In Florida, An Organizing Drive that Doubled the Union

[iwishiwas]

Late bloomers but I wish them well. Seems many have awoken!


http://labornotes.org/2011/06/florida-organizing-drive-doubled-union

In Florida, An Organizing Drive that Doubled the Union
Paul Ortiz
| July 11, 2011

Florida unionists in higher education have been rallying against relentless defunding of education, building their unions in the process. Graduate Assistants United (UFF/NEA/AFT)



Florida is not Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s history is Robert LaFollette, the Progressive Party, and the birth of public employee unionism.

Conversely, Florida had the Rosewood Massacre and the Ku Klux Klan. A grand jury recently found that “corruption is pervasive at all levels of government.”

Republican Governor Rick Scott recently signed measures making it harder to vote, moving Florida back toward its Jim Crow past. We are one of several states with no department to enforce wage and hour standards.

Despite these obstacles, faculty members in Florida’s public institutions of higher learning have been building unions in our right-to-work state at an outstanding rate in recent months. At the University of Florida union density was about 20 percent last year. Now it’s over 40 percent and rapidly rising.

[Angry Dragon]

1. Good

[TBF]

2. K&R nt

[midnight]

3. Sadly we have the guy who introduced the patriot act....

Oddly Florida and Wisconsin share ALEC Govenors.... Who share in their efforts to make it harder to vote....

[Recursion]

4. How odd to bring up the Klan

The Klan first appeared in Wisconsin in 1920. Under the leadership of Milwaukee insurance broker William Wieseman, the Klan grew throughout Wisconsin, though Milwaukee continued to have the highest number of members. Because the Catholic church was the only group on the Klan's list of enemies that had any real power in Wisconsin, the Klan went to great lengths to identify itself with American Protestantism and saw Masons (long condemned by Rome) as a logical source of members. Many Milwaukee Socialists joined the Klan out of their contempt for Catholicism, despite Victor Berger's condemnations of the group. Linking crime with immigrants (many of whom were Catholic), the Klan gained power in Madison by promising to maintain order in the city's Italian neighborhood, the Greenbush. The University of Wisconsin had a student group that called itself the Ku Klux Klan Honorary Junior Society. In 1924, Wieseman was replaced by Charles B. Lewis who secured a state charter for the Wisconsin affiliate from the national organization, a sign of organizational vitality and recognition.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=10537&term_type_id=3&term_type_text=things&letter=K

I do find it odd that the Klan in the South in the 1920s attacked union organization, while the Klan in the midwest in the 1920s was very strongly allied with union organization...