Union Perspectives

Our country is on life support thanks to the incompetency of the jester in the White House and the dunces that make up his administration. We are faced with a deadly virus of which we’ve not seen since the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and the ensuing economic collapse, both here and internationally. Trump says he couldn’t have known that the virus would reach our shores yet he did. Reports are saying he was informed in January, giving him plenty of time to activate a plan of action. But since he disbanded the National Security Council unit focused on pandemic preparedness, there was no one in charge to take the helm. Trump’s team was briefed on what to do should the U.S face a pandemic, but apparently no one was listening. Trump refused help from the World Health Organization. He did nothing so he, his family members and other Republicans could benefit from the ensuing crisis. Rather than listen to the experts, Trump chose to listen to and take direction from his son-in-law Jared Kush...

Now is time for all unions, AFL-CIO, to step up and put their differences aside just like former president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Walter Reuther dreamed of. It’s time for unions to do something bold, like Medicare for all and free education. Unions were the leaders in all these areas, consider child labor laws, free speech laws, pensions, and unemployment benefits when people were out of work; and the Social Security we have today. All of these things will go away if we do not come together and fight. At this time, it is workers’ unions against the corporations and the very, very rich, who would like to break our unions and even take away the minimum wage. We even know what their play book is on how the GOP is going to do this. The tax breaks Trump gave the rich has put us into debt is step one, step two is Trump and the GOP spends as much money as they can on the military complex, making many of the rich even richer...

Labor needs to pull their heads from a very dark place and look at what they are up against when going after the infrastructure jobs. One concern is there will be a hard fight to keep the jobs prevailing wage because if Donald Trump’s six people have their way, all jobs will be privatized Don’t look for help from the top Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, he received $575,000 fro Goldman-Sachs and $220,000 from Blackstone. He also voted for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, helped design the 2008 big bank bailout and opposed efforts in this own political party to raise taxes on private equity and hedge funds. He is no friend of labor. Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ties to Blackstone. Nancy Pelosi says the Democrats are willing to work with Trump on infrastructure, despite knowing what Trump and his administration are planning. There is big money to be made for companies like Black-Rock, the world’s largest investment company; the Securities Industry and Financial Mar...