It looks like it’s time to switch from Ivory to Dove soap, Crest to Colgate, and from Godiva to See’s chocolates. Union brands first!

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life as an activist in LA’s union community and I’ve never seen times as rough as this for our members and for working class families in general. All of the pain I’m seeing around me has got me thinking… a lot.

Did you know that 70% of the American economy is generated by consumer spending? That’s huge! This means that collectively how we, as average citizens, spend our money — more than government or corporate spending — is shaping the economy of the United States. And it’s not been a case of whether or not we’ve been spending (oh, we’ve been spending, believe you me!) it’s a matter of how we spend our money. As I look around my house, my garage, and my cupboards I realize that we have been spending our money frivolously on things produced in foreign countries. In the end, no good can come of it.

I first came to California from Cleveland, Ohio to study at Humboldt State in 1969 and I never left. Even in high school I knew I wanted to be an educator but I also cared about nature and natural resources. In fact, even at my age I still love to get out into nature. Skiing, hiking, biking and tumbling are all big hobbies of mine. There’s nothing quite like the feeling on being on the side of a mountain after a snowfall and just listening to the silence, feeling the magnitude of it all.

Now that I’ve shared my experiences about buying my first union-made car on this blog –  how easy and difficult a journey it was buying my Ford Escape   – it’s time to introduce myself, for those of you who don’t know me or my what we do here at Senders Communications Group. I’ve been a union activist for almost 20 years now. My company – including my crew of reporters, photographers and graphic designers –  has been fighting the good fight in favor of union-based political and social causes for more than 16 years now. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of stories, campaigns and elections we’ve done over the years. It’s been an invigorating, wonderful and sometimes frustrating journey in so many different ways. You take your victories where you can get them.

After being disappointed that the Ford Fusion wasn’t union-built, I turned my attention to Ford union-made SUVs. I am a working mom with two daughters after all. There’s a lot of practicality to having a roomier, but safe vehicle that I can haul around bicycles and home improvement materials in. I first looked at the Ford Explorer,…

Survival in nature means the proper use of natural resources (water, flora and fauna) in order to maintain health, to satisfy basic needs (sleep, food, water …) and personal safety in extreme situations in nature caused by various natural, social or any other factors.   TYPICAL BEGINNERS’S MISTAKES 1. Do not attempt to break through…

Did you know that 83% of products recalled over the last year were foreign made?  The overwhelming majority of these recalls were against Chinese-made goods. In recent years toxic Chinese dog food has painfully killed 3600 American dogs and cats. 81 American citizens were killed by a Chinese blood thinner before it was recalled. In…

Through all this union car shopping, sometimes you just have to go with your gut. Like most people, if a friend tells me how amazing something is, I’m interested. It usually takes an extraordinary piece of advertising to raise my interests.  But even then advertising doesn’t seal the deal. If it did, I’d be driving…

Sometimes advertising really hits a nerve. In my search for an American union-made car, I’ve found most car ads have not been that helpful or informative. But Jeep recently put out a commercial that summarized so much of what LA Labor 411 supports.  It talked about how once we as a nation defined ourselves by what we made. Now, we’re defined by what we consume. Its message: “it was time to return to the basics,” impressed me enough that I decided to look into a Jeep Grand Cherokee as an option.

It’s amazing how inundated we are with advertising, but we’re not necessarily any clearer on what is the best product for us to buy. I can’t count how many American car commercials and advertisements I see in a week, on TV, on billboards and in the newspaper. Still, there’s not much in these commercials about quality (not enough at least), even less about buying American, and nothing on the importance of supporting the middle class by buying union.