May Day: Fight for Workers’ Values
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Today as we celebrate May Day and the birthday of legendary labor advocate Mother Jones, workers and other progressives must think about how we use our values to build a struggle for human sustainability, including a sustainable environment, sustainable jobs, sustainable health and a sustainable economy.
Speaking today before a forum on quality green jobs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stewart Acuff, an assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, says that to successfully accomplish that goal, we must bury forever the falsehood that greed is good and every person is on his or her own.
See, while they told us you are on your own, they did all they could to make it so. While they ignored climate change and global warming and more and more kids with asthma and more and more cancer cases, they were busting our unions, outsourcing and contracting out and privatizing our work, Wal-Marting our economy, telling us we have to compete in a global economy that sends 13-year-old girls to factories and factory dorms and the whims of supervisors in the Caribbean Basin, that murders trade unionists in Colombia, that sends 9- and 10-year-olds to work in Vietnam and Pakistan and uses slave labor in China.
