Daniel Tilson
If most of Florida’s lower and middle-income working families were represented and protected by trade unions, Labor Day would be one hell of a big, statewide block party.
Parades would wind along thoroughfares of cities large and small, honoring Organized Labor’s historic struggle for social justice and economic fairness, and celebrating its transformative success.
Men, women and children would revel not only in the knowledge that they had a late summer Monday off from work and school, but also in the feeling that everyday life the rest of the year would unfold on the firm footing of economic stability.
Moms, dads and grandparents would tell stories of a time when most working people in Florida didn’t have that sense of security, when thoughts of family futures were still rife with uncertainty and fear of falling into financial distress, or ruin.
Teenagers would question with challenging urgency why anyone in their right mind was ever talked into thinking unions were unnecessary or had become “irrelevant.” Notions of union “bosses,” “thugs” and “special interests” perpetuated for a generation and more by profit-driven business and pay-for-play political and media interests (nothing special about them), would now be derisively mocked as propagandistic poppycock.
Proud union members would stride through the streets hoisting myriad colorful banners up high toward the sky, parading forward with the confident ease of men and women who felt good about going back to work the next day, for fair pay and sick time, vacation days and overtime, health insurance…and pensions.
The idea that modest pensions and the promise of retirement security had successfully been labeled as “entitlements” won by a shrinking and always-under-attack public employee sector would now be publicly lambasted. It would be called the dangerously divisive rhetoric it was, used by greed-crazed corporations in conspiratorial cahoots with their minions, to turn working people against one another and prevent them from uniting in common cause.
Local government leaders who once sided with those corporations and related private wealth interests in passing a “Right To Work” statute blocking union organizing in Florida would now march alongside the men and women who finally saw the law for the anti-worker lie it always was — the people who successfully fought for its repeal.
Working people of every type and stripe would parade, thinking back and shaking their heads in disbelief, wondering how they’d ever bought the whopper of a tall tale spun by corporate spin-doctors and marketing magicians. They would marvel at the notion that unions somehow interfered with workers’ rights and freedoms, rather than secured and protected them.
The elected officials and employers who’d kept Labor and workers at bay for so long would suffer their well-earned share of verbal jabs along the way, friendly jibes ingenuously overheard and enjoyed from Gainesville to Orlando to Tampa to Miami, and beyond…
“Yup, my bad, I fell for it when you talked about the union taking away my “freedom,” but you never told me the “freedom” they’d take away was the freedom to get crappy pay, no raises, no sick days, no overtime…yeah, I bought that one, then I almost bought the Brooklyn Bridge too, ha!”
Just imagine how good a Labor Day like that would feel.
Imagine turning back the toxic rising tide of economic inequality that threatens to drown us in desperation and despair and eliminate the hope of upward mobility.
Imagine a hugely enlarged, empowered and politically engaged Florida Middle Class, with labor unions helping them and their employers succeed and thrive, turning working poor people on public assistance into independent consumers capable of contributing to economic growth, and shared, sustained prosperity.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
