Unions Will Save America, Workers Are Fed Up 🇺🇲

Last edited Wed Oct 18, 2023, 10:33 AM - Edit history (1)

- Leeja Miller, 2023.
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Unions are democracy in the workplace. We have unions to thank for the 40 hour work week and the weekend (instead of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week).

- National Labor Relations Act/NLRB (1935), National Archives. Also known as the Wagner Act, this bill was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 5, 1935. It established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers in the private sector...https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/national-labor-relations-act

The targeting of organized labor and public interest groups by business interests increased after the effective social activism of the 1960s when Americans opposed the Vietnam war and made demands for minority and women's rights and consumer and environmental protections. This period of democratization was countered by the implementation of The Powell Memorandum (1971), a major business plan to fight the 'Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.'

-'How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began,' The Powell Memo, Robt. Reich https://robertreich.org/post/703554534532923392

The Memo called for increasing the number of business lobbying groups, the creation of powerful think tanks and gaining influence over US media and education. By the 1980s, anti union activity was heightened by President Reagan's firing of Patco employees, air traffic controllers who were on strike. War on unions.

- 'When Reagan Broke the Unions,' NPR, 2019. On August 3, 1981, air traffic controllers all over the United States went on strike, threatening to shut down the skies and paralyze the country. But then President Reagan fired them. This is the story of the most important strike in recent U.S. history, a strike that changed the trajectory of American labor...https://www.npr.org/2019/12/13/788002965/episode-958-when-reagan-broke-the-unions