Monday, September 7, 2020

20200907.0430

At this point in my life, I am management. I direct a treatment facility; I do not provide treatment, myself (which is good, because I am in no way qualified to do so). But I have still been a worker for more of my life than I have been a manager, and I remain appreciative of what organized labor has done for me, both directly in the days when I was a union man and indirectly in the social changes it has effected.

The work, of course, is far from done. There are still massive inequities that need to be addressed and that are not being addressed by as many of my peers--and I suppose it's a loose use of the term; I'm not exactly a luminary in directing the small non-profit I direct--as needs to be. Even if there were more managers and administrators working to improve things in the ways they need to be improved, making lasting changes of the kind that are needed has to have a broad buy-in--and that kind of buy-in has come from the labor to which some small lip-service is paid today.

I am well aware of the ideological onus under which organized labor operates anymore in much of the country. I can hardly live in the Texas Hill Country and be out among people and not be; it is decried and bemoaned in grocery store and gas station, and not only by those who would have to pay their employees more in a union system. But, unlike many who make the complaint, I have worked a union job--and while there were problems (as there are in any job; I've yet to meet anyone who didn't gripe about work), they were a damned lot easier to handle than many others I've faced, and I don't know that performance was any worse with them.

No, I think it was better.

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