Yes, we're somebody

So, I don't normally go in for political rhetoric, nor am I prone to soap-box preaching, but after watching the Wal-mart Documentary, I felt I should express something that has long been in my heart - we are losing the freedom to have Unions and to therefore negotiate with companies as equals.

For twenty years, in the early part of the last century, people fought and actually died so that American citizens could have the right to create unions, the purpose of which was to guarantee good wages, decent working conditions, and give us all some moderate leverage over our corporate masters. Now, that right is all but extinct.

Most people now can't even name a union, the purpose of a union, or name anyone they know that's in a union. Corporate America has made it seem like unionizing is immoral and undesirable. And, from their point of view that's very true. However, if we as a people do not exercise and flex that right to negotiate as equals with businesses, then it is a right that will wither and die, and we will be no better off than the mill workers of Victorian England, who lost hands, eyes, lives and limbs for mere pennies a day and with no hope for recourse. And, sadly, that's not as big an exaggeration as you might think.

At my present job, the few people I've ever heard talk about unions do so in a dead-whisper; no one dares to even suggest that people should unionize in current corporations. Yes, it's true that unions have earned bad reputations by becoming their own bureaucratic nightmares but that's true of just about any human institution, and is sort of inevitable. The actual right to group-negotiate is a hard won freedom that is not being employed, pursued, or reinforced.

Sadly, I'm reminded of the fact that our culture is, in many ways, backsliding into allowing fewer freedoms in the name and sake of global economy and greater profits. In some sense, the Dilbert comic strip (which I happen to love) is a sad commentary of our lives because it satirizes, and unfortunately in doing so validates, the fact that the people at the top of companies care nothing for those who work for them, but only of the "bottom line" and their shareholders.

In short, Americans have given up thinking we have the right to control our own work-lives. And it may well be, in x number of years from now, we will be no better off than people in other countries who can fired or harmed for presuming to have as many rights as a corporation.

Think about it.

ps. The pluralization of friends in the slogan is intended - I feel that friendship and unionization go hand-in-hand, because they're both something we do for both ourselves AND each other. Friendship is the first step in a collective identity.