Unions are an activity, not a thing

....By promoting class collaboration with the bosses and election of “friendly” capitalist politicians as the unions’ main purpose, the officialdom’s decades-long class-collaborationist course has hamstrung the union movement. It has been key to the union’s continued bleeding of membership and inability to recruit new forces, at a time of capitalist crisis when workers are starting to look for a way to fight back.

....unions are not “weak,” as many labor officials claim, pointing to declining numbers. This is simply an excuse for their refusal to organize workers and use union power — instead of subordinating workers and their organizations to the bosses, their government and the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties.

The unions are not a “thing,” but an activity, a movement — a “we” of all its members. Even today the unions encompass millions of workers with enormous potential to deal major blows to the bosses.

Our unions can and will become powerful instruments to fight back against attacks by the bosses and their government when workers start to take hold of them. During a recovery in hiring after a long period of high unemployment in the 1930s, “men and women from nowhere” started to gain confidence and waged mighty battles in the plants and on the streets that built the industrial unions.

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Source

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7734/773402.html