In the past workers formed unions to protect their conditions and to try to improve them. No doubt there have been bitter struggles where the union was at the forefront of those struggles. However, now-a-days, unions are big business, multi-nationals, and though they shout for change, they don't want things to change too much. They are doing very well thank you, with their fat salaries and expense sheets, making it all the more likely that they will compromise, and sell the workers short. Because of this most workers now feel they have to fight on several fronts, and take on the might of that corrupt alliance of power and wealth, the state, the corporate world, and the big unions. New methods of organising are necessary, and are developing, at ground level, in the work place, and in the community.
Mistreated by Movistar and abandoned by their unions, telephone
technicians take matters in their own hands — and occupy their
employer’s headquarters.
Read the full article HERE:Words of cynicism and distrust are repeatedly heard by activists of the country’s countless social movements, whether it is the excluded and isolated Movistar-Telefónica strikers, the powerful and popular PAH platform of indebted mortgage-holders and evictees, or just ordinary people who see the union movement as but one more player in capital-P politics — even to the extent that they form part of the hated casta, the ruling establishment.How nuanced, fair and widespread these sentiments are may be debatable and unknowable, but it is clear that the old high-level negotiations, the growing distance between workers and their union representatives, together with the bureaucratization and the awkward arrangements of public funding, have made people turn away from the traditional labor movement to develop alternative ways of pushing for social justice and equality.
