By Joe Maniscalco

Jane LaTour was a soft but powerful voice — one that the Labor Movement could ill afford to lose in these increasingly hard times. But she’s gone now, succumbing last week, like so many other good people, to the working class scourge of cancer. She was 76.

During her life, Jane LaTour fought hard against the stultified, anti-democratic elements within the Labor Movement that today continue to undermine the kind of real progress working people everywhere demand. Look out across the current political landscape of New York City where lifelong trade unionists find themselves pitted against a leadership class who’ve decided destroying traditional Medicare and delivering it to the vultures on Wall Street is what must happen. Can Jane’s forthcoming book “Rebels With a Cause: An Oral History of the Fight for  Democracy in New York City Unions” be any more appropriate for this moment in time?

Let’s pause for a minute to listen to Jane LaTour in her own words…