>This needs to be heard. Unions are NOT going to be the force for the kind
of changes needed in the US or anywhere else really. We no longer live in
the 1920s. >I have to agree with Katha Pollit on her scepticism re the
thnking that unions are our route to social justice though they can play a
positive role for the workers who >are members of particular unions.
Frankly, they've been a huge disaappointment as a force for social change.
>marta
Yeah, Social Security, Minimum wage laws, Medicare, Family Leave, Civil Rights-- it's all tremendously disappointing that labor played major roles in all their passage.
When Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham, who do you think put up most of the bail money for those arrested?
Yeah, unions represent a whole chunk of working class folks, so their politics are not as simon-pure leftist as foundation-funded fiefdoms by various activists, but purity of politics is the luxury of having no grassroots constituencies.
--- Nathan Newman