The Great Equalizer
by David Yancey, FA, AFT 6157 President

We live in a world today that seems in retrograde, where the disparity between the rich and the poor is greater than ever before. Where the average CEO makes 430 times more than the average worker he or she employs, where the middle class is disappearing along with employment based retirement plans, employer offered health care and reasonable prescription drug costs, and where the next generation, for the first time in our history, is likely not to have a better life than their parent’s generation.

Unions Helped Create the Middle Class

What is the solution to this deteriorating set of circumstances? It is right in front of us. Unions! One only needs to look to the recent past for the evidence to prove this assertion. In the last half of the 20^th Century this country enjoyed one of its most stable and productive periods of modern times. Most experts agree that the foundation of that middle class was the direct result of the strength of unions. It was the wages, benefits, and the employee protection rights negotiated by unions that set the industry standards that even non-union employers and employees use to set their own wages and working conditions.

So what happened? Starting with the rise of Ronald Reagan there has been a relentless assault on the value of unions, starting with the Air Traffic Controllers Union, PATCO, that Reagan would use his presidential power to crush. The media has also been complicit in this assault. They take notes and publish statements of political and business leaders without doing their due diligence to ensure the accuracy of that information before publishing it.

We must strive to re-educate the public and the political leadership of this state and the country that unions are crucial to reestablishing the middle class and providing the next generation that chance to the future their parents envisioned. In a society that has been victimized by the “me” concept of the Republican agenda, we need to reassert the idea of the “commonwealth” and the raising of all boats, not just my yacht.

Collective Action Works

We need to extol the virtue of the “collective action” of unions to raise the circumstances of the least amongst us to a reasonable standard of living. Is that such a weird idea? In a country of such great wealth, despite the current economic downturn, it is criminal that 98% of our nation’s wealth is in the hands of less than 2% of the people.

President Obama was right when he told “Joe the Plumber” that we needed to re-distribute some of this country’s wealth. He didn’t mean we should become socialists, as the Republican shill from Alaska tried to say; he meant curtailing the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the less than 200 of the richest families in this country.

Unions and union collective action helped build the middle class in this country and we can do it again. The percentage of unionized workers in this country has declined drastically in the last few decades, but with the new president and a much friendlier administration along with the passage of the “Free Choice Act” we can change those statistics. There are an estimated 57 million workers in the United States who would join a union if they could, but they fear intimidation and retaliation from their employers.

To be successful we need to join together to raise the awareness of the public to the long-term value of unions and start to rebuild a society that truly reflects the values that have made this country so great. So, please join us in the FA, AFT 6157 at whatever level you can. A great place to start is with our Council of Division Representatives, our next meeting is March 13, 2009 at San Jose City College, but you could also start by attending a meeting of the Executive Board. Check out our website http://www.fa-aft6157.org/ for the schedule and the locations of our meetings.