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Labor Vanishes?

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SharynS	Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 6:13 pm
Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 2939 Location: the 'puter	A dissection of the partnership between Big Labour and Big Money and it's impact on unionism. Beginning with Fletcher's "Labor Vanishes", the AFL-CIO and across the imaginary spectrum to Change to Win's (CTW), Andy Stern. By Zwarich: "Fight your closest enemy first, and never leave an enemy in your rear, to engage with an enemy you would rather fight." That is one of the oldest and most basic tenets of warfare. Failure to pay heed leads only to defeat." read more... _________________ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. - Salman Rushdie
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wm pasz	Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 7:23 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	People don't identify with "labour" for a number of reasons. For sure the ineffectiveness of institutionalized labour leaders is one reason and so is (to a lesser extent) the msm's coverage or lack of coverage of labour stories. But there's a much deeper reason. I've mentioned this before in other posts and it always gets panned because the notion seems so heretical but I'm going to keep bringing it up. People don't identify with "labour" whether as a movement or class or description of themselves because the term is in itself denigrating. Yes, people, get your heads around that. "Labour" as we've come to understand it over the past 200 years means work - mind-numbing, soul-destroying, submissive to authority, painful, disease-inducing, self-esteem reducing - work. Being part of "labour" means that you rent out your physical being to profiteers and that's the only part of your being that's worth anything. So who the hell wants to wear that label? For a while, when it looked like wearing the label might actually improve your circumstances, people did it but it's been a long time since there was any pay off here or in South Africa or wherever. (I take a lot of these international labour success stories with a grain of salt as they're mostly based on subjective observations from academics and other observers who really want to believe. Remember that American labour movement types used to sing the praises of their Canadian brothers for their great organizing feats and other breakthroughs only to find that well, upon closer inspection, things aren't really all that different here.) Other related reasons are that as more and more of us have to use our brains to do our work, we feel less and less connected to the "labour" label (any job that involves dealing with customers, using computers or other specialized equipment, communicating, planning or pretty anything other than physical ability) doesn't line up with "labour". Take a look at the public sector where unionization rates are still high - you don't see the word "labour" used in relation to unionized workers a whole lot. The reason: They don't want to be called that. It doesn't fit with their perceptions of themselves or their roles in the workplace. Fundamentally, the word "labour" reinforces an exploitive paradigm where humans are reduced to the status of worker bees in the service of a bunch of exploitive institutions. The thing has been around for 200 years, it has never worked in favour of us humans. We have to dismantle it and we're never going to do that as long as we insist on labeling ourselves "worker bees". Slaves didn't get motivated to cast off their chains by thinking of themselves as slaves. They got the idea that they were human beings, equal to other human beings. Then shit began to happen. A couple of years ago I began to read extensively on the history of "labour" in North America. I had it in my head that working people were very near a breakthrough sometime in the mid-1900's but then the labour relations legal "scheme" was implemented and they got stopped in their tracks. I wanted to learn more about what was going on during this period to see if there were any clues that might help us resume what I thought was a "revolution pre-empted". I learned a lot of interesting stuff but couldn't find the clues. So I kept going further and further back in time. The more I read, the further back in time I went. Eventually, I was reading 18th century books - real old stuff that was actually written back then by people who were actually living in that era. By the time I was through, I had drastically changed my mind about the revolution that almost was. It never came close to happening. By the mid-1800's it was all over. Why? Because by that time the people who were been herded into the factories and life times of wage slavery (a common term back then) had adopted the identity imposed on them by their oppessors - labour. The lowest caste in the new economic order. As soon as they started thinking of themselves as slaves, being stomped was not only inevitable, it was part of their identity. Interestingly, in the stuff I read, in the early part of the industrial revolution (up to the the 1830's or thereabout) there was huge opposition to the new capitalist order that was establishing itself. There was a lot said about the inhumanity of the factory system. The fact that the domination of the workers in the workplace didn't exactly square with the notion of a free and democratic society also wasn't lost on the writers and dissenting voices of the day. But by about 1850 or so, this discourse was gradually replaced by the discourse of economic fairness under capitalism. No longer was the debate about what was right for humans in a free society but what was fair for subjugated humans in a capitalist order. I think this happened as the generation that knew a different world (or at least one that wasn't completely dominated by the capitalists) died off and the generation that knew nothing but degradation and accepted its position in society as "lesser than" tried to argue for fairness from its oppressors. They were destined to lose because they had accepted the status of loser. As soon as they accepted the capitalist system, it was all over for them. Yes, for sure, they fought hard for many decades to come but they were destined to lose. The capitalists morphed into the corporatists who co-opted all the institutions of the state to advance their interests. We have to start reconceptualizing our identity before we can move forward. We're not worker bees. What are we? That's what we should be talking about. More soon. _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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John A. Joslin	Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:31 pm
Joined: 02 Apr 2006 Posts: 83 Location: Detroit, Michigan U.S.A. IBEW #58	siggy wrote: Beginning with Fletcher's "Labor Vanishes", Mitey, Mitey UNION! Bill Fletcher absolutely nails it when he actually speaks of Labor vanishing. Reminds me that I watched "Labor" pull off a very convincing disappearing act in Detroit this past Labor Day. I was paying attention and still don't know exactly how it was done. It happened like this. It was the biggest Labor Day parade in Detroit in over 20 years. It was also the only Labor Day parade in Detroit in decades that has ever had any spectators at all ! No lie. ( Homeless people in Detroit's downtown area have no choice but to observe things like this so I'm not counting them as voluntary spectators in the usual sense of the phrase... ) Downtown Detroit was truly all the way jammed up. You could not move. Not only were 30,000 + union paraders lugging placards that read," CHANGE" funneling themselves into a large outdoor civic plaza at parade's end , but triple that number of regular NON-union member Detroiters were milling around en masse for hours at the same location. Families had written pro-Obama slogans on their cars w/ bars of soap. One I remember was, " Don't be a damn fool, vote Obama " . Another was ," Barack the vote". Sound systems that were in place for a nearby jazz festival were commandeered & plugged into the podium mikes back at the inaccessible main rally area where 10,000 folks were already in line to be patted down & searched 4 hours before Obama ever showed up. So it turned out there were large handy gathering places 10 and 15 blocks from the "main stage" where excellent quality sound made it possible for the tens of thousands of folks who had come to see Obama to at least hear every word perfectly clearly from the man they had come to celebrate. ( note: I've never been to a Labor Day parade in Detroit that ever had more than a small, fuzzy , nearly inaudible public address system rigged up in honor of the 2 dozen or so local politicians who normally sat in the tiny reviewing stand built for them at the conclusion of the parade route. Not much , but considering they were usually the only onlookers , it was kinda' special to keep walking down the empty, dilapidated streets until you passed beneath their Democratic gaze at last, hacks though they usually were w/ the exception of the late mayor,Coleman Young, and the marvelous, sainted City Councilwoman MaryAnn Mahaffey, an amazing grey haired, genuine Democrat who was known to show up at freezing cold picket lines in the middle of the night attired for church in a neatly tailored pink wool dress with matching vest ,a snappy hat, and a rose pinned to a buttonhole while riot cop-thugs were clubbing union members down w/4-foot long batons... and standing with the pickets, not behind them . Saw that, too. May she rest in long deserved peace.) But that was the past. This day a gargantuan crowd of people had turned out for Labor Day. They were happy and raucous. Out-of-town papers had headlined for 2 days that Obama was set to "revive" a hallowed Detroit Labor tradition. In the old days, the Democratic candidates for Prez HAD to attend the Detroit Labor Day parade to prove they were serious about "courting " Labor's support. They couldn't just show up, either, they had to put on a show while they were at it. Obama was going to do what J.F.K. had last done almost 50 years before in the long ago forgotten time... Everybody was talking about it. Boatloads of national media were on hand here in the ex-Motor City to record this historic undertaking. Wow. ( media on Labor Day, that is.) There it was , just two weeks ago , in Detroit, USA. The table was set for maybe the only major public mingling of organized labor and the general working public that I have ever heard of in latter day Detroit ... You know, " the community" that Labor always talks about was actually there in the flesh along w/ the union contingents in their made for Labor day t-shirts and hats sorting them out by union, trade and local # affiliation. It was amazing , really. Goddawful huge throngs of white and black citizens sashaying around together in good cheer and spoiling for someone or something to fire up the kindling of their smoldering hopes . Okey-Dokey. Up on stage sat Ol'John Sweeney in his trade mark suspenders, ( note: super labor poobah numero uno - for you laborphiles in the far North), the formidable bulk of James Hoffa Jr. for the Teamsters, Ron Gettlefinger for the Auto Workers, and a gaggle of lesser local labor lights twinkling away as Obama strode before the multitude and took the microphone. You could have heard a pin drop across 20 blocks of downtown Detroit. Talk about being ready to dote on every word! Next thing that happened was that in a seeming split second it was all over , although it really consumed every bit of nearly seven minutes. He asked for a moment of silence & prayer for the Hurricane beset residents of Louisiana, and then, respectfully following ( he said) the lead of " whispering Johnny" ( I said )McCain , he then called for "quiet on this day". The senator from Illinois briefly asked our forgiveness for cutting his visit short, mumbled something about the "solidarity" that " the men and women of long ago had shown when they came together to form "these unions" and waved good-bye and left. The back-patting Labor bigs grinning on stage couldn't muster a single word to say after he left, giving not the slightest hint that the day was anything other than a rip-roaring rousing success. Hell, they prob'ly even saved a little rental time on the loudspeakers... and it WAS a fine turnout , after all, wasn't it ? Right in front of my eyes, really my ears, minutes turned to split-seconds and 5 hours of waiting evaporated into very thin air. We many thousands listlessly hobbled about slightly dumbfounded, wondering if we had been batch tasered by some infernal new-fangled Homeland Security device. Gathering up our children and our wits we struggled to focus on accomplishing something as we slowly embarked on the hunt for our distantly parked cars so that we could participate in yet another traditional Detroit activity -the wretched homeward bound traffic jam. Just at this joyless moment a straggling contingent of 80 or 90 UAW parade marchers was finally arriving at the rally site, probably figuring they had only missed a boring intro to Obama's speech on this great day. They were loudly reciting that polished chestnut of a labor chant that graces many a doomed picket line down here in the stix, uh,.. the states. Likely cribbed from some boot camp drill instructors , the thing is performed in a call-and -response format with a lead caller shouting out each verse which is then repeated back echo style by the entire group, " Everywhere we go ( repeat back )... people wanna' know ( repeat back)" ... "Who we are ( etc. ) ... So we tell them ( etc.) " We are the Union ... Mighty , Mighty union " ... and so on. I looked at these stalwart innocents, working people loudly & proudly striding down Detroit's main avenue on their way to the hushed up wreckage of a non-rally that had vanished into nothingness on Labor's most wonderful Day only a couple of unsuspecting moments before, almost crying as I realized they yet had undashed hopes and here I was listening to their determined yells of "Mighty , Mighty Union", already changed to "Mitey, Mitey Union"in my angry ears , my freshly broken heart providing the simultaneous translation. - John A. Joslin ( IBEW local # 58, Detroit, Michigan USA )
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John A. Joslin	Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:35 pm
Joined: 02 Apr 2006 Posts: 83 Location: Detroit, Michigan U.S.A. IBEW #58	ooops! ( repeat posting removed)
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gordon	Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 1:47 am
Joined: 11 Sep 2008 Posts: 69	John-- that's really depressing, I would expect that from union Bosses, but Obama let everyone down. You see, he can't show too much comfort w/ union bosses now, they figure it will hurt him. I take him at his word he will push the union card law and living wage. Inroads will be tough, as the previous historical post shows, pencil-pushing capitalists play on the insecurity/fear of the labour electorate. In the US one only needs to watch the financial tv, BOTH Bloomberg(not as rabid RepubliCon)& CNBC (rabid) hav'nt let a week go buy for 3 years without reminding viewers " WAGE-PRICE SPIRAL WILL FUEL INFLATION... WAGE SPIRAL THE MOST DANGEROUS...COMMODITY PRICES ARE COMING DOWN BUT WE STILL FEAR WAGE INFLATION..." Yes, a living wage is the enemy to stock prices, right? "Equity markets ARE the economy", right?(the word equity contradictory in itself, as you lose 50% of your money) If they repeat it enough, the spineless sheeple will believe them. To make sure they controlled the sheeple, they (whoever they are... politicians, elitists, gamers of the system to make income through cap gains,thereby writing the tax loopholes allowing them to switch lots of income to "cap gains" and pay only 15% tax, with NO Social Security tax or Medicare tax on it PLUS they excluded cap gains income from the Alternative Minimum Tax-AMT!!!, not wages) appeal to the American sheeple's most innate weakness, CREDIT. Something IMMEDIATE, "FOR FREE"! Now the party is over. No more credit.No more houses they never could afford. No union job security either having sold them that working with the hands, other than pushing a pencil, is demeaning, Americans have been forced to save in the last 6 months out of despair, primarily. Some data shows a spike in savings, although some is attributed to liquidating 401Ks and IRAs to transfer to checking accounts (used to measure money flows). I hope Obama can sqweak it out, and more organizing happens for labour. Obama's plan for tax credits to employers opening factories HERE is long overdue. I'm one who repects a trash-collector somewhat more than the banker. :~)
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SFway	Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 4:29 pm
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	Considerable food for thought in these posts/links/etc. Wanda, as always (!!) hits the nail on the head: Quote: What are we? That's what we should be talking about. Must think about a response awhile longer.
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SharynS	Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 5:05 pm
Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 2939 Location: the 'puter	PowerSource! People! Even though I can make it go forwards and backwards, I do know I don't want to be remembered as a wheel turner any longer. wm's point is even more grounded in that we even have to think this hard and long about who and what we are. I'll need more time too. _________________ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. - Salman Rushdie
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SFway	Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:22 pm
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	Well, hell...I've been spending some time thinking about this and have come no closer to any resolution than I was to begin with. So I'll dive in anyway... "Work ennobles man---be careful not to overdo it." (Unknown) "Be what you wish to seem." (Socrates) "Treat others as you wish to be treated." (Golden Rule) "I y'am what I y'am." (Popeye) .... "What are we?" Personally, I've always thought of myself as one of a handful of people whose work is to provide a great number of people with the commodities they need to survive and flourish. The job is as described: dirty, physically difficult, injury-and-illness-ridden, all the goodies Wanda mentioned. We all pay a price, those of us who do this work; the question is what we are paid in return. The real question, perhaps, is: is this work necessary? Valuable? Useful in a social as well as a personal context? And how do we measure these? One certainty is that our work has become devalued by the various employers, specifically corporate employers, over the past decades. Labor is considered an accounting liability, not an accounting asset. This is a natural process or result of enlargement. The "Age of Heroes" is done - there are no more Achilles or Hectors, the poems and songs have been replaced by a dessicated accounting of, well, beans. This has also been accomplished purposefully. We have been collectively and subtly indoctrinated with the notion of devaluation and with the economic consequences of this devaluation. We are told, day in and day out, in word and deed, by the corporations that we are worth less. It is a lie, repeated endlessly and in credible form - it gives rise to doubt, uncertainty, degrees of acceptance, depreciation and degradation. This lie,this devaluation, propagated by the corporate machinery, is difficult to combat...unless it is by an equally determined and sophisticated effort to propagate the opposing view. Unions have failed, almost completely, in this task; they have walked away from the battlefield and, worse, joined in self-professed "partnership" in the devaluation of our work. They have failed to integrate themselves and their values into the daily lives of their members. They do not know us, they do not share our lives, their hand turns away from our hand.
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SFway	Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:12 am
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	[continued] Worse yet, unions have adopted the premises of the corporations, the values of the corporations, the ethic of the corporations. Members are 'valuable, necessary, useful" only insofar as they are a source of income, i.e. dues, to be obtained as inexpensively as possible. A case in point raised on another thread: after the end of the 20-week grocery strike/lockout in Southern California in 2003/04 at least one UFCW Local president sent a letter to members of the Local 'demanding" that they pay back dues to cover the five months of the strike during which dues were not paid by those groceryworkers who were on strike/locked-out. This after the ratification of a contract that was worse than the employers LBF and so bad as to create a mass exodus from the companies and a "revolving door" of new hires that persisted for years. A case in point: in Las Vegas in 2005 the same union hired the unemployed and homeless to man a picket line in front of a Wal-Mart at a wage lower than Wal-Mart was paying inside the doors. Bad enough but one is given to question whether the members of that Local were even informed that picketing could have been a paid job rather than a purely voluntary and unpaid act. One suspects that the Wal-Mart is still there and the picket line evaporated in the Nevada heat. [Perhaps someone from Las Vegas could weigh in on this situation.] Members are kept at arm's length, at best - unwanted appendages of the Union corpus. Worse still, should these appendages "act up", they may be subject to removal in one form or another. This attitude, this ethos, this culture has evolved and expanded during decades. I was reading the memoirs of Arnold Toynbee, the justly famed British historian, published near the end of his life. To quote at length... Quote: Before 1914, this extreme privilege that was monopolized by a tiny minority of the World's population co-existed with a stability that seemed firmly grounded and was impressively widespread. These two aspects of the pre-1914 state of the World might have been expected to be incompatible with each other; yet they not only co-existed; they had co-existed in other societies over far longer period of time...The explanation is that, since the dawn of civilization about 5000 years ago, the exploited mass of mankind had been indoctrinated to be docile. 'As sheep before the shearer' they had been 'dumb'. Human nature itself, however, is not entirely docile; there is a vein of mulishness in human nature which asserts itself when people are oppressed and provoked beyond endurance. In human beings, discipline is not innate...It has to be inculcated as a habit; but habits, unlike instincts, can be broken; and since 1914 the habit of docility has been broken all over the World. [emphasis added] [to be continued]
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wm pasz	Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 3:14 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	sfway, everything you've said is true. This is how things are today and how we have got to such a dreadful point in our social history. However, when I speak about redefining ourselves, I'm talking about leaving what we do for a living out of the equation because as what we do for a living leaves us subordinate to others and having to beg for fairness, our definition will always leave us as somehow less than fully human. I think that once we redefine ourselves - I mean when we answer the question "When we strip away all the superficial carp like possessions, social status, money and so on, who are we really, fundamentally?" then we will be able to define work itself - and workplace relations. Yes, there will still be things to do that may involve physical exertion or unpleasantness but we will do them in different ways (maybe do the whole progression of different jobs in a process rather than just one), for different reasons (to help our communities not to make some fat cat rich) and under different conditions (more support, better protection, opportunities to use our brains, no more domination by others) - these are just a few off the cuff examples. When I think about "who are we?", people, human beings, citizen contributors, community contributors... and I think that this being the case, our interests should come ahead of those of pieces of paper, metal coins, digital numbers, imaginery money, corporate edifices, and other non-human constructs. We need to get away from identities that make us the tools, resources, employees or subordinates of others. Thanks for sharing your Labor Day story John. It's really poignant. I can sense the disappointment, bewilderment and even despair of the crowd. To me there's a message in this story. Now more than ever we need to redefine ourselves and stop labeling ourselves as "labor". We need to stop celebrating our 300-year enslavement. We need to stop looking to the fat and arrogant priesthood of the industrial era for leadership or compassion (the mainstream union leaders, politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats - the whole arrogant disinterested lot). Yes, it's really sad that all these people assembled where they did, when they did only to be paid such short shrift. But truly what did they expect? John Swiney and his pals have been ignoring them for ages and the politicians have been taking their cues from Swiney and his crowd. After all, if we behave as though these guys are our leaders, the politicians will take their cues from them. If our leaders ignore us and we seem OK with that, why should we expect that anyone else will give us the time of day. Swiney and pals were just doing, somewhat more visibly and brazenly, what they've been doing for years. Blessing us with their presence for a few minutes and heading back to the hotel. As far as the Senator from Illinois was concerned, I'm sure he could have done better. I'm sure would have been capable of (maybe even wanted to) saying more than he said. The guy is eloquent and I think also quite compassionate when it comes to the people. Why did he say as little as he did? My guess is he was taking is cues from the "labor mis_leaders". What could he say? Anything that the crowd might find rousing or inspiring would surely scare the mis_leaders and piss them off. So my point is that the conceptualization of people as labor is disempowering and pointless. It leads us to genuflect before people who don't give a shit about us. We march down deserted streets in ruined communities for what purpose? Not to take back our communities or to seek our freedom or to proclaim that we are humans who deserve better than this. No way - our signs and banners proclaim our status as slaves. Where are we marching to? Who knows. We seem more like abandoned slaves looking for a new master. We have to cut this shit out people. It's urgent. Now is the time. The idea that work under domination of others will make us happy or free or anything good is a lie. It's a lie that our ancestors swallowed (or maybe it just seeped in through their pores over a period of time) and that has been circulating our veins for generations - keeping us ignorant and docile and fearful. Arbeit macht frei - the nazis didn't invent the idea and it didn't end with them. I don't know what it's going to take - how many times must we be ignored, snubbed, put out of our homes, left to die from preventable and treatable disease, robbed of our meager savings - before it dawns on us that getting on our knees and saying, "Forgive us great almighty corporatist father, for we have sinned...have mercy on us...save us from ourselves...show us the way..." This paradigm is dead. It's lifespan was short from the very beginning as the massive production of mostly unnecessary goods was going to hit the wall sooner or later anyway. It was never sustainable. "Labor" had a modicum of respect from the goods producing corporatists when it was useful to them. When it ceased to be useful it was ignored and cast off. Once our usefulness as human tools waned, the corporatists found another use for us - consumers who could be enslaved by indebtedness. Gordon mentions the scourge of credit in his post. Unlike a lot of people, I think that its unfair and wrongheaded to blame people for getting up to their asses in debt. People were "living beyond their means" yes. But that's because the corporatists have made it virtually impossible for many to have the means to live. Predatory lending practices and non-stop pressure to achieve satisfaction through materialism basically just sucked everyone else in. So, to me, blaming the people is just victim blaming. The blame belongs elsewhere - the financial industry and its legions of greedy movers and shakers. What's really appalling about the whole debt crisis is that there's no real money involved. Rather than wagging our fingers at the people who are losing their homes and living in dread of the bill collector, we should be encouraging them to rise up and cast off the shackles - instead of paying to keep them on. We have to start asserting our belief in what we really are, who we really are. The time is now. I keep saying this and to tell you the truth for the past while I've had this feeling of urgency about this. I can't help but feel that we have a window of opportunity now but it won't stay open for very long. Look around at what's happening around us now. Does the ground seem unsettled? It's very unsettled. Everything seems to be in a state of chaos and confusion. The financial meltdown in the US is just the latest and loudest manifestation of this phenomenon. As the ground continues to crack and shake, the gatekeepers of the corporatist era try harder and harder to contain the damage. They are more brazen and more obscene in their methods. Check out the brazen lies of the McCain presidential campaign. The creepiness of his running mate (brazenly calculated to distract us from the landmines going off around our feet), the shocking government response to the Wall Street meltdown - Do you find it somehow obscene that the US government is now going to bail out the financial predators? A trillion dollars of the people's money is going to forgive their mendacity and cover their billion dollar bad debts! While people are being put out of their homes for missing inflated mortgage payments or threatened with legal action, wage garnishments and the like because they owe a few thousand on their credit cards?! WTF?! Do we really believe that these bail outs will stop a catastrophic economic meltdown? The meltdown is already here. It's already happened and the bailout will just be an exercise in throwing good money after bad - while leaving the looters free to come back and do it all over again when the dust settles. Only slaves believe that the mysterious machinations of their masters. Think about what could be done with a trillion dollars of the people's money? Think about how this vast sum of real money (unlike the imaginery money hawked by the credit companies) could be used to transform our communities, to help real people. We actually stand a chance today to influence events in a more humane, a more human-centered or humans-first direction. This is precisely because the ground is unsettled and when the ground is unsettled everyone, including the "masters" are vulnerable. Thinking about this "unsettled state" of things, I am reminded of the impression I had when reading about the early days of the industrial revolution - the stuff that was actually written back then. I had the very real sense that these people were living in a time of huge transition. The ground was shifting under their feet. They were conscious of this and tried hard to shift things in a more humane direction but their efforts were hampered by two things: 1. Limited ability to communicate broadly among themselves - which prevented them from fully understanding what was happening, defining themselves as humans "first" and engaging in concerted action and - 2. tendency to follow individual "leaders" who had some good ideas but who also had their own interests and agendas (many of which involved collaborating with the newly emerging capitalists). But we do not need to be hampered by these limitations. So we should not fall into the same traps. The ground is unsettled, let's use this to our advantage. Who are we? What are we? What do we want? Let's go out and get it. _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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ross53	Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 3:53 pm
Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1435 Location: california	SFway wrote: A case in point raised on another thread: after the end of the 20-week grocery strike/lockout in Southern California in 2003/04 at least one UFCW Local president sent a letter to members of the Local 'demanding" that they pay back dues to cover the five months of the strike during which dues were not paid by those groceryworkers who were on strike/locked-out. SFway, What makes things even more brutal is the fact that, during the strike/lockout all f the union officials received regular paycheck, and shameless, greedy, Kaspasrian with the blessing of the EB gave himself a $29,000.00 pay increase at the same time that he “demanded” the members pay back dues, and last but not least, while the members are left on the sidewalk with $100.00 per week, Kasparian goes to Las Vegas for the weekend. When my coworkers and I question the action of Local 135 the Secretary Treasurer reply was, Mickey didn’t want to do this, but he had no choice because the International mandated that all members need to pay back dues. Sad but true, we wrote a letter to the IU asking for justification of their actions, the IU response to me was I received your letter and I have forward to UFCW Region 8 director Shaun Barclay. “to be continued” _________________ " I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody" Lilly Tomlin.
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wm pasz	Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:46 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	Yeah, yeah Ross, we know: Mickey is a greedy spineless pig of a guy. And there are thousands just like him. We've chewed this over and over in thousands of posts over the past few years. Mickey and his pals are going to keep picking your pocket and lying to you for a whole lot longer unless and until you and millions of the rest of us start redefining who and what we are. In keeping with the theme that has evolved in this thread - who are we? _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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Pearson	Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 11:55 pm
Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 1417 Location: Sun City AZ	This is a tough call for me. As part of the bureaucracy, i always saw myself outside of it. Nope, not above it, but i tried to just do the things that mattered to the members i represented. What i've come to understand is no matter how pure or driven any one leader is, we all still are part of it. What is even more difficult is as i move away from being an "insider," i find myself more angry, more disturbed by what it is, what it has become. And i'll be very honest, it was becoming that almost the entirety i was there. I guess the difference now is the game they are playing is so damned contrived they aren't fooling anyone but themselves and the most hardcore of believers. This manufactured unionism stern/ctw is advocating borders on criminal. So where does that leave us? Wm p's points are out there. Therein lies the problem; most folks can't get their heads around something they can't at least picture. We are a visual society and if you can't imagine what it looks like, it is tough to embrace. Perhaps this financial institution/banking nightmare will be the trigger. We've talked in the past about behavior being altered by SEE's (significant emotional events) and if this downward spiral continues maybe it will prompt us to get our heads out of our asses and look for something better. And while we are talking about it, can anyone explain how a country like the USA with a national debt that grows by the second can underwrite a half a trillion dollars to bail out these guys? And, aren't these assholes that ran the financial corporations the same ones who were paying themselves millions of dollars a year? Back to Wm's point...what are we? I was one who defined himself by what i did for a living. I lived and breathed it. It defined me rather than me defining me. I guess the good news is i escaped it and have channeled what i learned into giving back to my community, with zero interest in being somebody. My life is so different today than from when i worked. I'm fortunate, i was able to get out and try and find some sanity in my existence. Unfortunately that can't and won't be the case for most people. They will be stuck on the treadmill and in the rat race looking for some way out. I wish i had the answers, because work will never go away. I suspect Wm p is right that what need happen is something totally off the charts. Something that allows people to live first and work second or better yet third or fourth. Unfortunately the way the system is constructed we are taught from a very early age to behave in certain ways. Breaking that cycle will be a monumental task. One last thought, and it has been touched on a dozen times here and on the old MFD. We are trapped and held captive by our lust for consumerism. That is something we have total control over. Until we get past that, nothing will change. _________________ If we don't do it, who will?
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ross53	Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:01 am
Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1435 Location: california	wm pasz wrote: In keeping with the theme that has evolved in this thread - who are we? wm pasz, Who are we? We are, UFCW members by choice, no one that I know hold a gun to our head, and said I will kill you if you resign your membership or quit your job. We choose to stay for varieties of reasons, needs of medical insurance, fear to explore other field, convenience “some” find it convenient to work 24 hours a week, the freedom to have another job/business on the side etc.. we stayed by choice. We hate injustice, we become outrage at the news that one, or a group, of our brothers or sisters will suffer unjustly by the action taken by our union leaders. e.g. The recent Shop Stewards conference in San Diego, one of the two stewards at my work place chooses to go to work at another store the same day of the conference instead of attending the conference. Kasparian and his dictatorship regime, allow that individual to continue to be a steward. That is fricking criminal, if I was a union president, I would have walked into that store the next morning and remove that individual of his duty of Shop Steward, instead, Kasparian allow this shop steward to retain is position, “WHY” It’s beyond comprehension. We are human, who by our own action chooses to work in this business where corporate greed and inept/corrupt leadership have a common denominator exploitation of human kind. Everyone of us have the Intellect to understand that we have some inept and corrupt leaders who driven by greed and by the authority vested in them “the seat of power” constantly oppresses us, yet here we are bitching and complaining, talk and more talk!!!!!!!!!!!! In our posting we quote Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Signund Freud, Abraham Lincoln, etc… that’s all good it shows the world that we are educated…..but that doesn’t change the fact that at this very moment the majority of the UFCW members are working at poverty wages and without benefits. Who are we, away from our work? that is a question that each one of us can answer by looking ourselves in the mirror. _________________ " I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody" Lilly Tomlin.
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SFway	Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 3:27 am
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	Hey now, Ross...I quoted Popeye, too. ...and it might be the most profound quote of all. My point in citation is to provide an indication that these are things that have been thought about, and discussed, throughout human history, probably since human beings became human beings. These thoughts may, and I repeat, may, provide some insight into our own situation, our own questions and possible solutions. Erudition never got a load worked - but it is a way to share the load with those who have come before and will come after. Wanda, your point is that we need to stop defining ourselves by what we do for hire, by our jobs, etc. My observation is that most of us already have, if we ever did. I will not define this as a problem, although it poses some problematic aspects; neither will I define it as a solution for the reason that in order to address the conditions which Ross describes so accurately and passionately, we must define ourselves, if only in part, by what we do for a living. We, collectively, do not "define" ourselves as "labor", by our jobs, by how we pay our freight; certainly we do so to a degree which has become reduced as the value placed on our labor has become reduced over the past decades. There are, indeed, other things in life by which to define ourselves. To amend Popeye: I y'am all the things I y'am/". The problem (or one of the problems) is that the other guys are defining themselves by their jobs; the corporate guy defines himself by what he does (and what he wants to do) in the corporation (and how much he gets paid to do it); and, unfortunately, the "union guy" also defines himself/herself to a greater degree if not exclusively by his/her position in the union bureaucracy (and how much he/she gets paid to do it). There exists, in short, a community of values between the "corporate" management/bureaucrat and the "labor" management/bureaucrat; an shared identity and ethos which is not ours. "Labor" has indeed vanished from their identity and ethic. One part of that identity and ethos is the assertion that "Bigger is Better" . Toynbee (sorry, Ross, gotta do it ) speaks of the scale on which we live as acting to "depersonalize human relations". Quote: The effacement of personality is the common underlying primum mobile of many world-wide current movements... Toynbee also speaks of the "dehumanized repository of power" with which averasge folks must deal, although the plural, "repositories" would be more accurate; he speaks of the "depersonalizing effect of numbers". Quote: Numbers are a menace because, in human affairs, the difficult business of living and working together - a business out of which human social animals cannot contract - goes most smoothly when it is done, face to face, by word of mouth, not by exchanging lawyers' letters or by filling in forms. He speaks of "the struggle to preserve personality" and he is right. For us, in my opinion, is is also the struggle to preserve human identity in the labor we undertake, human values in the labor we do, the personality of each of us and all of us. "Labor-The-Bureaucracy" has tried to define us by and on their own terms - and those terms are the precise opposite of "of the people, by the people, and for the people". [to be continued] It is high time to define "Labor" by us.
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