The disempowerment of the workers worldwide and the USA is driving the wage inequality wider each day, which puts the capitalists’ consumer-driven economy into a death spiral. This spiral began in the mid-1980s when executives and directors tossed aside their old patriotic inhabitations against laying off workers, cutting wages, closing U.S. plants, moving production overseas to dirt-cheap labor, and taking on debt.
Most of this was driven by locally owned companies becoming stockholder corporations where the bottom line was all that mattered, no matter the cost. Their only concern is the shareholders; but this way of doing business is proving counterproductive. There is no way to grow. There is no wages or jobs. No spending. No economy. It’s essentially like committing business suicide.
This type of death spiral was also supported by the business roundtable in the 1990. They changed their statement of corporations’ mission from making goods available at a fair price to generating economic returns to its owners.
In the past, workers were able to raise their wages through widespread collective bargaining or full-employment economy with an unemployment rate was at 5 to 4 percent, neither option is available today or likely to be any time soon.
So what to do? Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince,” that there are two methods of fighting. One is with laws, and the other is force. The first one is proper to man, but the second is proper to beasts. Because the first one often does not suffice (think recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings) one has no recourse to the second.
There are three phases of a general strike and unions must plan for one. Those three phases are: 1. general strike in an industry 2. general strike in a community 3. general national strike We need to move away from being on the defensive and move toward a good offensive. The American Federal of Labor (AFL) could not have held a general strike if it wanted to because they had thousands of different contracts that expired at different times of the year. This was done deliberately so that there is no consolidation of power for a general strike. Also, nowadays, there is no law agency that will support labor, except the National Labor Relations Board (NLBR), which has been under attack and in decline for years. This leaves the burden of change up to unions, and unless unions work together, little will change. We essentially have a combination of job trusts, which are not as strong as contracts, and the courts can break easily because the NLBR will be further weakened and essentially elim...
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