Letter: We must stop the erosion of workers’ rights

I am a dues-paying member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704. I have worked in many spaces in Dixon and surrounding areas, where people introduce themselves by their name followed by the local they represent.

In the middle of the night Thursday, March 27, President Donald Trump quietly signed an executive order that strips the collective bargaining rights of over 700,000 union employees in the federal government.

This represents one of the single largest shots across the bow at unions in the history of our country. This is one in many actions that the current administration has taken to directly attack the labor class in our country. What is happening in the federal government right now is building the tracks for what is to come for the rest of the labor force in this country.

Our collective memory is short. Unions came to be as a result of poor working conditions, lack of protections for employees and low wages. In America today, the billionaire class is in a race to inflate value for shareholders at the expense of their employees, and products and services they produce, while income inequality is at its highest point in history and union membership is at its lowest.

To allow this erosion of workers’ rights to continue is to abandon our history – and our future.

Tyler Jacobs, Chicago