Skip to main content

ALEC Using States to Block Wage Hikes

The fight for a living wage continues. Workers are asking for a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, but in reality it should be $24 an hour had it kept up with inflation and CEOs exorbitant incomes. When workers finally get their local leaders to support a better wage, they then have to deal with a handful of states with conservative lawmakers who get ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) to write wage preemption laws to block increasing the minimum wage. There are now four states with such laws. This template for states to block cities and counties from raising the minimum wage in their own communities is taking the voice and vote away from low-wage workers. In order to fight back, there needs to be unions and local lawmakers who should be incensed by what the states are doing in supporting the large food and retail corporations. The corporations don’t leave their profits in these cities, counties and even states. They just take from our coffers by forcing their employees to use government assistance programs and leave in their wake wage pollution. If there was a good living wage in these cities and counties, there would be more tax payer support systems. We need to elect good, honest people to the state government, who will support a living wage and people who will support workers at the local level of government and the workers need to keep up the fight and ask for union help. The unions can hold education classes on how to get this done and maybe even run the organizing of local leaders who will—in the long run—benefit by receiving jobs that pay a living wage, which keeps children in housing and in school. It is cheaper to pay up front than to try to clean up afterward when families are destroyed by drugs, divorce, crime and homelessness.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May Day 2028 or Sooner

Unions’ long game is to get all union contracts to expire on the same day nationwide. The United Auto Workers combines contracts ends on April 28, 2028. This could then result in a mass national strike starting on May Day beeginning that year. This could then put enormous pressure on employers, but also on lawmakers. It’s the muscle and sweat of the workers that keeps this country great, not the individual company or corporations. This May Day strike would be the time to change the workers’ world for the better by negotiating for a 32-hour week with the same pay, and the U.S. adopts a healthcare for all with no out of pocket costs. This would also help the employers as they would no longer have to provide healthcare. By striking, the UAW won same pay for new workers, all UAW contracts will end on the same date, a 25-percent pay increase, a cost of living adjustments, a guaranteed right to strike over potential plant closures, and also the right to vote to unionize through the card che
Post a Comment
Read more

Standing At The Precipice

Unions do not do well in a dictatorship because unions are the first thing dictators destroy, and rest assured the workers won’t be allowed to hit the streets in protest. If Trump is elected he will invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops into the cities to crush them and send a message that he will terminate and dissent. They will eliminate unions and unionized workers. We are standing at the precipice and it's up to us to fight the fall into a dictatorship. By voting for the GOP, maga people and anyone else will be able to keep their guns until Trump says, “No.” By then, he will have already amassed an Army of foot soldiers in place to take over the government jobs. They will be Trump’s people and they will do whatever he tells them to do. The only way this can be stopped is for all unions and their members to put aside their political and social differences and stand strong for democracy, unions, workers rights and workers safety. This is not a drill. It will happen just loo
Post a Comment
Read more

“Workampers” are the New IWW Wobblies

We now have another organization that will enhance the wage pollution for the wage slaves. Walmart started the wage pollution and then temporary agencies, which offer no healthcare or pensions, just temporary low wages. Now we have the online U.S. retail business, which did $197 billion in 2011. The workforce that does the work in these hundreds of warehouses are called “workampers.” Amalgamated advertises positions on websites that workampers frequent. This is just a modern version of what the old Wobblies had to do in the 1920s and ‘30s; only then, instead, of traveling from place to place living in trailers and motorhomes they rode railroad freight cars and camped in hobo camps called the Jungle, which we still have. The reason that the warehouse owners like workampers is they are temporary and will not stay year round that way by not staying in one place the workers do not have time to make friends, which could start unions. This is an old way to keep unions out for if people w
Post a Comment
Read more