Unions Fight for Us All

by Tula Connell, Mar 26, 2006

Remember the 34,000 New York City transit workers who went on strike last December?
 
They have long been back on the job and are working out details on a contract agreement.
 
Writing in Newsday, Gene Carroll, the director of the Union Leadership Program at Cornell University, reminds us what they—and their union, Transport Workers Union Local 100—were fighting for. And as Carroll sees it, they were fighting for all America’s workers.

I see the transit workers carrying out the historic mission of a labor union. Looking closer, I see them acting as a countervailing power in the struggle for economic and social justice—not just to protect the interests of their dues-paying members but to sound the alarm that the general interest of the vast majority of all New Yorkers, and the vast majority of Americans, is at stake.

What’s at stake is fundamental not just to achieving the American dream but to everyday survival: affordable health coverage, retirement security—and jobs.

The struggle of the transit workers is really about the most important domestic issue facing American society: how to maintain jobs that provide a wage to live on and raise a family, and how to provide a decent and secure health insurance and retirement plan. 

Together with their union, the workers “join and fight as an independent social force made up of members who are aware, informed, militant and motivated. They’re doing their job.”
 
Check out Carroll’s full editorial.

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