Union Perspectives

Bank of America is rooting for there to be less jobs so the employers will be back in control. Joblessness could help companies bring people back in the office where they want them, despite evidence that shows employees are more productive when they work from home. These titans of wealth would like to see a recession just to put the little people back in their place so they can regain the control they had over the working class who feared losing their jobs or having their hours cut. Some employers enjoy watching their workers grovel for their jobs that pay low wages where missing a day’s work could mean not being able to pay the rent or make a car payment or pay the utilities. Good timing and planning are the ways to win strikes with as much support from all unions that can get involved. The young workers are getting smarter even though they don’t teach about labor and the capitalist system in high school. The young workers can now just look up labor laws and history and how the ca...

There are other alternatives to banking with the corporately owned big banks that screw over the little guy. Some of these alternatives are being used around the world and in a couple of places in the U.S. Alternative currency keeps local cash locally. Some foreign cities where this is being used is Basel, Switzerland, Nantes, France, and Bristol and Brixton, England. The Banque WIR, an alternative to the Swiss franc, has been using its own currency, the WIR, since 1934. Nantes created its own currency based on the WIR. Also, there are the Bristol pound and the Brixton pound used as alternative versions of the British pound. Here in the U.S., there is Ithaca, New York, called the Ithaca Convertible, one Ithaca dollar equals one U.S. 1 dollar. Then there is the Deli Dollars that arrived in 1989, started by Frank Tortoriello, a deli owner sold $10 for $8 to be used in his refurbished deli; followed by Massachusetts’ Berkshire Farm preserve notes or BerkShares in the early 1990s. Sa...

The fight for $15 is not just a fight for money or even the equality of life. In all wars there are scrimmages and in these scrimmages is where momentum is won, which usually puts the opponent on the defense and is hard to overcome. The fight for $15 is now worldwide and gaining ground. Labor is on the move and with each win they are and will get stronger. Also, labor is winning strikes across the U.S. and the world. But we are fighting an uphill battle with a long road to go and labor needs all wage slaves and unions to stand together just like all those hard hat union construction workers did for the fast food workers not too long ago. We need to understand that the fight against labor started long ago, and also who we are up against. The “Art of War” says that you must know yourself (your history) and your enemy to have a chance for victory. Labor’s enemies are the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Koch brothers’ American Legislative Exchange Co...

The Art of War says that you must know your enemy and, yes, there is a war between the 1 percent’s very rich and the corporate chief executive officers against the toilers. The toilers do not know just who their enemies truly are because the anti-union, anti-worker corporations spend our money (from buying their products) to pound us with misinformation The inequality keeps the toilers heads bent low trying to just trying to scrap by with minimum wage jobs that they don’t have the time of energy to stand up, look around and compare notes with other toilers and understand what they, the 1 percent, are doing to us. The worst part is we give them the bullets (our money) to use against. When we do business with a store that belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, which is just a union by a different name. They use their dues to lobby against unions and higher wages for the workers, safety laws and benefits. They look out for themselves, not the workers who will eventually be their customers. ...

The oligarchies do control the world with money. They have bought and paid for our elected politicians and entire governments. What we usually see is the one person at the top who we then direct all our attention to, but we should look at this oligarch control as an iceberg, as the really destructive danger is not seen. The unseen, larger portion of the iceberg is under the water and this is why we, the 99 percent, get blindsided by people who we think are running our country, like presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and in Russia Putin. They are all just figureheads controlled by the 1 percent oligarchies and their corporate money, which is all part of the underwater part of the iceberg. The oligarchies formed organizations, such as American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC to usurp our country’s political process. The ownership of countries by the oligarchies has never worked out or lasted long. After they have all the money and power th...

The corporate oligarchies’ plan is to turn the American worker into an uneducated, underclass, subsistent wage slaves, which will put the American Dream out of reach. Even at this time the Dream is a lie still being told to our young people today. The money hogs’ worship of profits has brought a plague upon our country, the environment, and our cities. While the oligarchies are doing this to us, the Wall Street speculators loot and pillage to the point we now know their plan and whether they know it or not it is a self-destructive plan. We will have to help them self-destruct for the oligarchies are working out of the old play book where they want to feed us 24-hour television and run up our credit card debt, work to pay off our loans and be grateful for the scrapes the corporations GOP toss us. That is their old short-term strategy, but we, the 99%, and unions have a grand strategy that is nonviolent shift in power by attacking the columns that hold up the power structure. Those colu...

At a union meeting an AFL/CIO representative was trying to convince the union leaders there to educate their workers about how the GOP are going to attack them this election and with only 100 plus days left before the election I would call this crisis management. Why do the union leaders have to educate their workers for they should know what they’re up against and they should know themselves—their union history—for the Art of War says if you do not know yourself you will lose half of your battles; and if you do not know yourself and do not know your enemies then you will lose all your battles. I think that the AFL/CIO should spend most of its money on explaining about the unions and what they have done for the working people—whether they are union or not—and also we should show the faces of the new and old union leaders, which were the real heroes of the working class wage slaves and there are many. What the unions have been doing is giving money to promote unknown wannabe polit...

There can be no doubt that we, the 99%, are in a class war and the oligarchies are draining the treasury of the 99% and the unions, which a classic way to win a war (Art of War). When we, the 99%, have to defend our labor rights, voting rights with a court system that is slanted toward the corporations - Citizens United - (which only supports the 1%) then the oligarchies can, with unlimited money, buy lawmakers, governors, judges and presidents of the United States, which creates a plutocracy-type government. We are very close to a plutocracy government and getting closer with each election. The Koch brothers and Karl Rove’s GPS Crossroads are dedicated to this end. One of the things that can turn this around is the 99%, OWS movement, with the help from labor. Right now labor is working at a disadvantage because of some labor contracts that labor has entered into, such as no strikes, but they might just Wobble like in the old days of IWW movement or when a state or other entity votes...