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Cast Your Vote in ‘Turn Around America’ Video Contest |
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The 12 finalists in the AFL-CIO’s “Turn Around America Online Video Competition“ have been selected. Now you can pick the winner of the contest’s Our America Award.
The dozen finalists from around the country grabbed their cameras and harnessed their creativity to answer the question: How do we “Turn Around America” in this time of a failing health care system, stumbling economy, stagnant wages, disappearing jobs and an endless war? How do we go from the wrong track to the right direction?
Click here to see the entries of the 12 finalists and then cast your vote for the video that you believe best answered the question. Votes will be counted through 5 p.m. EDT on Thursday, June 19. All winners will be announced June 24.
Your votes will select the Our America Award. That video will be featured on the AFL-CIO website and in videos and rallies throughout the summer as part of the AFL-CIO initiative to “Turn Around America.” The mobilization will feature major events in battleground states and build grassroots momentum to elect leaders who will fight for health care, good jobs and an economy that works for all.
The idea was inspired by a question from retired steelworker Steve Skvara last summer to the candidates at the AFL-CIO presidential forum. Skvara asked: “What’s wrong with America and what will you do to change it?”
A panel of judges, including representatives from the worlds of labor, film, stage, documentaries, comedy and television, along with Skvara, will choose a national winner and a young activist winner in the video contest.
Go ahead, take a look at the finalists and vote.
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Dual-answer whenever American labor wakes up: 1) sector-wide labor agreements (collective-collective bargaining: the only answer to the race to the bottom) and, I think, 2) revolving (like every four years) union certification and RE-certification elections in every workplace (the only way to keep some union leaders permanently on their toes I am afraid – no need to fear decertification with sector-wide agreements: non union firms are forced to work under conditions negotiated by union terms).
The industrial revolution created the opportunity for BOTH ownership and labor to bargain as large units. The middle years of the twentieth century represented the high tide of collective bargaining for America labor — perhaps because the kind of rough work (factory, warehouse, truck driving) that constituted the core of our economy then CLUSTERED mostly HIGH TESTOSTERONE male workers (one thinks of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters) to do labor’s core bargaining (and politicking).
As those information economy bells broke up that tough old gang of Jimmy’s — nothing replaced it as a bargaining counterweight to ever more competitive ownership — in America. In Europe, the over regulation and over protection of labor that was part of the social contract for the first decades after WWII — as a trade off for allowing more profit to be reinvested into production to speed rebuilding — has actually overstayed its usefulness leading to two-tier over protection/under protection labor structures in some European nations (which may last until too many people find themselves on the lower tier, the way human nature works).
As Pogo might say: We have met the enemy and he is us — not the greedy corporations or their Republican slaves who are just doing what they are supposed to be doing: being greedy. 50% of America’s private sector workforce may wish they could unionized — but they mostly lack any sense of the mandatory urgency to do so; or of the unnaturalness of the hurdles manufactured by the current legal scheme under which they may supposedly unionize.
Reconstituting American labor’s bargaining power under modern (lower testosterone workers, higher testosterone ownership) conditions can only be accomplished via a bargaining power multiplier used by labor literally all over the world, almost universally in some form in the better paying OECD nations: sector-wide labor agreements (A.K.A., “collective-collective” bargaining).
Sector-wide just backed WalMart’s 88 big-boxes out of Germany because their business model didn’t work when they had to pay the same as everyone else. (Unfortunately America’s WalMart workers do not a price break on housing, real estate or automobiles produced by higher paid workers.)
At the least America can adopt France’s and French-Canada’s sector-wide “light” wherein everybody working in the same geographic locale does NOT have to work under one commonly negotiated contract (German version) but non-unionized firms MERELY have to abide by the contracts worked out with unionized firms.
A force-multiplying concomitant might be MANDATORY certification elections and RE-certification elections at every workplace every so many years (four?). This would ensure economic democracy American style (fairly balanced, free labor market) while preventing union leadership from ever getting entrenched and out of touch (the most often heard complaint about unions and the most often made explanation for hesitating to unionize).