(Ruby) Union suppression, US vs. El Salvador

Ever since the recall election in Wisconsin, my neighbor state, I've been thinking about Scott Walker and the state of unions in this country in general. As a public school teacher, I'm proud to be union member. While my union isn't perfect, I'm still grateful to have a union and to be part of it. It's sad and just plain crazy that unions are under attack, that our power of collective bargaining is being limited. People are being mislead to believe that we, as union members, are somehow the cause of the economic problems we're in today. As someone said on Facebook,

Remember when teachers, public employees, unions, NPR, PBS and Planned parenthood
crashed the stock market, took trillions in TARP money, spilled a crapload of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, wiped out half of our 401ks, gave their selves billions in bonuses and payed no taxes? Yeah...me neither.

I can get pretty worked up about the injustice of it, but our troubles are small in comparison to what happened in El Salvador in the 1970's and 80's. Not that we shouldn't be concerned, not that we don't need to act to prevent the further erosion of unions' power. We do. But in El Salvador, union leaders were imprisoned, tortured and killed for advocating for safer, more humane working conditions and livable wages.   Here's an excerpt from an interview with Alicia, the former head of CoMadres. Alicia died in August, 2010.

             In those days, in 1978, my oldest daughter, Marta Alicia, started to work in a factory that made men’s shirts. They sent the clothes up to the U.S. She was studying at the university, but started to work to help me out so I would have money for all the busses I needed in my searches. (Searching for missing family members.) So there in that factory, a union began. Because she was very active she was made to be a spokesperson for the union, part of the leadership team.
            When she was already involed in the union, the National Guard came to the factory. The boss had called the Guard because the women were meeting there. He didn’t want them to lose work time. He wanted them working, so he called the Guard. Well this day they just came to see what was happening. But three days later they returned and took all the women in the leadership team.
            When we knew that the National Guard had captured Marta, we went there, but no. They told us that they didn’t have anyone. They hadn’t captured anyone. That surely it was another branch, like the Police of the Hacienda or the National Police had done it, but they, the National Guard, had not. So we went again to the different quarters. It was the same thing all over again. They all said they hadn’t captured the union organizers.
            Fifteen days later, five of the young women appeared assassinated in a little town called Ilopango, close to Lake Apulu. But not my daughter. When they were found, these women had been tortured, murdered, they were without fingernails, without teeth, beaten. Their mothers retrieved them and buried them.
            At eighteen days, my daughter appeared, three days after the other young women. They left her, they thought she was dead, you know? They left her there just lying on the pavement. Just her. Just Marta. Naked. Some people saw her body. Vultures were coming, the ones that eat dead bodies were moving in. But she woke up and moved, and some people saw her. A taxi driver moved closer and he said, “This girl is alive!”

I'm writing this not to diminish our problems, but to try to understand how bad it would be if I had lived in El Salvador during the Civil War. And it's still bad there today, with unions being suppressed by the government and by multi-national corporations doing business there, including US corporations. I wish I had a positive note to end on. I'm not sure what that is, except to say that Marta survived and was helped to escape El Salvador.