As American as a Union Contract
There was a time when American unionism was considered one of our most valuable exports. It was even used as a Cold War tool, providing other countries with a humane and democratic alternative to totalitarian Soviet-led Communism. Unions were an essential part of the process of democratizing Soviet Europe.
I worked with union organizers on State Department education missions to provide working people with information on union-supported benefits. We spoke to coal miners in the Silesian mountains, dock workers from Gdansk, and factory workers in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
The president and secretary of state were Republicans in those days. But they understood that unionism was as American as apple pie, and that a strong global union movement benefits all of us.
One Big Oligarchy
The IWW -- the "Wobblies" -- used to talk about "One Big Union" for the "workers of the world." But it's corporations, not workers, who have globalized in the 21st century. Multinationals span the globe, bypassing sovereign rights and local economies, collaborating with one another at the expense of consumers and workers everywhere.
They've formed "One Big Oligarchy" to control the price of labor and restrict the rights of consumers. We all pay the price -- with our wallets, and our lives.
Apple is warned of deadly fire dangers in its China suppliers' factories, and Steve Jobs does nothing. Government officials are warned of imminent building collapse in Bangladesh, but they protect their cronies as they too decide to do nothing. Company owners in Texas criminally falsify safety records and they, too, do nothing.
In each case, those endangered workers needed independent unions to fight that One Big Oligarchy for their rights -- and their lives.
A Disaster Speaks
The politicians came to give their eulogies in West, Texas. But even the president's moving and eloquent remarks said nothing about ensuring that government will do more to protect the people of that town. Neither the president nor any of the other speakers promised to provide more funding and stronger laws to protect other people from experiencing a tragedy like the one that scarred that little Texas town.
What about us? What should we do?
They're counting on us to become numbed by the sheer numbers of the lost. People were galvanized by the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy because they saw the humanity in the fallen. The One Big Oligarchy is relying on Stalin's dictum that "One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic."
To resist them, we must tell of the tragedy. Poet Nicole Cooley quotes the French writer Maurice Blanchot in a moving essay about disasters and poetry. "It is not you who will speak," said Blanchot. "Let the disaster speak in you."
The disaster speaks first with the faces of the dead. Then it speaks with the words of loss. Then it speaks with action.
Union Starlight
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