I’ll admit it: before reading this article I didn’t know there was an indian reservation (their term, not mine, don’t shoot me) in southern california.  Figured there wasn’t enough space.  Eh, anyway, here’s what’s going on there:

Once steeped in poverty, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has become one of the nation’s wealthiest tribes thanks to casino gambling.

Now the Southern California tribe is using its riches to fund a potentially precedent-setting legal fight contending that tribes are exempt from federal labor laws because they are sovereign governments.

A ruling against San Manuel could open the door for unions to organize an estimated 250,000 workers — dealers, servers, cooks — at the nation’s 400-plus tribal casinos. Except for a handful in California, tribal casinos are generally not unionized; unions say it’s difficult to make inroads without the protection of federal organizing rules.

Note the assumption here, that for workers to organize they MUST have the federal government behind them.  This type of creeping dependance on politics is what has largely crippled organized labor, turning many away from it and transforming the leftover shell into little more than a cog in the status quo. Despite that, they want to foist it on these people, who it’s safe to say have been through enough already.

Backed by many of the country’s leading tribal organizations, San Manuel is fighting a 2004 opinion by the National Labor Relations Board that asserted the board’s jurisdiction over tribal businesses.

Under the decision, tribes would be covered for the first time by the National Labor Relations Act that bars unfair labor practices and gives workers the rights to organize and bargain with employers. (emphasis mine)

“Gives” rights?  Gee, I must be stoned out of my mind, because I could’ve sworn more rights were taken away by the Taft-Hartley Act than were “give[n]” by NLRA.

Union activity has basically become a joke, a buereacratic mess.  Why?  Because through politics it was forced to organize in an alien and inefficient manner.  Rights CANNOT be “given”, they exist by virtue of humanity itself, by buying into this idea that we merely do what we’re allowed to we end up in a position akin to a slave asking his master “please may I take a break?”.

The laborers of these reservations should learn from our mistakes, and say to those who want to file their interests into neat little boxes to be marginalized “no, we can do better without you”.  You want to unionize?  Then just gather together and declare yourselves a freakin union.  If the casino owners don’t like it, tough, there are more of you than there are of them.