Ever think about why free education ended at the high school level in California and why we do not have free higher education? It is because the money people needed their wage slaves just smart enough to do the bulk of the work to make the oligarchies and corporations wealthy. The management positions would be reserved for family members and others who come from wealth and can afford an education.
In 1847, the first public university, Baruch, was established in New York. In 1862, the first Merrill Act was established that established public universities through federal land grants. At that time, many states opted to charge for education, except for California. Three months after California established its public university system in 1868; it decided to make its university system, the largest in the country, free. That was until 1966 when Ronald Reagan ran for governor; he attacked free education just as he attacked “welfare queens” in his campaign for president and the GOP uses immigration. Reagan succeeded and California citizens had to pay for their higher education with costs that seem to rise yearly.
By ending free education, Reagan essentially forced middle class and poor families and students to go deep into debt to get an education. If people cannot afford an education, how are they to get ahead in life or a good job? This is the way it is set up where the free education is just enough to keep the worker bees working and making profits for the corporations, but not enough education to move up the economic ladder.
So, when we are talking about the higher minimum wage we should also be talking about going back to a free public university system all the way. The only thing students would have to purchase is their books and with a minimum wage of $15 to $18 t $22 working college students would be able to afford their books and survive.
Think about the old G.I. Bill that put the GIs through college, helped them with buying their first home and this drove the economy up while raising the standard of living for generations of people. We should be ready for our next fight before winning the minimum wage. We now have understanding of what we need and are getting support for a higher wage, but why waste the moment on just the wage when we could very easily run wage and free higher education at the same time.
If the minimum wage goes up, there will be more taxpayers, more jobs, and some of those taxes could be used for paying for the higher educational costs. At this time we need more medical workers in all fields. We need more engineers, scientists, and educators. Most of all, we need a very well educated public who can think and reason for themselves and won’t let the wrong people control the images, propaganda that will control us, like Reagan used to end free public universities in California.
We have a movement; let’s not miss this opportunity to diversify like they did when Dr. Jonas Salk invented the vaccine for polio. If the polio association had diversified into another disease, they would have been way ahead on the next cure, maybe some form of cancer, but they were a single focused group. So, let’s not miss an opportunity with the minimum wage increasing and free education.
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…