Oliver, an excellent interview. My daughter has been an organizer for HERE since she graduated from Pitt back in 1998. I got to see the benefit of a union first hand. I worked as a welder at Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding in the mid-seventies. It was non-union, in the South and heavily into defense contracts, building carriers, sub and missile frigates for the navy. It was dangerous, dirty, low pay and no real benefits. As a welder for the IBEW at the San Onofre nuclear plant I made more than twice the money, with pension and benefits. I will always remember when I was about ten, my dad, an IBEW electrician, pointing to our house and new Chevy and saying that we wouldn't have any of that without the union. . . "never cross a picket line!"
It’s pretty hard to argue with once you’ve actually experienced the difference — as my stepfather, grandfathers, uncles, et al. did — but I think Duff nails the fear of rocking the boat mentality that has worked against the American worker (who have gradually come to identify themselves first and foremost as the American consumer, just let us keep consuming a bit, just a few more years of letting us have a taste, please, only a little longer…)
Excellent interview. Everybody needs to listen to this, which means that around two dozen Americans, max, will do so.
We were especially interested here at the Index in what Duff has to say about the psychological barriers at play. It’s not simply that no-one wants to organize, the problem is psychologically and physiologically prior to that. The realization that you are living in a world where organizing is necessary--that it's do or die--is just too threatening. So that realization is repressed. Good thing we have everything we need to distract and stupefy us now available at the click of a button!
This holds true at all strata of society. We’ve been reading the Leiter Reports website for years listening to the philosophy professorate discuss one crisis after another and when a crisis that might support a plaintiffs’ class action is under discussion we pop up and say something like “don’t just sit there, let’s do something about it!” All we need is a 15 minute chat but nobody ever calls. For these radicals “#resistance” def does NOT mean filing a lawsuit.
The funny thing is, now with Substack we can SEE them peeping out from behind the curtain at us standing on the front stoop ringing the doorbell. They’re just too afraid to talk, because that would mean that their ideas about that vague entity they think of as “the left” would be revealed to be an illusion.
Yeah, that to me was the best insight among many good insights. He nailed that process. “Just let me have my steel-belted radials and leave me alone” as Peter Finch mocks in his “Mad as Hell” rant in Network. So many of my relatives just wanted to skate by until retirement or they dropped dead (some already have). Give me one more day, no need to rock the boat, I already ate a pretty good hamburger for lunch
Hahaha! That hits close to home … I was buying a new rear wiper blade the other day and lo and behold found out I can replace both sets of hood struts for … $30?!?
Awesome! I’ve been loading groceries and checking the oil while holding the lid up with the back of my head for MONTHS b/c I didn’t want to get ass-raped at the dealer. NGL, when they came in the mail and I put them on it made my day
Many of those southern workers actually did not believe it when I told them what union welders made in California. They thought it had to be bullshit. "nobody makes than kind of money welding". Keep up the "work".
Oliver, an excellent interview. My daughter has been an organizer for HERE since she graduated from Pitt back in 1998. I got to see the benefit of a union first hand. I worked as a welder at Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding in the mid-seventies. It was non-union, in the South and heavily into defense contracts, building carriers, sub and missile frigates for the navy. It was dangerous, dirty, low pay and no real benefits. As a welder for the IBEW at the San Onofre nuclear plant I made more than twice the money, with pension and benefits. I will always remember when I was about ten, my dad, an IBEW electrician, pointing to our house and new Chevy and saying that we wouldn't have any of that without the union. . . "never cross a picket line!"
It’s pretty hard to argue with once you’ve actually experienced the difference — as my stepfather, grandfathers, uncles, et al. did — but I think Duff nails the fear of rocking the boat mentality that has worked against the American worker (who have gradually come to identify themselves first and foremost as the American consumer, just let us keep consuming a bit, just a few more years of letting us have a taste, please, only a little longer…)
Excellent interview. Everybody needs to listen to this, which means that around two dozen Americans, max, will do so.
We were especially interested here at the Index in what Duff has to say about the psychological barriers at play. It’s not simply that no-one wants to organize, the problem is psychologically and physiologically prior to that. The realization that you are living in a world where organizing is necessary--that it's do or die--is just too threatening. So that realization is repressed. Good thing we have everything we need to distract and stupefy us now available at the click of a button!
This holds true at all strata of society. We’ve been reading the Leiter Reports website for years listening to the philosophy professorate discuss one crisis after another and when a crisis that might support a plaintiffs’ class action is under discussion we pop up and say something like “don’t just sit there, let’s do something about it!” All we need is a 15 minute chat but nobody ever calls. For these radicals “#resistance” def does NOT mean filing a lawsuit.
The funny thing is, now with Substack we can SEE them peeping out from behind the curtain at us standing on the front stoop ringing the doorbell. They’re just too afraid to talk, because that would mean that their ideas about that vague entity they think of as “the left” would be revealed to be an illusion.
Yeah, that to me was the best insight among many good insights. He nailed that process. “Just let me have my steel-belted radials and leave me alone” as Peter Finch mocks in his “Mad as Hell” rant in Network. So many of my relatives just wanted to skate by until retirement or they dropped dead (some already have). Give me one more day, no need to rock the boat, I already ate a pretty good hamburger for lunch
Hahaha! That hits close to home … I was buying a new rear wiper blade the other day and lo and behold found out I can replace both sets of hood struts for … $30?!?
Awesome! I’ve been loading groceries and checking the oil while holding the lid up with the back of my head for MONTHS b/c I didn’t want to get ass-raped at the dealer. NGL, when they came in the mail and I put them on it made my day
Many of those southern workers actually did not believe it when I told them what union welders made in California. They thought it had to be bullshit. "nobody makes than kind of money welding". Keep up the "work".