Union Perspectives

Senator Bernie Sanders will be our next president and we need to start planning now for how we will get single-payer healthcare, $15 an hour minimum wage, free college, immigration reform and taking on the banks and Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, prison/justice reform, and reduce the military industrial complex by making the Middle East deal with their problems instead of relying completely on the U.S. These are just some of the things that need to be done. Also, we, union workers-retired or still working, must ensure that Sanders doesn’t forget us and will push for card check, which President Obama promised and then sold us out. In his campaign platform, Sanders also states, aside from the above items, but also passage of the Work Place Democracy Act to strengthen the role of unions, he leads the fight for $15 and a union for fast food workers and federal contract employees, and supports the Employee Free Choice Act or card check, and equal pay for women. With all of this to do,...

If our workers here in the U.S. think their alone in their fight for a living wage and better living standards for their families, all they need to do is look at the rest of the world’s workers. Workers in places like Quebec, Canada, Egypt, Puerto Rico, Tunisia, Ukraine, South Korea, Belarus, Romania, and Bangladesh. We are all in this together, think about this, a five year study was done on Walmart’s Chinese imports which cost 133,000 American jobs, but it wasn’t just the U.S. workers that got screwed over, the Chinese workers weren’t paid a fair wage. These are just a few of the countries fighting the government and the oligarchies who control the large corporations, backed by sedition laws—laws impeding free speech and organization, deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order, which means anything they, the oligarchies, don’t like. The sedition laws put harsh restrictions on mass gatherings of workers. Remember laws and law enforcement a...