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Caraway Organizing New Americans to Save the World

Speaking of impressions, consider the first impression Rebecca Zweig gets of South Dakota’s Queen City of the East:

As I drove into South Dakota in the warm aftermath of a bomb cyclone, miles of flooded fields gave way to a modest metropolis of bungalows and casinos tucked behind convenience stores. It’s a place that Kooper Caraway, the 28-year-old president of the local AFL-CIO, calls “a Republican utopia” [Rebecca Zwieg, “‘Organize or Die’: Kooper Caraway Ushers in a New Labor Movement,” The Nation, 2019.03.29].

Zweig didn’t come for the architecture or video lottery; she came to talk to the youngest central labor council president in the country about how he has rejuvenated labor organizing in Sioux Falls since his election last year:

Within a year, they rewrote their constitution, including an amendmentthat banned white supremacists and fascists from holding office in AFL-CIO-affiliated unions. They organized Sioux Fall’s first Native American Day parade and defeated a bill designed to strip university professors of their collective-bargaining rights. And they formed an International Solidarity Committee comprised entirely of immigrant and refugee union members. (Of the 32 local unions associated with the labor council, the largest by far is the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, whose membership is overwhelmingly immigrant, refugee, and people of color.) [Zweig, 2019.03.29]

While South Dakota’s leaders do all they can to make people from elsewhere feel unwelcome, Karaway’s union is helping new workers realize their stake in South Dakota and the global economy:

The new International Solidarity Committee equips incoming immigrants and refugees with their rights as workers and helps them organize into unions. “We have a lot of people from western and southern Africa,” Kooper told me, “and they have their traditional tribal relations that they’re bringing over here. Now they’re developing their own organizations inside the labor movement.”

The committee also educates American workers on labor issues elsewhere in the world. “To build that solidarity,” he said, and added that an emphasis on buying American-made products was a losing strategy.

“The largest corporations and the richest folks in the world don’t recognize borders and neither should the unions. If we implement a working-class solidarity that runs across all borders, there’s nowhere for the corporations to go” [Zweig, 2019.03.29].

For Caraway, helping workers, especially his generation, understand their power and their right to exercise it is a matter of survival:

Kooper paused and looked out to the damp landscape. “By the time we’d hypothetically be old enough to collect Social Security, we won’t be able to breathe the air or drink the water, and nothing will grow from the ground. We know that it’s organize or die” [Zweig, 2019.03.30].

The corporations are certainly organized, and their organization leads us to oppression and destruction. Caraway’s organization leads the common man to life and liberty. Keep up the good work, Kooper!

16 Comments

  1. jerry 2019-03-30 10:31

    The treatments of labor unions is nothing new for the Republican party. They are, after all, a party that stood shoulder to shoulder with a fellow called Adolph Hitler not so long ago and embraced what he stood for.

    ““The train arrived punctually,” a Christian Science Monitor report from Germany informed its readers, not long after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. “Traffic was well regulated” in the new Germany, and policemen in “smart blue uniforms” kept order, the correspondent noted. “I have so far found quietness, order, and civility”; there was “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.”

    As for all those “harrowing stories” of Jews being mistreated—they seemed to apply “only to a small proportion”; most were “not in any way molested.” Overall, the Monitor’s dispatch declared, the Hitler regime was providing “a dark land a clear light of hope.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-american-papers-that-praised-hitler

    See if you see the similarities between then and now. If it walks like a duck…and quacks like a duck… it is the new mantra of white Republican direction, can we cut to the chase and que the Q-Anon?

  2. o 2019-03-30 11:44

    “If we implement a working-class solidarity that runs across all borders, there’s nowhere for the corporations to go”.

    This has always been a missing element of “free trade.” So often a race to the bottom (line) fuels an exploitation of labor, safety, the environment in the quest of maximum profit for the owners/stock holders.

    Political parties have failed workers; all that is left are unions to embody the democratic ideal that the many ought to have a larger voice than the few.

  3. grudznick 2019-03-30 13:25

    Unions are dying because they are useless. Unions are bad, they are bad.

  4. Roger Cornelius 2019-03-30 13:33

    South Dakota republicans are bad, they are bad.

  5. o 2019-03-30 14:05

    Unions are dying because they are being hunted. Unions are good, they are good.

    What your bumpersticker reasoning omits who stands against unions, Grudz. Organized labor is bad to whom? Let’s follow the money of your answer to that one.

  6. grudznick 2019-03-30 14:07

    There is one good thing about unions. Their supporters’ goats are plentiful and easy to get.

  7. o 2019-03-30 14:49

    My dear Grudznick, as you dabble in demagoguery, it is not the goats of the opposition I worry for, but the bandwagon of the supporters. You may set out to get goats, but all too often lead processions.

  8. Roger Cornelius 2019-03-30 15:20

    Any South Dakota republican that thinks they can get this ole goat’s goat is as delusional as their leader, Donald Trump.
    The fact is that unions work and that is why capitalist are afraid of them.
    The simple fact remains, when workers belong to a union they earn more money and have better benefits then non-union workers.
    We should all want the best for American workers.

  9. o 2019-03-30 15:26

    Roger, as a STRONG union member and believer, I still see myself as a capitalist (obviously with a hearty mix of some socialism): I just disagree with the non-unionists and the 0.1% on how the immense wealth of capitalism ought to be distributed.

  10. Roger Cornelius 2019-03-30 15:40

    o, I enjoy throwing punches at capitalists from time to time to keep them on their toes.
    Clearly a mix of capitalism and socialism is needed to make America prosper, it amazes me the number of people don’t comprehend that and think we have to have one or the other.

  11. grudznick 2019-03-30 16:08

    grudznick is an enigma who loves a free breakfast but does enjoy capitalism. My good friend Gwynplaine agrees, and will be speaking on the topic tomorrow after my opening rant at the Conservatives with Common Sense breakfast.

  12. mike from iowa 2019-03-30 18:45

    Conservatives with common sense is likely to be found in the dictionary as exhibit A of the word oxymoron.

  13. Debbo 2019-03-30 22:29

    Jeremiah Murphy/Grudz, biggest liar on DFP, disparages unions, then lobbies for them. You can never believe anything Liar Murphy says. He’s just mean.

    Roger and O are right about unions. Unions and youth are our nation’s and planet’s best hope. It’s sure not greedy capitalists or big Liars like Murphy and Frantic Flaccid Fool.

  14. Richard F Schriever 2019-03-31 10:02

    o – this is where the old biblical saw about the “love of money” (emphasis MONEY) is the root of all evil. Money has become the predominant form in which people conceive of capital. Labor is a form of capital. Natural resources are a form of capital. Money is simply a measuring tool – it is not actually capital at all – yet the holders of money (banks and those with bank accounts) mistake that instrument for capital itself – beyond its utility as a measuring tool for adjudging the value of actual types of capital in a negotiation for trade. In brief – the yardstick ahs been mistaken for the yard. The problem is really one of a pervasive false perception.

  15. Jake Kammerer 2019-03-31 10:15

    The Lawyer’s Guild, & Chambers of Commerce (and others) are the ‘unions’ of the capitalists and they use them quite astutely to cast doubt and suspicion on labor,

  16. bearcreekbat 2019-03-31 11:09

    Jake’s characterization of the Lawyer’s Guild as an organization “to cast doubt and suspicion on labor,” is mistaken. See, e.g.,

    The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association (ABA) in protest of that organization’s exclusionary membership practices and conservative political orientation. They were the first US bar association to allow the admission of minorities to their ranks. The group sought to bring more lawyers closer to the labor movement and progressive political activities (e.g., the Farmer-Labor Party movement), to support and encourage lawyers otherwise “isolated and discouraged,” and to help create a “united front” against Fascism. (Emphasis supplied)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lawyers_Guild

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