Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Why Everyone Needs Unions

David Sirota says that everyone, not just janitors (see below) should care if we have a strong labor movement.

Clearly, the alliance between Big Business and the Republican Party has been, in part, responsible for demonizing unions and thus driving down union membership and reducing union rights. They ultimately want a country that has no unions at all, and they claim that would be good for America.

Not hearing the counter argument to this out of the anti-union corporate media, most Americans probably believe that wouldn't affect them, because most Americans aren't in a union. But as we see, nothing could be further from the truth. If we hadn't had a strong union movement in America's history, we wouldn't have a weekend, we'd have a 7 day work week; we wouldn't have a minimum wage, we'd have slave wages (which we are approaching fast because Congress refuses to raise the minimum wage); and we wouldn't have laws preventing child labor, we'd have kids working in sweatshops.