Category: Labor & Environment

Quality as a Cultural Way of Life

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The posts below are my personal true goals in this seemingly pointless 30 year struggle with Corporate International. 

As anyone who actually had to endure my long winded posts could easily tell you, I believe in Quality (in Edwards Deming’s sense of the word) by Consensus and that it is the critical ingredient that is lacking in the modern corporation whose absence keeps us from making the vital switch that diverts the runaway death train of modern corporate capitalism from the washed out ecological bridge of quantitative exploitation of the Earth. 

Unions, union organizing, educational efforts, Board and other Title 29 charges with various Federal agencies, economic conflict in the forms of hard bargaining, militant grievance and arbitration enforcement of existing contracts, internal work actions, boycotts and, finally, all out strikes, are only a means to the reasonable end of stopping the greed and egos of the Corporate elite from killing off humanity entirely, along with countless other species as well.

The writings below are just part of my efforts over the past three decades to promote this notion of Quality as a cultural way of life, Quality by Consensus even, as the change we must make in order to empower nearly the whole of humanity to adapt our highly quantitative civilizations to complete sustainability before about 3/4’s of the worlds population has to die off in a single generation or two. This is the terrible vision I have carried. It haunts me as much as it does Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, Naomi Kline and hundreds of millions of others around the globe.

But to stop them, to overcome their nearly complete monopolies over natural resources, economic enterprise, wealth and capital, human capital, political parties and all forms and levels of government, all mainstream media outlets, and even the traditional religious and ideological systems that support the state, we have to somehow dry up their precious profits and smash through their thin facades of egotistical self-importance. Unions give us the only means of doing this without resorting to the unspeakable horror, widespread death and never-ending chaos of international civil war.

We must fight and we must begin now! 

Alone, peaceful demonstrations, passionate speeches, and even non-violent acts of civil disob are somply not going to get us there in time. The oligarchs are too entrenched , too entitled and too arrogant. The have so much influence on world governments that the term is no longer even an exaggeration. Through their corporations the control almost every aspect of human life.

If we are to stop their ecological crimes on all of humanity, at least without oceans of blood being spilled, we must convince those few million oligarchic families, that one tenth of 1% of the global population of planet Earth, that it is in their best economic self interest to change.

Otherwise even when the Great Human Die-Off begins, probably sometime in the next century, they won’t even notice the screams of those who will die violently by the tens of millions, or who die quietly in loneliness and apathy from disease by the hundreds of millions, nor the cries of the billions of starving children. They won’t even look up from their financial portfolios by which they measure their sad, and, in truth, nonexistent, sense of self worth. 

We must offer resistance now, for the very right of our descendants to even exist. We must fight determinedly without reservation or doubt, and we must fight now.

Not next year, or next month, or even next week. 

Time is a luxury we no longer have. It has all been squandered by our own indifference, self-absorption and our collective addiction to the material trinkets with which they feed our never ending need to consume.

But the young at least are beginning to come awake from the mind-numbing daze of the mass consumption drug. It is harder for them to ignore the price of our ecological relationships with life-giving Earth.

We all must join with them. We must form unions. We must strike. We must wake the Oligarchs, and their corporate executives pets, up from their own dangerous drug of insatiable greed at any human cost.

We must face them with COURAGE and SOLIDARITY. Otherwise our genetic lines will die out.

We, all workers on Earth, defined exceptionally broadly, that bottom 99% even, must find effective means of resistance. 

Means like solid, always-stick-together, stick-to-your-guns, kick-their-elite-little-rich-kid-asses, take-none-of-their-bullshit, UNIONS.

We must organize ourselves into these effective UNIONS. We must do so for our own sense of self respect, for our own material good, for the health and prosperity of our families, for their economic and educational futures, but most of all to switch the tracks on that runaway capitalist death train that will leave them no future at all if we don’t.

We all must ORGANIZE TO LIVE!

Repost: To the BWAY Workers from Southeast Asia

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This is a repost of an article I wrote on Sept 29. 2011 for my Asian coworkers

Having worked for so many years with all of you, I should by now know much more about the cultures and languages of my Vietnamese, and one Cambodian coworkers. To my shame, there is still much I need to learn and understand. However, as an anthropology student, I dare to believe that I have a little better understanding than many of my countrymen. Not only due to my genuine interest, but also because as an anthropology student I have studied different human cultures.

Here is what I do know. I know that you are among the most diligent, hard-working and conscientious people I have ever worked with. I know that, unlike most Americans today, you still value the extended family and still hold your ancestors in reverence. I realize that our Western social relations must sometimes seem rude and discordant to you. Westerners do not always value social balance and harmony as much as these are valued by your cultures

This lack of harmony and balance also extends to our Unions here in America. Here, Unions are not a part of the government. There is both good and bad side to this. On one hand, this means that Unions in the US have to be funded independently, since they are not subsidized by the state. This is why Unions in the US have to collect union dues from their members. It is a way to pay the expenses involved in representing Union members. In addition, in the USA Unions have no direct political control. There is no one to represent Labor in our presidential cabinets in the same way that the Leader of Vietnamese Labor is intended to represent Vietnamese workers on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But there is much good in this too. Here in America Unions must answer to their members, and not to the state machine.

Why would you want to join a Union here in the USA? First of all, in your own economic interests. Union workers tend to make about 25% more than non-union workers for comparable work in the same industries. Unions employ collective bargaining tactics in order to gain additional 1% to 2% in annual raises for their members. The same applies to negotiated benefits, such as healthcare coverage and retirement benefits, and others. These economic benefits of unionization outweigh the cost of union membership dues.

And what about other, non-economic reasons to join a union? We all remember the incident when one of our nozzle bowl operators was written up for trying do her duties, while repairing water cans at the same time. However, her own acting supervisor had approved her actions at that time. This was an unjust write-up, and that write up should not have been allowed to stand uncontested. In a union shop, at least any union shop that I was a part of, it would not have gone unchallenged.

Many of you have been subjected to verbal abuse by the line mechanics the company has put over you. Recently, one of these mechanics went too far and put his hands on an Asian employee. The company should have terminated this mechanic immediately given the requirements of the law on the matter. They did not. At a union facility, this would have not gone unaddressed. If grievances had been filed in response to many previous incidents, the company culture tolerant of abuse (sometimes with racial undertones) would have been checked. At the very least, the mechanic would have had to take an anger management course through the company’s Employee Assistance Program. As the result, a good mechanic, who is an asset to the company, would have received the help he clearly needed. Workplace violence would have been curtailed. But none of this took place. The hostile workplace culture was allowed to continue unchecked, with the company being as responsible for it as the individual involved. A Union would have insisted on healthy changes.

Finally, I want to share with you my strongest personal reason for believing in unions. Unlike many of my countrymen, I myself believe in honoring the elders, both the living and those who have crossed into the ancestor realm. My rituals are not the same as yours. But I do acknowledge the indisputable fact that I am the product of those who came before me. I do try to remember and honor my own ancestors, belligerent and semi-psycho “round-eyes” that many of them may have been. But even more important to me than these immediate ancestors are those who came long, long before. The “primitive” ancestors of all modern humanity. It is my belief that the understanding of the social wisdom, the strong sense of kin and community is the key to the survival of our descendants in the global post-industrial era. That our future lies in following the examples of a time when every man, woman and child was absolutely committed to the economic success of the whole of the people.

The economic technologies and methods of these peoples may have been simple. We have no hope of returning to them. To do so with our global population would require more than 1000 Earths. Even so, their methods of economic decision making by consensus within a small group, the social organization of these mostly forgotten Ancestors are vitally relevant to all of humanity, as we desperately seek to get to global economic sustainability for our own descendants. And we only have a few generations’ time have to get there, ore die out.

Already it is probably too late to save many places on Earth from the climatic changes industrialization is causing. Places like the Mekong Delta and the lower Mississippi Delta in southern Louisiana, as well as many other low-lying coastal regions all over the world. As global warning melts the icecaps and raises sea levels these places will flood. Even more devastating environmental changes, like the shift of the life-giving monsoons away from Vietnam, will come soon after, unless we quickly begin to change our industrial ways and our social methods of making economic decisions. We must return to the Quality by Consensus cultures of our ancestors.


Look at the example of post-World War II Japan. In the post-war economic devastation of that nation, the Japanese people, along with a few American business consultants (Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, most notably) had for a short time returned to consensus based of economic management. They had organized their businesses into continuous process improvement teams. This freed and empowered the workers to solve their own work place problems and diligently serve the needs of their customers. Unfortunately, by the late 1980s success would lead the business leaders and politicians of Japan back towards the Quantity by Command model of the rest of the corporate world. Total Quality would not live up to its promise in Japan either.

Still, this example does show us the way. But the international industries are not going to willingly lead us down this sensible path toward the consensus ways of the Ancestors. They are driven by the need for immediate profit. This makes them apathetic the fact that they are waging ecological war on their own descendants.


Unions are our best peaceful hope of forcing corporations to empower us with the Quality by Consensus approach, the social wisdom of mine and your ancestors. Unions are the way to undertake the small local changes that are required in order to reach industrial sustainability, to live our modern lives in harmony and balance with the Earth.

The price of our inaction is terrifying. It could total hundreds of millions of lives. We do not have the right to place this heavy burden solely on our descendants. We owe it to them to unite in this generation, and through Unions institute the required changes, so that our children and grandchildren will not have to face desolation and violence in the generations that follow.

Ultimately, this is why I believe in unions, both in America and all over the world. I hope my Asian coworkers will be able to relate to my passion and my concern for the future generation. And, being able to relate, I truly hope that when asked if you are willing to join a union here at BWAY, you will join me in this attempt to be worthy of our descendant’s veneration rather than of their contempt. We must try, with all that we are, to leave them a world worth inhabiting. This is our sacred duty as their Ancestors.

WHY-UNIONS September 20, 2011

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The Voice of the People is Heard

The survey went much as I had expected. Only 17 surveys were returned to me in favor of a Union here at BWAY. Four surveys were returned marked “No”.

I have long said that I would not try to force a Union down your throats here. I have done my best to educate you all but you choose not to hear. So I now keep my word to you.

Yesterday I turned in my two week notice, because I can not work in a place where I can make no meaningful contributions to greater Humanity. I do not wish to live in hopeless servitude. I have no desire to be a powerless victim to the greed driven whims of the BWAY Corporation. It just is not in my nature to quietly submit. I must find some place where I can make a meaningful difference.

No one should feel too sorry for me, however. On a personal level you have done me quite a favor by releasing me from my self-perceived duty here. Only your collective Voice could have ever done that.

Fifteen hundred miles away there is a fairly amazing little “roman” manager who honors me with the full-time gift of her willing submission. She is such a good girl in fact that she has endured a separation of a year and half, because she understood how important what I was trying to do here was to me. Being released from my duty here, it is now time for me to give her all that she has so long deserved and to reward her numerous and considerable sacrifices for my sake.

So I reckon I will be alright. Indeed, I can’t wait to be holding her again.

I am saddened for those who will remain here though, both hourly and management.

Those of you who are not salaried missed a golden opportunity to make your lives and your families lives better.

But those who lack the courage to stand up for themselves can only accept what they are given. And if the good ole boys manage to use their “influence” to skim a little bit more of that for themselves and rank and file workers are unwilling to do anything about it, then, quite frankly, they do deserve it.

Next week in the final BWAY edition of WHY-UNIONS we will consider the question of wage rates from top to bottom.  I have spent a bit more than a year accumulating this data from multiple sources, both current and former. The specific wages listed are estimates but I have great confidence that nearly all will be accurate within a few cents. There will also be a somewhat rougher estimate given of average weekly overtime hours worked.

This should give you all a fair indication of just how much has been “skimmed” over the years. But it is doubtful that you will ever choose to do anything about it.

Workers here must also realize that when they encounter unfairness, favoritism, nepotism, discrimination or verbal abuse in the workplace, they can now only blame themselves. Once again they either lacked the concern, or the courage, to fight to change things….to make them better.

In this BWAY hourly workers have something in common with management. It is also a decided lack of courage that binds our management team to this broken system. It is true that management cannot organize themselves into unions. They have to use more subtle forms of resistance. But their spirits have been thoroughly crushed as well. Indeed, the terms of their bondage to Corporate are even harsher than ours.

But if no resistance is ever given, how will the system ever be repaired?

So when Randy ends up in his “time out” chair, listening to some lesser man dictate how things will go in the Memphis plant, he likewise must know that it is his lack of will and courage that makes him deserve it.

Years ago Gil Lima told me “You know, the problem with Corporate America is that to them loyalty is a one-way street.”

I wanted to scream back at him, “You fool! Why can’t you see that means that the social contract is broken? They don’t deserve our continued loyalty. They deserve our Rebellion!”

But in truth I suspect Gil already knows this. Like so many others he just doesn’t know how to resist.

We all like to blame the media, the politicians, the lobbyists and, of course, the corporations, for an America that is rapidly declining. There is truth to all these claims, but at a deeper level these are also excuses. The truth is that we have lost the courage of the ancestors that built America into a great, freedom-loving nation in the first place.

Corporations dominate almost every aspect of our lives. From the banks and financial institutions, to the oil companies, to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, to the retail monopolists, to even our allegedly “democratic” governments we cannot escape corporate tyranny. And of course that also includes the great proportions of our lives that we spend toiling for whatever corporation we happen to work for.

Never in all of human history have we needed the courage to resist more. But instead, we can not be bothered to look up from our I-phones and Play Stations, or to interrupt our quest for that new big screen TV, that new Ford 150, or that bigger house in the suburbs, long enough to even notice what is going on. Our current economic system, the corporate culture of “Business as Usual,” is severely and rapidly overtaxing the Earth’s natural systems on which everything is ultimately based.

Resistance is essential. But everyone is too caught up in “me” to care. We all seem to be content to let the next generation worry about it. If that generation turns out to be as lazy, self absorbed and cowardly as our own, there is not going to be much hope for long-term human survival. We are quite simply going to let the corporations exterminate us through our own “me” obsessions.

Maybe unions are not the way. Maybe there is some other. But to do nothing under our current circumstances is to quietly accept the dying out of most of our lines of descent. Surely we can’t be that far gone.

The large scale capitalists know this all too. They believe their far greater material resources will allow their own descendants to survive while most of ours perish. They may well be right. By killing off billions there may be enough natural resources left for the descendants of the wealthy to survive.

But why is it in our own best interest to quietly accept this?

At any rate, I want to wish everyone here my personal best. I truly hope that you all have as rewarding lives as the limitations you put on yourselves will allow.

I bear no malice towards anyone, and I do regret that I have had to offend some in my quest to offer you the choice of a union.

Maybe, I am wrong. Maybe “good ole boy-ism” is more important than human freedom. But it will likely take a bullet to the skull to ever “convince” me.

Perhaps it will come to that one day. That is ok. It does not change my firm belief that men were born to be freedom-loving warriors, not corporate sheep being led to slaughter.

So I will head off to Utah to see if Polynesians, Mexicans and Mormons have any more will to resist than Southern blacks and whites and recent immigrants from Southeast Asia.

It may well be no different. And if so, I will try elsewhere. Somewhere on this planet there must be some people who are willing to do what must be done for our long term survival.

Anyway, I wish you all the best of luck.

WHY UNIONS September 29, 2011

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To the BWAY Workers from Southeast Asia

I am ashamed of my ignorance of the cultures and languages of my Vietnamese coworkers and of our one little Cambodian. Many years ago I studied Anthropology, or the study of human culture, so perhaps I know a little more than most of my countrymen. But to have worked for so many years with you all, I should by now know much more.

I do know that you are among the most diligent, hard-working and conscientious people I have ever worked with. I know that unlike most Americans today you still value the extended family and still hold the ancestors in reverence. I know to you all of our social relations must sometimes seem rude and discordant. Westerners do not always value social balance and harmony the way Easterners do.

This pattern of contentious social relations also extends to our unions here in America. Unions are not part of the State here. There is both good and bad in this. On one hand it means unions here have to be independent and free standing. This is why unions here have to have union dues from their members, so they can be able to pay the expenses involved in representing their members in collective bargaining and contract enforcement. Unions here are not subsidized by the State.  Neither do they have direct political control. There is no one to represent Labor in our presidential cabinets in the same way that the Leader of Vietnamese Labor represents Workers on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But there is much good in this too, because in America unions must answer to their members, not to the State.

Generally unions are more effective here, at least in monetary terms.  It is true that members must pay union dues, but it also true that union members in America, after having been organized for a while, tend to make about 25% more than non union workers doing comparable work in the same industries. Little by little, the 1% to 2% more in annual raises that unions typically achieve in collective bargaining eventually adds up. The same is even truer in terms of negotiated benefits such as healthcare coverage and retirement benefits. These economic benefits of unionization soon come to outweigh the cost of union dues many times over.

Other reasons for unions are non-economic. You will all remember when one of our nozzle bowl operators was written up for trying do her duties and do can repair at the same time. She had been strongly encouraged in this by her “acting” supervisor. This was unjust, and that write up should not have been allowed to stand uncontested. In a union shop, at least any union shop that I was a part of, it would not have been.

Many of you have been subjected to verbal abuse by the line mechanics the company has put over you. Recently one of these mechanics finally went way too far and put his hands on an Asian employee. The company had but little choice but to terminate this mechanic given the requirements of the law on the matter. But if a union had been in place it might not have had to come to that. If grievances had been filed in those many previous incidents, a company culture tolerant of abuse, sometimes with racial undertones, might have been checked. It is even quite possible that these grievances could have lead to the mechanic’s getting the help in anger management that he needed, probably through the company’s Employee Assistance Program, so that a very good mechanic, whose loss is going to seriously hurt our collective efforts to serve our customers, would not have had to have been lost. Nearly as much blame for that incident belongs to the workplace culture of the company as it does to the individual involved. A union could have helped them here.

Finally I must tell you my strongest personal reason for believing in unions.

Unlike many of my countrymen, I also do my best to honor both the living elders and those who have crossed into the ancestor realm. My methods are not quite the same as yours. There are no shrines in my home, nor do I typically remember the death dates of my immediate ancestors as most Asians do. Still I do acknowledge the undisputable fact that I am the product of those who came before me, and I do try to remember and honor them, belligerent and semi-psycho “round-eyes” that many of them were. But even more important to me than these immediate ancestors were those who came long, long before, the “primitive” ancestors of not only me, but of all modern humanity. It is my belief that the understanding of the social wisdom and strong sense of kin and community of these long forgotten ancestors is the key to the survival of our descendants in the global post-industrial era.

My rituals in remembering these Ancestors are simple. They usually involve no more than finding a quiet, natural spot in some forest or field, of making offerings of tobacco to the spirits of the place and to the six cardinal directions in the way of certain Native American peoples. And then I will sit and allow my senses to be filled with the natural things around me. Then I seek out the Ancestor’s memories and try to “remember” what it must have been like before man became “civilized” and greedy.  What must it have been like to live in a society were no man had the right to tell others what to do, but where every man, woman and child was absolutely committed to the economic success of the whole of the People, even unto the death.

The economic technologies and methods of these peoples were very simple. We have no hope of returning to them. To do so with our global population would require more than 1000 Earths. Even so, their methods of economic decision making by small group consensus and the social organization of these mostly forgotten Ancestors are vitally relevant to all of humanity as we desperately seek to get to global economic Sustainability in the few generations we have left to get there.

Already it is probably too late to save many places on Earth from the climatic changes industrialization is causing. These places include the Mekong Delta and the lower Mississippi Delta in southern Louisiana, as well as many other low-lying coastal regions all over the world. As global warning melts the icecaps and raises sea levels these places will flood. Even more devastating environmental changes, like the shift of the life-giving monsoons away from Vietnam, will come soon after unless we quickly begin to change our industrial ways and our social methods of making economic decisions. We must return to the Quality by Consensus cultures of the original Ancestors.

Karl Marx glimpsed this evolutionary truth more than 160 years ago. Then he promptly confused everyone from Lenin to Mao, from “Che” Guevara to “Uncle Ho”, by calling this return to the social structures of the Ancestors by the ridiculous label of “the ‘Dictatorship’ of the Proletariat” and by insisting that the only way to get there was through socialist and communist “stages” that could only come about through bloody revolution.

A hundred years later in post-World War II Japan, the Japanese people, along with a few American business consultants, Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran most notably, would prove Marx at least potentially wrong. In the post-war economic devastation of that nation, the Japanese would, without knowing it, return for a short while to consensus based methods of the original Ancestors. They would organize their capitalist companies into collections of continuous process improvement teams that freed and empowered workers to solve their own work place problems and diligently serve the needs of their customers. Unfortunately, however, by the late 1980s success would lead the business leaders and politicians of Japan back towards the Quantity by Command model of the rest of the corporate world. Total Quality would not live up to its promise in Japan either.

Still, this example does show us the way. But the international industrial corporatists, whether calling themselves communists or capitalists, are not going to willingly lead us down this sensible path toward the consensus ways of the Ancestors.  Their unending Greed blinds them and makes the apathetic to even the fact that they are waging ecological war on their own descendants. They are unwilling to change, even though they know that great social change must come or the Great Mother Earth is going to exact a terrible vengeance on all of mankind.

Unions are our best peaceful hope of forcing them to Empower us with Quality by Consensus, the social wisdom of those original Ancestors, so that we may make all the untold millions of local changes all over the world in order to reach industrial Sustainability and be able to live our modern lives in harmony and balance with the Earth

In the end it may yet have to come to Marx’s vision of world wide revolution, but the blood price of that now would be so great as to defy his 19th Century comprehension, likely a price of hundreds of millions of lives.  If we can, we owe it to not put such a horrible burden on our descendants. We owe it to them to unite in this generation and give peaceful resistance to the international corporatists through our unions, so that they may not have to give desperate and violent resistance in the generations that follow.

Ultimately this is why I believe in unions, both in America and all over the world. I hope my Asian coworkers will forgive these grandiose ideas and assertions and my great presumption in making them.

Even so, I do hope that when soon asked if they would be willing to join a union here at BWAY, my brothers and sisters from Southeast Asia will join me in this attempt to be worthy of our descendant’s veneration rather than of their contempt. We must try, with all that we are, to leave them a world worth inhabiting. This is our sacred duty as their Ancestors.

WHY UNIONS? August 22, 2011

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A Special Note to my White, Southern Brethren

 

Nathan Malcolm Nichols enlisted in the 3rd Tennessee Infantry in July of 1861. He was 15 years old. His would not be a particularly glorious military career. Almost immediately he would come down with some camp disease, probably measles, and be on medical leave for several months. It is unclear if he was back with the 3RD when they surrendered at Fort Donaldson in February of 1862. If so, he would have spent the next seven months at the infamous Yankee prison camp, Fort Douglas, until the regiment was paroled in October of that same year.

It is known that he was back with the re-organized 3rd TN by the battle of Chickasaw Bayou in December of 1862, when Sherman’s first attack on Vicksburg was bloodily repulsed. In early 1863 he would be with the 3rd at Port Hudson and would come under bombardment from Yankee gunboats. In May of 1863, he would participate in the rather fool-hearty attack of Gregg’s brigade on a full Yankee division at the battle of Raymond in a failed attempt to relieve the siege of Vicksburg. There the 3rd TN would lose about a third of its strength and Nathan would be among the casualties, seriously wounded and captured. He would spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war.

Once the war was over, he would make the long journey home on foot and would again take up residence in middle Tennessee.  But reading between the lines of our family lore one gets the impression that he was probably caught up in the unofficial war between Nathan Bedford Forrest’s boys and the state “blue-belly” militia of Reconstruction Governor William “Parson” Brownlow.  There are family stories of him having to leave several middle Tennessee communities for things like “getting drunk” and shooting up into the rafters of a black church during Sunday service, and for killing two men “in self-defense.”

Eventually, he wound up in Dyer County in Northwestern Tennessee. His third son, Alfred, a local deputy sheriff, would also have a reputation as a bad-ass. He would die violently of a shotgun blast in 1916 in a rather stupid ongoing dispute with a neighbor. Thus, my grandfather, Harry Edward Nichols, would become the man of the household at the tender age of 11.

Granddaddy was pretty salt of the earth, a simple sharecropping farmer for most his life, until his eldest son, a 19 year old sergeant, was killed in Korea. The government insurance money, along with his own little bit of savings, would at last allow Granddaddy to buy his own little 200 acre farm on the South Fork of the Forked-Deer River, just a few miles south of Dyersburg. I would spend much of my childhood on that farm learning what it is to be a Southern lad.

Now the point of all this family history is this: Even though I don’t typically wear camouflage or watch Nascar, I reckon I am as Southern as any of you. I also figure that gives me as much right as any man to say what I am now going to say to you.

I look around this New Industrial South and everywhere I look a see whites sucking up to Corporate America.  I see them trying to be the “overseer” class of the Yankee factory managers. I see them now loving the same Republican Party, still representing that same old New England money, against which our ancestors fought so desperately.

I see them happily spending half their paychecks at our homegrown “scallywag” corporation of Walmart, even though this company has economically devastated nearly every single small town in the South and driven thousands of small Southern businesses out of existence.

Finally, I see Southern whites hating unions, because unions give all members, regardless of race or gender, equal voice, and because unions interfere with their slimy efforts to cut their little personal deals with the company at the expense of their coworkers.

Sometimes it seems that all that we have preserved of the Old South is the worst of it, the racism and the tendency of working class whites to suck up some rich white man so that they can feel superior to someone. It really is fairly pathetic.

So what happened to us my brothers? Where did the freeborn Southern warrior of Thomas Jefferson’s and Andrew Jackson’s day go? What happened to our values of serving our community whether in war or in a local barn raising? What happened to banding together to addresses the threats to our communities, particularly those posed by industrial Yankee capitalists who are even now represented by firms like our own Madison-Dearborn.

If we yet believe in Jefferson’s vision of a common man’s democracy then we have to believe in unions, because without them we have no practical means of resisting the overwhelming economic power of the corporatists and their political puppets.

You all know well that internationally the corporatists have been waging economic war on the middle and working classes. They have been doing so for more than thirty years now but in last decade or so their efforts have intensified greatly. Their Greed knows no bounds. They have already done great damage to the global economy and now they even threaten the natural processes of the Earth from which all human economies ultimately derive.

I tell you my brothers and sisters that there has never been a more appropriate time and place than right here and right now for that irrepressible Spirit of Southern Rebellion.

By the way, that little “Tea Party” that many of you support does not a Revolution make. Nearly every single one of those candidates has voted consistently with the corporatists, just like the neo-cons of the Bush Era. They sided with the insurance and pharmaceutical companies in the Healthcare debate, They refused to close the tax loopholes that highly profitable companies like Exxon-Mobile use to pay zero taxes. They support the “free trade” policies that continue to ship millions of American jobs oversees and that have led to the plant closings of 50,000 American factories in the last decade alone. With nearly 20 million Americans out of work they have not even passed a single jobs bill since they took control of the House in 2010. They have done nothing about our crumbling infrastructure, and they have made sure that the wealthy are not asked to make any sacrifices at all to settle the debt crisis. They have put all of the burden for fixing that massive corporatist screw up on the backs of the working and middle classes.

It is going to take a lot more to change things than such paper political “revolutions”. It is going to take real grass roots commitment, a willingness to step up and solve our own problems, and the courage to stand up to the corporatists in every single American factory or other commercial enterprise that remains.

Right here in the New Industrial South we should be leading the world in resistance to our corporatist oppressors.  We should be should be showing the rest of the world how to fight. We should be forming ourselves into unions, or worker confederacies, if you prefer, in order to fundamentally change these corporations from the inside out, so that we can offer our Southern descendants some kind of future.

Do you no longer have it in you my brothers? Have you all become the tame little lap dogs of Corporate America?

It may be a vain hope, but nonetheless I ask each of you, as you consider this Union vs. non-union question, to remember the sacrifice and courage of our Southern ancestors and what they really stood for.

The rightful response to our oppression by the industrial corporatists is still the same as it always was. It remains unending Defiance across the generations, even against seemingly impossible odds.

At least that way we do not have to sacrifice the few things the Yankee Industrialists were never able to steal from us, our Southern Heritage, Honor and Pride.

WHY UNIONS – December 7, 2010 Issue

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On Legal Maneuvers

By David Nichols

As you all know, in late October I filed a charge against the company for illegally interfering with my right to distribute Union literature on non-work time and in non-work areas. As these things go it is a relatively small charge. Moreover, I do believe that the company has clearly received the message I intended to send by filing the charge in the first place.  They know now that any effort to break, bypass, or otherwise ignore the National Labor Relations Act in the future will be fiercely contested.Read More »

Why We Must Fight

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Why We Must Fight: The International Corporation’s Betrayal of Humanity

By: DAVID NICHOLS

Let me start with this little disclaimer. The opinions I am about to express here are not yet generally accepted in the Labor Movement, However, as more and more environmental awareness comes to the general public, it is, of course, beginning to affect the views of union membership and should eventually be reflected in Labor’s goals and objectives, in Union leadership, in bargaining and organizing strategies and in overall Union tactics towards socio-economic change.Read More »