Union Perspectives

There are unintended consequences of the 1 percent’s greed in offshoring corporations to save on taxes and labor costs. This greed has awakened the Have Littles to the fact that there is and has been a war waged against them by the 1 percent. This has been going on for about 40 years and most of this scheming has gone unnoticed because the corporate media has blocked coverage of it. Now the greed has gone too far and will bite the anti-worker 1 percent in the ass and the governments that support them. The people have had all they can take and are demanding their rights. Rights that include good wages, healthcare, pensions, unions, free education, and protection of our environment and climate. The sad thing is that most of these rights are provided to citizens in other countries, some countries are trying to take them away from their citizens and those countries where the citizens are fighting for these right—the sad fact is that other countries got the ideas to give or take these righ...

The Bernie Sanders supporters must be ready for the long-haul fight. Just electing Bernie is just the start, the beginning of the revolution. A true revolution carries the mission until complete change is carried out and taken hold, which means we will have to elect a true Democratic Congress and Senate. Not only do we need to rid the Congress and the Senate of Republican politicians, but also Blue Dog, centrist, and corporate-beholden Democrats, if we want to see the change needed. When we clean house, then we can see real change with free education. Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Chile and Brazil all have free college education and the main reason is that their governments aren’t controlled by corporations and the stock market. When your politicians aren’t beholden to corporations, it’s amazing what can be accomplished. Those who say increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost jobs; you have to ask why would these people say such a thing. When you pull...

As income inequality becomes more known across the world, people are responding, tired of the disparity and not being adequately compensated for their work. Income inequality is greater now than it was in the “Roaring ‘20s” and though we went through a recession, the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer. As Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders surges in the polls, the British just elected its version of Sanders when it elected Jeremy Corbyn as the Labor Party’s leader in a landslide victory, by almost 60 percent of the votes. Shocked by the outcome, Prime Minister Cameron resorted to fear and intimidation when he tweeted: “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.” It’s interesting how the U.S. and Britain’s conservative leaders tanked their economies by falsely leading their countries into war with Iraq followed by deep recessions, and the wage slaves paid dearly for their poor voting decisions. T...

Labor needs a worldwide movement and now is the time for the world’s labor and the proletarians are ready. Labor needs to be unified, such as Germany, South Africa and Brazil. The U.S. unions need to have a better unified political agenda. The U.S.at this time is ranked at the bottom in workers’ rights by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). We rank four out of five in ITUC’s categories, and the ones who are five have no rule of law, like Somalia and Ukraine. The fours also include countries like Iraq, Peru, and Mexico. This should be a reality check for the U.S. unions. This was started when the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955 and never could agree on a common strategy for the common good of labor, but maybe labor is starting to wake up to the reality that labor needs to bring everyone into its fold. A good start is the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, which will probably be won by the people using Sycthanian tactics with significant structural reform in American politi...

The old International Workers of the World would be proud of the way wage slaves today are standing up for their rights in countries, such as Bangladesh, most of Europe, Israel, Palestine, and now South American countries, such as Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, who are now fighting for the rights of day laborers, back pay, who work on the ports. They are being supported by the Longshoremen’s union. This is world solidarity among the wage slaves. The way it is supposed to be, and we should not forget the Ukrainians’ fight for the right to protest. Yes, the tide is turning slowly in favor of the wage slaves, but we must remember what Karl Marx and Frederick Engles said in 1848: That now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. The fight must keep moving forward to even up the disparity of a few with so much and so m...

If the USA is a consumer economy, then there must be good wages paid to the consumers to drive the economy. The business community thinks they have the right to pay anything they wants in wages, but what they don’t want to consider is that their businesses is not totally theirs if in order to conduct their business they use the commons (e.g. roads), which is paid for by all the U.S. people who actually pay their taxes or at least subsidized by the people like the railroads and post office, law enforcement, schools, bank regulators, Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration, to name a few. Without most of these things there would be no way to have or conduct a business. The taxes to support our schools that train the workers in math and English the companies then hire. Without good wages as the base pay it must be very solid or the consumer economy will crumble and with it the whole system. The more we make the more we spend and the more we must produce, which is...

The leaderless world revolution and the armies are all around us just waiting for a trigger or tipping point to march and they are all leaders so how are they controlled? It looks, to me, like they have taken a look at history and have written a play book that has taken old tactics that worked and came up with new ones and with that they have added and use our new technology. What we are seeing is it is very hard to kill the snake when you cannot find its head. Brazil is a good example of a tipping point, upping the cost of public transportation that millions of low wage workers would have to pay and then humiliating one person by pepper spraying her in the face for no reason other than they think they can and get away with it. I wonder what the cops were thinking when they were pushed into the ocean up to their waists—power to the people. This is just the start of the Have All against the Have Some and Have Nots. For us, wage slaves, have a right to have a say and a right to an equa...

Just not in the U.S.A. Big box stores are told by governments that if they want to operate in their countries the stores have to allow unions to exists or form in their stores. For example, Wal*Mart had to allow its stores in South Africa, China, Brazil, Argentina, and even the England to form unions --- everywhere it seems except in the United States. Why is Wal*Mart spending millions of dollars fighting pro-union legislation, when it could be spending that money on its American workers. Why are other countries taking care of their workers, but our country isn’t? What the hell? It looks like these governments are helping their people. Are their workers more appreciated than our people? Like I’ve said before, the corporations can ship our jobs out of country, but they will then ship their goods back to this country to sell. This is when we need to organize. This is our opportunity to organize the big box stores. Our government could help us by passing the Employee Free Choice Act (...