I've been in a union for over 20 years, and work in a power plant for a utility company. I've watched the destruction of the labor movement in this country in many ways, and have personally watched our union slowly get busted over the last ten years, and it just gets worse by the day. We're lucky in the sense that we cannot be out sourced and that is has to be workers here in the States doing our jobs, but what my company has done instead is to bring in more and more outside contractors, and for now they're union contractors for the most part, and get rid of as many full time employees as they can in order to bust the unions of the full time workers. They're making money hand over foot, but they want to get out of the pension business, and the insurance business, and they'd like to see us gone since they feel we have too much say so at the work place and with how they run their business.
They continually sacrifice safety for generation, and they've cut numbers to the bone where it not only threatens safety, but also load reliability, and eventually that means unreliable service for customers. There are just way too many running the show who are "yes men", and who have visions of grandeur for themselves that they might be one of the guys up top making the big stock options and over paid bonuses, and that's all that matters to them even if they don't agree with the business practices going on. They won't say anything about it since it would hurt their chances to move up the food chain.
It just amazes me that within our union, we've got so many religious voters who do not pay an ounce of attention to the sorts of issues that are discussed on this site, such as the ones raised on the diary that prompted me to write this which was OrangeClouds115's Labor & Unions: The Fox Ate the Hens http://www.dailykos.com/.... Much of this is my reply to that diary and I was told I should put it in a diary of its own, so here it is. The diary and the replies to it raised a lot of great points about what's happened to organizing, and how the GOP has limited workers' rights to organize, stopped government employees from organizing, and how they've taken the definition of what a supervisor is and have turned it on its head. By much of that definition, my training of apprentices or my being trained through two different crafts could be considered being a "supervisor" or being "supervised" which it obviously never was. I was and am still a journeymen training apprentices, and not "supervising" them.
As I said in my reply to that diary, Bush has done absolutely nothing but immediately go after workers' protections, and their right to join a union from day one that he got in office. He's done it primarily through the type of people he's appointed to important cabinet posts, and those people have dismantled organizing rights, safety protections, environmental protections, and anything that keeps the average working Joe from getting a fair shake when all they're trying to do is put in an honest day's work. They put coal executives in charge of coal mine safety, and guess what's on the news? Coal miners dying since they don't have proper PPE, breathing equipment, and warning equipment since it might cost the mines some money to keep them alive. Have a repetitive stress injury? Well, they've got a guy who doesn't believe that exists whose daddy is on the Supreme Court and helped put Bush in office who doesn't think you should be able to file a claim and that you made up that injury. I would think those poor ladies in the chicken industry who have hands and wrists that look like they're eighty years old instead of twenty something might have something different to say about that. Molly Ivins does a lot better job than I could ever hope to in her book Bushwhacked which I would highly recommend for anyone here who has not read it and wants to read more about the Bush appointees that he put in there from day one and how awful they are for workers and any average citizen who doesn't want to pay for big business to pollute and not clean up afterwards and lay it on the tax payer and on how Bush never found a business he could not run into the ground.
Since these things get absolutely no press coverage, sadly I have listened to my fellow union members complain about how the union is not doing enough to represent them and getting better contracts for us while voting for union busters since they're single issue religious voters who care more about the abortion issue than anything, and who do not watch or read any news, or very little, or they might watch Fox which amounts to worse than watching none IMO, and they let their church tell them how to vote. As I said in the reply to the other diary, when you try to talk to them issue by issue about the awful things Bush has done once in office, there is usually a deer in the headlights stare out of them and silence, or you just get silence and shame, but very little engagement.
As I said before, labor has got to quit stabbing itself in the back, and wake up, and I've been trying to do what I can person by person, and issue by issue to just talk to fellow workers about that's gone on. I do slowly see my fellow workers waking up to how bad Bush is, and how bad Matt Blunt has been here in MO, but they're still always clinging to the hope that they did something right by voting against abortion and not really wanting to stare the truth in the face about where the labor movement is headed in this country, and how they've allowed what's happened to it. I don't have any answers on how to make this problem better other than what I've done personally. I think it's one that needs to be addressed nationally by progressives.