hey-hey. ho-ho.

 

 

If you know, then you know the name of this blog is a play on a very many words, part of which lot is the name of "Fighting" Bob LaFollette, in an homage to one of the two places I consider my home.  If you do not know who Bob LaFollette is, ok, but that sound you hear is him spinning in his grave over what is happening in Wisconsin right now. 

I wrote the other day that I am so fucking pissed-off about this attempted union break.  I can not believe that anyone would be so stupid as to try something like this in Wisconsin -- did someone not do their homework? Or did they just think they would start at the toughest place?  If this gets pushed through in Wisconsin, home of The Wisconsin Idea, it can happen anywhere. 

I know that for a lot of people who consider themselves cosmopolitan & moderne, plus achingly fucking hipster with all their rad creds in order, unions seem like a quaint, old, needless relic whose time has passed.  To them, maybe, the imported exotique of Egypt + Libya are more relevant.  I think a lot of those people wonder what all the fuss is about.  I can not explain it to them.  I just don't have the sweet, helpful, pedagogical language to explain to a fucking grownup why or how organized labor and the historical gains and protections of such are important.

I can say that I was reared in a union house, in a union family, in a union neighborhood in a union town -- hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads, the nation's freight handler.  The weight of the proletariat in Chicago assured those of us who came from blue-collar families the same opportunities as anyone else, anyone who did not have to or did not choose to use their backs or their brawn to make a living.  Chicago -- oh, come & show me another city -- knew who built it, knew who made it great.  Some of those people -- Chicagoans who went first -- died, in fires, in industrial-machinery accidents, in shootouts at demonstrations, all because they wanted a fair wage, safe working conditions, adequate rest between and during shifts, the right to try to build a life, just the same as anyone else, even if they did have to work.

So, I grew up in a house that we owned; I went to private school; I went to college.  My father was a police sergeant, my mother was a unit clerk at the county hospital.  Half of the girls I went to high school with were also from blue-collar, union families -- half of those girls lived in houses that lost their incomes when the last steel mills closed while we were teenagers. 

Today, we took a drive with Eve to a rally in Philadelphia.  There were signs announcing the locals for pipefitters, steamfitters, plumbers, and roofers.  There were teachers, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, Teamsters, SEIU, and, um, Eve with the rest of her Actors' Equity peeps.  But God bless the actors!  Because they have to work so hard to get work & the union can not really help them with that, but there they were in solidarity, so exemplary.

One of the speakers addressed what I think people might be thinking when I talk about my excessively middle-class childhood.  He talked about the resentment toward union members, how people will say, "I don't have a pension, why should you?  I don't have a dental plan, why should you?  I don't have anyone to represent my voice, why should you?"  He said that the real question is not why we do, it is why they do not.

 

I was reading to the children last night from the encyclopedia's entry on the labor movement, where it read: 

Before 1929, most people regarded business executives as the nation's leaders and union members as dangerous radicals.  But people lost faith in business leaders after business could not relieve the depression.  Many Americans began to believe the way to fight the slump was to increase the purchasing power of wage earners.  The political climate changed from one favoring management to one favoring labor.   

I was thinking aloud and explaining to the children, at once, that this is pretty much exactly the case now -- people seem to think that it is perfectly fine for corporations to steer the ship and in the end, we will all get ours, that the goodness from their hearts of gold will drip down & enrich all our lives.  In the meantime, these union people -- their detractors seem to think -- are getting in everyone's way.  If we all just lie here on the ground and pretend to be dead -- the reasoning seems to be -- maybe they will not have a reason to come back & shoot us in the head, one by one.

It feels so much to me like America's workers have been terrorized by greedy profiteers for so long -- the past 30 years?  Reagan broke PATCO in 1981? -- that the only thing the middle-class feels is resonant in 2011 is to break the unions and drag them down to their level of misery.  Why do we not all aim higher?   

As much as I can not believe that this is happening in the Grand Old Badger State right now (that Indiana and Ohio had it on their slates is completely believable to me), I have to say that I am so pleased and so, so proud that this demonstration of what is righteous, this example of how we are many and they are few, is coming out of Madison.

 
 

We were all headed back to the car, after the rally today, and I pointed out this exceptionally lovely building to Garçon & Fille, the building with the rose windows I had admired through the speeches and the speakers. 

I told them that over 100 years ago there were men who built that building, stonemasons who fitted it together one piece at a time, all the way up to the sky.  They made something so beautiful and so enduring with their bodies, and those men had a right to safe working conditions, a right to a fair wage that gave them what they needed to feed and house their families, that they had a right to be treated with dignity because look at what they left for us.  This is why we need unions, so people can speak up for themselves, so we can benefit from what their work gives to all of us.  It tears me apart that there are people who can not understand that, but I can only try to give the world two more people who do. 

Comments

[becky]

I forwarded your post to my family because they too are a bunch of dangerous radicals. My dad said, "This sounds like our kind of girl." Oh hells yes!

The total tragedy of all this is the way different groups of working people are pitted against each other.

[Flora Fauna Dinner]

It is beyond my understanding that anyone doesn't get this. Of course, that's because I'm a commie Brit, no doubt.

[Curious]

I am ashamed that it was only through your tweets that I knew this was up, it has had no press reports here which surprises me in a country built on unions which is in danger of forgetting what the unions delivered because our resources boom - built on hard labour and dangerous conditions - cushions us.

[saltypepper]

*holds lighter up*

[Betterthanmachines.blogspot.com]

What an excellent post. You hit on so many things I've been struggling to articulate.

I have "progressive" friends who think that unions are "a quaint, old, needless relic whose time has passed." I think that's how it must have felt in the 1920s too, when the radicalism and union uprisings of the turn of the century seemed like ancient history and big business was treated like a god. Of course we know the story turned sharply in the '30s, and suddenly unions were cool again.

I'm not sure if we've hit our own turning point yet in 2011. But I know that people who think unions are merely a thing of history don't understand history.

[lala]

Becky, the thing that gets me so worked up is how people have internalized all this maltreatment from greedy corporations such that they feel like turning it against schoolteachers and sanitation workers! It is so horrible, like Stockholm Syndrome.

Oh, Bettina. I hope you can harness this into some kinda fascinating unit study in yr homeschool facility.

Ms Minty, I wonder if it just is not news in AU or UK that the USA treats its wage-earners like garbage.

Charlie, you are a flatterer and sweet.

BTM, I saw that you linked to me (thank you!), so I won't reveal yr secret identity, lol. I keep checking yr blog hoping you will write something further, because idk if I can let my blog elope with current events. It feels v End of Days to me and I am trying to keep a tight lid on it. At the same time, it's so personal to me, so essential to what I believe, that it feels like lying to casually update with anything else.

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