The Nation...John Nichols: This Is Where Union-Bashing and Union-Blaming Gets Ridiculous

[Omaha Steve]

https://www.thenation.com/blog/200113/point-where-union-bashing-and-union-blaming-gets-ridiculous

John Nichols on March 5, 2015 - 12:21 PM ET

The American trade union movement has achieved remarkable progress with its fights for fair wages and benefits, for an eight-hour day, for protections against child-labor abuses for pensions for retirees and workplace safety. And the movement’s accomplishments have extended beyond the workplace to the community and the nation as a whole, especially when it has marched on the front lines for civil rights and social justice. Those gains have required sacrifice and struggle, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explained when he addressed the AFL-CIO national convention in 1961.

“Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth,” said King. “The duality of interests of labor and Negroes makes any crisis which lacerates you, a crisis from which we bleed. And as we stand on the threshold of the second half of the twentieth century, a crisis confronts us both. Those who in the second half of the nineteenth century could not tolerate organized labor have had a rebirth of power and seek to regain the despotism of that era while retaining the wealth and privileges of the twentieth century.”

So it really has never been easy.

There have always been haters and baiters.

FULL story at link.