Ten Lessons for Today’s Unions from Labor’s Militant History

Click here to access article by Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer from Toward Freedom.

Today, the incomes of working people are declining, those of the rich are skyrocketing, but federal and state governments are nevertheless aiming their fire at working people, demanding pension cuts, wage cuts, layoffs, and cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and social services. These cuts will only accelerate the inequalities in wealth. Now more than ever, organized labor needs to step up, reclaim its glories from its past, and mount a major campaign to oppose these attacks and demand that the government institute job-creation programs.

Although we have much to learn from the largely expunged history of our ancestor's struggles against organized capitalists, we must also understand that we are living under quite different conditions and apply those lessons accordingly. We are living in a globalized capitalist Empire where the ruling classes can shift economic enterprises fairly easily from one location to another. Thus, we must collaborate much more closely with workers throughout the world. We must globalize worker struggles to overcome the oppression of globalized capital.