Union Perspectives

What happens when one person is above the law? And, what if he or she is the president of the United States? If this were to happen then it is not just one person above the law, but this includes all the people helping this person be above the law knowing there is a pardon waiting for them when the rug is pulled out from under them. How can this happen? First a party, like the Republicans, needs to be corrupt and greedy to the point it will warp the very foundation of our country. Then you must obtain control of the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court by denying a sitting president the right to appoint a candidate to fill a vacant seat; then you get the new president to appoint judges willing to rule the way you want and not by legal precedence. Then you pull out all of the stops to include election corruption to get your candidate elected to the presidency, just like George W. Bush, who was followed in office by Barrack Obama, who chose not to prosecute the corruption that w...

The oligarchs require a government with tremendous power of law enforcement to control the anger of the people. More GOP controlled state legislatures are working to suppress local progressive victories, such as living wage ordinances, filling private prisons with poor or undocumented people. They are engineering retirement crisis by moving workers to inadequate 401Ks. The GOP is once again taking away rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making workers sign forced arbitration agreements. They are gutting the public education system to keep people ignorant because they’re more likely to vote for GOP lies. The GOP will even refuse children clean water as they’ve been doing in Flint, Michigan for going on five years now. James Buchanan says people who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs are to be treated as subordinate members if the species akin to animals who are dependent on others. He says this without factoring in the wage discrepancy...

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 t...

Today, our Commons are mostly invisible in life in the United States, but about two billion people around the world depend on Commons for their livelihood, like water, fisheries, farmland, roadways, air and other natural resources vulnerable to theft and seizure by corporations that want to do fracking, privatizing, or monetizing every aspect of these resources. The push for privatization is a way for corporations to plunder our commonwealth and life blood ends up with such results as our groundwater sold for brand-label bottled water, the patenting of the human genome, and the replacement of shareable agricultural seeds with proprietary GMO (genetic modified organisms) that must be bought year after year. The word Commons was termed in the 16th-19th centuries by the English gentry. They would seize the village pastures, forests, and waterways for their private use. These seizures were called “enclosures.” This drove the people who now were dispossessed from their Commons to the citie...

When the sun shines on ice, the ice usually melts and when the sun shines on agendas and methods of the oligarchies they will start to lose ground. The Koch brothers fund Americans for Prosperity—just think about this for a moment. The prosperity is just for the Koch brothers, not for the workers. When they invest they invest to make more money. The Koch brothers are also large contributors to ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), that writes state bills and gives them to Koch supported politicians to get passed in state houses across the nation. Again, this only helps the oligarchies. One only has to look at Wisconsin and New Jersey to see how detrimental these ALEC influenced bills are destroying these states because the laws only help the oligarchies. The Koch brothers and other rich oligarchies have their water boys, who are their mouth pieces, their talking heads, like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and the entire Fox news cast of characters. These corporate whores are als...

The strike or temporary walkout: why workers fear doing it and how to alleviate their fear. One way to picket a fast food or any low wage place is to recruit people from like-minded businesses. This way it is hard for owners to retaliate against workers asking for a $15 an hour minimum wage. So, workers at Burger King can picket a McDonald, and then the workers of McDonalds picket at Burger King. Another thing is to find out what other organizations would support increasing minimum wage to a $15 an hour and trade off might be just the exposure of their membership, such as faith-based work centers. You can leverage your manpower to help each other to see that there is no retaliation. This is not a new strategy. These are time-tested tactics used by the Knights of Labor in the 1880 and the International Workers of the World. The tactics were used to gain freedom of assembly and speech. These tactics will get around the outlawing of solidarity of workers that the National Labor Relations...

Lady Justice is supposed to be blind. So all law abiding people have an even chance for justice and if usually starts with judges of the court, which should not be obliged to anyone other than Lady Justice and the money to elect judges should be public money not corporation money from oligarchies bent on controlling the country. When the moneyed 1 percent starts funding the election of our judges then Lady Justice will no longer be blind and she will see the large piles of money to be made or put toward elections. The 99 percent wage slaves are in for a losing fight for their share of the economic pie. The oligarchies can just buy the whole damn pie by electing the judges, who will uphold the claims of the 1 percent every time and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) will keep helping the state governors pass laws, which will be upheld by the 1percents’ judges. If this is what is happening, it will only leave the wage slaves and the ‘have nothings’ with only one way to fight an...

Labor councils, which is already well established, can be used to counter the GOP and anti-union corporations think tanks and other anti-worker organizations, such American Legislative Exchange Council, State Policy Network (SPN), Americans for Prosperity (their prosperity, not yours, and funded by the Koch brothers), MacIver Institutes and many others. They all are well-funded, but labor has its councils, which are well established, but we just need to expand and update our effort to counter our enemies. One thing that the GOP think tanks are doing is hiring media reporters and setting up a syndication service providing right-leaning wire service, which tends to sway public opinion. We, the labor councils, could very easily do this with very little expense. Every labor council should have their own think tank. In these think tanks there should be politicians, labor, business, academia and work on the messages for the media. It is the only way to tell our story and get support. I have ...

I find that it is not quite as painful if I understand how and why the 1% do and how they do it to us 99%, such as how do the 1% control the 99% of the wage slaves in a country that is a democracy. The people elect their leaders, which then always supports the wishes of the 1%. This goes back to the founding of this country. Well, the 1% has had control since the beginning of our country. Our Constitution was originally written for the 1%, the rich white men, and little rights were given to the 99%. Rights that included the 99% were written only after the 99% fought back and got the Bill of Rights. Then the 1% started to devise ways to weaken the 99%, which was a two party system and for the GOP money people, and one for the leftovers, the Democrats. But when the leftovers were getting too strong the 1% figured out how to split the leftovers into smaller groups by divisive issues, such as race, gender, religion, abortion, sexual orientation and so on. Always something new like gu...

Why don’t we, labor wage slaves, have organizations, other than labor unions, fighting for our workers? The right wing has not only anti-labor think tanks, but also many undercover organizations, such as American Legislative Exchange Council; the right wing group the Lincoln Club of Orange County, California; Manufacturers Association; and the local, national and international Chamber of Commerce. These are just a few of the organizations that have come out from under their rocks and are getting laws or propositions on the ballot before we wage slaves even know what’s happened. This always puts us on the defense, which we must stop in order to counter their actions. They have the money, but we have the people. Whether or not they lose they will have depleted our treasury and worn our people out. What we need to do is take the fight to them, which will remove what they are doing to us. We could do this by using our labor councils and spin off organizations to work on propositions and ...

We need today a Congress like the one we had in 1935, which was a worker-type of Congress that guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions. Their rational for setting forth the National Labor Relations Board Act was that inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association … and employers. The money people who are organized in corporate or other forms of ownership association tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and this is the same today. The workers have shown productivity gains for the last 30-40 years and yet the wages have dropped and the money gains have gone to the 1%. Today what workers’ rights we still have are now in extreme jeopardy by restricting most of what the 1935 Congress set forth: (1) by restricting the rights of workers to learn about unions; (2) the right of workers to organize and choose union representation; (3) the right of...

Labor is not the enemy. They are the customers. Why do us wage slaves give our hard earned money to people who use it against us. And, yes, we are wage slaves for anyone who drags their tired body up every day to earn wages. The GOP will tell you the U.S. is the land of opportunity; and that is true to a certain extent. Not everyone is born equal or from the same circumstance, and no one makes wealth on their own because they need employees to help them get there and we turn around and buy what they are selling. So, in this capitalist system we are wage slaves. If we don’t do this we will not eat or have shelter or be able to send our kids to school—you know, like take care of your family. Why do we give away our hard earned cash to corporations like Wendys, McDonalds, Mars Inc. (candy), Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Intuit (website creator) and the Gates Foundation (Microsoft), who were all long-time members of the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC. The organization b...

When we don’t know what the antiunion people like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are planning then all we can do is respond like the thousands of Indiana workers who just got the “right to work” for less jammed up their butts. Now that it is done we talk about how bad it will be for the workers like making more than $5,000 a year less on average maybe we should pay attention to what is going to happen and warn our workers before the damage is done. It’s too late after the legislation has passed to take to the streets in protest. Unions should be holding meetings with its members, educate them and their families on “who” and “what” and “how" labor is being attacked right now. Labor is being attacked in 20 states along the lines of anti-worker legislation. The “what” is to break workers into temp workers without a voice; the “how” is through the power of people and the ballot box; and the “who” are the likes of ALEC, Citizens United, American Crossroads, Chamber of ...

The 99% think the 1% is in control or is about to control our country’s government and the work place. In reality the people who are in control are 1/10th of the 1%. The true oligarchies with their minions engaging in anti-union organizations, such as the Koch brothers’ Limbaugh, ALEC’s Club for Growth, and Dick Armory as puppet master of the Tea Party’s Americans for Prosperity. Labor has boxed themselves into a corner with labor agreements, which binds labor to no walking off the job site while there is an agreement in place. The strike was labor’s best weapon against the anti-union corporations. If labor could partner up with the 99% maybe we could help each other and labor would not be in breach of contract. The 99% could picket in front of businesses or job sites where labor has a no walk off stipulation in its contract. In the long run we all want the same things: healthcare, jobs, good pay, a home, good schools, pensions, end to the war, and rebuilding our infrastructure. We...

The minions do the work of the oligarchies in keeping the tax rate low for the very rich; but the minions are also the mercenary army that works to elect Republican people to offices in county, state and federal government. The definition of minion in this case are people like of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, etc., who are the water carries for the Koch brothers, and American Legislation Exchange Council (ALEC). Then when they are elected to office they are then asked to join ALEC. There the newly elected people are wined and dined at ALEC retreats where they are given cookie cutter legislative bills, which enhance the oligarchies’ money and power. The more they get the more they want. If ALEC can find ways to break the unions and suppress voters’ rights they will be unstoppable unless the 99% can expose the oligarchies’ minions for who they are and how they work. If we don’t understand and know our enemies we will only win half of our battles, but if we...

American Legislative Exchange Council is pushing the union busting resolutions to make states “right to work” states. Dr. Martin Luther King had said was one of the greatest frauds ever perpetuated on workers. What ‘right to work’ would do is let workers, who are in a union pay dues or opt not to pay. If they opt out they still get the benefits from the union as the dues-paying workers. Some pay, while others get a free ride. I always thought Republicans and the Tea Party members were against free rides – something for nothing. What the ‘right to work’ does is weaken the unions by sharing the benefits in an open shop whereas in a closed shop everyone pays their fair share. Weakening the unions is what ‘right to work’ and ‘pay check protection’ is all about and ALEC and the GOP won’t give up until they succeed in destroying all the protections in place for workers. This is what this is all about. There are currently 23 states with ‘right to work’ legislation; and Arizona is currently...

The oligarchies, 1%, with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) buys governments and with ALEC’s help buys new laws to have the advantage over the wage slaves, 99%. With the new anti-union slave wage laws, they can take away the bargaining rights of workers to even have a union rep. With a plutocracy form of government that oligarchy have put in place so that only they can benefit as they cut funding for education for the 99% wage slaves, which keeps the wage slaves at the bottom of the economic ladder. Also, a dumb worker won’t cause much trouble. The wage slaves will probably have to work until they die for the oligarchies. The slave wages provided by employers will not allow the wage slaves to have a pension, and the wage slaves do not make enough money to save for retirement and if they do save, the oligarchies will find a way to take it away (Wall Street) so the wage slaves will have to work until they die. The oligarchies, corporations, and GOP have figured out that ...