Rebecca Friedrichs is a 30-year public school teacher in California (Orange County: where else?!) who hates unions. She leads a lawsuit of 10 California teachers who want the California Teachers Association to cease charging them for the services which yielded Friedrichs, etal, their work contracts, benefits, and retirement packages. The services were done by the CTA with the school districts.
By becoming a teacher in California, you can elect not to join the union. I was a member of United Educators of San Francisco. Had I elected not to join, I would have been charged a fee to essentially cover a portion of the costs for the benefits afforded me in the negotiated contract.
She is quoted as saying, “Americans of all political preferences would rise up against such tyranny if their rights were squelched by corporations, yet teachers unions have been legally trampling the free-speech rights of teachers throughout our nation for decades through forced dues used to fund their one-sided political agendas.” [Guardian UK, 1/9/2016]
She is quoted as saying, “Americans of all political preferences would rise up against such tyranny if their rights were squelched by corporations, yet teachers unions have been legally trampling the free-speech rights of teachers throughout our nation for decades through forced dues used to fund their one-sided political agendas.” [Guardian UK, 1/9/2016]
Tyranny? I smell Ayn Rand! Friedrichs thinks she can negotiate her own contract, benefits, and retirement package. I hope it is not vicious to wish that some crusading investigative journalist looks in to her finances. A trust fund? A rich spouse? Maybe she's German NAZI princess.
Certainly as a school teacher she must know that unions are the main reason for the rise in women's wages, and their death has seen the decline in these wages over the last few generations. If she does not know the tyranny of industrial feudalism, wage slavery, child labor I wonder what she is teaching in these history classes ... ahh, but this IS Orange County.
Her case, Friedrichs vs the California Teachers Association has been catapulted to the US Supreme Court. The issue is: being made to pay this fee to an organization she does not belong to compromises her rights under the First Amendment.
Forty years ago, the high court ruled these fees legal and appropriate, but this was before the war on trades-unions had put public employee unions in its cross-hairs. This was before the court was staffed heavily with neocons and neoliberals. Pensions still had a few years life in them in the late 70's, now they are an extinct species.
Forty years ago was before the pandemic of right-to-work states had reached a fever pitch. With liberal Wisconsin gone now, and the Koch brothers in battled mode, anything is possible. We will all be right-to-work states soon.
I reserve particular ire right now for the crusading left, which keeps playing in to the hands of the Democratic Party. SEIU and its Campaign for $15. Black Lives Matters. Occupy. Et cetera. They mobilize people under leftist Democratic Party goals, then fall in line behind Democratic Party super-stars.
I should be tired of saying they need to fall in line behind the militant trades-unionists, anarchists, communists and start shutting machines down that they do not seize. This is not the 21st century we are headed for but the 19th century.
These fake leftists have given up so much by making their arguments about wages and not who owns the means of production, or why we should be exterminating management altogether.
Improving industrial feudalism is what Democrats do. It is not an improvement. Stop it.
When Margot Honecker was asked to assess the "revolution" that brought the Berlin Wall down and reunified Germany, she recounted what has happened to these capitalist economies and how they they've been worse, not better, for workers: "The past was brought back. No one can name that 'revolution'."
I cite Honecker because the attitude of the neoliberals is that these modifications and innovations, bail-outs and stimulus packages to our economies are seen somehow as groundbreaking things, when really they are things Charles Dickens reported as a journalist and put into his novels.
To call Friedrichs vs CTA a last straw is feeble when there have been 100 years of straws to choose from. The patient, to mix my metaphor, has been on life-support in ICU for a long, long time. Given the reaction of the business unions, I wonder if there is any brain function left.
I am all for pulling the plug. Let this corpse die, and take its riffraff, fake socialists with them, like Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant, not so workers can go off in this libertarian capitalist fantasy world where they can negotiate their own wages and benefits. No. But rather, so the whining from leaders of the business unions that the sky is falling will be silenced - the sky has already fallen, baby!!
If the machines cannot be taken, shut them down. If they cannot be shut down, burn them down. If workers cannot be allowed to own and run their business, burn those down too. If management won't be housebroken, lock them out. If there is a past to be brought back it is the militant past that reacted to the best and worst of industrial capitalism.
To call Friedrichs vs CTA a last straw is feeble when there have been 100 years of straws to choose from. The patient, to mix my metaphor, has been on life-support in ICU for a long, long time. Given the reaction of the business unions, I wonder if there is any brain function left.
I am all for pulling the plug. Let this corpse die, and take its riffraff, fake socialists with them, like Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant, not so workers can go off in this libertarian capitalist fantasy world where they can negotiate their own wages and benefits. No. But rather, so the whining from leaders of the business unions that the sky is falling will be silenced - the sky has already fallen, baby!!
If the machines cannot be taken, shut them down. If they cannot be shut down, burn them down. If workers cannot be allowed to own and run their business, burn those down too. If management won't be housebroken, lock them out. If there is a past to be brought back it is the militant past that reacted to the best and worst of industrial capitalism.
