I come from a long line of union workers.
My grandfather was a mailman and president of the Letter Carriers Union. My father traveled the world advocating for the union movement. I’m lucky enough to have three union pensions and unions gave me health plans and income to buy homes and raise kids. I built a multi-million dollar business that signed union contracts and provided thousands of jobs for union workers.
What we’ve replaced all this with is bullshit. Under stress it collapsed and stranded millions of people without health care or income. That’s just poor business anyway you look at it.
I miss the days when we had a strong, vibrant economy with serious opportunities for earning. That’s not what we’ve invested in the last 20-years.
It’s not just unions we willfully gutted. We gutted royalty from intellectual property. We gutted savings plans. We depressed wages against rising costs. We invested in debt, not wealth.
Our current business practices make no business sense to me. Our workers are not just workers, they’re consumers. Investing in workers wealth is how we built the solid core of the great American economy. We’ve been cruising on that accumulated wealth for the last 20-years, but there’s no gas left in the tank.