Leadership

[Richard Gibson]

Call the union and offer to help? Still laughing....is this like the time
many of us in Detroit went to the UAW led newspaper picket lines to assist
them in stopping production, and the UAW leadership busied themselves with
breaking the picket lines? Or is this like the time the UAW had a nearly
third of its membership on strike or layoff, and the leadership busied
themselves with their own uncontested reelections in Las Vegas? Or is this
like the time at the Mack Avenue plant take over when the UAW shipped in
people from all over the country to drag the workers out of the plant? Gag. 

The UAW under Yokich is the same authoritarian, anti-democratic, gang of
hacks with fundamentally the same vision---going back to the days of
Reuther and Bluestone. Consider the maneuvering to get Bob King out of
Region I and to replace hime with a Yokich wannabe. Or reconsider the fact
that the UAW did indeed lead the botched newspaper strike. 

Neither the AFL -CIO nor the relatively privileged North American
industrial working class is likely, in the foreseeable future, to launch a
struggle to establish the practice and ideas necessary for democratic or
egalitarian social change. This does not mean the workers never will. It
does mean they won't soon. 

The struggles for justice in the near future will lilely come from youth,
in schools and out--and others locked out of the industrial working class....

Sisternally, 
best. rich

At 08:37 PM 6/26/98 -0700, you wrote:
> Dear Doug and the Left Buysiness Observers, 
>It's always easy to blame the union leadership, and, that's the easy way
>out that a lot of people take when the pressure is on!!!  I know you to be
>a very smart and righteous gentleman  Give your union a call and ask them
>what you can do to help out.  Fraternally, 
>Tom 
Rich Gibson
Director of International Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202

http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap.html

	Life travels upward in spirals. 

	Those who take pains to search the shadows

	 of the past below us, then, can better judge the

	 tiny arc up which they climb, 

	more surely guess the dim

	 curves of the future above them.