An injury to one...

There is a lot of work to do. I say that with the realization that all of us in the labor movement are on a continuum from complete oppression on one side to absolute social justice on the other. It is like a worker's Likert scale, because even thought there is much work to do here, that doesn't mean we abandon the improvements we want to our working conditions in the United States. We need to continually evolve and move forward on the continuum, or risk sliding back. Just because we can say "good thing we don't have to teach in a war zone" that doesn't mean we give up trying to earn meaningful staff development time. We do not use the abysmal working conditions of someone else to shrug our shoulders and say "I guess I have nothing to complain about." We use it to organize around the idea that we can and will simultaneously act as inspiration to others on the continuum and push the boundaries of where we are as professionals as well. That is what the labor movement is about: improving peoples' lives. Otherwise there would be no continuum; instead there would merely be a series of individual and independent experiences. The labor movement worldwide is a single experience for all of us still.