Saqib Bhatti and and Stephen Lerner want to transform the work of labor unions. Instead of focusing on the limited gains offered by bargaining with individual employers, they say that “...unions need to start looking to the actors higher up the food chain, to the people who control the money in the public sector as well as the private sector ”.
Those people, of course, are the nation’s biggest investors. Bhatti is director of the ReFund America Project and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Lerner is a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and was an architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Bhatti and Lerner offer evidence and data to support their case, and provide examples of how a confident labor movement can change the economy in their article "Labor Must Take On Capital," which first appeared in Jacobin Online on August 9 and was republished by Portside. We have a link to it on our website at dclabor.org For the latest local labor calendar listings, go to dclabor.org and click on Calendar. Here’s today's labor history: On this date in 1918, at the IWW War Trials in Chicago, 95 were sent to prison for up to 20 years. Many IWW members opposed US participation in World War I, arguing that war represents struggles among capitalists in which the rich become richer, and the working poor die at the hands of other workers. Today’s labor quote is from an IWW newspaper, the Industrial Worker, written just before the U.S. declaration of war in 1917: "Capitalists of America, we will fight against you, not for you! There is not a power in the world that can make the working class fight if they refuse."
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