“Trade unions must convince the world at large that their efforts far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions,” Karl Marx.
Union steelworkers in Greece fight being framed-up by the Ellimiki Halivourgia steel mill where the workers are fighting a 40 percent wage cut. The riot police stormed the picket line and arrested six people at the gate. This was inspired by the dogma of the law and order of the government of the anti-union oligarchies who own the government of the employers. They are using back to work orders with threats of jail. The threats are also used against all union that try to support their fellow union members, like public transportation workers, longshoremen, and farmers.
This is not new to the world for on May 26, 1937, ten strikers fell dead under police bullets at the Republic Steel’s south Chicago plant in the USA and scores of their fellow strikers were wounded. They had come, 300 of them in a peaceful parade to demonstrate their demand for union recognition. Maybe the unions will have to organize self-defense guards.
Just the other day pro-Russians went to the mouth of a Ukraine mine and told the miners to take down the Ukraine flag or they would throw explosives into the mines, but the miners had a defense unit, which drove the Russians away. Is this what the world’s workers will need to protect themselves from beatings, killings, and frame ups while trying to protect wages? In the Occupy Wall Street movement, they had some lawyers to help the protesters arrested. The lawyers were on scene to watch, but with today’s anti-workers groups, this might not be good enough.
The fight to raise the minimum wages to $15 to $18 an hour, healthcare, and free education will be brutal verbally and physically. The oligarchies will not submit easily, for they worship their money like some worship their gods with fanaticism and it’s very hard to negotiate with fanatics. It will be class warfare—it will be the 400 with the money against the 99 percent. I like our chances, but we must plan, educate and have the whole 99 percent: the have nothings, have little, used to have and want to haves.
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…