‘Which Side Are You On, Boys?’
Is there a wave of nostalgia for the 1930s? I wouldn't have thought so, at least not until the Republicans of Michigan passed the bucket of anti-union legislation last week.
Is there a wave of nostalgia for the 1930s? I wouldn’t have thought so, at least not until the Republicans of Michigan passed the bucket of anti-union legislation last week. The procedure they used to pass “right-to-work” was pretty sneaky: no hearings, no public readings, voting by a lame-duck legislature and signature by a governor who had given the impression that such doings and law were not part of his agenda.
I was surprised at what Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, and his boys did. I was even more surprised when I found myself humming “Which Side Are You On?” — Florence Reece’s labor anthem of 1931.Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1931, the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners, who hired the local sheriff to break the union and a few heads in the process. The sheriff and his imported thugs forced their way into her house, looking for Sam. This is just a bit of what she wrote after her husband escaped out the back door:“Come all you good workers“Good news to you I’ll tell“Of how the good old union“Has come in here to dwell “Which side are you on boys?© 2012 UNIVERSAL UCLICK
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Volkswagen and the United Auto Workers are working toward labor harmony with union representation at VW’s Chattanooga plant. So a right-wing anti-union group is mounting the fight that VW doesn’t want to wage, fearing that success by the UAW could give unionization momentum in the "right-to-work" South.
A video that shows Steven Crowder getting punched in the face and threatened with gun violence in the midst of a right-to-work protest in Lansing, Mich., may have been heavily edited.
Washington has a way of focusing the nation’s attention on tactical games over partisan maneuvers that are symptoms of a few really big problems. But we almost never get to debate or even discuss the big problems because the tactical games overwhelm everything else.
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