Unions have begun organizing Walmart and this is a fight worth fighting, and if it is won all others will fall like dominos. It looks like the Walmart organizing effort was well planned. The Art of War says the Army who attacks can pick their time, in this case right before the holidays and the presidential election, and the places, stores, where workers are needed for the holiday hours. Other companies will not help, but will be happy to take Walmart’s customers and business. Knowing this, Walmart corporate leaders, threatened with a strike on Black Friday, are talking to themselves about whether to raise wages or bring in more part-time workers.
The workers have nothing to lose. They are already at the bottom of the economic ladder: no healthcare, no pension, no job security and the only power they have are their feet, and the solidarity of other wage slaves and unions. Now is the time for a full court press from all wage slaves to support the Walmart workers in the streets and with money, food, signs or whatever is needed for if Walmart falls there will be plenty of union work to go around for the economy will pick up and the need for unemployment will drop to 5-4 percent enough jobs for everyone and more money spent equals more things to be made, which equals more jobs and the cycle continues.
This will be a hard fought war of the wage slaves against the well-funded corporatists who have everything in their corner, such as laws, union busters, and money for replacement workers. People will go to jail, people will be beaten, and lives may even be lost. It will not be pretty, but all things of value are not free or easy. If they were they would already be done.
The organizing of our retail is on the scale of when the auto industry was unionized, which created the first middle class of working families in the U.S. Now we have a chance to do this again, rebuild the middle class, with the retail workers. Retail used to be union jobs with a living wage. The retail unions were killed by apathy, sleeping unions, weakened labor laws and right-wing court decisions.
We just forgot what the word “solidarity” means. It is the most important word in the language of the wage slaves.
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…