by Doug Henwood at KPFA's Behind The News
US living standards for ordinary people have deteriorated the last 40 years because Democrats and Republicans have systematically de-unionizeds the country, says former union organizer Jane McAlevey. Illinois governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel are on a jihad to kill the last unions in Chicago, the better to impose more privatizations, cuts in child care, wages, education and more austerity.
McAlevey, author of "We Need Syriza Here In Illinois " published last month in The Nation, declares the distinction between people working in the so-called “public sector” and “private sector” is nonsense. There are not two economies, there is one, and there are not two ways that workers get treated, depending on whether they work for government or corporations, there is one. She reminds us that real unions create traditions and institutions of internal democracy, which is not the same as "horizontalism" that they run strikes regularly, and that they are frequently led, as the Chicago Teachers Union was in 2012 by black women.
McAlevey was a remarkably successful union organizer for SEIU in Nevada, a so-called right to work state.
Left economist Doug Henwood, among much else the host of KPFA's Behind the News, interviews Jane McAlevey on the connection between Bruce Rauner, Scott Walker and Rahm Emanuel, how the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike kept Mayor Rahm Emanuel from closing 100 Chicago public schools instead of just 50, and the ultimate collective power of organizing the workplace.
Catch Doug Henwood's program every week here.
McAlevey is the author of Raising Expectations, Raising Hell.
listen
http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2015/15_02_19.mp3
This week impeachment and China were topics of discussion. We share your letters for “
The history of enslavement and American apartheid segregation has permanently disfigured politics in this country.
Islam’s association in the West with “terror” makes it nearly impossible Islamic theology as a force for racial or social justice.
White supremacist Democrats staged a military assault on the last bastion of biracial government in the South, killing scores of Blacks and driving thousands out of North Carolina’s largest city.
Yes, Trump is an inveterate liar, but American politicians have always told lies about the Black and brown people they demonize and mass-imprison.
