The union that isn't

This is what can happen when a group of people realize that their ostensible allies can't wait to put a knife in their backs.
The National ICE Council says its members are sick of being labeled Nazis and racists by fellow unionists and is filing charges with the Labor Department to seek financial autonomy from its parent unions, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Government Employees.
The council says it cannot get adequate representation from the two organizations, which “foster hate and prejudice” against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and have backed political candidates who call for defunding ICE — essentially advocating for the erasure of the 7,600 jobs the council represents. The council accuses the two labor groups of holding ICE employees captive. It says the parent unions, wanting to garner “partisan political favor” from the administration, refuse to let the employees manage their own affairs but won’t advocate for them.
“AFGE and the AFL-CIO became far-left organizations a long time ago,” Chris Crane, the council’s president, told The Washington Times. “They don’t care about workers. They only care about their far-left agendas and politics. The corruption and misspending in the organization is out of control. ICE employees want no part in it.”

5 comments:

Grim said...

It is true that the big labor unions stopped making any attempt to support labor at some point, and became enthralled to the same crap as the rest of them. You would think that wages and working conditions had been solved.

In related news, a group of Border Patrol leaders who served under three quite different former administrations issued a letter warning against punishing those involved in the so-called 'whipping' incident.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/border-patrol-chiefs-warn-biden-on-whipping

Anonymous said...

Stop paying union dues.

Grab em by their pussy.

Greg

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I belonged to the union at my hospital in the 80s, when it was local. All officials were in NH. Then they affiliated with SEIU to give "us" more bargaining power and I decided to drop away. I did have a situation in the late 90s when I could have used one of their attorneys in a supervisory abuse dispute, but on balance, I made the right decision. It stopped being about contracts and benefits and more about having more "voice" in Washington. Utterly predictable.

J Melcher said...

Gompers has almost been written out of the US union history narrative; while Debs keeps on keeping on.

Grim said...

I was also in the SEIU at one time. That would have been the mid-1990s. I had moved to Savannah and was having trouble finding work, when I was hired by the unions associated with the port to do things like check on members who were sick or retired, make sure people were getting by. For whatever reason they considered that appropriate to the SEIU, so that was the local they had me join while doing that work.

It was during that time I developed my appreciation for labor unions. The young members I'd visit lived in trailers or collapsing hovels; the older ones, houses in acceptable neighborhoods; the retired ones, simple but nice homes in middle class neighborhoods, with pictures on the wall of their children or grandchildren in college graduation gowns. It appeared to be a system that helped people elevate themselves into the middle class reliably in return for a lifetime of decent work.

Of course, the system was falling down even as I observed it. It was not long after that Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA and other trade plans, and the jobs all went south and the out to Asia. The good they could do was being undermined even as I was learning about it firsthand.