David Bacon, a California Writer and Documentary Photographer, is a former Union Organizer who now documents Labor, the global economy, war and migration - and the struggle for Human Rights. He recently penned a Labor Op-Ed that was headlined: The Labor Movement Needs A Freedom Agenda, that was published in People’s World. It reads, in part:

When Zohran Mamdani spoke after his primary election victory in New York City, he declared, “We can be free, and we can be fed.”

Mamdani is telling our Unions and workers that we can reject the old politics of agreeing to war abroad and repression at home, in the hopes that at least some Workers will gain.

We don’t have to go back to the CIO and the radicalism of the 1930s to find voices in Labor calling for a radical break from the past.

The Labor Movement has to become a movement that inspires people with a broader vision of Social Justice.

Our standard of living is declining.

Workers often have to choose between paying their rent or their mortgage or having health care.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society and Unions have to be courageous enough to say it.

Working Families need a decent wage, but they also need the promise of a better world.

For as long as we’ve had Unions, Workers have shown they’ll struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt.

But it takes a radical social vision to inspire the wave of commitment, idealism and activity.

The 1920s were filled with company Unions, the violence of Strikebreakers and a lack of legal rights for Workers.

A decade later, those obstacles were swept away.

An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the Depression and Left-Wing activism, forced (relative) corporate acceptance of the Labor Movement for the first time in the country’s history.

There are changes taking place in our Unions and communities that can be the beginning of something as large and profound.

If they are, then the obstacles Unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.

To Read Bacon’s Labor Op-Ed In Its Entirety, Go To: The labor movement needs a freedom agenda – People's World