Georgetown Labor Prof On Our Historic Moment
Wednesday, March 23, 2011(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
“We have all been stunned by the level of passion and
resistance that has welled up in response to Governor Scott Walker’s attempt
to strip public workers of their rights to collective bargaining… Moments like
this don’t happen all that often,” Joe McCartin (right) -- director of the
Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and associate professor of
History at Georgetown University -- told the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council at
their March 2 meeting in Washington. “Labor has always done best when its
arguments have spoken to the interests of all workers, indeed to the interests
of the nation… Thanks to Governor Walker, collective bargaining has suddenly,
improbably become part of a passionate national debate… Suddenly you have an
opportunity to engage people on this question as you have not been able to do in
a generation: to explain why unions are necessary; why they are vital in a
democracy; and to do it in a way that connects to peoples’ realities. Walker
has given you an opportunity to make a case that you haven’t had an
opportunity to make on the national stage in a while: a case not just for trade
unionism, but for who and what we are as a democracy.” Click
here to read the full text of McCartin’s remarks.