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So Many of Us
by Sudhama Ranganathan
Thursday, Apr. 14, 2011 at 8:12 AM
uconnharassment@gmail.com (email address validated)
Americans watch our children go off to war. We watch the dreams of home ownership disintegrate in our hands like wet paper. We watch the gap between the wealthy and ourselves widen and try to keep saying it that way, as by doing so it makes it sound less like we’re getting poorer somehow. We watch our children have less access to quality education – the one thing we know will give them the kinds of futures we might have had.
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So we wait and watch hoping the politicians will help us out. One side says they will help us by being on the side of the majority of us – the middle and lower income classes here in America. Yet when union busting is taking place all over the country what is the national leadership of the party supposed to be “protecting us” doing?
Where are the national crusades to get people to come out and protest? Where are the national drives? The nation gave them a super majority and what did they do with it? They spent an entire year on a single issue. That isn’t even expected to go into effect until 2014 and even they admit it’s flawed. Why a whole year?
The other party told us that by rolling back regulations, cutting government spending and passing tax breaks we would be better off and more prosperous. They told us the wealthy would become wealthier and that would trickle down to us… yeah… right. We waited for them too and what was the result of that? We watched our economy tank and set off ripples around the world.
Financially we aren’t expected to fully recover for years. In the end that very party had to pass a huge financial spending package designed to help out the wealthy on Wall Street. It bailed out the very sector responsible for the mess through its own reckless behavior. It bailed out people responsible for giving loans to people they knew could not pay them off, then bundling those debts into bonds stacked into flimsy towers of tranches just waiting to teeter over all the while knowing no matter what they were doing was in the end protected by tax dollar funded insurance. They seemed to have just gotten richer. Where was our insurance?
They got their bailout and were the first place in the nation to see good recovery financially. Yet three and a half years later and jobs are still a problem. Jobs will come back sooner or later; the problem is the emphasis of the response. The government obviously had the everyday people and ordinary Americans boxed in as last priority. Here we are still waiting for jobs to come around.
Again it comes back to unions. The way a great many of our parents went from lower incomes to middle incomes and even higher was through manufacturing. With manufacturing and other blue collar sectors came unions. Those unions were responsible for the American way of life we know today. They didn’t invent products or technology. They helped us afford the way of life we call our own. Without unions our children would still be working 14 hour days in environments we wouldn’t allow our pets in today.
They helped to level the playing field for all Americans, and minorities were no exception - including people of color. It still is, and the loss of unions will affect them especially harshly. “Without union leadership and protection, many people of color—with particular historical emphasis on African Americans—would not have accessed the middle class. Black workers fought hotly contested, deadly fights for access to unions in order to secure basic protections and economic equity. The successful unionization of integrated workplaces over the last 140 years not only increased the wages of African Americans—who were otherwise making nickels to white workers dollars—but it also raised the overall floor for anti-discriminatory labor standards in hiring and benefit distribution. African-American workers collectively leveraged their arduous labor in exchange for safer conditions and better compensation by forming and joining unions— gaining standard protections historically denied to American workers descended of America's enslaved.
“What gains African Americans have made through union protection and collective bargaining aren't as accessible for other groups because of diminishing unionization. On one hand, many Latinos, who have been in the United States for generations, have been able to leverage the same gains as their African-American counterparts by joining unionized workforces. On the other, as established and newer Latino communities continue to grow in the United States, many of the 23 million Latinos presently in the workforce stand a different, lower chance for middle-class means than they did in the past.
“For new Americans, such as recent Latino immigrants and their first-generation American children, the concurrent decrease in unionization rates, the rise in Latino workforce growth, and Hispanic over-representation in low-wage work spells peril. The hard-fought access to unions that improved the economic standing for African-American workers could afford the same opportunities to immigrants and their children. In the absence of unions' protective force, however, transient workers searching for immediately available work signal to predatory employers that they are economically vulnerable and desperate.
“In addition to having fewer economic levers, Latinos in the United States are less likely to have college degrees than white and African-American workers, and are crowded out of the increasingly college degree-based sector of good jobs. Where unions lower wage inequalities for workers without college degrees, the steady decline of unionization rates make Latino workers increasingly vulnerable in the quest for fair and beneficial employment.” (http://www.minoritynews.net/the_importance_of_unions_for_workers_of_color)
Of course for all of us - regardless of race - unions helped provide families more than lives as just cattle with more developed brains. All Americans were able to move up into better positions, were able to educate themselves and secure a better future for their children. Unions went overboard in some areas and most have been willing to admit this since the recession and work out solutions more amenable to present circumstances.
While we watched from the sidelines, waiting for action neither party has been doing the kind of work needed to help us close the income gap. Truth is it’s a gap that is widening for so many of us – white, black, Latino - whatever. This nation has not seen things get better we have seen slicker car salesmen try to keep telling us things are fine. In the meantime collectively our kids have dropped in academic competency and more and more of our good jobs go over seas through currency manipulation deals struck to keep friends during the cold war that are still in place.
With so many of us whatever our religion, race, ethnicity two parties simply cannot keep pace with our needs and that is evidenced in where we are now. At this point it almost seems they shoot themselves in the foot on purpose depending on the race so the other guy wins to keep the peace. But, that’s not American peace – it’s merely in their interest.
“I’m all for you just hold on another two to four years” and “trickle down from our mansions to you” policies have failed us. Jobs will return, but without protections and a better quality of people looking out for us, what will those jobs be as opposed to what they could be if we had more diversity in our representation and more ways to have our many views represented? What will happen next time? Why don’t we demand more security for ourselves and our children? Don’t we deserve that?
To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com
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