Zitat des Tages von Andy Stern:
Employers need to recognize that the world has changed and there are people who would like to help them provide solution in ways that are new, modern and that add value to companies.
Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.
I would say that workers in general, and white workers particularly, are correct that their economic wellbeing is deteriorating.
I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured.
The AFL-CIO is a structure that divides workers' strength by allowing each union to organize in any industry, then bargain on its own, even when workers share a common employer.
It has no enforceable standards to stop a union from conspiring with employers to keep another stronger union out or from negotiating contracts with lower pay and standards that members of another union have spent a lifetime establishing.
The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn't cost the government a dime.
I'm not running from any particular problems, I just want to take some time and figure out in my life where I can keep doing what I'm doing but in a way that I can also honor what I want to do for myself.
When I left SEIU, we had started this quality public service agenda to say to our members what I think the United Auto Workers learned: that quality is our only job security in the long run.
America is living through the third economic revolution and our country doesn't really have a plan on how to deal with it, and when it does - like the president sort of outlined when he first got here - we have a Congress who seem incapable of acting on it.
I was too much of a victim of the model I created. I tried Change to Win and helping Obama, and then I just ran out of Andy Stern ideas.
The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?
Unions should not be lapdogs to a political party, they should be watchdogs for their members' interests.
I'll never run for office. But I intend, either on the fiscal commission or on issues like immigration, to hopefully have my voice be heard.
