Union Perspectives

The sheet metal unions are losing the war against nonunion sheet metal shops: Local 36 lost five shops; Local 170 lost two; and Local 18 lost three. We should be adding union shops and members not losing them. Are sheet metal unions giving up on organizing union shops and acquiring new members? I live in northern California, specifically Shasta County, north of Marysville, in the jurisdiction of Local 104. There are now no union shops north of Marysville. The nonunion shops number about fifty to sixty shops and that is a lot of union work lost. We, in Shasta-Trinity counties, just passed a $138 million school and union college prevailing wage jobs and no union workers received any of the $138 million in jobs. I have never seen any union reps on the jobs, checking prevailing wages or talking to the nonunion workers about unionizing. It appears like sheet metal unions have just given up the entire northern section of California, where the nonunion shops will just get stronger and keep e...

The last bastion of organize labor is now on the west and east coasts, like New York City, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Labor has mostly given up on the south and the middle of the U.S., is that because unions aren’t up to the fight? We have lost Detroit, Michigan and Wisconsin, which was the start of public unions. These GOP government control states, like govenors Synder and Pence have kicked our union butts. In California, labor has lost all of the rural counties, Orange and San Diego counties; and now San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles counties are our last strong holds. It would not take a lot to lose California. California has elected GOP governors before and with our new federal government now in place and with the Koch brothers, et al, and their money it could be done again. We, union workers, could lose it all. They have started on teachers’ union and they are still trying to break the postal workers union by forcing the pension funds to be funded 75 years ahead of pay...

How did government handle the unemployed and homeless throughout the country in 1913-1914? In the Los Angeles Plaza where 1,000 homeless and unemployed held a demonstration. The police, with clubs and revolvers drawn, broke up the demonstration, killing one worker, clubbing many others and arresting 75 others. The newspaper said the demonstration was peaceful until the police arrived. In San Francisco, CA, where the homeless and unemployed were led by the International Workers of the World (IWW) and with Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert R. Parsons, was arrested at the head of the demonstration. The protestors and police clashed with the police and Mrs. Parsons was arrested. But not before voicing demands for work and food for the homeless and unemployed. Then an IWW contingent left San Francisco to go to Sacramento, CA. They proceeded to camp on the Southern Pacific Railroad sand lots. General Charles T. Kelly and W.A. Thorn and several other leaders were arrested on...

Wage slaves who have the illusion that their problems can be solved through electing reformist politicians must remember that the nature of capitalism is not to allow mass needs preference over corporate profits. Demands for services change in social conditions will be vigorously opposed by the ruling class—Koch brothers, Wall Street and all the others. The capitalist-designed electoral system is used to corrupt elected representatives of both parties. Even my hero President Franklin Roosevelt, who purported to assure labor the right to organize trade unions and to bargain collectively with bosses, but it was a hollow promise. In the practice he continued to use the deferral government as a strikebreaker agency, simply using subtler methods than previously used for such purposes. The year 1934 was a hard fought year for labor, but they won while even taking on the National Guard in Toledo, Ohio. May 1934, labor fought the Guard with bare fists and rocks in the 6,000 Auto-lite strike an...

We need to get our shit together, and unless we are together we will continue to be stomped on by the 1 percent. One way to get our act together is organize our efforts to keep track of what the different organizations are doing, a clearing house of sorts. The workers of the world must expand and reinforce the war on inequality. The workers must carve out some of the cash that the oligarchies and corporations are hording. The wage slaves of the low wage jobs will have to force wage hikes by strikes, walkouts and withholding their labor. If you are making minimum wage, you probably can’t fill up a gas tank even at $3 a gallon, the average tank would be about $54—about a day’s work. So, minimum wage workers walkout will hurt the fast food, Walmart corporations’ executive officers more than you for you need the money, they worship money and they have to report to stockholders, which can get them fired. You just missed a day of work, or didn’t have work the day of the walkout, but their ...

Today, our Commons are mostly invisible in life in the United States, but about two billion people around the world depend on Commons for their livelihood, like water, fisheries, farmland, roadways, air and other natural resources vulnerable to theft and seizure by corporations that want to do fracking, privatizing, or monetizing every aspect of these resources. The push for privatization is a way for corporations to plunder our commonwealth and life blood ends up with such results as our groundwater sold for brand-label bottled water, the patenting of the human genome, and the replacement of shareable agricultural seeds with proprietary GMO (genetic modified organisms) that must be bought year after year. The word Commons was termed in the 16th-19th centuries by the English gentry. They would seize the village pastures, forests, and waterways for their private use. These seizures were called “enclosures.” This drove the people who now were dispossessed from their Commons to the citie...