That comment goes a long way toward explaining the attacks on public and private-sector unions, according to my boss, Jim Hoffa. In today's Detroit News, Hoffa wrote that those attacks are meant to divide working people from each other.
Gould's vision of class warfare is being played out today in the shameful attacks on public employees. These attacks are secretly financed and planned by modern-day Jay Goulds who aim to keep their own taxes low. Some vastly powerful corporations and billionaires want to cripple all unions and turn America into a low-wage banana republic.Hoffa quotes some of the comments made by recently elected governors. New Jersey's Chris Christie, for example, said he got the unions to cooperate with him by threatening "to take a bat out and hit you." Writes Hoffa,
They're succeeding. Across the country, new governors and new legislatures are demanding cuts to jobs, pensions and concessions from public employee unions. Their demands are nothing more than payback for the billions of dollars that the ultra-rich have poured into political campaigns.
Christie's threat isn't funny to anyone who remembers the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. All the workers wanted was to earn above-starvation wages and to be respected as human beings. Peaceful workers were gassed, dragged, arrested and threatened by armed National Guardsmen in tanks.Hoffa points out that it wasn't public-sector unions that caused government budget problems. He puts the blame squarely where it belongs, on Wall Street. And he urges everyone in the labor movement to stick together, because,
Only after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed while in Memphis supporting the struggle did city officials come to their senses and recognize Local 1733 of AFSCME as the bargaining representative for the sanitation workers. Just think where those workers would be today without a union.
...after they've finished with government workers, they'll be coming after you, too.
