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
Prelude: One Warlord croons, “Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran—“ another Warlord solemnly chants, in Spanish, “Yes, we can!”
The yellow vests ought to be inspirations for the 99% on this side of the Atlantic ocean. “They will not accept neoliberal plunder without a fight.”
Clinton’s reemergence is a dangerous reminder of who she really is: a “too big to fail” parasite of finance capital and the war machine.
The Zionist slanders and attempts to impoverish Marc Lamont Hill must be answered by massive, determined action by everyone concerned with democracy.
By conservative estimate, the US has directly killed nearly half a million people, and doomed millions more, in just three of the countries it is attacking.
