(Speech planned for the SEIU Candidate Dinner from August 13, 2015…but which was not delivered in its entirety due to time limits.)

 

I want to thank the SEIU for inviting me here to speak today.

 

My father is in immigrant from India. He worked his way up from the factory floor as an Engineer to a manager and eventually a Director position at what was then Sybron, a medical supplies manufacturer. There were several times when the factory workers went on strike and I remember my father telling me that it was important, even as a manager then, not to cross the picket line. He would go over and have a chat with the workers about their grievances.

 

He caught some flack for that from his higher-ups and would also tell me of the glass-ceiling for brown people in management. There was only so high you could go up he said. These are lessons I learned in high school.

 

My mother is a fiery Irish woman from South Buffalo and a retired public school English teacher. Her ancestors were steel workers from Pittsburgh who eventually made their way to Buffalo. Irish people and Indians have a rich history of battling empires, specifically sharing a common foe the British. It is from them that I learned to be a fierce defender of the underdog.

 

Today, the worker remains the underdog. In the digital era, manufacturing jobs have been lost overseas, and unionization has been sliding for decades. While high-tech leaders try to portray their companies as more humanitarian than their predecessor captains of industry, and use phrases such as “Don’t Be Evil” and their CEO’s wear t-shirts and blue jeans, the truth is and the data bears this out that unionization is scarce among the tech giants, economic inequality is worse during the digital era, and minorities and women have even less representation in the workplace than the previous manufacturing era. Workers fear challenging there bosses because society’s safety net has so many gaping holes in it, that the risks of being unemployed are significant.

 

So while we can point to victories in the service sector for organizing with the Fight for $15 and all the great work SEIU local has done to grow this union, the horizon does not look good if these tech barons repeat the same hierarchical management models of the gilded age era. The new captains of industry are more monopolistic and more top down, and less transparent, in other words Empire like than ever before.

 

This is why I believe in worker power, workers making the decisions, not simply bargaining for this little grievance or piecemeal approaches. Because to me the word bargaining sounds too much like begging. We ought to never forget that the workers far outnumber the capitalist class, and that we ought to push for a maximum wage limit to CEOs in these service sector companies averaging a $7,000 hourly wage.

 

This is so crazy, this is why I have been on the picket lines with you, outside the University of Rochester, outside Walmart, Wendy’s, for the past decades in support. This is why I teach in my social studies classes about labor history and devote more attention to it than the scant examples in the standard text provide. Rather than subservience to a common core curriculum, we need a revolutionary core curriculum. We have to change our schools into training grounds for activists and organizers. These kids don’t know about the General Strike of 1946 in Rochester, or Ida Braiman, the garment worker strike of 1913. We have to teach the young people about their city’s radical labor history and leaders. I was inspired by my labor history professor at Geneseo, Joseph McCartin.  This was my favorite subject in college and inspired me to get into grassroots organizing early and often. But by the time you get the history in college it may be too late because of the pervasiveness of brainwashing of capitalist propaganda throughout.

 

Finally, I am unapologetically a socialist. I believe that an economy should be measured on how well the people and planet are doing not by the profits of the few. The McCarthy Era has long been over, Reagan is a phony figment of imagination in the aging imperialists’ heads. Our generation is not afraid of the word socialism. It is time we stopped settling for the politics of practical. Our city and our citizens are better than what these lackluster Democrats and their corporate party backers have to offer.

 

Another Rochester is possible.