Syracuse Ska Forum

One version of this story you can read on CNN Online.

I'm sure probably few of you are union members, although your parents might be. And some of you may have grown up distrusting unions, which is understandable.

America has changed a lot in terms of unions. As the article on CNN points out, "When the AFL-CIO formed in 1955, about 35 percent of American workers belonged to unions. Today, unions represent about 8 percent of the private-sector workforce."

I would never argue that unions are the golden answer to the inequities of the workplace struggle between the owners and the workers. But without them, workers seem even more underrepresented.

Feel free to weigh in with your own views.

BTW, to keep this more ska-related (even though I hope some of you realize it already is), check out longtime Chicago ska band, The Adjusters. At the risk of alienating any of you, I'd be curious how you feel about their "modern action club".

Speak up or others will pretend to speak for you ...

The New York Times had an article on this split up where they mentioned that the leaders of the splinter groups wanted boosting union membership to be a larger priority. Only through numbers can unions maintain strength, was their view. Unfourtionaly membership is declining and has been for 50 years. This is due to both a decrease in unionized jobs, and less intrest in unions.

Personaly i think that unions are vital to lower class workers who, historicaly, seem to get treaded on otherwise. Unfourtionaly, in America, more and more people are moving up to white collar jobs and leaving behind organized labor in pursuit of personal gains. This continuing trend will probably further shrink union membership until it whittles down to a very small group. Only time will tell how this will affect America's socio-economic landscape. Weakness in unions will either further accentuate the growing divide between the rich and the poor in this country, or become a nonissue as the vast majority of americans prosper. (i'm leaning towards the former, rather than the latter).

Meanwhile, the time for organized labor is long overdue in developing countries with lots of manufacturing such as India, Malasia, and especialy China.

I guess only time will tell. I just wish we could get someone who cares about people (not money) in the whitehouse

To the degree that service jobs are "white collar" jobs, yes, that's true. But the vast majority of service sector jobs are lower paying than factory jobs and with fewer benefits. Wal-Mart has set the trend for the industry, unfortunately. My closest friend growing up is in the grocery workers union in California, which is being broken up as the big grocery chains cry that to compete with Wal-Mart Super Centers (the ones with grocery stores in them), they need to severely reduce pay and benefits to compete. The new labor agreement was a major retreat in that direction.


There's no doubt that a growing number of Americans are prospering in the "new economy", but that the vast majority of Americans are actually going backwards. Job security is disappearing, as is the guarantee of decent health benefits, for the vast majority. If you own a lot of stock or if you're a CEO in a large company, you're probably doing quite well. Moving jobs to China and India, for example, really helps the bottom line for many companies. But it's a negative factor for the people whose jobs get replaced and for the growing number threatened with future job losses.


What happened in Korea heartens me. When Hyundai workers started realizing just how wildly successful their company had become, they demanded and got much better pay and benefits. I expect that to happen in India as well. But China? Good luck. The last vestiges of communism there are all about keeping workers in line, aren't they? How ironic.


Amen to that. They're just better at connecting to the electorate than we've been so far. That's a fixable problem that needs to be urgently addressed. And I think those of us into ska have a unique perspective on that battle, seeing how we seem good at taking underground music and making it work for mainstream tastes. Maybe ska needs to be the new music for the working people, which needs to include everyone in the service sector.

BTW, you'd be surprised how many ska bands worldwide talk about these things. They call themselves "skactiviste".

I'd kill for one band... just one band around here... that'd confront issues like that, and didn't talk about lizards, boobs or toast.

The problem with unions in america today is that outsourcing is very easy. So when a group of workers tried to organize a union the company goes ok, you can have better wages but we can quite easily ship your job over to a cheaper country such as china. This will continue to happen. Companies such as wal-mart dont allow unions to organize because then they could collectivly raise up and demand better wageds which is what wal-mart wants to avoid. In most company contracts you cant discuss pay amoungst co-workers so if one person gets a pay raise then people dont know this. As to what danny said about korea and how they realised they could ask for better pay and benefits because of how widly succesfull their company was this could happen. I could more than see this happening in India. for China this could be more difficult since they have an oppressive communist government. Although in recent years it has relaxed on certain rules. The problem we are facing is really no different than what happened in the 1800's. The upper gentile didn;t want to pay the workers any more. The people had a presidents who supported this. The Pullman strike in 1894 after the company reduced wages the strike happened after a national boycott. The owners didn;t feel this was right and asked the president to act, he sent in the national guard to break up the strike. Now looking at that in contrast with today we have a president who seems to care about the bottom line of business than of blue collar americans. We can see this through his use of private savings acounts, etc... Now he has managed to weaken certain unions by not stopping companies packing there bags and leaving we can see this even here in syracuse with carrier. The maintance and service union of united have agreed to pay cuts in order to climb out of bankruptcy. These are just some facts on unions and how they become affected by global change.

Yeah. No kidding. The Fallen, in Buffalo, came close sometimes, but they've been gone for a couple of years now.

I forgot about them before... You ever listen to Hudson Falcons?

Of course.

Not really into the working class oi boy kinda music, but I really enjoyed that dude's acoustic stuff.

And by the way, what I meant by that was a SKA band. There's plenty of amazing bands around that write lyrics that are inspirational and very important to me... but, I can't think of any local ska band that does that.

Maybe if getting naked was what was foremost on my mind, then my opinion might be different!













Ooooh.

I'm a dick.

Well, it's happening, so have your heart attack ...

For starters, Razbari Sumthing has "The Great Distraction" as the title track of their new CD. It's not about lizards, poop, boobs or getting naked. And I know The Benefits are trying to write some more serious lyrics (Heather actually pushes harder for that than anyone else in the band -- the naked song was written before she joined, believe it or not).

I think the locals haven't quite caught on to the idea that ska can be fun and meaningful at the same time, which I consider my fault. I gotta burn some CDs and get the word out. The Specials will be a major surprise to many of these kids. BTW, that's part of what Mike Park and I discussed at some length. He's only interested in either trad ska bands (he just signed Monkey, for example) or ska bands with a political sensibilty like The Specials.

Stay tuned. I really do believe we'll be addressing this sooner than later. Finally.

our american culture...the culture of capitalsim as it were...is based on the whole, "every man for himself" and "you can perservere against the odds wonderhero," type of dynamic. notions of brotherhood and unity are generally seen as weakness it seems. ever since they started, unions have been downplayed by the big businesses and people who don't want to see their workers have any power. and through the cold war era, it seems like any sort of social reform was considered "communist" and evil.

it's ridiculous. i honestly detest the way our country, supposedly built for and by the people, does so much to take advantage of people.

i have no answers, but it's definitely an issue that needs to be considered. have people just gotten lazy? are they less politically charged? has all the "terrorism" made people want to just shut up and work or whatever? i don't get it.

someone mentioned workers in other countries needing unions. well, because of a lack of labor laws and the current free trade system, americn companies are free to come and go, use up cheap labor and then just go where it's cheaper without any consideration of the worker. i've become a strong supporter of fair trade. fair trade is a sort of a union movement in a way, ensuring that workers are fairly compensated for their work.

taking sociology and anthropology courses just makes me angry, i want things to change and i want to help.

*end blind rant*