Unions saved us from Communism and Fascism. I do not exaggerate. Back in the 1920s and 30s, with wealth in the hands of the few, and most workers in the position of being wage slaves, and then with the Great Depression making life almost impossible, Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik who wasn't afraid to enforce obedience through use of military force, predicted that American workers would create a communist state. Though he often used the word "democratic", his actions proved otherwise. Equally busy at the time were the fascists, seeing the unrest as a good time to take control of the frightened, battered people. (Some even admired Hitler as their model.)
What saved us from that? What defanged the growing Communist movement? What stopped the Fascists? The unions, my fellow Kossacks, the unions.
American workers were indeed suffering then. Suffering badly. In an amazing number of "company towns" around the country, they were paid only in scrip, chits issued by their bosses that couldn't be spent anywhere except at the company store, thus ensuring the worker could never quit, and went deeper and deeper into debt to his employer.
Those who didn't live in company towns fared little better. They worked long hours and were paid so little that they could never balance anything approaching a budget. They received no benefits, no health care, nothing.
And they were getting restless and angry, because they could look at the bosses and see how well they were doing by comparison. Kept in their various poverty ridden neighborhoods, they weren't supposed to know or see...but they did. And they were getting angry.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, a lot of Americans joined the Communist Party, under various names. They wanted a revolution. And in New York, and later Mexico, Trotsky was nearby, pushing and pulling to make it happen.
Fascism or Communism: Supposedly the only choices a worker could make.
Except some Americans had a brighter idea. Basically it amounted to: "Hey, if we don't come to work, they can't make money. They can't exist without us showing up at their factories, sweatshops and mines every day. So let's get together and make them treat us like human beings and pay us a fair wage."
Out of that idea came the union movement. "If we don't work, you don't get rich. So share the wealth!"
The name for that is, goshdarnit, democratic socialism. The path down the narrow middle between fascism and communism. Not Trotsky's version, but the death of Trotsky's dream. (Funny how that word socialism has become as despised as communism when all it means is that we have a right to expect something back from the government we pay for, little things like roads, bridges, libraries, police, firemen, defense of our nation...and maybe, oh golly gee...healthcare?)
This became the salvation of American democracy at a time when totalitarianism was once again taking root (see Prescott Bush, Morgan Bank, Chase Bank, et. al.) and communism attracted many in the intellectual and working classes who thought it could provide a utopia.
I know many of you receive the Progress Report so I won't quote at length. But here's a little nugget to consider:
Half of all workers in the United States now say they would vote to join a union if they could, yet union membership continues to decline — down to just 8 percent today from one-third of private sectors workers in the decades after World War II. The reason: Existing laws make joining a union a Herculean task that few are able to undertake.
Or this:
The importance of unions to the American worker cannot be understated. Union workers earn 30 percent higher wages than nonunion workers. For women and people of color, union membership improves wages even more. As union membership has declined, so too have real wages. Meanwhile, top business executives earned "344 times the salary of the average American worker in 2007." As Madland explained in the Washington Post, income inequality "is now at the level it was in the 1920s, when unionization rates were also below 10 percent."
If you think you're not a wage slave because you don't have to shop at the company store with scrip and go ever deeper into debt to your employer, you're wrong about one part of that equation: You're going deeper into debt, just not to your employer. You owe the banks and the mortgage company, many of you probably more than you can pay. It starts with your student loans, which are growing ever more expensive, and continues with credit cards, offered freely the day you graduate from high school.
Not go to work? You can't afford not to. You can't afford to quit, complain or even unionize because they-who-own-your-life will come after you and ruin you. That little thing called a credit report can even prevent you from renting an apartment that you can afford. So you pay, pay, pay, and then when you get sick and your insurance company disallows a huge chunk of your treatment, you find your credit card interest rates rising to nearly 30% even though you have never missed a payment. (I know, it happened to me. The minute I paid off the hospital after emergency surgery by using my credit card... zap!)
The Republicans are doing everything they can to prevent American workers from unionizing, and telling lies about how a law designed to ease unionization will harm us. No, what will harm us is the danger of a furious working class screaming "off with their heads."
Unionization saved us once. It could save us again. But in my lifetime I have watched the systematic breakdown of unions, the presentation of unions as somehow "unAmerican," a lie bought only by those who have never needed a union. We have been repeatedly told that high union wages have sent jobs overseas. A canard if ever there was one, especially since the loss of jobs to overseas markets has accelerated as unions have diminished.
Back in the 80s, I lived in a town with just two grocery stores, one unionized and one not. You wouldn't believe how hard the employees of the non-union store tried to get a job in the union store. They talked freely about how they wanted the higher pay scale, the insurance, the guaranteed hours. Guess which store had more customers? The union store. Why? Because the employees were a heck of a lot happier and worked a heck of a lot harder. The difference was palpable.
But something else was going on in that town at the same time. It was a mining town, and the miners had a union. So, the instant things got a little dicey, all the miners were laid off. Meanwhile, not too far down the road, another mine, owned by the same company, never shut down. Why? Because they hadn't joined the mineworkers union. This is where it got interesting.
The company claimed it was too expensive to keep the union mine opened. Never mind that in order to keep the second mine from unionizing the company had offered the non-union miners exactly the same wages and benefits as the union workers.
I am a little fearful that this time we may not be able to unionize fast enough to save ourselves. The first rounds of unionizing spilled blood in the streets. I knew some of those union organizers in my younger days, and was amazed at the risks they took, the beatings they took. They were brave people.
But too many of us have bought into the "Unions are anti-American" meme the conservatives have been shoveling out for the last fifty years. If we don't get past that quickly, the alternative will be scary indeed.
The Dems have been trying to make it easier for workers to unionize. They've been repeatedly stopped by Republicans in the Senate. So think about this when you go to vote: The down-ticket races matter too.
I, for one, never want to see blood spilled on our streets again over whether you and I deserve a living wage.