Union Perspectives

Workers engaged in the “Gig” job should study the playbook of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies. They fought for free speech and one big worldwide union with a cooperative common wealth, which would be free of class and national distinction. The Wobblies were founded in 1905 and are still around today. The Gig workers should consider joining the IWW since most of the Wobblies were part-time workers and travelled the country looking for work. The 9-to-5 jobs that a worker could retire from are just about gone. Four out of 10 Americans now make a living through nontraditional work schedules. There are a large group of freelance, contract, part time, temporary, virtual shared, and patched-together work. All that the workers fought for since the 1880s and the 21st century have been lost and we are now back to a kind of scavenger economy and existence. Forbes magazine predicted that by 2020, 50 percent of the American labor force will work at least p...

We, proletarians, are now trying to fight the second Gilded Age. The workers have lost the muscle and drive to confront a system run by and for the very rich 1 percent and the people who should be sided with the Have Nots and labor has been brainwashed into believing that they should be supporting the corporate domination of the economy and against Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps even though most of the proletarians are receiving or will be receiving Social Security, Medicare and food stamps. Do people get dumber with age instead of getting smarter? Or is it the corporate media like Fox brainwashing these people who are recipients of some type of pension from a government or union and they don’t understand that they have been suckered by the likes of the Koch brothers. Then there are the veterans, who buy into the same kind of crap by listening to radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, who are broadcast overseas to our troops, but not the progres...

How do the money people get very, very rich off the backs of the poorest Have Nots? Well, one reason is labor laws or the lack of labor laws in any case, the government is involved, which usually means highly paid lobbyists work for the very rich and against the poor. These are the lobbyists who fight against the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage—the restaurant workers’ pay, farm workers’ pay and overtime, and home health aide workers. Most of the wage slaves do not even earn federal minimum wage, but the people who have moved into the International Franchise Association (IFA) are getting very rich off the back of these workers—as usual. Whenever there is a push back against the $15 to $18 an hour, it’s usually the IFA there helping the likes of McDonalds, or suing the federal government to keep home health aides from earning a minimum wage and overtime. According to an August 2014 study in the Journal of Health Affairs, 62 percent of the home health care industry now consists of for pr...