Steps needed to revive the Have Nots and Have Littles to a middle class status include income inequality, which the movement for $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage will help with opportunity inequality. With more money and time, workers would have time to take night classes to improve their chances for a better job and will have more time when they don’t have to work two or three part-time jobs.
Then the workers need childcare, vacations and some type of pension, which will follow them from job to job like a hybrid Social Security without changing the present Social Security system. The fly in the ointment is there is just not enough jobs worldwide and here in the U.S. and there will be even less after the passage of Trans Pacific Partnership.
The capitalist system depends on the proletarians who need to be adequately compensated for their labor to have money to buy the products the capitalist system sales, which ironically are made by the labor of the proletarians.
One way is a hybrid capitalist system, such as workers being paid a non-labor wage, which provides substance to keep people out of poverty and not need many different types of government assistance—just cash once a month. Think of all the subsidies corporations get and give nothing back for this public money. They pay no taxes and have loopholes to get out of paying fines.
This then would free people to work temporary low-wage, part-time jobs. With their free time, the proletarians could provide free labor to the social infrastructure, such as firefighting or volunteering at a school, medical service, tutoring, couching sports, boys and girls club, scouts, the list goes on. These types of volunteer jobs have the potential to lead to a full-time job.
In the end, people who are better educated can move out of poverty, with better paying jobs, more purchases can be made thereby necessitating the production of more goods because there will more people purchasing more goods. More taxes paid by workers who make more money with the cash subsidies.
We have to make changes. Better labor laws, which give people the right to form unions or associations to represent them. These are all civil liberties that the proletarians have a right to. Also, another source of money to support these non-labor payments should come from rent for the use of our Commons just like the State of Alaska does for its people.
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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