UNION RIGHTS, Mel Packer, April 2010

Unions, the organizations that brought us the weekend, an end to child labor, paid vacations, sick days, workers compensation laws, retirement...need I say more?

Yes, it’s true, some union “leaders” no longer view their role as “servants” of their members but instead as life-time leaders and directors of the membership who are entitled to special privileges. And while it may be true that some unions function in a less than democratic way, there are plenty of others which encourage full democracy in their practices and fully support workers rights over corporate profits.

I will continue to support, as I always did during my years as a Teamtster truck-driver and as one of the founders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, workers’ rights to form unions, collectively oppose corporate abuse, and the right to strike both in public and private industry.

I believe that democratically run unions are one of our main barricades against corporate abuse and that every effort to weaken unions is a blow against all of us who work for a living and serves only to aid those who have already stolen the nation’s wealth from those of us who helped to create such wealth.

As I write this, we are mourning the deaths of over 25 coal miners who perished in a mine that has been repeatedly and systematically labeled, fined, and recognized as a dangerous mine rife with safety problems. When our unions were stronger, that mine would have been on strike a long time ago and those failures would have been corrected or no profits would have been made. Instead, corporations have weakened our unions, decreased the power of those agencies that regulate such mines, and killed those miners.

We need to restore the power of unions or many more of us will die.