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ORGANIZING PROFESSIONAL WORKERS
Not Just Laborers Need Labor Unions
By Robert L. Hill
URW Organizational Director, United Rubber Worker
(November 1972)
On Nov. 9 AFL-CIO Organizational Director William
Kircher was in Akron to address the American Institute of Chemical
Engineers. As I listened to him speak to this group of professionals on
the assets of banding together for the sake of collective bargaining, I
became more and more aware of the benefits of unionism to all workers,
no matter what their position or profession.
Kircher did not make a sales pitch for the engineers
to join the AFL-CIO All he did was lay the facts of collective
bargaining under their noses. And, as he confessed to the group, he knew
first-hand that management oriented professionals sometimes rebel at the
first hint of organizing, unionism and collective bargaining, so there
could be no reaction by the engineers that would surprise him.
"My files are full of quotes from your various
magazines and management-dominated groups who are more and more saying
that "unionism is all right but only as a last resort and that time
hasn't come yet'," said Kircher.
But such an attitude, continued the AFL-CIO
representative, is stupid and matched only by the narrow-mindedness of
some unionists who feel that the presence of professionals in unions
would prostitute unionism.
"It seems to me that the essential point is
whether or not industrial engineers, in this case, have common problems
whose solutions are susceptible to the collective bargaining
machinery," Kircher said.
"And, from the number of professional
organizations, societies, or whatever they're being called these days
that exist in your field, it appears that collective action and security
is advantageous to chemical engineers."
A major asset of the collective bargaining system--in
every situation--is its flexibility, according to Kircher.
"The very best usages of the methods and
procedures of collective bargaining have not yet been explored in your
profession," Kircher told the engineers. "It is certainly
worth investigation, I am sure."
Whether the chemical engineers choose the AFL-CIO, a
professional society, or the status quo, is not Kircher's concern. If a
group of workers--professionals or otherwise--have common work
situations and goals, collective bargaining is a logical solution.
Naturally, a union of chemical engineers would not be
run the same way that the United Rubber Workers is run. But the pulp and
paper workers operate in a different manner than us, so such reasoning
for refusing to consider collective bargaining is invalid. Unions have
individual problems that must be dealt with as such.
If there is collective need, collective bargaining
could very well be the answer, for chemical engineers, rubber workers,
everyone.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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Store
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update
31 March 2012
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