Union Perspectives

Can workers today make more than their parents? At this time it is 50/50, but people born in 1940, the chance of children making more than their parents was at 92 percent—why? One reason for this is economic growth has slowed from 4 to 5 percent in the past decades to just 2 to 3 percent today; and almost all of the benefits of the 2 to 3 percent growth goes to the top with people in the lower income bracket are stuck with stagnant wages. The Americans at the bottom 50 percent are making an average of just $16,000 a year while the top 1 percent makes $1.3 million, and send their children to elite schools so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Part of the attack on the 1.7 million poor workers are employed by temporary agencies. Of these 1.7 million workers, 900,000 are on zero hour contracts. This problem is worldwide. Workers in the UK are facing the same problem, some 20 percent of the workers do not know if they will get a full week’s work. The people who are and have be...

There are unintended consequences of the 1 percent’s greed in offshoring corporations to save on taxes and labor costs. This greed has awakened the Have Littles to the fact that there is and has been a war waged against them by the 1 percent. This has been going on for about 40 years and most of this scheming has gone unnoticed because the corporate media has blocked coverage of it. Now the greed has gone too far and will bite the anti-worker 1 percent in the ass and the governments that support them. The people have had all they can take and are demanding their rights. Rights that include good wages, healthcare, pensions, unions, free education, and protection of our environment and climate. The sad thing is that most of these rights are provided to citizens in other countries, some countries are trying to take them away from their citizens and those countries where the citizens are fighting for these right—the sad fact is that other countries got the ideas to give or take these righ...

Labor here in the U.S. and worldwide should take a look or revisit what Sweden and Norway did to beat the 1 percent, the oligarchies who had held the country’s people in horrendous poverty. It was so bad that many thousands of people fled to other countries to avoid starvation. The Norwegian workers knew that change was needed, but the 1 percent had a death grip on the electric democracy and stacked it against the proletarians. The proletarians tried nonviolence actions to bring about the power change, but in both countries the troops were called in to defend the 1 percent’s riches and power, and the workers were killed in the nationwide general strike. The Norwegian workers and unions did not give up and they still wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent means by establishing co-ops and using electoral arena. The fight was on and workers led strikes in 1921-1923-1924. The employers, backed by the state, beat back the strikers with 100,000 armed people to protect ...

If you have a job that doesn’t pay enough to live on or to take care of your family would $5,000 or $20,000 extra for a family of four help if you received this once a year? This could be done in in the U.S. by charging rent for the use of our commons and for carbon taxes, financial transactions, intellectual property and technological infrastructure seeded with public money. Then there is also our natural resources, such as natural gas, oil, iron, gold, silver, copper, trees, water, clean air—all of these and more is considered sovereign wealth, which belongs to every U.S. citizen. Each citizen should have one share in America and receive each year dividends. Just like the corporations, which are using our commons for the most part free and it is time for them to pay up. This is what is done in the state of Alaska with its oil product. The citizens receive about $2,000 each a year as compensation. Most wage slave people here in the U.S. and around the world do not understand the conce...

Workers have the right in a capitalist system to make money and better their lives and the lifestyles of their families. But if working for wages or owning a business, which makes money, there comes with it a responsibility of how it is used or spent. It should not be used to destroy, it should be used to build and enhance the community and living standards for all, and this will not happen if the 1 percent just sits on their cash or worse yet, hides it to not pay their share for using our commons. The most important fact to appreciate is that the concentrated wealth translates into concentrated political power. The remedies that could reverse the increasing inequality are outside the mainstream politics today because the wealthy 1 percent gets to define what’s mainstream. This is why we need a wage hike of at least $15 to $18 an hour, more full-time jobs with benefits, such as healthcare, pensions, and free education for all. There are comparisons to draw from, such as Denmark or Fin...

What would the world be like if the dream of the old International Workers of the World (IWW) could come true? The IWW thought that all toilers of the world were the same and all had rights and there is no need for country borders. All workers are brothers and sisters. So if this is true, there would not be a reason for war. All would have a place in the world, such as Israel, Palestine, Kurdistan and Ukraine would not be fighting to hold onto their spot of land in the world. It is always the toilers who do the fighting and dying for the people in the background, who pull the strings of war. How do the toilers get forced into killing their brothers and sisters? A lot of this is rooted in a lack of education and religion. As long as there are borders around countries, the string masters can manipulate the toilers to do their bidding. Sooner or later the toilers of the world will figure out that they are the ones with the power. When they do they’ll have to decide if they want to conti...

Old anti-union and protesters’ tactics still work and are used by the corporations and large and small governments, cities, counties, state and federal. A tactic from the old days was to keep workers and workers’ families from getting together and comparing notes. The bosses worked people sun up to sun down six to seven days a week. Today, workers work two to three jobs at a time. They also used people’s ethnicity to keep people apart, such as the Irish, Asians, blacks and browns. The idea was to keep the workers from forming relationships so the bosses thought if they could keep the workers overworked, uneducated and suspicious of each other. They, the 1 percent, control the masses. The only place toilers could go and be together was church, which was again split into different religions and should be taken with a grain of salt for many were controlled by the rich. Today’s protests we see the Wall Street protesters and the police tactics, which are getting closer and closer to our m...

The strategy of the GOP oligarchies is to control the governments from the local level to the state to the federal level and the U.S. Supreme Court. Their biggest and most effective weapon is money, which they have the most of, and everyone knows, unfortunately, money equals power. The 99 percent working people have more people than the 1 percent, which means the Have Nots have their own kind of power. The people’s only chance to add money to their strategy is through unions and their members paying dues and this is why the GOP is so hell bent on destroying the means of unions collecting dues from union members. Using tactics like Right to Work laws in states and laws that let workers be in a union without paying dues, yet receiving all the union benefits. So the union members who do pay their dues are supporting the benefits of the non-paying members. It is easy to see how this is working out for the money strategy on both sides—union and GOP. Right to Work has nothing to do with the...

Competition can be used against the Haves. The Haves possess and, in turn, are possessed by power, obsessed with the fear of losing power; their every move is dictated by the idea of keeping their power. The way of life of the Haves is to keep what they have and wherever possible to shore up their defenses so now we have the Haves 1 percent determined to keep its power and in constant fight with the Have Nots. At the same time they are in conflict among themselves. Power grows or dies therefore in order to keep power the status quo must get more; but from whom? There is just so much that can be squeezed out of the Have Nots, so the Haves must take it from each other. This cannibalism of the 1 percent is a good time for the Have Nots to attack, such as the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage. The Have Nots should try to pick fights between fast food places by picketing one, which would bring more business to the one where there are no pickets. Then, when the owners see what is happening t...

For unions to be strong, they must be prepared and protect the one power they have over the 1 percent anti-union oligarchies. That is the strike. In the past, strikes always ended with losses on the wage slaves’ side because the unions never have enough resources to keep their workers fed or housed and money enough to keep the workers’ bills paid. This is a ploy the money people have used against wage slaves. They make it easy for anyone to get credit and credit cards, which the oligarchies control all aspects of credit cards from the limits to the interest rates, and when the average person needs more money they are encouraged them to tap into the equity in their homes. With no savings, large debts, it does not take long to break a worker and the strike ends. The oligarchies literally starve workers back to work. The unions must make a concerted effort to educate their union members on money management and how to survive a strike long enough to prevail in the strike. One thing that...

Inequality means you get screwed. Large gaps in educational achievement and racial divides all make the reduction in inequality difficult. The poorest states in the USA are Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia and most of these are Red states or considered Republican non-union, but right-to-work states. The Republicans will tell you wage slaves that inequality is desirable. Inequality gives wage slaves the incentive to work harder and invest. But at some point, which is where we are now, the inequality of income and wealth becomes so wide as to harm society. When most all the economic gains go to the top; the wage slaves and everyone aspires to join the top percentage, but they no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. Moreover with the small number at the top 1 percent making most of the investment decisions the economy will go up and down. Also, with the 1 percent gains more wealth they also gain more political power in a disproportionate amount, whic...

The widening of the wage inequality worldwide is going to destroy democracy as we know it today and destroy the economy for the economy and democracy go hand-in-hand. If we take out the guts of both, which is the wage slaves, we can lose it all. The wage slaves are the ‘have littles’ and the ‘haves,’ which leaves the one who are at the top, the 1 percent, and the ones at the bottom, the ‘have nothing.’ The 1 percent just sits on their money and the ‘have nothings’ have no money to add to the economy. If we could get more money into the hands of the ‘have littles’ through higher wages, tax breaks, and free healthcare. They, then, would employ the ‘have nothings,’ then the new money and taxes they pay and the funds that are saved from welfare would trickle up to the government and the 1 percent, who could make even more money. The inequality of wages would start to lose, which might just save the consumer economy and democracy. The alternative is what? A plutocracy or a revolution? ...

The magic number is $16 an hour and the wage slaves are winning. The 1 percent oligarchies are in a slow walk backward. Also, the governor of the State of California wants to kick the minimum wage to $10 an hour and already some low wage businesses have raised pay toward the magic number. You cannot rely on the government to do the work for you. They would have to vote to raise the minimum wage in order for it to become law, and the lobbyists would spend millions to stop it. So the best way is to just make corporations pay the $15 to $16 an hour and then get the government to make it a minimum wage law. This way the precedence will already be set and you will diminish the effect the lobbyists will have on the politicians, mainly the GOP. If the $16 an hour is obtained by the millions of low-wage workers, which for some workers would more than double their spendable income, the economy would boom. The 1 percent would bring back their money from the Cayman Islands to invest here. One mu...

Will the Dream of Debs, written by Jack London, ever come true? I think that it could happen or some version of it will occur. The dream was the Holy Grail of labor, which is a general strike over all of the United State. Step one was that labor stock pile enough food and necessities to outlast the 1 percent; sort of like what the Mormons teach their followers to do: stock pile food for a year. Then the union members have to save enough money to pay their bills for when union go on strike. In the past, strikes were usually lost because members ran out of food and money. The unions would have to be self-sufficient to shut down everything at once or to do a rolling strike planned to take place at different places to stay ahead of the corporations trying to neutralize the efforts of the strike, such as tying up the docks. Then tying up the trucks, shutting off the fuel at the refineries, followed by the railroads and power plants, and with the communication we have today, this could be a...

You know when you’re winning when you get the attention of your opposition and especially when the opposition starts recognizing your organization after first trying to ignore you and then treating you with distain. The message of the 99% is now resonating with increasingly more “Have Nothing,” “Have Little” and “Want Mores.” The win is when the 1% starts to see themselves being boxed into a corner in which there seems no way out other than alienating the 99% of the working people. They are failing to recognize that in the 99%, 70.2% are registered as Independents and 2.4% are registered as Republicans. It is time for the 99% and unions to go for a full-court press for now 99% have the best time for our message to be heard by the lawmakers of our government. They will have to pick a side: the 1% or the 99%. If they do not recognize us, the 99%, there is no doubt the 1% will lose - this by the 1%’s own admission. We must come together and keep up the pressure. We have the 1% on th...

The Have Nothings are the homeless, the Have a Little used to be the middle class and the Have Some are the new middle class and the Haves are the 1% and they have it all. The wages of the 1% are at an 80 year high. Some of the highest 1%ers are: Oracle’s Larry Ellison with a wage of $77.6 million; Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship at $38.2 million; Zynga’s Mark Pincus at $110 million; Caterpillar’s Doug Oberhelman at $10.4 million; Johnson & Johnson’s William Weldon at $25.6 million; Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein at $19 million; Ford Motor Co.’s Alan Mulally at $26.5 million; McKesson’s John Hammergren at $469 million; Omnicare’s Joel F. Gemunder at $133 million; TRW Automotive Holdings’ John Plant at $4.5 million; Verisk Analytics’ Frank Coyne at $33 million; CVS Caremark’s Thomas M. Ryan at $ 50 million; Wal*Mart’s Michael Duke at $18.7 million, which is 750 times more pay than the average Wal*Mart worker makes. There as never been such a large inequity in wages....

How will and how will the corporate GOP start demonizing our name 99ers? The 99ers are the people in the streets of New York and seventy plus cities across this nation. We are in a class war with the top 1 percent of the nation who owns 40 percent nation’s wealth, and the top 1 percent of Americans take home 24 percent of the nation’s income. They, the top 1 percent of Americans, owns half of the country’s stocks, bonds and mutual funds. They also have, with all that wealth, only 5 percent of the nation’s personal debt, and the top 1 percent is taking in more of the nation’s income since the 1920s. If this is not enough to infuriate us, the 99ers, then we only have to look at what the 1 percent, such as the Koch brothers and other billionaires are doing to us, such as buying entire states from governors to all elected politicians, attorney generals and judges. They then use these positions to break unions and deprive 99ers of their voting rights. They would like to get rid of child l...