"...a better future will only come when represented by a strong union."
Posted by: Pat Crowley
in Labor
on February 06, 2010 
Dean Isabella from Providence has a letter to the editor in Pravda today that lays out an alternative vision of the world from what we typically see on those pages. Check it out.
Reasons to unionize
As a municipal employee and police officer for 22 years I have watched and read with great interest as Governor Carcieri has outlined his plan to legislate away municipal and state worker benefits and more importantly the right for workers to collectively bargain for those benefits.
And I have watched with even greater interest as politicians both Republican and Democrat along with corporate leaders and most conservative talk show hosts blame unions for every financial woe in both the state and country. But the thing I have found most amazing is the ease in which the average worker has been fooled into believing that the elimination of unions would somehow be of great benefit to them.
If the average worker thinks that the private-sector employment tactics are the gauge by which they and their children’s future should be measured I would hope that they understand that the private sector has the average employee earning less now then 10 years ago while the CEOs of these same private-sector companies earn up to 250 times the pay of their average employee.
They should also understand that the private sector has American workers that are more productive than in any other time in history, yet they continue to have their benefits, including medical, sick pay and pension plans, reduced or eliminated.
People need to realize the correlation between a unionized workforce and family prosperity. For example, the most profitable time in U.S. history for the average worker was the three decades following World War II, when 35 percent of the work force was unionized (when a family could be raised on one paycheck).
During the last 20 years with only 7 percent of the workforce unionized 90 percent of the income gains in this country went to only 10 percent of the workforce, and out of that, the top 1 percent took roughly 60 percent of those gains.
I hope every Rhode Island worker will come to realize that their right to bargain collectively for a better future will only come when represented by a strong union.
Dean Isabella Providence
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