Union Perspectives

Reports are coming out of the government saying the economy is good, but tell that to the people who are working at Lowe’s, a retail giant company, which is scheduled to layoff thousands of workers from the assembly lines to janitors. Many of these employees have worked full time for the company for years putting together girls, wheelbarrows and other products. The company plans to outsource the assembly of products to the companies that pay lower wages and fewer if any benefits. Lowe’s is in competition with Home Depot to boost its profits off the backs of workers. The company has already closed 140 stores during the last year. The workers will not get severance pay instead they will get up to two weeks pay. The loss of jobs within the retail industry is just beginning. Some workers are being fired as 7,500 stores are closing this year. Many have depleted once thriving shopping malls. The rising dominance in retail sales of Amazon and Walmart turning to robotization instead of empl...

When you decide to buy a house, like most people you take a loan out from a bank. As a result, the bank actually owns the house until it is paid off. But, while the bank/mortgage company owns the house, you’re paying the property taxes and insurance to protect the property that the bank owns yet the bank pays nothing, plus the bank is earning interests on the loan you’ve taken out to buy the house in the first place. It’s a win-win for the bank. The banks and mortgage companies can also sell your house and make money on it while paying no taxes and getting interests on your house that they actually own and can foreclose on you. Taxes should be pro-rated. They, the banks and mortgage companies, pay most of the taxes at first but then as the loan gets paid down, you pay more of the taxes until you own the house at which time you pay one hundred percent of the taxes and you have no more interest to pay. Most home loans are for fifteen or thirty years. Just think about the taxes you pay ...

Wage levels: how low would business executives of corporations and owners of businesses like wages to be. Most say $3 an hour or less or even no wage at all. They would like to replace wages with food, housing and basic needs and thus control the conditions that create instability among the workers. It would be like the like the work camp jobs, a true wage-less slave company, just like in the coal mines and logging companies of yesteryear when workers were paid in chips that had to be used at the company's stores. What the workers need to know is how they are perceived by their bosses. The bosses look at workers as “they are not people who you get to know” and will tell the workers that “this job is not a social problem.” You, the worker, are not to know about the corporation’s well-being. The corporations are getting business instruction about “bleeding the beast,” which is squeezing every ounce of work out of their employees. It is getting what you want out of people, such as ge...