It is premature for me to comment on the Coastal Forest Industry/Steelworker deal (I have not seen the devilish details) but it sounds like my new union has done what needed to be done at the bargaining table after three months of striking. Billy Bragg was right: There is Power in a Union. And the power of the working class hanging together is needed now more than ever.
Join up, motherfuckers, we got a fight.
2 comments:
Hey, congratulations. We just signed a six year contract. I suspect that they are being nice to us while they fold up the operation. That's OK for me, I'm an old timer and I'll get out with some money. At least we weren't asked to two tier things. That's what I was afraid of: "We'll take care of you if you fuck the new hires."
As to my previous post, Dorothy Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. She lived with the poor and resisted the powers and principalities. She's not all that popular because she wasn't running a non-profit and doling out charity. She rejected wealth, violence and power and struggled to share whatever came her way with whoever she met. Also, she was unsentimental and very practical. She was an ex communist and IWW who never turned against her old comrades. She honestly believed that her religion made their work complete.
Thurman was an African American mystic, scholar and preacher. He was the pastor of California's first integrated church. He believed that the role of religion and of Christianity was to strengthen and empower the dispossessed. He was close friends with Martin Luther King Sr. MLK Jr. supposedly carried a copy of Thurman's "Jesus and the Dispossessed" everywhere he went. Thurman also knew Ghandi and met with other anti-imperialists.
Both of them were so cranky and weird, so in the face of the world as we know it, that I have to give it up to them.
Shit, I suppose that now that you're going back to work, you won't have time to write. Happened to me. I had a blog at a tiny blogsite run by a union guy from Toronto. I tore up my shoulder and was off work for seven months. I wrote something everyday. Then I went back to work. I was the most active blogger at the site, and when I stopped writing and the site got hit by various spambots he closed it down.
Anyhow, you're bookmarked, and I'll check back.
Wow.
Great stuff Jon.
And as an homage to the cranky and the weird everyhere, you can't do much better than the following, from a not so old timer.
____
Mr. B&H--
Amazing how often that Mr. Bragg fellow is right.
Right?
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