Union Perspectives

Our country could go from a democracy to a dictatorship if the Republicans take the House, Senate and Presidency starting on Tuesday and into the 2024 elections. If the Republicans win, we could conceivably lose all of our social services, Social Security, Medicare, right to unions, among others. Should the working people, retired and unions members just wait for this to happen or start planning on how to keep our democracy or return fully to it? We will need a strategy on how and what we need to do. But first, we must find the right-wing GOP’s Achilles Heel. The Classical Greek myth illustrates well the vulnerability of the supposedly invulnerable, the warrior Achilles. The myth states no blow could injure and no sword could penetrate Achilles’s skin. When still a baby , Achilles’ mother dipped him into the waters of the magical river, Styx, resulting in the protection of his body from all dangers. There was however, a problem. The mother held Achilles by his heel and the waters of t...

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency during the Great Depression. People were looking for bold leadership and that’s what’s happening now. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a package of reforms to rescue capitalism from collapse and thwart rising labor militancy from growing into independent working class political action. The Have Nots now have a long needed leader in Bernie Sanders, who has devoted his entire life for the betterment of the working class so it perplexes me as to why union members would support Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Though we can’t blame Clinton for her husband’s policies, such as NAFTA, mainly because she has enough baggage of her own. Unlike her opponent Sanders, Clinton supported the Iraq invasion, Wall Street bailout, authorizing the Patriot Act twice in 2001 and 2006, supports TPP, which is considered worse than NAFTA, offshore drilling that is killing our oceans, and Foreign U.S. Military intervention that is bankrupting our economy. Her top donor...

The world labor market is changing. We are running out of jobs and the people who will be displaced from the workforce will devote their freedom to simple leisure, some will seek to build productive communities outside the workplace, others will fight, passionately, to reclaim their productivity by piecing together jobs in an informal economy. These are the futures of consumption, communal creativity and contingency in any combination it is certain there would be a radical new role for government. The world will be watching Greece now that it has voted no on austerity. The Greeks are done with years of harsh economic conditions inflicted upon them by financial institutions, not for anything they did. One, they will probably take a hard look at the present capitalist system and the Eurozone nations and do they even want to keep the Euro as their currency. Hell, they might even go to Bitcoins or back to the Drachmas. There will be changes in the labor and probably an upswing in the pre...

To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant. Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?” This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their jobs...