I appreciate his follow-up on how union strength (especially outside of the public sector) has been declining percentage-wise since the 1950's. His source was good, you can find this from other sources as well. His assumption that I am serious and attempting to make a point or two is correct. He didn't take personally that I knocked TNR. In fact, I would now knock Brink Lindsey's attack on the "loony left" and love letter to globalization that's on TNR's web site right now if it wasn't tangential.
Regarding "hostility" mentioned by several:
As I said in my original post, I was "disappointed" when I started searching through the archives and saw few posts regarding labor unions in. I became "disgusted" when I saw that the only posts that were followed up on were the ones bashing the UMW and AFL-CIO (Teamsters/UAW) for not supporting liberal social issues like gay rights, gun control, and environmental issues (and IAFAW for not opposing missle defense). Any "hostility" I have is in response to that. If I had seen an equal amount of concern over labor organizing and issues to even out the bashing, or just a total lack of concern over labor unions in terms of supporting or bashing, I would have just been "disappointed" not "disgusted" as you can infer from my original post. But most of what I have seen is bashing labor unions. I later went on in my original post to note the exception, in the opposition to corporate globalization I have seen expressed here.
Regarding Mr. Henwood's comments:
> As for the substance of the points - the new arrival
> claimed to have read through the archives. To say that
> people here care more about pansexual orgies than
> workers just has no basis in anything that was ever
> written here.
I said nothing about pansexual orgies. I said expecting rural labor unions to suicidally support liberal social issues like gay rights reflexively is ridiculous. Labor unions are democratic organizations, if Mississippi is the sort of state where "defense of marriage" laws would pass by a 99% margin (<- hyperbole), you can't condemn a democratic labor union of rural coal miners for not being at the forefront of social progressiveness regarding gay rights.
> Almost everything in his greeting post was not true of
> the list's inhabitants, and drew on a tired series of
> false oppositions - either you care about queers or
> Mexican grocery baggers. You can never care about
> both, and of course the Mexican grocery bagger is never
> a queer herself.
That's up to the locals. I'll postulate that it's a more progressive thing to stick up for gays than it is to stick up for African-Americans or people from Mexico. I'll state something I have read about and seen with my own eyes - a pre-operative transexual starts coming to work in a dress. A local with obligations to it's members, how much should it go out of the way to defend the pre-op transexual to go to the bathroom of his/her choosing and so forth? If management won't stand for it, how obligated is the union to fight for the pre-op TV's right to wear a dress, go to the bathroom of his/her choosing, continue employment at the company, go out to see customers/clients as a company representative and so forth. This is a whole thread in and of itself.
Regarding the ironic "the Mexican grocery bagger is never a queer herself", I respond, the queer is never a Log Cabin Republican herself? I have met queers of a Republican bent, although their marginalization usually has makes them more in a libertarian capitalist mode. Didn't Goldwater bash the religous right and praise gay rights or something before he went up to the big cattle ranch in the sky? Again, the separation between left wing social and economic issues.
Which I have little desire to discuss. To go back to Mr. Page's points, I spend a lot more time thinking about unions than I do whether I should listen to ACT UP or Leviticus regarding homosexuality. If ACT UP is looking for working class support of homosexuality, going into St. Patrick's Cathedral and spitting out the holy communion is not exactly the best PR. Since the UMW posts involved gay rights, it seemed like a good touchstone. As I said in my previous post, you can replace gay rights with "generic social issue that urban liberals and rural conservatives feel differently on".
********************************************* Looking for 100 free long distance minutes and state-to-state rates as low as 4.5 cents/minute? Check out http://savings.freeze.com/longdistance/ !