Supporting the Union Man.

I grew up in a Union household which might strike some as strange I imagine given supposed political leanings. A big part of the whole cleanup process is sorting through things and figuring what needs to be tossed and what should be saved for posterity.

The EYOC was a Union big shot at one time. It was long ago, back when I was very young but, he was a pretty big deal. At one point he was in hiding because of a strike he called – if you can imagine something like that. Unions were never popular with a certain segment of the population, hell unions weren’t even popular with other unions when they called strikes and the members of other unions were obligated not to cross the picket line.

We forget about those days today I think.

Unions are painted in a negative light because of their sometime association with more notorious segments of the population but, even so Unions are responsible for a lot of good that happened in this country (a lot of which has gone away).

When we had the transit strike last year, the public wanted to hang the Union out to dry for going on strike but, nobody seemed to hold management in equally low regard for having negotiated in such bad faith. People forgot how the TA cried poverty at the end of one fiscal year, raised the fare, only to miraculously have a great surplus due to some magical bookkeeping (which was what the Union had been talking about all along). The TA played a game of brinksmanship forcing the Union to call a strike and at the end of the day the Union got the blame.

What I found ironic was how some of the professed liberal, democratic bloggers I read regularly railed against the transit workers when they were out on strike. Guess those principles are only good when you don’t find yourself inconvenienced?

Anyway, among all the flotsam and jetsam I continue to dig out from under I found a multitude of documents detailing negotiations with management and various docs with a certain historical significance. Now I’m just waiting to hear if the University I contacted wants them as part of their collection. It sure does make for some interesting reading though - you’d be surprised how little things have changed.