The ironies here can’t be richer!
It’s not Top-Down or Die, or Collaborate or Die, or Marketing Development Reps or Die, or even Business Unionism or Die?
IT IS “ORGANIZE OR DIE”!
Had the title down, the remaining 127 pages was what not to do in a free market capitalistic society if you are a labor movement?
- Think you are a brand
- Think you can sell a product and place all control of the Building Trades future in the hands of businesses and politicians to solve OUR unwillingness to organize.
- Refer to the construction community as our customers
- Abandon all forms of economic pressure on anti-union entities such as end-users, construction managers and GC’s; such as strikes, controlling the means of production, legal civil disobedience and much more legal labor unrest.
- Keeping on rolling over until we find ourselves in the position we find ourselves today.
First law of “HOLES” is to quit digging when you find yourself in one.
BTW – organizing is taking the company regardless if they want to or not, and putting them under a CBA, Collective Bargaining Agreement. It is also to give those anti-union construction entities their wish – which is they would rather go out of business than sign with the union. Taking the company and the workers adds market share and density as all jobs going forward are now done union, along with the companies necessary to achieve that.
Striping is not organizing, it is adding more workers to the rolls without the corresponding increase in market share. A tool sometimes in a much broader strategy. So exactly what is that written strategy?
Organizing also pays big time attention to the end-users, CM’s and GC’s of the world’s decision to play worker against worker. These are the wallets that need to be grabbed, and grabbed hard economically via their revenue.
Not that hard to do in the 21st century if a union concentrates on the non/anti-unions clients, credit and social footprint.
BUT… as our Founders found out – it’s all about how the money gets divided, and if we are going to continue with the passive please see our value approach, and plea with politicians with the can’t you help out a brother, and do the inane Facebook postings as to all the benefits labor has done for you, when no modern generation of worker or leader has done squat – then the workers are going to take a flyer, and sit tight for the time being.
When the non-union has 85% of “all” work and growing – not that hard to understand that they do not want to jump on the Titanic. This isn’t bashing Brother General Presidents, it’s the reality that has confronted the Building Trades now for at least 3 decades.
We will all be asking ourselves in the years to come as the Titanic sinks – what role did I play, and just because you got in a lifeboat – doesn’t mean that on your watch – we hit multiple icebergs and went down. Enjoy your awards as “man of the whatever”; because history is going to judge us very precisely and harshly.
“if you see a good fight – get in it”
Danny L Caliendo
Organizer
Labor Rising Group
