Posted on 12/06/2008 9:09:42 AM PST by Phoenix11
CHICAGO (AP) -- Workers laid off from their jobs at a Chicago factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
This will be repeated in various guises throughout the country. People will not allow themselves to be canned and ripped off at the end of the day.
And why should they?
Was he allowed in meetings conducted by his union thug leaders whose demands probably helped drive this company into the ground?
I play a little golf at the local municipal course. People still played after the market crashed. Since Obama was elcted business is way down, golf stores are not doing well and practically cannot give things away. The golf courses in these parts raise prices in teh winter but they are delaying it.
People, businesses and business owners have zero confidence in the little marxist.
Ah, did the President Elect lie to his believers?
Did Obambi forget to mention his motto?
“All for me and none for you”.
Good luck with that. A company that shuts its doors usually doesn't have a lot of cash lying around.
you can fool all of the people some of the time and you can fool some of the people all of the time (this second class of people are called liberals), but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time...another great saying by Lincol I think.
Sending in the goons in either instance is, in my opinion not the way to solve the problem. As you can see by the actions of the employees, once one law is broken, both sides escalate the confrontation until violence and bloodshed are certain to follow.
If they could have just held on- hope and change is riding to town on a gallant steed to save all in January. The O will fix all this...
...well let’s ask Obama to buy the factory and rehire them all.
He can show us how “redistribution” works by setting an example. :)
My point was that 'union' members of today have absolutely NO connection to union members of the 1st half century of the 1900s or before, that's all.
The UE and the Communist Party... (from Wikipedia)
Republican victories in the elections of 1946 had brought a much more conservative Congress to Washington, with the determination to curb labor. The Taft-Hartley Act, drafted in large part by lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers, General Electric, Inland Steel and other industrialists, represented a major revision of the Wagner Act that significantly weakened labor’s ability to organize and effectively negotiate.
Among its many anti-union provisions was a clause requiring officers of all unions to sign “non-communist affidavits,” swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party. Leaders of virtually all CIO and AFL unions denounced this new law, and in particular called the non-communist affidavit clause an intolerable government interference in internal union matters and an encroachment on freedom of speech and association. Union leaders vowed to boycott the Taft-Hartley labor board and agreed in principle that all would refuse to sign the affidavits. But few lived up to that pledge.
Some union leaders, including Walter Reuther of the UAW, signed the Taft-Hartley affidavits and then proceeded to raid (attempt to replace) locals of UE and the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), whose leaders were still holding out and refusing to sign. This meant that the raiding union, UAW, would appear on the NLRB ballot, but the incumbent union, UE or FE, could not.
The CIO, under President Philip Murray, did nothing to discourage the United Auto Workers from poaching on UE shops in the arms and typewriter industries in the Connecticut River Valley; other unions affiliated with the AFL, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, likewise displaced the UE in some plants.
Fissures within UE that appeared around the 1941 convention (when James Carey had been defeated as UE president by Albert J. Fitzgerald, a GE worker from Lynn, Massachusetts) reopened in the late-40’s national political environment of anti-communist hysteria. Up-and-coming Republican politicians, such as Congressman Richard Nixon of California and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, built their careers by conducting witch-hunts for imagined “Communist subversion” within the federal government, and by red-baiting their election opponents. The CIO itself was a prime target of the Republican red-baiters. CIO leaders such as Philip Murray of the Steelworkers and Walter Reuther of the UAW responded to these attacks by purging their own unions of radicals, and by attacking those CIO unions, such as UE, that held out against the red-baiting tide. Investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and criticism from groups such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, which actively organized dissenters within UE into an opposition faction, put UE leaders on the defensive.
Anti-communist raids by other unions removed some conservative members and locals from UE, thereby weakening the right-wing internal opposition. Nonetheless oppositionists were confident that the national political atmosphere would enable them to seize power in UE at the union’s 1949 convention. But the right-wing candidates were soundly defeated. UE’s convention delegates instead backed their national officers’ demands that the CIO stop the UAW and other CIO unions from raiding UE.
To defend the union from future raids, UE reversed its refusal to sign Taft-Hartley affidavits, enabling the union to again appear on the ballot in NLRB representation elections. When the CIO refused to take action to stop CIO-affiliated unions from raiding other CIO unions, UE boycotted the CIO’s national convention in 1949 and withheld its per capita dues payments, effectively resigning its affiliation to the CIO. The CIO responded by announcing the expulsion of UE as well as that of the United Farm Equipment Workers (FE); the following year the CIO expelled nine other progressive unions.
Of the 11 “left” unions that were expelled or resigned from the CIO in 1949-50, only UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union remain in existence today. All of the others were broken by the relentless attacks of employers, the government and other unions through the period of McCarthyism.
In the case of UE, the CIO went a step further, chartering a rival union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), that would attempt to destroy and replace UE. James Carey, the ex-president of UE, was appointed president of the IUE. The IUE wrested away many of the locals in the radio assembly and light manufacturing industries; the UE held on to much of its base in machine building. In the heavy electrical equipment plants, on the other hand, the two factions each had substantial strength. The resulting battles were fierce: in Local 601, which represented Westinghouse workers in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and whose members had a tradition of radical politics dating back to Eugene V. Debs’ candidacy for President in 1912, the two factions were led by brothers Mike and Tom Fitzgerald, who attacked each other personally as vigorously as the factions did on political issues. The IUE won a close election, with the semi-skilled workers supporting the IUE while more skilled workers favored the UE.
Employers, the federal government, the news media and other establishment forces played major roles in the efforts to eliminate UE. UE was subjected to an endless barrage of inquisitions by Congressional committees, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations, and a similar committee chaired by Sen. John Marshall Butler. In several instances, these committees used subpoena power to set up UE members to be fired by their employers, unless the subpoenaed worker cooperated by “naming names,” and thereby subjected other workers to the inquisition.
This is where those community organizing skills come into play....
“It seems like people who actually get their hands dirty making things are not worthy of a thing, lets go green and sit in pretty offices all day while going to sensitivity training, or betting other folks money in hedge funds.”
Agree with you that attitudes need changing. A colleague of mine was saying how the US needs to return to manufacturing and how the US was good at doing so.
And he’s from France (Normandy which happens to be more pro-American than many part of the US.)
I wouldn’t spend my time occupying a factory. I’d go look for another job. If money/time is owed because of a federal law, then it will eventually be worked out I suppose. But I wouldn’t count it.
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