On Disturbing the Natural Order
Today I am privileged to head to the Steelworkers Linden Hall Training Center in the highlands south of Pittsburgh. The actual training center is an “econologdge” type affair with classrooms and some of the best food, both for mind and body. It sets on the historic grounds of the Linden Hall Mansion, built by a Gilded Age Coal Baron and sustained by his Methodist widowed wife. The Mansion has been restored by the USW, is a national historic site and hosts tourists who get a glimpse of its fascinating history. (Got to check out the suicide shower). At this relic of the Robber Barons, I’m going there to get better at disturbing the natural order of things. Because that’s what union thugs do.

Adam Smith, the father of the capitalist system, was clear that he intended to use greed and exploitation as the engines of his economic system. Lesser known was his insistence that there had to be bumper blocks in place because unrestrained avarice and advantage-taking would lead to his economy destroying itself. Unions are part of thwarting the human impulses that Smith foresaw as necessary to balance his dog-eat-dog ideas. As I see it, the union activists’ job is to uphold the people’s needs in the face of the money-power that Adam Smith set in motion. At our best, we challenge the premise of his system and bring a sober assessment of its excesses.

The more education and training union activists have, the more we can do our jobs. So, we come to Linden Hall, and union training centers across the world, to learn how to be better. Better at communications, helping members navigate their rights, learning labor law, upholding a labor agreement, assuring workplace health and safety, how our legislative and political systems work, how our economy works, understanding how to run a Local Union and administer its funds and all those things that working people need to confront and get a fair share of our economy’s bounty. For two days, I’m going to learn how to get better at organizing people so they can exercise their collective power in their workplaces. In other words, to improve my ability to disrupt the seismic waves of corporate America. Having done this for almost fifty years now, it still is exciting to get with my co-trouble-makers and plot the success of working people.

Given the current fleecing of America’s working folks, the hoarding of the nation’s assets by Adam Smith’s acolytes, and the social dysfunction it has brought on, union activist education and training needs to up its game. It is a product with a growing demand. Polling shows that in unions current embattled position as less than 10% of the workforce, working people are again seeing union organizing as a weapon to win the economic battle. Not only has the image of unions improved, after decades of pummeling by the forces of wealth and power, but workers are newly energized to take on the boss. They’ve even invented a name for it. Striktober. People are withholding their labor and getting a fairer slice of their productivity. The nation’s greed-enablers are screaming that “no one wants to work anymore” as millions of people stay at home or decide now’s the time to change jobs. Take this job and shove it, is a big thing right now. And these long overdue ripples in the natural order are scaring the living shit out of those who thought all the restraints to the dark side their efforts had been nullified.

So off I go, like a happy camper, to add to my abilities to encourage working stiffs to stand up and push back. In my mind, there couldn’t be a better time. So “Smithies” out there, were arming up and coming for you. Because the natural order of things, in the long run, are not so natural after all…

igh 10-27-2021

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