trash unionized labor

I just sat there at first thinking what sad, ignorant fool this acquaintance had become. His complete lack of any understanding of the history of this country coupled with his smug delivery of Rush Limbaugh talking points finally became too much for me to bear in silence. I told him that the only thing more stunning than his ignorance of how organized labor had provided for and sustained his family was his arrogance and sense of entitlement at having a job that, for now, is paying him a living wage. I reminded him that his father never could have provided as well for his brothers and sisters if were not for the railroad union that he belonged to. I ended my little rant by offering that in my life I had become completely certain of a few things. The first was that the quickest way for a conservative like himself to become a progressive was to be on the receiving end of injustice. The second thing was that Rush Limbaugh was rotting his brain in addition to lying to him.

[burnsei sensei]

3. I think that the vision of a living wage

is getting clearer and clearer.
The idea of earning a living may just come back into vogue, after being suppressed for so long.

[ljm2002]

4. Great piece...

...and all the comments so far on the daytondailynews.com site are negative.

Sad.

[senseandsensibility]

5. This should be obvious

but unfortunately isn't. Too many people have no idea why they have a five day work week, vacation, or safety standards at their workplace. And because of this ignorance, workers are losing these benefits.

[Vinnie From Indy]

6. You have hit on one of my biggest criticisms of the current leadership of organized labor

The fact is that the leaders of the major remaining unions have completely failed to understand the importance of reminding Americans of the contributions of unions to THEIR lives. It seems so obvious that much of the money being spent by unions on other activities related to marketing could and should be targeted toward campaigns that educate Americans about the origins of the benefits they take for granted nowadays.

Cheers!

[senseandsensibility]

7. Great point

I agree completely. Maybe we should e-mail union leaders with that suggestion? Couldn't hurt.:toast:

[bvar22]

8. Now, LABOR only needs a political party to represent them.

Instead of one where the Leadership openly campaigns for virulently Anti-LABOR candidates in local Primaries.


"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone