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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (April 19, 2019)
NorTHweST lABor PreSS | April 19, 2019 | PAge 11 America’s top union leader pops into Portland National AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was in Portland March 27-28 for the Oregon AFL-CIO’s 2019 Organizing Summit. “Something is happening in America, brothers and sisters,” Trumka told union leaders in the summit’s keynote address March 28. “Fed up with an eco- nomic and political system that doesn’t work for them, workers are turning to each other — to us. Every single day, more and more working people are realiz- ing that the single best way they can improve their lives...is to join a union.” A recent survey by MIT Sloan researchers and the Na- tional Opinion Research Corpo- ration found nearly half (48 per- cent) of nonunionized workers would join a union if given the opportunity. That marks a sharp increase from about a third of the workforce expressing this preference in 1977 and 1995, the last two times this question was asked on national surveys. The scale of this change indi- cates that 58 million American workers would want to join a union if they could, quadruple the number of current union members. The Wall Street Journal re- ported that 2018 was the biggest year for collective action in our history can inspire today’s young workers By ron Verzuh Pacific Nw labor History Association Oregon Building and Construction Trades Council officials Robert Camarillo (left) and Jimbo Anderson (right) met with national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at a labor reception at OHSU’s new Knight Cancer Center in Southwest Portland. three decades, Trumka said. There were strikes and organiz- ing wins in every sector and every region. “We elected more than 960 union members to public of- fice,” Trumka said. “Workers are in motion.” The Organizing Summit was a training for unionists on or- ganizing tactics, messaging around common sense econom- ics, and how to build worker power in the wake of the Supreme Court’s anti-union Janus decision. “As unionists, as organizers and as activists, everything we do comes back to one simple mission: lifting up the lives of working people,” Trumka said. “The best and most enduring way to do this is with collective bargaining and a contract on the job.” Trumka joined local labor leaders the night before at a re- ception at the new Knight Cen- ter for Cancer at Oregon Health & Science University. Organ- ized labor helped raise money for the Knight Center, which was union built and now is union maintained. A hundred years ago in 1919, the labor movement made history with the Seattle General Strike. Then the Win- nipeg General Strike rocked the West with a 36-day struggle marked by violent clashes. Workers in the Pa- cific Northwest supported the strikers, and some launched sympathy strikes. The general strikes created labor heroes, along with a few labor martyrs, and they inspired new generations of workers to join unions. Labor educators turn to historical events like the strikes to teach union members that they have inherited hard-won rights. When I was 18 years old, I joined my first union. I worked in a large smelter where the pay was good and I didn’t think much about unions. Then I learned about the general strikes and other events in labor history from my union steward. He taught me about our long and sometimes radical history of winning and defending workers rights. He made it a living lesson, showing how we make our own history every day. He taught me that safer workplaces, better labor laws, fighting discrimination, and demand- ing respect and dignity for everyone were victories recorded in the annals of labor history. Learning about the 1919 strikes was my first lesson in that history, and it inspired me. It was a lesson I never forgot. Now 100 years after those strikes, I celebrate la- bor history, but I wonder who is there with me. Recently I was shocked to hear some university pro- fessors say, “Students won’t sign up for a course called ‘Labor History.’” So the professors buried it in business courses, if they include it at all. When mass media out- lets replaced the old “labor beat” with the more busi- ness-oriented “workplace reporter” they buried the daily record of workers’ struggles. In today’s high schools, workplace issues are not part of the curriculum. Labor history? Not even a mention. Too often young people hear unions called dinosaurs standing in the way of progress. Some social media in- sist that unions have “outlived their usefulness.” I fear that young people will fail to question the anti- labor rhetoric flowing from Fox News and other con- servative propaganda outlets. I also fear that they will reject labor history, perhaps seeing it as a plot to hood- wink them into believing unions are good. In fact, as labor history shows, unions are good. “In Oregon,” notes a recent article in the Northwest Labor Press, “having a union at work means an extra $4,701 a year, and better benefits.” That means a richer economy all around. When teachers struck in West Virginia in 2018, the strikers invoked local labor history to inspire workers to hold the line to victory. Labor history helped get them get a better deal. In 2019 let’s remember the 1919 general strikes as part of the ongoing struggle against regressive social and political forces. Let’s encourage young people to learn from that 100-year history. Ron Verzuh is a Canadian historian and trade unionist currently living in Oregon. He is a past vice-president of the PNLHA.
