Union Perspectives

Unions are being organized at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere. Applications for union elections this year are on pace to approach the highest level in a decade. The people who are organizing are college students, who are taking jobs with the intention of organizing workers. Years ago, unions used college students to help with the groundwork in unionizing companies, and these individuals were referred to as “salts,” and their use as “salting.” This practice was started in the 1860s when the Rochester Trades used “salts” to organize construction jobs. The “salts” educated the less-informed and scared employees of how their work and bodies are being exploited to make the owners wealthy. Once a targeted company has been identified, a college student obtains employment with the company with the full intent of organizing it for a union. According to the National Labor Relation Board, it is illegal to fire a “salt” or refuse to hire a person who makes it know their intentions. Unions...

The strike or temporary walkout: why workers fear doing it and how to alleviate their fear. One way to picket a fast food or any low wage place is to recruit people from like-minded businesses. This way it is hard for owners to retaliate against workers asking for a $15 an hour minimum wage. So, workers at Burger King can picket a McDonald, and then the workers of McDonalds picket at Burger King. Another thing is to find out what other organizations would support increasing minimum wage to a $15 an hour and trade off might be just the exposure of their membership, such as faith-based work centers. You can leverage your manpower to help each other to see that there is no retaliation. This is not a new strategy. These are time-tested tactics used by the Knights of Labor in the 1880 and the International Workers of the World. The tactics were used to gain freedom of assembly and speech. These tactics will get around the outlawing of solidarity of workers that the National Labor Relations...

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...

The 99% think the 1% is in control or is about to control our country’s government and the work place. In reality the people who are in control are 1/10th of the 1%. The true oligarchies with their minions engaging in anti-union organizations, such as the Koch brothers’ Limbaugh, ALEC’s Club for Growth, and Dick Armory as puppet master of the Tea Party’s Americans for Prosperity. Labor has boxed themselves into a corner with labor agreements, which binds labor to no walking off the job site while there is an agreement in place. The strike was labor’s best weapon against the anti-union corporations. If labor could partner up with the 99% maybe we could help each other and labor would not be in breach of contract. The 99% could picket in front of businesses or job sites where labor has a no walk off stipulation in its contract. In the long run we all want the same things: healthcare, jobs, good pay, a home, good schools, pensions, end to the war, and rebuilding our infrastructure. We...