April 15 is the big one! This rally will be worldwide for the fight for $15 an hour minimum wage. This fight is for not only fast food workers, but for all low-wage workers, such as adjunct professors at colleges, who are now part-time and non-tenured with no pensions, home healthcare workers, airport workers, childcare workers, Walmart-Target-Kmart-Home Depot, workers, car wash workers, auto lube workers and the list goes on. Corporations have decimated the pay of workers by demeaning the jobs as only unskilled or uneducated or student work jobs as if that had anything to do with the work being done.
There will be actions on 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the U.S. and abroad. There will be around 2,000 groups, including Jobs with Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support, as well. This will be the largest mobilization America has ever seen in decades.
This push is being headed and supported by the Service Employees International Union. This rally should be supported by people and money by all unions and labor councils, like the AFL/CIO, for this is labor’s chance to show the workers’ union and non-union that we, the labor unions, are for all workers and that we have the power to win.
We, wage slaves, will not let the Scott Walkers pit worker against each other—hence the right to work laws he recently signed. Also, this is the right time for the Democratic Party to take a stand for the workers. It is time to show just which side you are on: big money or the workers and their families. If Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken can do it, so can the rest of the Democratic politicians. Even Socialists like Kshama Sawant and Bernie Sanders have taken a stand for workers, so you can also.
There should be letters to the newspaper editors supporting the $15 and hour minimum wage, the right to form a union, as a civil right, and don’t forget we are owned the rent for the use of our Commons from the corporations making huge profits from what belongs to all of us.
What do you plan to do on April 15—fight for $15 or just pay your taxes?
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…