For decades corporate profits have sored while the wages of the American Working Class have failed to keep up with the increasing cost of food, housing, and other essential needs. The 40 hour work week and the 8 hour day that union workers fought for and that helped to create the Working Middle Class have all but disappeared. Every year working class folk have to work longer and harder for less while corporate profits skyrocket, but that is what happens when you don’t have strong unions.
A recent polls show 86% Americans approve of labor unions. Public support for labor unions has been generally rising since hitting its lowest point of 48% in 2009, during the Great Recession. Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics union membership is less than 10% nation wide and only 8.9% of Oregon worker are members of a union.
We have to aske our selves if 86% of American workers want a union why are less that 10% of American workers unionized? The answer is poor leadership and a lack of solidarity among union leadership and workers in general.
We have union leaders that prefer to rub elbows with politicians while looking down their noses at their working class members. This leads to union members feeling frustrated and ignored which weakens the union and the labor movement as a whole. Organizing to get politicians elected instead of organizing workers in our community to unionize is one of the biggest reasons we have seen a decline of unions.
Its time we stop begin politicians for table scraps, it’s time they fear us, it was the American Working Class that fought 2 World Wars, built the greatest democracy and the strongest economy. They should fear the American Working Class because it is just a matter of time before we rise up and take back our county.
We don’t need a violent revolution we need a labor revolutions. We need to engage with our communities, support both other unions and non-union workers. We need to bring back the picket line, the boycott, the general strike.
The most successful strikes of recent years, like the West Virginia Teachers strike and now the Untied Auto Workers Strike were not won by standing strong and standing together.
If our union leadership is to timid and weak to push back then we need to show them what a Wild Cat looks like with it strikes. We need to strike not just for our own wages but for the common good. If the railroad workers, truckers, and dock workers had whet on strike when Biden broke the railroad strike and said they would not go to work again until the U.S. Congress upheld the rights of all workers to strike and have a union they would have won. Because we have the power.
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