Union Perspectives

Why single-payer/Medicare for all would save money and help the capitalist system. One, if no business or corporation, like the auto plants did not have to pay health insurance, they could sell their vehicles overseas cheaper. If all the people had health insurance, a person could start a business and not worry about having to provide health insurance for themselves, their families and their employees, which would put more people to work and their jobs could be backfilled by another worker. People who could retire, but must keep working until Medicare covers them could now retire without worrying about their healthcare. They could retire and open a job up for someone new.  Countries with universal healthcare are: Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Solvenia (where Trump's current wife is f...

The workers are losing while our labor leaders sleep or hide out, hoping they can hold onto their position until they retire. Our labor leaders appeared to have given up the rural areas and pulled their efforts into the big cities. This is like having a fort with a moat around it and think they are safe. We all know forts can be conquered in the long run. It’s as if labor leaders learned nothing from the Clinton era. We, at this time, are losing with the Right to Work laws being passed in 27 states, and now there is legislation in Congress for a national Right to Work law. Couple this with legislation in Congress to ban the Davis-Bacon Act on prevailing wage law, and the attacks on union pensions. These things will drive the nail into the heart of unions. This is happening in other countries, like the UK and France, who are electing leaders, such as Marine Le Pen, a far right leader. We, here, in the U.S., cannot just depend on the Bernie Sanders-types. We need new, strong unions wi...

Laborers of the world over must stop depending on governments to look out for their interests. At this time no political party is working for or defending workers. Government policies now are pitting people against each other by promoting and establishing wars resulting in millions of refugees. The refugees flood host countries for safety, but end up being used as cheap labor by those benefitting from the wars the refugees are fleeing. This cheap labor is used to break the unions and labor laws and drives wages and benefits down. Nothing can stop this but the people. The governments and the oligarchies make their profits off the misery of others. Labor has always won when they were in charge. Labor laws were not put into place to help the workers, they were established by President Franklin Roosevelt to stop strikes, which were beating back the nonunion workers. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rules were to replace the decisions that were being made from fighting for rights...

On a night in February 1933, Frances Perkins sat in front of the newly elected 32nd president of the United States as he told her that he wanted her to be the new Secretary of Labor. Perkins told President Franklin Roosevelt she would take the job if she could do it her way. Perkins wanted: a 40-hour work week, minimum wage, work compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance. The opposition to Perkins demands came from courts, businesses, labor unions--yes, labor unions, conservatives, and the chamber of commerce. Even with all this opposition against Perkins, a lot was accomplished. Today, we are trying to protect our Social Security, which we pay into, and even to expand it. We also want to go back to providing free college, like we used to have before politicians, like California Governor Ronald Reagan, redirected the money for f...

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 the world over at this time has no friends in this corporate world, and there is no political part that will support labor because unions don’t have the kind of money politicians are looking for. The political parties now side with Wall Street, corporations, big banks and lobbyists for this is where the money and political power is and where laws can be written—laws that will make them more money. One only has to look at the U.K., France, Ukraine, Spain, Greece, Turkey, South America, and, of course, here in the U.S. where labor laws have been shot full of holes and probably do more harm than good. Now is the time for a revolution of minimum wage workers, students burdened by student loans, all labor unions, people on Social Security, veterans, minorities and all the rest of us to band together to bring voter pressure on the Democrats, if not them, then a new people’s party because what we have now is not working for either party, Democratic or GOP. Are we in the U.S. reverting b...

We, here in the U.S., have our very own Greece. There is the destruction of the city of Detroit, which has been raped and pillaged by hedge fund vultures who are major donors to both political parties, which means the politicians then pass laws to protect hedge funders’ money, that is usually invested in bonds. On a bigger scale there is Puerto Rico, which has labored under colonial rule since Christopher Columbus landed on its shores in 1493 and claimed it for Spain. After the Spanish American War in 1898 the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico in the treaty of Paris and ruled it as a territory since. Puerto Ricans are considered natural born citizens, but like all stepchildren they must abide by U.S. laws without a voting member in Congress. For decades the island was a jewel of the Caribbean with the highest per capita income in Latin America, but in 1996 when a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to a 10-year phase out of section 936, a tax exemption for U.S. manufa...

The world’s ills are driven by greed and the never ending lust for power over the proletarians by the oligarchies, who hide and hoard their cash so they don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes. When the government cannot meet their expectations of payments they then demand austerity measures thereby placing the deficit burden on the workers, who did not cause the problem. Governments provide so many loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy, which ends up shorting all of us, but the people at the bottom pay the greatest price. Most of the wealthy people today got that way not by hard work, but by their DNA, they inherited the wealth. Their lack of a work ethic means they lack the guilt or awareness that their greed hurts most of the population when the austerity measures are implemented. The wealthy invest in banks, which the countries like Portugal and Greece have had to keep their Eurozone partners and creditors happy by taking from the poor to make the rich richer. When the money...

Has the world’s 99 percent finally figured out that they need to vote for and support people who will stand by and fight for the good life they deserve? People like Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s newly elected Labor Leader is a socialist, and Canada’s liberal candidate, Justin Trudeau, promises to work for the toilers. Now, we have a leader in the U.S. who is running for president, Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, wants big money out of politics, universal healthcare, free public universities, expanded Social Security and a job’s program for youth, plus a living wage beginning at $15 an hour. There is a global movement going on at this time and the toilers are electing popular leaders in countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland, Turkey, Israel and Britain. These people are anti-austerity people and they rally thousands when they speak out for the dispossessed, challenge moribund elites, they are vilified as populists, deluded and dangerous, but they are winning elections. This movement is a...

Why did the U.S. back the Turkish government to up the war on the Kurds? Was it just to save jet fuel by having a base in Turkey? If so then money is more important than Kurdish lives and when the Kurdish fighters are the only ground troops who are kicking the asses of the ISIS fighters. The Kurdish people have been divided into four places and they have been fighting this injustice for the last 100 years and the Kurds have never given up. The air strikes that we use to fight ISIS have to be coordinated by someone on the ground, which at this time is the Kurds. There needs to be a payoff for the only ground troops who are fighting and winning against ISIS. The Kurds would have had their own country except for what the U.K. did after World War I. The UK at the end of WWI denied the Kurds a homeland which turned the Kurds into nomads, but they have never given up on a homeland for there are 30 million oppressed nationality who struggle to survive in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. To ma...

Low wages and debt go together to make the 1 percent very, very rich. To begin with, the rich pay the wage slaves very little, which then promotes the toilers to use debt to survive. Case in point, with no extra cash for repairs and a broken washing machine, for example, the cost to repair the machine is a one-time large cost that seems greater than buying a new machine for a low monthly payment. This way, the 1 percent makes more money in two ways and makes the toilers actual wage slaves. This enslavement starts very early with school debt so that young workers start out in debt with an average of $31,000 to $100,000 and higher depending on the field of study, which, without a very good paying job, leaves them as wage slaves for many years. We are nearing the end of economic/industrial growth, primarily, but not only for ecological reasons. When growth stalls, lending opportunities disappear. Since money is essentially lent for existence, debt levels increase faster than the supply ...

Then the rulers and bosses seek to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the Have Nots and working class whose labor is or was the source of their wealth. The capitalist governances in Europe are united only in their determination to make working people bear the brunt of their greed. Within the European Union, which includes the 19 member Eurozone, the capitalist in each country plus the U.S. go after the wages and living conditions of the working people within their borders and the anti-union ruling class of the larger powers seeks to reinforce their domination and deepen the exploitation of the toilers, such as removal of obstacles to laying-off workers, weakening unions, and their collective bargaining rights. Then when the power of the people is gone the banks can then force the countries and cities to sell or privatize their assets, such as Athens, Greece, which must privatize its some 55 billion in government assets. This is what is now happening in some U.S. cities. The prolet...

The new attack on unions is Verizon’s move to cut pensions and healthcare, which Verizon says it needs to do to keep up with its competitors. If it wins, its cuts will be a death spiral to the bottom for union workers. There are two ways for unions to win: one is to stand fast; the other is to put pressure on the nonunion competitors or a combination of both. Workers must know that these attacks on them come from the GOP’s call for austerity and that ideology imported from Europe, mainly Angela Merkle’s Germany, and big banks, which is being forced upon countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. These banks and corporations would very much like to import austerity here into the U.S. to break unions. This is or should be the tipping point for workers to go on the offensive instead of always playing the defensive game. A good offense will always defeat a defense. And at this time it looks like workers and labor unions have retreated to large cities and abandoned the rural count...

One only has to look at Europe to see what is in store for the proletariats in the U.S. Look at the similarities of the proletariats of Europe and here. The GOP wants to eliminate minimum wage completely along with labor unions while cutting funding for all social programs. Also, in Europe there are countries like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain that are now being black mailed by an international group of corporate chief executive officers who are not even elected and they are not accountable to anyone except to the banks and their own interests. The people in these countries now have no rights or hope for a better life or even a job. When this is done then these people have no country. They’re just living in a place with no rights or future. If the capitalist system of the world hopes to exist the oligarchies must change their money making ways and invest in jobs and quit using their money in loans or getting rich off the interest, paying no taxes and making poor people wo...

What happened and is happening in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal has already happened here in the U.S. The blatant facts are it is not the fault of the borrowing people or countries; it is the reckless lending by German, U.S. and other banks or lending institutions, like Goldman Sachs. Greece should have never been let into the Euro and only met the membership criteria by working with Goldman Sachs to cook its books much to the detriment of the Greek people. The books were cooked to hide Greece’s debt with currency swaps after the 2008 crisis. The banks that lent so recklessly were bailed out and Greece was left holding the bag. The idea that Greece is to blame for its woes and should do like Ireland did is wrong. If this all sounds like we here in the U.S. have heard and seen this financial criminal behavior before, we have and again the banks and Wall Street were bailed out and the people were thrown out of their homes. At this time in Spain, nearly 350,000 Spani...

The very rich oligarchies buy countries, states and local governments and then pass their anti-tax policies, which over time leaves the government with not enough tax revenue to pay bills or maintain infrastructure and they then often opt for pension holidays to make ends meet, skipping payments to the pension funds. Over time this has created large unfunded pension liabilities in effected countries, like Greece and cities like Detroit, and maybe Chicago is next to borrow money from pensioners to make up for revenue shortfalls after giving corporations and the wealthy tax breaks. Now austerity hawks are using these unfunded liabilities to argue slashing pensions even though it was their own anti-tax policies that caused the problem. While it is sound public policy to use debt to fund long-term capital projects, it is deeply problematic when governments are forced to borrow money to deal with revenue shortfalls. It is even more problematic when they are doing so as a result of a concert...

The $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage fight is winning with support of the United Healthcare workers #1199 SEIU. This can be effective by targeting the international corporations that pays low wages, such as McDonalds, Walmart, and clothing factories that supply U.S. stores and colleges. There are now hundreds of people and groups across the U.S. and worldwide who are speaking out for the world’s toilers. The wage slaves are showing the low-wage unsafe corporations there is no place to hide. All toilers are demanding what is their civil rights, which is a safe place to work, a living wage, dignity, vacation pay, pensions, healthcare, and a free education to the bachelor’s level, and if the world’s wage slaves can get this then maybe they can get safe drinking water, safe food, toilets, clean air—the things that make life bearable and can give hope that their children will have a better life than the present wage slaves. We, toilers, must understand it is up to us to stop the wars and t...

The $15 for ’15 campaign is moving in the right direction, but we know most of the gains are being slow walked. A case in point is Walmart, which has made some movement and also some fast food corporations, but believe this—this movement is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it is because they are being hurt in their profit margins. The wage movement has come from workers’ protests and the loss of business due to the way businesses are treating their wage slaves. There is a long way to go to close the inequality gap. But the pro corporate people are gearing up with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council or A.L.E.C. The group has come up with a strategy to bolster the power of big business. GOP lawmakers plan to introduce an A.L.E.C.–backed bill that would ban Community Benefit Agreements or CBAs. CBAs are one of the few options local activists have to fight for higher wages or affordable housing. But A.L.E.C.‘s CBA ban, which specifically prohibits a local minimu...

The toilers of the world fighting just to stay alive in countries like Ukraine, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Iraq, Turkey, Greece and the USA. What would stop all or most of the evil that hovers over the heads of these wage slaves would be good paying, safe jobs, good governments, which looks out for the toiler. But in order to get there, the world needs good peace-loving and smart leaders, not leaders or government officials who are bought by corporations. All toilers need to be educated in labor and government history, and must pay attention to what is happening with labor on a daily basis. One way is through the Militant newspaper and the column, “On the Picket Line” by Maggie Trowe, which relates the labor news from all over, like the dockworkers in the U.S. or chicken butchers in Israel, Walmart and Kellogg workers in the U.S., Canadian grocery workers and the steelworkers union is in a fight with Chevron at the Richmond refinery in the U.S. Jim Payne, Steelworkers Local, s...

This could be the year of the Have Nots, Have Littles and even the Used to Haves. The year 2015 will have some good things moving for them, such as in many places the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage has or is being adopted and other wages hikes are being slow walked. Gas prices have put a little extra money in the pockets of U.S. wage slaves. Finally there is talk of free junior college education for everyone, even old people! There is healthcare for more people than ever before. There is a pushback against law enforcement brutality against blacks, poor and anyone recording them. And it looks like Anonymous has our backs. It also looks like workers the world over are talking to each other and supporting each other, like Hong Kong, Ukraine, France, UK, Turkey, Greece, Africa, Canada, Mexico and South America; but, we need to get ready for spring and the fight ahead. The wealthy are going to fight back with everything they have and they are experts in convincing the average person to...