Speaking out for American labor

In July, almost 250 workers from eight states gathered in Butte to attend a labor school. They came to learn, and to teach, how to lift the voices of working people and rebuild the middle class.

They walked in the footsteps of workers who more than 100 years ago migrated to Butte to work in the mines with the hope of a better life. Those miners ended up fighting the Copper Kings (mine owners) for the basic right to human dignity.

Today’s workers — young, old, native, immigrant, blue-collar and professional — gathered to stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and continue the fight for a decent living.

In the early 1900s, workers fought for fairness by holding public protests and work stoppages. The union contract was the solution to this strife through the creation of a written commitment that workers and owners would talk — and listen — to one another across the negotiating table and come to good faith solutions. We are re-living history.

The American working class has returned to its roots. The summer of 2013 saw the largest working class protests in U.S. history. In the absence of effective “rules of engagement” that ensure workers have the freedom to be heard, work stoppages have again become the only leverage workers have to achieve justice.

All over the U.S. including in Missoula, workers from McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Taco Bell are protesting low wages. Car wash workers along both coasts walked off the job over low wages, too. Wal-Mart workers walked off en masse in 100 U.S. cities, with 30,000 community supporters alongside.

Workers have also been locked out of their jobs by employers making huge profits that want to pay less. In North Dakota and Minnesota, 1,300 of our neighbors were locked out at American Crystal Sugar for over a year. Longshoremen on the West Coast — the people who load cargo ships — have been locked out since February by foreign corporations.

The “Corporate Kings” have replaced the Copper Kings. Their names are different, but they’re driven by the same greed. Their appetite for wealth has no boundaries, and they abide by no rules. They simply buy the political and judicial systems to assure the laws that once protected workers are weak or unenforceable.

They use their wealth to make laws that expand their power, like the ruling in 2010 that declared “corporations are people,” which allows corporate money to pour into public elections, and the overturn of Montana’s Corrupt Corporate Practices Act of 1912. This law was passed by voters in response to the attempt by one of the Copper Kings to literally purchase the votes needed to be a senator.

With no limits and unlimited resources, corporate kings get politicians elected that pledge to do their bidding. All of the good laws we have are really only as strong as the next “bat crap crazy” legislature or the next run-away Congress. Workers must remain vigilant.

This year, the AFL-CIO is opening up membership to all workers and community groups. If we are going to change the world, we need to have a big army and a lot of ideas. It is a historic new path for organized labor and I’m very excited about it. No worker will ever have to go without help again just because they don’t have a union contract on the job.

You see, we believe your family should have a decent chance. If you believe that, too, unions have been your ally for generations, and we will continue to be for many more. Just like the old mining families of Butte who ended up renting space in boarding houses instead of buying homes and sent their kids to work instead of school, many workers today are facing the same choices.

Eventually the injustices become too great, workers gather together, form unions and start the work of balancing the scales of wealth and power. We all deserve respect, a reasonable standard of living, a quality education, job safety and the right to retire rather than work until our dying breath. Together, bound in solidarity for a common cause, we can make the dream of a better life a reality.

Al Ekblad is the executive secretary of the Montana State AFL-CIO.