This is your grandfather's or great-grandfather's AFL-CIO and I'm damn glad because it means progress.
In the 1930s, there were many sit-in strikes and non-violent civil disobedience actions, as well as violence created by the bosses and their thugs. Well, real labor activism is back:
More than 100 union members, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and UNITEHERE! President John Wilhelm were arrested at a sit-in demanding justice and a fair contract for San Francisco hotel workers last night. The workers have been without a contract since August.
AFL-CIO Blog: Hotel Workers, Trumka Arrested at Sit-In for Fair Contract
For those who think the continuation of the war on work and workers will go unchallenged, think again. Working people, unionized and unorganized, have had it.
A new day is coming.
Why the actions? Because hotel chains are screwing workers.
The action is part of a campaign to win fair contracts at several national hotel chains, including Hilton, Hyatt and Starwood.
The profitable chains are using the recession as an excuse to demand health care benefit cuts in contract talks with more than 16,000 workers at dozens of hotels in San Francisco, Chicago and other cities.
At the rally before the march, Trumka told crowd:
"A job is a good job because working people fight to make it one. It doesn’t matter if the job is in a coal mine or a hotel, a classroom or a car wash.
"That’s why the struggle of hotel workers here in San Francisco and across our country is so important. If we don’t protect the wages and benefits and health care of hotel workers no job is safe, no worker is safe no family is safe."
AFL-CIO Blog: Hotel Workers, Trumka Arrested at Sit-In for Fair Contract
Trumka understands what has happened in this nation and why baby steps and tepid actions are not enough. Unlike some politicians in the Democratic Party, he will fight for working people:
Tuesday’s live Web chat, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka talked about what we need to do to fix our economy in both the short term and the long term—and touched on a vital, too-infrequently discussed issue: the need to end the stranglehold neoliberal economic thinking has on our politics.
Spurred by Milton Friedman and other economists, the neoliberal agenda is based on the radical principle that it’s markets, not people, that matter most. By nature, the neoliberal principle is hostile to collective bargaining, public regulation and all manner of ways to leverage community power to balance out the power of wealth. Trumka sums up Friedman’s poisonous political philosophy:
He believed that anything that got in the way of the free market was something that was bad and should be eliminated. Any regulation on business is bad, so get rid of it; any tax on business is bad and distorts the marketplace, get rid of it. A union is bad and distorts the marketplace, so you have to get rid of it.
For the last 30 years, that’s the system that we’ve had here. It brought us to this crisis.
Trumka says the labor movement needs to get back at the forefront of economic policy, including monetary, fiscal and industrial policy. Unions need to lay out a clear new economic agenda that will work better and stand as an alternative to the markets-first, people-later neoliberal agenda.
That means building an economy in which the financial sector works on behalf of the real economy—not the other way around. It means listening to the needs of working families, not pundits and corporate shills who claim that good jobs with living wages and benefits are "bad for the economy." It means we don’t let big bankers reap profits from destructive speculation and pass the risks and the consequences on to us. It means that wages, not debt, drives the economy.
Trumka Takes on the ‘Neoliberalism’ that Broke U.S. Economy
Change is coming, but it won't be coming FROM Washington. It will be coming TO Washington and Democratic politicans from top to bottom can stand with working people or they will be swept out of the way.
There are going to be more and more actions by working people and the AFL-CIO has been leading.
If you are not a union member, you still can join this movement:
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It's time to bring change to the politicians who only give lip service to it.