Labor Amnesia Can Be Fatal

Top Ten Things Labor Unions Have Done For American Workers: 1) Child Labor Ban 2) The 40-hour Work Week 3) Unemployment Insurance 4) Minimum Wage Laws   5) Occupational Safety & Health Laws 6) Health Care Benefits 7) Paid Sick & Vacation Days 8) Pension Benefits 9) Overtime Pay 10) Family Leave.

Big and small business owners alike have talked for years now about how unions aren’t necessary, about how unions just drive up costs and interfere with profits - uh, wait, most employers actually prefer to call profits productivity. These are the same arguments made back when unions first started organizing American workers in large numbers.

Do you think there would be a list like the one above if people fell for that back in the day?

If those anti-union arguments had succeeded in the early twentieth century, workers would never have won collective bargaining and binding arbitration rights in contract negotiations. No grievance procedures. Without unions and their counterbalancing strength in American society from the 1930s through the 1960s, there would be no Social Security. No Medicare.

Labor helped lift America out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and as its strength grew, so did the overall strength of the American economy, and the middle class. Big Businesses made a ton of money during those days too. But that was simply not good enough for them.

And so for the last thirty years Corporate America has spent billions of dollars to convince millions of people that unions are somehow “special interests” that no longer protect and serve the best interests of working people. The Republican Party has chipped in by echoing that message and by obstructing new union organizing efforts at every turn.

This Corporate-Republican campaign to discredit unions, interfere with organizing, and diminish Labor's counterbalancing influence on American society has led to: the outsourcing of millions of jobs overseas and the firing of  millions of workers; the elimination or radical reduction of employee health care and pension benefits; demands for increased productivity with decreased compensation; restructuring of industries and workplaces with no input from workers; ruthless pursuit of “sky’s the limit” profit margins, no matter what the human cost.

It seems all too clear that our collective American economic survival and revival can only be achieved if working people shake off the cobwebs of corporate deceit and demand some restorative balance of power in the workplace - the kind of balance that can only be achieved when unions are allowed to organize, and to be an equal partner in the constructive repair of all that is broken in our economy.