10/09/2020
Our Union is in trouble; weak contracts, a failure to fund our Health and Pension Plans for decades, runaway production and growing amounts of non-union work happening even before the Pandemic hit. We find ourselves at a crossroad. Members are asked to continue paying our dues, stay strong, only accept Union jobs, watch our health care slip away and our pension take a hit. Our executives and staff although there may be fewer are keeping their salaries at the same level as if nothing is going on.
You may hear they are working day and night putting in long and arduous hours as if that is a justification for their now inflated salaries. I’m sure if a poll was taken among our members many would jump at the chance to put their careers on hold for the next year or so and do the full time work at home (since 5757 is all but shut down) for half of what staff and executives are being paid.
Don’t get me wrong I respect staff and our executives but for them to think that our membership should sacrifice in ways we have never had to sacrifice before and not just right now but into the unforeseeable future while they collect the same salary as before this Pandemic hit is delusional. When the whole body is attacked, the whole body must make compromises and sacrifices. If the heart and head are preserved but the limbs and other organs starved, the body ceases to exist.
Without dues, without new members joining our ranks then the streams of income our union has grown dependent upon won’t adequately pay for the infrastructure of our union. We have no equity. If we owned our building or a building and the parking lot to that building, we would have access to the capital to weather this storm. We pay Six Million dollars a year just for our LA Building. We pay close to a million dollars a year for the “free parking” we enjoy when we show up at 5757 Wilshire for meetings, social functions or charity events. Imagine if that money was paid to back to the Union every year, deposited in a strike or emergency fund.
When this Union was formed in the early thirties it was in the middle of the Great depression. People had to learn to sacrifice to survive. A decade later World War II created a need for victory gardens, war bonds, rationing, people pulled together donating metal items to make war materials, the government made steel pennies to preserve copper for bullet shells. War bonds got us through and the era after was the most booming era our country has experienced.
We need to budget, cut costs, avoid frivolous spending . . . tighten our belts and pull up our bootstraps. In addition, we can be creative in saving and developing streams of income. I’ll give a few ideas suggestions in separate posts following that will cut our spending by millions this year and create streams of income for the future. Please contribute your own ideas and suggestions to cut spending or create streams of income that will keep our union strong throughout this crisis we are facing and lead us into a bright robust and strong future.
If we keep our heads buried in the sand with the naïve notion that it is business as usual, then the ensuing pain will be sharper and greater and for sure our demise will be inevitable.
