Union Perspectives

The gap between the 1% oligarchies and the wage slaves gets wider by the day. The Stock Market just hit 1,500. It has never been this high and the corporations are making record profits than ever and yet the workers are paying for this as the wage gap just keeps widening so what are we to do? The elected politicians won’t help. They are in the pockets of the money people, but some of the world leaders are starting to get nervous about the level of anxiety of the poor 99%. There is no jobs and what there is pays very little and no health or pensions. When people have no hope, the masses can be very dangerous. All that is missing is a leader or leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Reuther, John F. and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X or Gandhi. When the leaders do appear we had better hope they are good ones and if they are we had better protect them from being killed like our old friends “Abraham, Martin and John.” Now will the new leader or leaders be something l...

Wisconsin will be the turning point in which workers will either prosper or decline on the issues of pay, pensions, healthcare, vacations and all the other worker gains over the last 100 years. The GOP and wage slaves are at a crossroads and if the GOP wins then the dominoes will start falling state by state, which will put the workers in the position, the only option, of having to fight in the streets. We have already lost the U.S. Supreme Court, which is where all appealed cases end up, and they will and have already ruled against the workers. The only thing left will be the streets, which will not be good because the GOP/oligarchies will be able to identify the leaders and jail or, like in the 1800s-1930s, just kill them by trumped-up charges or by mob violence. Some of our labor leaders who were eliminated this way were Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Walter Reuther, Eugene Debbs and Martin Luther King Jr., just to name a few. This is the old anti-union playbook and this worked time...

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...