“If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of congress, and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks.” – Eugene V. Debs

LINKS
June 8, 2016 – Shouldn’t private sector employees receive what public sector receives? Big Capital wants just the opposite – Mike Miller

Rumour has it that the Calgary Golf and Country Club has opened its doors to union bosses. Where are yesteryear’s John L. Lewis who regularly shamed mining companies into paying a decent wage; Walter_Reuther who, his face beaten to a pulp, won the Battle of the Overpass over Henry Ford’s thugs in 1937; Big Bill Haywood who Clarence Darrow saved from the gallows on a trumped-up mureder charge; and Mother Jones, who organized a Children’s Crusade that ended the exploitation of U.S. children? The bosses now run their unions like the Board of Directors of the Canadian Imperial Bank runs that financial hocus-pocus. I can tell you one thing — playing golf and fighting the union fight don’t mix. The union bosses seem to think becoming respectable middle-classers is more important than looking after their members — the plutocrats are playing them like fiddles … Did you see union bosses leading demonstrations outside the Royal Bank when that bastion of Canadian job creation tried to export more jobs to India? Did they organize a crippling boycott of Loblaws when Loblaws’s subcontractors murdered 1,127 workers in Bangledesh?

In the last 15 years union bosses have perfected their golf swings while over 10% of their members headed for the hills. Only 18% of private sector workers still belong to unions — only 9% can still count on a guaranteed pension.

LINKS

• BBC — Communist Party bans golf club membership for all party members
• Colin Gordon — The Union Difference: Labor Policy and American Inequality

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