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I am tired of the bad rap Unions get.  You know why they get a bad rap, because they are one of the few institutions in society that can mount effective opposition to corporate power.  You like your 8 hour work day?  Thank unions for that.  Health and Safety regulations? Thank a union for it.  You know why you’re thanking a union and not your employer?  It’s because they don’t give two shitz about you, your family or your future.

Union history does not get taught in the classrooms because of course like actual democracy, it is a threat to corporate control and power.  I’ve been reading Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Hedges and Sacco and I will share a few excerpts with you today.

“Workers in this country paid for their right by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targets assassinations of union leaders, and armed battles with hired-gun thugs and state militias.  Unions created the middle class.  They opened up our democracy.  Federal Marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times even U.S. Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush organized workers.  Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887.  Steel workers were shot to death in 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania.  Railroad workers were murdered in the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894.  Coal miners were massacred at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 and at Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920.

The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies, and the Morgans – the Goldman Sachs and Walmart of their day – never gave a damn about workers.  All they cared about was profit.  The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation.  They rallied around radicals such as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones – arrested at one point in the West Virginia coalfields for reading the Declaration of Independence to a crowd of miners – United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis, and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies, as well as Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle […].”  Frederick Douglas said.  “If there is no struggle there is no progress.  Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. […]”  […] Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. “

From Days of Destruction Days of Revolt p. 159 – 160.

So before your next anti-union rant, maybe just stop and think of all things you are benefiting from right now that was paid for in blood and misery by people who had the courage and will to demand justice in society.