Our Building Trades International Presidents are part of the Biden Transition team once President Elect Biden becomes President Biden.
Perhaps in another era this would be a good thing – but not in today’s environment. Why? Because they bring nothing to the table except need after need. These IPs play the victim game, looking for “someone/anyone” to solve issues they and their predecessors had a strong hand in creating. With the “strategy” of Value on Display being front and center for decades, the issues listed below have steadily gotten worse as BT senior leaders keep “kicking the can down the road”. No plan, no sustained actions, no follow through. The LM-2’s lay out the pitiful amount of money used to fight these issues in the courts and in the world of public opinion. And as if that is not enough bad news, there has been next to zero coordinated field protests and job actions on a sustained basis to demonstrate “skin in the game”. Skin in the game would be the power of workers in the field displaying concerted activities to secure workers’ rights. Feel free to use the comment bar below to show ANY actions missed – have at it!
The trades need pension help – aka bail outs, NLRB reform, wage and hour reform, Davis – Bacon reform, prevailing wage help, OSHA reform and more – get the picture?
Typically, a stroke of a leader’s pen is far more potent to get things done. However, even with President Biden’s executive power, and hopefully congressional help, not much will fall in line for the trades in the next 4 years. Infrastructure will work against the trades – not for us. More in upcoming blogs.
Biden is a seasoned politician and certainly not stupid. He will give the trades exactly what they can deliver to him – NOTHING!
The trades HAVE NOT earned the ability to demand anything. They have coasted and sat on the sidelines for decades. Huge numbers of trades members are Trump guys, not R’s. And, by the way, Trump followers and R’s are not and have not been one in the same for years now. You can show these Trumpian guys the paper ballot we all used in voting and which backs up the electronic version to nearly a perfect match. You can show these guys every variation of state political law and counting mechanisms that have survived as close to 100% of challenges in every type of courts in the U.S. No one wants them or any voter to embrace a candidate they did not support; however, to continue to perpetuate voter fraud conspiracies in an environment of zero proof makes these Trumpian guys unfit to live in a democracy and be part of a labor MOVEMENT. And they want neither. They want an America for white people and a specific religious belief. They will trade an authoritarian/fascist leader to achieve that end and subvert the constitution if it is in the way. Apparently, the Crusades have never stopped and add to that the confederacy!
As for this group of Trumpians BEING dangerous – not this group of crusaders! They are cowards and posers almost to a person. They liken themselves to the Patriots with a capital P that formed our country. WTF – are you kidding me? Our founding fathers and mothers risked and lost their lives, property, and everything they had to stand against the British rule. Everything!
These Coward Boys like to parade around with their weapons and threaten people behind the veil of secrecy. If push comes to shove, they will not put their jacked-up trucks, Harleys and toys at risk. They know they are protected by the very media they say they hate when out and about posing for photo opts. Trump, like the coward in charge he is, wants them and others to spark unrest and fear on HIS behalf. Not America – HIS behalf! Pick any leader, great or cult lead. From Washington to Koresh – they led from the front! Trump picked the Kardashians of the crusaders. Designer militias with the latest in camo and guns – a major flaw in his grand scheme. If you the reader have ANY street smarts you know bullies when you see them. The clear majority of these guys are posers and not bullies per se. There is a big difference between them. (Now the Black Water people that Trump pardoned are a different story. This is a mix of ex-military that run the spectrum of excellent and not so excellent soldiers aka sketchy MF. They can get away with murder. Paid many times more than a typical solider and/or Marine. I would keep my eye on any guy who goes around picking a fight for money. Is there enough of them to sow unrest in the future? My bet is on U.S. military every time. In the next day or 2 it may very well come down to our military leaders saying NO to our president).
Back to the coward boys and posers (tin soldiers) – they are like most guys (not women) in the gym these days. They hit the arms and chest for show – times a million sets. Few hit the squat rack or do pulls and deadlifts anywhere near correct, if at all. Why? Because that requires work and discipline along with knowledge of the anatomy. My personal favorites are the guys who load the leg press machine with every 45 lb. plate they can use and then unlock the safety, move the sled 3 inches, and think they are bad ass and claim 800 lb. squats. They genuinely think they are! Then they load their skinny asses with their big arms into their trucks/jeeps with their punisher decals et al and demonstrate how tough they are. All show and no go to use an old adage!
Value on Display is exactly why these MEN and a few Karens exist in the trades. We in the trades have always been both R’s & D’s – but NEVER weak men & women being told what to do by anyone! We used to question ALL leaders and held them to a standard that then earned them their right to lead. That has not been the case for the last 5 decades and counting.
When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the abuse of power that follows.
And it appears that our senior leaders understand this. The world they live in is awfully bad for workers, union or not on their watch. The Building Trades have NOT been a democracy for many decades and Value on Display has made it even worse!
Meanwhile while our senior leaders sit in meetings and enjoy the sounds of their own voices, anti/non-union forces will play hardball in a way not seen to date. Anti/non-union forces love the catch-phrases of collaboration used by the trades, all the while extracting concession after concession over decades. Going forward management will shove the words of collaboration right down the senior leaders’ throats, which will then result in the demise of the trades on their watch as we know them! It has been happening for 5 decades!
We are facing the ripe environment for management to put down the trades. By and large, unions outside of the BT will expand; but the trades will continue to be no more than a temp agency. And, based on all available evidence, we at Labor Rising do not think that ALEC, RTW, Heritage Foundation, ABC, CURT, et al, will NOT even want a temp agency to survive.
The senior leaders continue to think skills are what the construction world wants. Value on Display has demonstrated unequivocally that skills are NOT what raise market share much less the standard of workers lives. The additional unintended consequence has been, at a minimum, two generations of individual tradesmen that absolutely think their skills are at the center of the building universe. Think arms and chest with a hoodie in the gym and you get the picture! Or check out all the bad ass stuff for sale by the trades. We look smashing but cannot organize a sock drawer! The members are not bad people. They are taught within the trades current 5-decade old culture to admire skills and hype them. They have zero idea how to band together and fight a fight much bigger than an individual can wage. They have to be shown what they can accomplish as a group and actions that will live beyond them and for there families yet unborn – kind of dramatic but true.
And our IP’s WILL NOT lead by example in the trenches – WILL NOT! They by design let the “organizers” run around and throw up the rat and talk to workers to recruit them. In a few instances even run a bottom-up campaign. BS by design. Keep you busy and out of the way.
The IP’s will not take on management – their clients, their credit, their customers, their perception and go toe to toe until they have secured a CBA. They will not grab any company by the wallet – no matter how anti/non-union they are and impose a union on them or put them out of business.
Management will – and that day is here – the non-union does approx. 90% of all construction – not that hard to put us down and we have the exact right leaders to lose with!
“if you see a good fight – get in it”
Danny L Caliendo
Organizer
Labor Rising
