Georgetown Labor Prof On Our Historic Moment

(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.