When politicians in right-to-work states attack “unions” it is important to know who exactly they’re talking about.

Firefighter Bradley Harper and Police Officer Daryl Raetz laid down their lives in service to the people of Phoenix last weekend and both were dues paying union members.

Unions have names.

Unions have faces.

They are the names and faces of the thousands of men and women who work hard on our behalf every day. Labor associations advocate for their safety equipment, the resources their members need to get the job done, and yes, for the compensation that will now go to the families of these fallen heroes.

Some of our city employees say goodbye to their families every morning and place themselves in harm’s way so we can be safe. Do we the taxpayers have a responsibility to them? You bet we do, and politicians who cheapen that obligation by throwing “union” around like it’s a dirty word don’t speak for me.

Even when we disagree, it’s possible to do it in a respectful and constructive way. I believe it’s important to always remember this:

There is a wall in the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association’s office hung with the photographs of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the people of Phoenix. There is another similar wall at the United Phoenix Firefighters office. Both of those walls are filled with pictures of union members.

On neither wall will you find the photograph of a politician.

Karlene Keogh Parks

karleneforcouncil.com/

Are you a landlord, living off of land rents and real estate? Happy you, if you are, and you’re not over-leveraged. But if this is not the case are you the owner of a major industrial enterprise or a financial mega-corporation? No?  Oh, sorry about that.

I guess that leaves  a small manufacturing operation with a handful of employees, or a small business, which is great so long as a Walmart or a giant manufacturing operation doesn’t force you out of business, and then you know what, boyo?..

…you’re a member of the working class. If you’re a wage earner with no control of your working conditions or wages, if you can be fired at will with no recourse and deprived of the right to collective bargaining then you are for sure a member of the working class, working for wages, even if you’re a highly paid middle manager for a corporation you don’t own.

Labor Unions are as American as apple pie but over the past thirty years their power has been clawed back by business interests and their political allies. The argument has been, “Well we needed unions once, in the bad old days, but we don’t need them any more.”

In good times, with a little home of their own and a bass boat parked in the driveway even many union members suckered for this argument  figuring they didn’t need union protection or union dues anymore. Sweatshops, eleven-hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism’s continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This is not a good thing.

A union is the average hourly worker’s only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials at the lowest possible price. It’s not dumb, if you’re an hourly wage person, to remember you’re just so much raw material to that system.

The union maid and her guy aren’t opposed to Capitalism. If you stop and think about it, the fact is that just the opposite is true. These folks simply want to behave exactly like all the other links in the capitalist chain of supply and demand. All they ask for is the right to bargain for the price they get for their labor and the conditions under which it is supplied.

Why should they be the only players in the game denied that right?

Most of us are working class and we need the union movement more than ever.

Happy Labor Day!

On the 2nd of November in 1909, during what became known as the “Uprising of the 20,000,” female garment workers went on strike in New York. Many were arrested and a judge told those arrested: “You are on strike against God.”

Wow…who’d have guessed?

There’s nothing unpatriotic about the union movement; it’s as American as apple pie.  Boston carpenters walked off the job in April of 1825 in the interest of a 10-hour workday. Ten years later, children working in the silk mills in Patterson, New Jersey went on strike. Of course they had an outrageous demand: A six-day workweek of eleven hour days.

Sweatshops, eleven-hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism’s continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This may not be a good thing.

A union is the average hourly worker’s only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials (that’s you, oh my brothers and sisters) at the lowest possible price. It’s not dumb, if you’re an hourly wage person, to remember you’re just so much raw material to that system.

May Day Events Today:

9:00 Annual Tucson May 1st Coalition March for Immigrant and Workers Rights, from Greyhound Park Parking lot to Armory Park for a Noon rally with speakers, entertainment and info booths.

Afterwards, join Occupy Tucson at Armory Park for extended fun, entertainment, potluck, and other activities, well into the evening.

Perhaps in the new America of fiscal responsibility the working class will be inspired to hitch up its collective britches and realize the American dream unhampered by the cost of compulsory of health insurance; unsnarled in safety nets; and freed of the cruel domination of labor unions. And all at the minimum wage.

In other words we might actually realize, and come to adore, the great conservative heaven

Of course there is always the chance that we will watch a process of slow decay as we produce a permanent under-class of the unemployed, and underemployed, whose lack of buying power eats away at small business, by denying those businesses customers.

Keith Olbermann has offered an excellent analysis of what the nation has been put through. He doesn’t think polite letters to  our congressmen are going to turn things around.

… the only response is to be organized and unified and hell-bent in return. We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960′s and early 1970′s and we must protest this deal and all the God damn deals to come, in the streets. We must arise, non-violently but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation take-overs – but modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified, by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication.

That was then,  but this is now… and as Stephen Webster comments over at AlterNet:

Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to appear at a single protest or picket line.

Realistically, I guess we can’t expect the President to slip into some comfy shoes and and offer even a photo-op on a picket line; but a throwaway comment during a news conference, something about collective bargaining or the right to strike ,would be appreciated. Oh wait a minute…wouldn’t want to annoy the Republicans.

Did the President just announce he would be running again in 2012? And an important part of his base is……?

Join Us!   Monday, April  4th  at 4 pm  for a Solidarity Rally. Meet at Pancho Villa Park —  -  Downtown Tucson (Broadway & Church Ave. by the statue)  Then,  at 5  pm,  march to Armory Park 221 South 6th Ave. (less than a one mile hike) for hot dogs and other picnic food and probably more rally. This is a family event – bring your kids, your friends, and your co-workers. Bring blankets or outdoor chairs for park.

Please RSVP to Laura Hogan @ (520)388-4139  or to http://local.we-r-1.org/weareone/events/show/32 so we know how much food to bring.

Sponsored by the Pima Area Labor Federation.

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Leonard Pitts’ column in today’s Arizona Daily Star is a commentary on the event tomorrow’s march honors. These excerpts are particularly worth noting.

It will come as a surprise to some that the civil-rights leader was also a labor leader, but he was. He had this in common with Asa Philip Randolph, who suffered long years of privation to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And with Walter Reuther, brutally beaten when he organized sitdown strikes that helped solidify the United Automobile Workers.

These people and many others fought to win the rights now being taken away.

Granted, those rights have sometimes been abused – used to shelter the incompetent or reward the greedy.

But to whatever degree our workplaces are not filled with children working adult hours, to whatever degree an employer is required to provide a clean and safe workplace, break time, sick time or fair wages, that also reflects organized labor’s legacy.

It is instructive that this campaign to roll back that legacy is contemporaneous with a New York Times report on how General Electric earned $14.2 billion in profit last year, yet paid no U.S. taxes. Indeed, the Times says, GE netted a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

What’s it tell you that some of us are on the offensive against working people but breathe scarcely a peep when a giant corporation somehow slips through government-provided loopholes, paying no taxes? If need is a character flaw, what, then, is greed?

Read  Pitts’ column here.