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    BlackMage2030Genetta M. Adams
    2/25/19 3:04pm

    No coincidence how as unions got more diverse the anti-union movement gained more power and influence. It saddens me to see people spout the business owners’ lines about the evils of unions based off of decades of propaganda against organized labor - the same organized labor that allowed for weekends, holidays, assisted with Health and Human Resources and OSHA formation, etc. Non-white men had to fight for recognition and membership and just as we get in and get comfortable there went Reagan and his ilk gutting stuff, making them weaker and letting their weakness cracked them more. And we wonder about wages, we wonder about childcare, we wonder about healthcare... not being united for our paychecks is a big part of it.

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      FlamingFeministaBlackMage2030
      2/25/19 11:10pm

      “organized labor that allowed [FOUGHT FOR] for weekends, holidays, assisted with Health and Human Resources and OSHA formation...”

      Negotiated, and went out on strike (living on low strike pay) and fought (got their skills and backs cracked with baseball bats) furthering the concept of ~somewhat~ equal pay to become the norm! Fought for healthcare that allowed your grandmother to birth 10 LIVE children who then lived past age 3. Fought so that same grandmother could still live independently at retirement age, after Grandpa died, instead of dying in poverty being shuffled from basement to back porch!

      People take for granted soooooo many concepts of work that would NEVER have caught fire and proliferated to every other industry and around the globe - if not for American unions!

      That these institutions were far from perfect should not diminish the actual good they’ve done.

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      BlackMage2030FlamingFeminista
      2/26/19 8:50am

      Agreed. Labor Day is not the day off to end the summer, it’s the day to mourn the folks who died so that your only day off wasn’t Sunday and if your job hurt you there were recourses beyond “oh well, fuck off now” and your average ten-year-old wouldn’t be maimed in factory work. And yes, many unions started racist/sexist and some were protection rackets for nepotism and peerage - but they were the start of something. 

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    BiturbowagonGenetta M. Adams
    2/25/19 4:10pm

    This mirrors FDR’s Four Freedoms speech:

    Freedom of speech

    Freedom of worship

    Freedom from want

    Freedom from fear

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    MarcelineGenetta M. Adams
    2/28/19 11:51am

    The movements for civil rights and labor rights have always been powered by the same principle.

    Somebody needs to tell the guys putting up “whites-only” signs at GM.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/us/gm-toledo-racism-lawsuit/index.html

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