LABOR DAY REFLECTIONS from COLOMBIA

About Labor Day... I am personally proud of my role in supporting 
my local NEA = APT teacher's unions as a member. local rep and 
state council member. I am also proud of my family's membership 
and leadership roles in the TWU, ILGWU, Teamsters, and 
Milliner's Union during the 20th century. 

Without the labor movement  the country would have fallen
 to Fascism or Communism. That didn't happen! 
Thank the Unions!  
Thank the organized labor movement.  

Do what you can to support the workers of our nation.

PS...  I live in a country that does
 not have a labor movement, 
Colombia.  It has, at best, weak 
consolidations of farmers and miners. 
 As a result, although Colombia never
 was quite a Fascist State or a 
Communist State, it was always
 a constitutional democracy,  it teetered, 
and the country during the twentieth 
century was weak and in a state of 
terror and violence unknown in the 
United States.  If the workers had 
had the opportunity to organize, to
 see to the well-being of all the people
 through decent work rules, pay, 
benefits and other social institutions,
 it might not have fallen to 
narcoterrorism and it might today be 
richer and more prosperous than it is.  

The state has taken over the role of 
benefactor to the workers through 
socialism subsidizing education, 
farm policies, health care, public 
works, transportation, child care, 
welfare and so forth.  It is late to 
the gate but the future is bright.  

In the last ten years another 20% of 
Colombia's population has moved 
into the middle class. Still, if the 
country could have been strong
 through a strong workers' movement
 seventy years ago, who knows?  
We've written before about the damage
 that having a super power exploiting 
Colombia has wrought.  But maybe
 that too could have been mitigated 
by a strong labor movement during
 the last century and into the present.