Here’s a meme-oid that the anti-union forces are tossing around: Unions are racist.

I love it when people bring this up.

The one thing about my union, APWU, is that race and gender and having to kiss up to an idiot boss (and 99.9999999% of them are just that) and being the boss’s BFF and all that bullshit all but vanish in a decent union. People scream about the seniority system of promotion that we employ but I remind them: What other factor is completely unbiased and free of dispute? Seniority has done more to get minorities and women into decent jobs, at least in the postal service, than any other factor. Every other blue/pink collar outfit I’ve worked at, the white guys got the high-paying jobs, the women got the lower-paying office jobs, and everybody else got the shit jobs. It didn’t matter how long you had worked there, what your skills or interests were. You went into one of the pigeonholes, and you didn’t argue with it. That was always the breakdown.

Here at the USPS, you’ll see women driving semis, “throwing” parcels (our term for distributing them), hauling equipment around–you name it. You see minorities in the “cushy” jobs that working for the USPS 25 years will get you. Why? Because they hung around long enough and eventually got to grab the jobs they wanted.

Of course, you have to do some crappy work in the beginning, and deal with shitty hours. But someday…

I can’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had with liberals who parrot the standard lines about unions: how “passe” they are; how “corrupt”; how “irrelevant” to a realignment strategy; how little they do for democracy.

They think it’s progressive to drink lattes in (antiunion) Starbucks.

We now have Janet Rogers Brown sitting on the DC Circuit Court. She would roll the law back to the days of NY v. Lochner. She and her soulmates are poised to rule into law the myths of “freedom” you rightly mock. Brown’s appointment was part of the “gang of 14″ deal that got us nothing — to no one’s surprise. At no point was a stink raised about what she would do to working people.

Still, keep it up! It’s hitting home, as the numbers are showing.

One of my concerns for the last 20 years is how the working American is becoming more and more powerless. In the last 6 years it’s gotten to be an even bigger concern for me.

A powerless people is a sign of failure, not success in my opinion. The more powerless working Americans get the more degraded America becomes.

It’s the old rule of supply and demand. We have an “oversupply” of workers, so they have no leverage and are abused. It makes me wonder if this is another reason they are trying to outlaw abortion: keep that stock of workers growing, so we can all have slave labor!

You are MORE LIKELY to be poor if you have a 4-year college degree than if you belong to a union. Put more bluntly, unions do a better job of protecting an individual from poverty than a college education.

That’s a bottom line most policy folks WON’T address.

And yes, I’m a proud member of the AFT.

My Dad was a union guy for many years(steelworkers union)til he got laid off when the auto industry cooled off.You’d think that would have given him a clue. His Dad was also a union guy(truckdriver for a big company),granpa was pro-union all the way. Both my grandmas worked in union shops too(factory workers).

After Dad left the steel mill,he ended up as a manager at a large trucking company(after working on the loading docks for a few years-as a union member). Hated unions because he said they protected workers who stole stuff from the trucks. I never understood how someone who came from blue collar roots and was blue collar himself could turn against unions.

My first good paying job came at 19,I worked for Goodyear. Our union took damned fine care of us. Sadly the plant closed after a fire,a fire that started(on my shift and on my line)because the company refused to follow some safety rules-benzine heat source= big boom and fire. Our union had been trying to get management to stop using benzine to clean injection molds,(at the time it wasn’t known to be a carcinogen-to the public at least),management refused. Then the fire happened and the problem was never addressed. About 100 of us lost our jobs,the factory closed for good about a year later.

I’ll never understand how people can think that big bidness interests will do the right thing if you get rid of regulations and unions. Over and over and over again,corporations prove that they will not do the right thing when no one’s looking. They’ll lie,cheat their workers, destroy the environment(that Goodyear plant,btw sits abandoned after 25 yrs and is FULL of barrels of chemicals that have never been cleaned up.And once this plant left that town,it’s been ravaged by poverty),and CEOs will do anyhting to hoard and steal as much money as they can.

I say bring back the unions in full force. We need them now,just as much as we did before.