What the Navy and the AFL Have in Common

From the Bellman:

This is a bit long, but cruise through it. It actually has some good data that I imagine apply to most of our careers.

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This is great. Sixty-nine ;) slides of the Navy trying to understand the kids today and at no time did the Navy consider that the way the kids today live might, I don't know, better than the way they were brought up.

Let's see...the kids today are perfectly comfortable with technology. They are perfectly comfortable living in a "virtual" world. They have multi-ethnic friendships. Nation means little to them. Race means little. They like their parents. They value education. They want to serve, volunteer, and be involved. They learn by doing, rather than through understanding theoretical models. They have no inherent respect for "authority." They are hyper-achievers. They want praise for doing work.

And the Navy would like to undo all of that. Mentor a kid. Teach 'em that the 60s were the bomb. Life is hard. Respect authority. America kicks ass! Sand niggers must die! The "real world" sucks. And is like the Matrix. Without the hot chick. One would imagine. Teach 'em that they have to respect you because you're old. Teach 'em that they don't know nothin'. Make sure they understand that college, unlike the Navy, is for sissy boys and girls. Say things like, "I thought that black eyed peas were for New Years!" Then cackle maniacally. Teach 'em about Reagan and the Cold War, you know when the world made sense. (Don't teach 'em about our support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, that will only confuse 'em.) Teach them that the Navy is really like one giant video game, expect you actually kill real people, but you only get to be a guy who monitors a screen, not the guy who actually pulls any sort of trigger.

We have the same damn problem in the union movement. We're starting to get the speeches that point out that most "good" union men and women are retiring soon and the kids coming up behind them need to understand the value of the union. Because the kids today, I tell you what, they just don't get it. So I go to workshops about reaching out to young workers, but what you get is a room full of Boomers bitching about how the young people just don't respect all the work that Boomers did to get those contracts. They don't want to join the union. They don't want to get involved. Let's all sit around talk about what is wrong with these kids and how we can get them to be more like us.

I've started to become a bit more vocal in my displeasure about these sorts of conversations, but I have yet to hit upon any kind of rhetorical strategy to make the oldsters see that it is maybe they that need to be thinking of ways to relate to the kids and not the vicey versey. That our unions must change in order to stay relevant. The unions of the 1950s did not look like the unions of the 1930s, the 1970s did not look like the 1950s and so on. A massive cultural shift is here, but I don't think it happens by convincing the young people that the union model has been perfected, so it is time they get on board.

Of course, I am hampered by my lack of knowledge about how it is we reach out to the young people. I am very conscious of the fact that my Simpsons references, which used to go over like gang-busters and formed the heart of the GTFF for a while, now fall totally flat. Using Robert Guilliaume as a cultural touchstone is over. And like all old folk, I fear that which I do not know. But still, I like to think I am slightly better off than my Boomer aunts and uncles.

So what do we do to reach out to the young folk? For the most part, I think it is just a matter of getting the hell out of their way and seeing where they take us. Maybe the key to getting the old folk to understand how to "reach out" to the young people is to teach them that everything is going to be okay. Maybe educate them a little about the po-mo. Tomorrow's unions won't be "better" or "worse," they'll just be "different." And that's "okay."