On the Blue-Collar Challenge: The truth is that labor has to up its game. To do that, we need a mix of the old and lots of innovation. It’s disturbing to admit, but we’ve been out-organized on what should be our home turf. That’s nothing for the nation to celebrate. As goes labor, goes the soul of working America.
Labor’s value to this country is that unions organize the voice of those who are not wealthy. To the extent that we can pull together wage-workers and our allies, we can effectively speak truth to power. But the concepts of labor are not guiding our country at the moment. We are far from “unity is strength”, “all for one and one for all” or “we all do well when we all do well”. All of these basic union principles, the ideas that built the middle class, are out of favor in our current political climate. In their place is “me, myself, and I”. A nation possessed with the idea that every man and woman is an island.
The good news is that we have the opportunity for blue-collar families to raise their united voices, and change the agenda of greed. That requires re-awakening a sense among working people that they are working people first. Working people in the full sense of our personhood. The labor movement has been boxed into a role as an economic up lifter. While critically important, that doesn’t do justice to labors role in our society. History tells us that labor succeeded in America because it offered so much more. Prosperity, opportunity, social equality, safe workplaces, old age security, health security and an agenda that legitimized and gave some permanence to our gains through legislation.
That unity and strength bent the various social forces of the day to labor’s needs. We had labor priests, labor journalists, housing campaigns, hunger eradication efforts, strike support movements and a strong labor presence in political party decision-making. Labor was the core of developing a nation where the promise of the American Dream was substantially advanced. Fifty years of efforts by wealth, power and corporate pushback have eroded blue-collar power to the extent that we’re desperately seeking Pied Pipers to restore our former status.
Just as it is a time for the opportunists to advance their agenda of greed, so is it the time for a re-invigorated working people’s resurgence. But we have to have the guts to get back to challenging our leadership and ourselves. Union’s have been in a survival mode for a long time. That has forced us to develop a “circle our wagons” kind of model that is geared toward necessary survival. It’s time to recognize that we have to risk coming out from behind the wagons and learn to charge into the battle again.
That isn’t some kind of blind rage. We have that now. That assault on power and money takes strategy, purposeful organizing, a clear agenda and the willingness to take risks. We have to decide we’re taking back the national steering wheel and be clear what we will do if people put us in the driver’s seat. It a s a rank and file that is willing to challenge how we do things now. We also have to decide to challenge the way we have been led to think, now. That doesn’t happen at the AFL-CIO Headquarters in D.C. or any other union headquarters. That happens at the rank and file level. That happens when the union movement produces leaders out of our workplaces that are willing to talk and organize and educate endlessly until we form a critical mass that forms the power and agenda for change.
No local union activist today should be able to claim leadership without a strategy that offers a vision of where they their workplace and members to be in five years. Every local activist today must be willing to do the work. That means hours of personal time and constant engagement. Every union activist should be demanding our voices be heard in boardrooms, in community affairs, in both political parties and in the media. In this world, if you’re not present, you don’t exist.
The hardest work is re-enthusing working people with the sense that we do, in fact, have the power to change things. That’s frankly a fight with ourselves. Right now, people are looking for short-cuts, scapegoats and finding someone who will fix things for us. The power of labor comes from just the opposite. Labor succeeded because its activists were in for the long-haul. We succeeded because we pulled together lots of different kinds of people and organized into a common cause. We succeeded because we realized no one was going to fix it for us and we had to believe enough in each other to go get the job done right. Labor isn’t about Messiah’s. It’s about building a movement.
The other misconception we need to get over is that change comes from above. A true reading of our history shows that leadership responds to its sense of where its constituents are. In other words, it is largely reactive to activism at the grassroots level and changing public attitudes. That doesn’t mean labor leadership hasn’t promoted new ideas or been about changing minds. Labor certainly has had its unusually perceptive and skilled leaders, who organized and motivated us. But the ones we laud were students of timing, knowing when to launch the CIO, how to take on “big steel” and how to push for trade reform. All of it based on their sense of where the membership was and when to force the issue. Much of that was decided at the rank and file level as workers shifted their attitudes and demands and decided what kind of leadership they would support.
These are the challenges that lay before us. A new generation of activists that turn outward, have a unified vision and are willing to work extremely hard for the long-term. A rank and file that comes to understand the task of rebuilding will be a struggle that can’t be contracted out. We have new technology to utilize, new ways to bring people together, new ways to communicate ideas and a new economic order to confront. Yet it’s the same old struggle. So, get those stones, pull back on that slingshot and let’s let loose a barrage of well-aimed shots to again bring Goliath to its knees.
ihg 3-22-2024 If you like these commentaries, join my blog for free at: https://ikegittlen.substack.com/ and share. Let’s see what we can build together.
Beautiful expression of the heart of labor. Thank you.
Well done! Good mixture of past, present, and future under the reading glass and a firm conclusion.