Union Perspectives

Labor must always be on the offense so we must never rest. There should never be time that we are not organizing for new members and shops. This is a 24-7, 365-day a year job that unions must commit to in order to beat the destructive nonunion GOP corporations wishing to destroy the union way of life. Every town with a labor counsel should be the headquarters for organizing for all unions at one time. We started a program called Labor Cities. Maybe we should look at that program again. Unions need to work on a ‘work-life’ balance, like a four-day work week with full pay. Workers need to stop and think about how they are selling their time one hour at a time and time is the greatest resource that we have in our lives and on this earth. Corporations want to exploit this resource as cheaply as they can get without regard to the hardships on the workers. Corporations are not your friends. Remember the billionaire class. They have a different set of rules for themselves and expect everybody...

Amazon should be the training grounds for union organizing. All unions should send apprentices and shop stewards to do a week on the streets to help unionize Amazon. This could be the training grounds of what works and what doesn’t. The experience the young union people will help build our unions larger and better, and we will be training new leaders. The unions all need to come together as one to win this fight to put a union in one of the largest and richest companies in the world. There are playbooks out there, such as the one about Debs and the Pullman Railroad Strike. The Ford Motor Company employees’ sit-in strike. The big people and corporations have been brought down before. We must all band together like we did in the 1950s with the AFL/CIO, the two largest unions combined as one with one leader. A thorough investigation into the failure of the union attempt at Amazon in Alabama needs to be done before we continue. We can’t just blame the workers and community. We need to u...

The Postal Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, was enacted in 1792 when Congress passed the “Postal Service Act.” This Act established the Post Office Department. The republican party is still going after what they consider the holy grail of large unions and doing everything it can to bust the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) union at a loss of thousands of good paying jobs. There are two current factors pushing this effort to destroy the USPS. One cause of the current attack is based on the thin-skinned crybaby occupying the White House. His revenge against Jeff Bezo, who happens to own both Amazon and the Washington Post, is one driving force behind the current attack. The Post runs articles telling the truth about Trump so, in retaliation, Trump is demanding the Postal Service triple or quadruple shipping costs for Amazon packages and the Postal Services gets caught in the middle of these tw...

The two things which will destroy our world as we know it, are inequality and climate change. The Freedom of Enterprise Act (FEA) being proposed by the Republicans will be against anything that alleviates climate change and inequality. In fact, EEA exempts anyone worth a billion dollars from paying taxes and from having to obey all laws, exempts for now homicide and assault. OxFam, an international charitable organization focused on eliminating global poverty, says there are now 2,043 billionaires in the world and their fortunes grew by $762 billion in 2017 while the poorest of humanity saw no increase in their wealth. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett have $250 billion more than 160 million Americans. If this trend continues driving up the bargaining power of those at the top while driving down the bargaining power of those at the bottom, this will trap people in poverty and further fracture our society. OxFam said the massive inequalities are being driven by factors t...

Where have all the jobs that pay a living wage gone? We know that greed has sent a lot of jobs to countries that accept cheap wages for their workers and to the non-union southern states. Now we are seeing robots changing the employment landscape and eliminating jobs in factories. Even with all this, there were still the brick and mortar jobs selling the cheaply made products from overseas. Now these jobs are going by the wayside with Amazon and Walmart companies investing in E-commerce. This has started a retail apocalypse on thousands of mall-based stores shutting down. JC Penney’s 138 stores, Sears 150 stores, Kmart 3,500 stores. Then the Kroger company, the largest grocery store chain, sales plummeted 25 percent erasing more than $7 billion in value. These jobs will go to $7.25 an hour minimum wage and workers will be hired by Amazon for warehouse jobs. These jobs are in a cutthroat competition and is based on keeping out unions at all costs. What these workers at Walmart and Ama...