A Vision for the Future I Want to See

Here’s a portion of an article worth sharing. You can find the whole thing here.

It’s about the showdown at the AFL-CIO Convention, but says so much about what unions were created for in the first place, and really, what Democrats are fighting for.

What this author says truly is the anathema of Republicans in power far and wide. They’ve worked long and hard to make ‘union’ into a curse-word in much the same way ‘liberal’ has become. Before you allow misinformation campaigns to cause you to utter some knee-jerk denial for the need for unions, read below. How can this be a bad thing? Would you really rather not have this in your own workplace as well?

Looking into the middle distance, we can perhaps see that new wave of union evolution, gathering strength. Its predominant face is of color, and female. It is Spanish/English bilingual and capable in many languages. It is predicated on dignity, power, and living wages for service work -- our new industrial shop floor -- with an international structure, a non-imperialist culture, and worldwide standards for safety, health, and environmental integrity. And I like to think that, despite the current furor, most of us are eager to catch it, bending the arc of history toward justice.

For me, that means a world in which we all can live in dignity, mutual respect, and peace, sharing equitably in both resources and decision-making -- entitled to good air, food and water, housing, and healthcare from birth to death; a world in which we can grow to our full potential through education and work -- free to think, create, play, free to worship or not, free to sing what we want, and free to love whom we please -- provided we cause the least harm to other people, our planet, or our universe; and a world in which we use more consensus than coercion to accomplish these goals and always stretch ourselves to see that others have the same rights and privileges as we do.

We need to restore poetry to our politics, the meaning that strengthens the muscle. Bread and roses. It may be more than we bargain for, but for progressive labor, it's the real deal.