Wages and safety should be the owners’ responsibility: pension, healthcare, and seniority on the job should be the unions’ responsibility. If unions had the responsibilities of pensions and healthcare and a union member has to move to another area, their pension and healthcare follows them. With this scenario the power shifts to the member and union and not to the corporation or government entity.
If the corporations or government control the pensions and healthcare, this gives them a wedge issue to use to split the single workers and family members or the new workers against the workers about to retire. If all unions, like the Building Trades, took control of their pensions and healthcare (healthcare might not be the issue now that it once was) it would take away the talking points about how unions are responsible for bankrupting companies and government entities with huge pensions, which nonunion workers don’t have. It is the pensions and healthcare that is used to turn public opinion against unions and is what wins the elections for right to work state laws, which kills unions.
You cannot be in partnership with your capitalist enemy and win. You must always stay an arm’s length away to have a clean vision of what is happening—the old forest for the trees thing. The big win for the wage slaves at this time s to win the $15 to $16 an hour fight. They then should start their pension and healthcare plan fight. The timing is right for this fight and those fighting can use the Building Trades model. The wage slaves need to understand that the very things they are being denied are freely given to the executive officers, who do little of the true work.
The AFL is with Senator Bernie Sanders and it is the people’s only chance to push back against Elon Musk, who wants to dismantle our government. Musk family is said to have left South Africa because they could no longer exploit The native/black Africans so he bought Trump and now he’s laying waste to America in the name of progress. With Senator Sanders’ leadership and backing of all labor unions, we could put together the whole of 99 percent of the people and beat back the 2 percent destroying we what once had and stood for while also saving Social Security, healthcare for all, elder care, child care, while working on the climate change crisis (we are running out of time, as the weather is showing us). The workers need to go big, such as a four-day work week like other countries have; universal basic income (UBI) and Medicare for all for unhoused people, which would help get them off the streets. UBI goes right back into the local economies, which supports jobs for the other working p...
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