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Which Side Are You On? Organizing Labor in America
Unemployment is up, Wall Street is reporting record profits, the health care debate is dragging on, and Americans are angry. There's no doubt about the anger, anyway. But it hasn't translated thus far into any increased agitation for labor. Workers are getting squeezed from all sides-more work, less pay, the constant fear of job loss, and employers using the specter of that job loss as a bulwark against complaints. "You're lucky to have a job," indeed.
What happened to organized labor in the US? With the decline of manufacturing jobs and rise of female-dominated service fields, does the old labor union model still hold up, or do we need new ways of organizing and supporting workers? And what happened to solidarity?
Paula Finn, Editor of the New Labor Forum, Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?
3 Comments so far
Show AllNurses, RNs, were declared "management" legally in an issue about this and the courts then said that "management" cannot be "labor" - IE, "in unions" - but this "management" was based on ambiguous points that RNs "delegate" to LPNs and CNAs, but note this, if you will, the vast majority of RNs as staff nurses, are HOURLY WAGE WORKERS.
The last time I checked, THAT WAS LABOR.
Only Head Nurses (Nurse Managers), Supervisors, Directors Of Nursing (Chief Nursing Officers), etc., are SALARIED. Only THEY ARE management.
In fact, in the day to day interactions, they ID themselves as "management," and not the staff RNs the courts so easily leaned into the anti-union crowd for their ilk's gain.
I speak as a ex-RN, 25-years experience. (Disabled, oxygen 24/7.)
I'd like to view this, but Grit TV has a bad habit of using blip.tv and it plays badly in my browser; the voice streams much faster than the video image does. So I'll be skipping this additional Grit TV video.
My browser is Firefox 3.5.5 and the OS is Win 2000. This should not be the problem, but maybe it is, somehow.
What happened to organized labor in the US? Simple: we're lucky to have a job!