Today as you read this, I want you to know that unions (including DCSMEC ) are not only fighting to maintain working conditions and jobs for their members but are engaged in a fight for the very survival of the union movement itself.

The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists, who sneeringly ask why should public sector employees even have benefits, which they call “entitlements”. Of which many nonunion working families are denied. This is an ingenious plan which pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps.

As the powerful and wealthy with no one to keep their greed in check are gorging on record profits, they continue to foreclose on homes in record numbers, drive health care costs through the roof, and further drive this country into two classes rich and poor. They continue to slash our most essential and basic services, school funding, first responder budgets, elderly assistance and even funding for special needs children. As we pay for the fraud they committed as they wiped out $14 trillion in wealth, wages and retirement savings all we have left is our ability to say NO MORE. If we stand united and refuse to cooperate, then the despots are indeed in trouble. Our power is our ability to vote. We must use this to make a difference, otherwise our jobs and our future and the future of generations to come may be in jeopardy.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of  human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. …If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. …”

If we don’t protect the contract and the men and women it serves then the struggle of those before us will have been in vain. If we don’t hang together in these hard economical times then we will definitely hang apart.

Keith Love

Business Agent