Union Perspectives

Workers need to understand that fear is a potent weapon in the hands of the powerful elites. In his book, Death of the Liberal Class, Christopher Hedges writes, the fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism was used to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech, habeas corpus. In the name of anti-communism, the capitalist class, terrified, of the numerous labor strikes after WWII, rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 along with a Congressional override of President Harry Truman’s veto. It was the most destructive legislative blow to workers until NAFTA. It was fear that in 2001 after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Bush administration were allowed to push through the Patriot Act, engaged in extraordinary rendition, and establish offshore prisons where we engaged in torture, which was against our code of conduct. Fear has led us to embrace the endless wars in the Middle East. It is the cowardice of the liberal class leaves the group prone to manipulati...

We elected a person four years ago that then pissed away four years of our lives, our treasury, our standing in the world, mishandling a pandemic costing almost 150,000 innocent lives and the soldiers who went to serve their country not realizing their commander-in-chief allowed a bounty to be placed upon their heads by Vladimir Putin. These set backs will take a decade or more to fix, the deficit probably longer. The damage done in the last four years has gained us nothing while it has made trump filthy rich by the myriad of ways he has overcharged the U.S. government through his hotels and golf courses. People are losing their homes for lack of rent or mortgage payments. Was it intentional to allow the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures a ruse by the republicans as a form of voter suppression? If you have no home address you can’t vote. Families are going hungry, food banks struggling to meet the need, and republicans are calling these people freeloaders who’d rather take free...

Why are some labor unions supporting Hillary Clinton when labor does not have a seat at the table at the Democratic Convention? Bernie Sanders chose RoseAnn DeMoro, head of National Nurses union, as one of his platform representatives on the platform drafting committee for the convention. She was to advocate for Medicare for All. The rationale for eliminating DeMoro is because unions are represented on the full-platform committee. However, labor has one seat out of the 15 people on this drafting committee. Labor built the Democratic party to represent the working people, and built this country’s infrastructure, and for that we get one person to represent us. As has been said by others, at the Democratic Convention, K Street is better represented than the labor movement. The Clintons’ antilabor legacy is partly responsible for the 2008-2016 world financial crisis. NAFTA went against all labor and sent jobs out of the U.S. and the threat of moving jobs broke the unions and drove wa...

Wall Street wants the clients to keep Wall Street just as it is and for that is Bill Clinton will get another four years as president even though Hillary would be the elected president, assuming she is elected president. She cannot and will not be able to control Bill, and the establishment knows this. They all at Wall Street, corporations and big banks remember what Bill did for them at the detriment of the wage slaves. So why do the wage slaves want Hillary? This includes some of the leadership of the unions. Don’t the union leadership remember NAFTA, and Bill never helped the unions with card check or tightening up the National Labor Relations Board to help keep unions strong. Maybe it was because Hillary set on Walmart’s board of directors. Should we not expect Hillary to support a $15 an hour minimum wage? Also there is the incarceration of black Americans at a higher rate than others. This prison population exploded under Bill’s presidency and now Hillary was getting large sums ...

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...