Like the tombstone on Boot Hill, "Here lies Les Moore, 3 rounds from a .44. No less, no more." Get over it David. There are no Unions on Master's Slave Plantation any more and there won't be. Working Americans don't want Unions, they want the comfort of their chains and the hope that maybe someday they'll get lucky and "their number will come in".

You're no kid. I expect you were there back in the late 60's and 70's when ALL the leaders for economic and social justice in this country were hounded into silence and suicide (ritual defamation), or falsely imprisoned (cook the evidence, plant the evidence, or withhold exculpatory), or simply executed under COINTELPRO by agents of any one of 20 secret police agencies or the local PD acting as proxies.

THAT'S what made Raygun possible. Had to kill all the meaningful voices that would "CHANGE" the power structure in AmeriKa. We don't tell that history either.

After COINTELPRO we got "the Gold or the Bullet." When the FBI makes you that offer, you take it. You pay for Brittany's braces and get the 500k house, and the retirement and the college fund and all the good upper middle class trimmings - AND THEY SUCCEEDED BY FAILING for last 35 years, because they wouldn't piss MASTER off or scare anybody. They took the deal.

No unions? Hell, no Citizens. Can't have Unions without Citizens can you? We are nothing but vassals on Masters New World Global Trade Plantation where everybody gets an RDIF chip in their ass with Master's Initials on it.

Enjoy. This is what your parents and grandparents bought for you. Isn't it a nice surprise? They believed their insulated white privilege over the poor and the colored was forever, that MAster LOVED them BEST. There's one born every minute and now the rest of their ives will be Hell on Earth. I guess that's ok. Most Americans believe in the Hebrew blood god so I guess this will make up for their time in Purgatory. I knew religion had a purpose. Now I know. Religion is there to reconcile the peasants to their servitude. Isn't it. The blood god is always on the side of the most psychotic monsters of the day. Made in His image - rich and ruthless. Are you?

The national shift to the (corporate) right after the election of Fire-the-PATCO-workers Reagan has yet to be answered. The Obama movement is the effort of the day, and actually has some chance of success (albeit not yet a done deal by any stretch.)

The "union" we need in America is now less a matter of Teamsters and AFL-CIO, UAW, CWA, etc., and more a matter of Congress + President + Supreme Court on a national scale.
Perhaps that's always been the need, but due to globalization, the old American model of unionism is vulnerable to more frequent failure--and that's what we've been seeing for 3 decades now. There is no reason for a select few (and increasingly only in the public sector) to have benefit of "a contract" while the masses get the doctrine of employment "at will". Workers need the government---all branches of it. That is startable at this moment with Obama---if we'll be smart enough to not waste our "moment."

When a Dem sycophant tries to tell you that you as a worker dosn't need a union, you just need Democrats in office, then you should be afraid ... very, very afraid.

The Dems in office will send out the militia to gun you down in the streets just like at Ludlow, and if you haven't organized your own union and your own political movement to defend yourselves, you'll just get screwed again.

When a chronic naysayer tries to tell you that it won't matter to unionism whether Democrats occupy government or not, that you can somehow just get your own union up and running strong to protect you no matter whether Republicans keep control and continue to thwart you and all other union organizers or not, you needn't be "afraid", but you do need to get someone smarter to listen to.

unions, universities, a free press, state and federal governments................

the list is endless of institutions under attack by the radical right.........

corporations are the answer - destroy ALL other institutions - only corporate interests are of concern, depend on them for everything because ALL other institutions are fallible (by purpose)

None of us will be invited to join the slave owner's association so we might just as well join any union and vote Green.

I was a union worker most of my career, that's why I now have a nice retirement. I worked plenty of non union jobs too, and I can tell you the contrast is stark. Non union jobs, you would work 60 hours to make what you did in 40 hr's at a union job. Non union jobs, little or no health care, no paid vacation, no holiday pay, no protection from unjust firing.
I'm not saying every union is wonderfull. If you can be easily replaced, it makes it harder to bargain during contract time. We had to bargain for the things we thought most important. And as a union memeber, you had to always remember that if your employer isn't making money, it's only a short time till you'll be out of work. The idea is to get a fair cut of what your labor produces.

Lets be frank here, the labour war is over and the forces of the new enlightened ones have won. This war started with the election of Ronnie Reagan in the U.S. and Maggie Thatcher in Great Britain. Today only about 10% of the American work force is unionized.

You have to admit the anti-union forces have done a hell of a job - they have convinced millions of people, who should be in and/or could use the help of a union, that unions are evil. I personally am not in a union but my Dad was. I understand the pros and cons, good and bad etc. but the average bloke has been completely bamboozled into accepting inferior pay with no benefits and, oh yes, they hate unions because St. Ronnie told them so. What goes around comes around and the sheep are receiving their just rewards.

Labor is just another commodity to be bought cheap, used up, and discarded by the corporate "personages" which run our country. Americans have been programmed to think that Democracy = unregulated crony Capitalism and Patriotism = War. They have been duped into voting for their own demise, on so many levels, year after year. The union has been sold to them as another form of taxation, and taxation has been sold to them as the worst evil of all. This year we will be allowed to "choose" between and empty suit, an empty head, and an empty soul to run our empty shell of a country. Until we break the hold of the chains we so willingly put around ourselves, we're doomed.

David Sirota may be accurate in his assessment of the history books, but I'm suspicious. His assertion that history books glorify union busting sounds like the outdated commonplace that history books glorify slavery or the mass murder of American Indians. That reality has a liberal bias is so widely recognized among scholars that conservatives have made their own revisionist history into a cottage industry.

David, which history books are you referring to?

wcdevins,

The choice between "an empty suit, and empty head and an empty soul" sounds too dire and defeatist for me.

Obama is none of the above. He is at heart a community organizer trying to "organize" as many of us as are willing to stand up as a sufficient coalition and reorder the priorities of our nation. "He" personally is not of epic and historic proportion.
But what he is trying to herd us into accomplishing for ourselves IS of historic proportion. "Empty" doesn't fit.

Thanks to David for the article. As a union officer and an organizer, in Colorado, I appreciate some recognition of what we're going through and would welcome all the help we can get. As for unions having been defeated, yes it looks dire, but there are lots of us who haven't surrendered yet. Give us a bone and support union boycotts, honk when you see us picketing, and never EVER cross a picket line. By the way, Ludlow wasn't the only massacre of workers in Colorado. Google Columbine Massacre (the original one at the Columbine Mine town, not the high school tragedy).