Union Perspectives

I recently had a conversation with a person who asked why no one wants to work at minimum wage jobs. While this is a good question, it also shows how disconnected the person, who lives a comfortable life, is from the economic reality of so many in our country.  This person pays workers $9 to $11 an hour to do work in a large orchard. I suggested that perhaps some people have given up seeking work because the income they’d earn would amount to them merely existing on minimum wage. Minimum wage workers may earn enough to pay rent and maybe have a little leftover for food but little else, like gas, utilities, car insurance and clothes. Low wages are not a good motivation to go to work with the prospect of never getting ahead. It's not hard to empathize with these workers when you learn what Robert Reich recently pointed out, “Wall Street bonuses totaled $27.5 billion last year, which is more than 3 times the combined annual earnings of all American workers employed full-time at the...

The fight for a living wage continues. Workers are asking for a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, but in reality it should be $24 an hour had it kept up with inflation and CEOs exorbitant incomes. When workers finally get their local leaders to support a better wage, they then have to deal with a handful of states with conservative lawmakers who get ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) to write wage preemption laws to block increasing the minimum wage. There are now four states with such laws. This template for states to block cities and counties from raising the minimum wage in their own communities is taking the voice and vote away from low-wage workers. In order to fight back, there needs to be unions and local lawmakers who should be incensed by what the states are doing in supporting the large food and retail corporations. The corporations don’t leave their profits in these cities, counties and even states. They just take from our coffers by forcing their employees t...

The $15 an hour minimum wage has been virtually stopped by governors passing $15 an hour minimum wage laws that will take years for workers to realize. The slow walking of the minimum wage is nothing more than an attempt to pacify workers and those who support them, but nothing more. What good will $15 an hour in six years do for workers today, especially those effected by minimum wage laws that have lots of loopholes. I cautioned about politicians who would slow walk an increase of the minimum wage a year or so ago and, unfortunately, I was right. New York and California are slow walking the states’ minimum wage increase, but they added such safety valves as having state officials who are to conduct annual analysis of the economy in each region to determine whether a temporary suspension of the scheduled increases is necessary, the government press release states. Now, guess who won’t be on the panel making the decisions on whether or not wages should be increased–wage slaves. The wo...

In a small town in San Francisco’s East Bay, the 22,000 workers, 2,227 of who are minimum wage workers, received a bump in pay. Emeryville, CA, is home to the highest minimum wage in the county at $15 an hour. Emeryville’s wage hike went to $14.44 overnight where Los Angeles’ $15 will make an appearance in 2020. Seattle’s wage hike to $15 is also being slow walked to 2017, but the genie is out of the bottle and the workers have gotten a taste of what a living wage can afford them and others see their gains and now know it can be done—done without having their wages slow walked. Now eight cities in San Francisco's South Bay are contemplating raising its minimum wage. What some of the wage slaves, who make more than $15 an hour, don’t understand is when the people earning $9 an hour wage that goes to $15 it will push all other wages up, and they probably will not even after ask for as raise. Case in point, dishwashers now make $15 an hour and then the cook, who has always made $15 t...

Where's all the cash? Hint, it's not in your pocket. The need for cash is necessary to alleviate the war on the poor. The latest facts show 1.5 million households with 3 million children have cash incomes of less than $2 a day. The number we usually use to measure third- and fourth-world poverty. Then in order to get the cash to pay rent in some dilapidated housing, buy diapers, and even tampons. They will have to sell their blood or their food stamps at a deep discount and the desperately poor people are willing to lose about 40 percent of the value of their food stamps, which is the going rate to trade some of their stamps for cash. There is about 15 million people who are in deep poverty with annual incomes of about $10,000 below half the poverty line for a family of three. A lot of the $2 a day people are single mothers without a high school diploma whose jobs have been in decline. This is one of many reasons that we need $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, single payer healt...

The fast food and restaurant industry today is as bad in working conditions as what author Upton Sinclair wrote in “The Jungle,” a 1906 classic about the meatpacking industry. The fast food and restaurant industry is the 21st century's version of "The Jungle"—a sweatshop where workers are enduring horrible health and safety conditions with no paid sick leave and no healthcare. Workers work sick with ailments like cuts, burns, flu, pinkeye and H1N1—do you think these maladies miraculously stay out of your food? It’s not the workers fault; it’s the owners for putting greed above your health. This is not good for the wage slaves nor their families and not to the healthy customers putting their trust in the food they receive. Owners expect customers to tip to compensate for the low wages. Tipping dates back to slavery and originated in Europe. When tipping was brought to America in the late 1800s to 1900s, the Americans at that time rejected the practice as undemocratic and...

The $15 minimum wage fight is gaining some ground, but when Los Angeles voted for a $15 an hour minimum wage all they did was slow down the momentum of the fight for the city wants to spread the wage hike out for five years—this is not good and will do more harm than good for the wage inequality fight. When the five years are up and workers are making $15 an hour minimum wage, inflation will negate the increase and workers will need a minimum wage of $18 to $20 an hour. The wage slaves need to demand $15 an hour NOW, not in five years, and a work week of 38 to 40 hours week paid sick leave, regular shifts so workers can plan for childcare or be able to further their education. The $15 an hour minimum wage, like Los Angeles, looks good in the newspaper headlines but the devil is in the details and the details do not look that good. The corporations are losing and what they are doing is just a tactical retreat until they can regroup and try to change public perception and by spreading ou...

Things that could change the USA and the world for the betterment of the proletarians and save the capitalist system, which is what we have to work until something better comes along, like maybe a hybrid capitalist system. Until then, this is it. The changes for the fastest results are a minimum wage of $15 to $18 an hour, legalizing drugs and taking away the profits for the bad people and then applying a tax, which would support government and care facilities for the addicted. There are jobs in the marijuana grow industry and care businesses. With more cash in the hands of our spenders, there will be more jobs, which will be more taxes paid and also with these changes there will be less reasons for so many prisons (the prison industry is one of the obstacles to progressive drug laws). If we take drugs off the table, the lives of our people and families will be much better. Then there will be an incentive for getting a better education, which will make the corporations happy. For 2015...

We must revisit the wage stagnation that has been going on for the last 34 years, which has exacerbated the wage inequality and lead to the decline of the unions from 35 percent in 1954 to a total of 11.3 percent of workers unionized or 6.7 percent if you count only the private sector workers. This decline has led to a downward trend of workers’ power to protect themselves from corporation greed; but what it has also done is decimate the middle class and those used to have now have been pushed down into the bottom of the social class of the have very littles or have nothings. Consider this: cash in a capitalist system is just like fertilizer to a farmer, the more cash you put in the pockets of the workers the healthier the capitalist system. If you withhold the cash it’s just like withholding the fertilizer from crops you end up with stunted plants and your economy won’t grow. Austerity is withholding fertilizer on steroids. So at this time there is just the 1 to 5 percent—and the bot...

All countries are only as good as their people. They are the engines of any country. The engines should be as powerful as possible in order to do this we need the best educational system, which should be free up to the bachelor’s degree, or an apprenticeship of four to five years for a trade, and a free healthcare system. The workers must have the wages to be able to save for a good pension when they retire, which would mean they would be productive on a volunteer basis. The workers must be paid a good living wage, starting at $15 to $18 an hour. Paying people well for their work would release funds for government assets, which could be used for the cost of free education and healthcare. Also, the workers would be tax payers, instead of being like the Walmart stores in Minnesota with its 20,997 employees, which creates a public burden of $92.7 million a year in government assistance for these employees. Most workers are 35 years old and 88 percent are 20 years or older. This is just wh...

Nick Hanauer is a visionary capitalist and a billionaire, who is warning his co-oligarchies that the pitchforks are coming for the plutocrats. You know the ultra-rich greedy oligarchies who are fighting the minimum wage hike to a living wage with some disposable income. If the tidal wave of wage inequality does not stop, then surely there will be pitchforks. I understand some entrepreneurs’ thinking having been one myself. Unless your workers have a union, the worker is on their own. I remember once speaking with a non-union contractor about workers’ pay and I told the contractor that I thought his workers were worth more than he was paying them. His answer was, “I know they are, but I am not going to pay them more until they make me do it.” It is sad some people think this way and have to be made to do the right thing. This is why it is so important for people not to get distracted or happy at the prospect of increasing the wages to $10 an hour or so. If the employers and government h...

The fight about inequality in the coming year will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of wage slaves pushed to the wall by bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity. This will be punctuated by street battles with ultra-rightist movements fighting against unions, militants, revolutionary socialists, women, blacks, gays, immigrants, Jews and others. This will happen even in the most stable democracies if the working class fails to take power out of the hands of the oligarchies. This is why the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage is so important at this time. For one reason, it is a rallying point, and two, it will show the workers they can have a better life if they set aside all other differences and work together. The pressure is beginning to pay off as evident in a recent survey of American millionaires, 51 percent think inequality is a major problem for the U.S. About two-thirds also think higher taxes on the wealthy and ...

Why have wages remained flat or even gone down in the last 30 years? There are lots of reasons and plenty of blame to go around from the workers to the corporations to the politicians and even to the courts. To start to understand, the workers should look at themselves. Like why we negotiate our wages down to get a job or why we work for a nonunion, low wage corporation, or why we don’t fight to have a union or basic working rights. Workers stop valuing their skills and, out of fear, gave into the corporate disrespect for workers. Then there are the huge corporations who pollute the wages by setting or using the minimum wage set by our government, who the workers voted into office to look out for our interests. Look how that has turned out for us. Remember, minimum wage is just that. It is the lowest wage you can receive unless you work as a restaurant food server, and then you can receive much less. Of course, you could be an unpaid intern, who’s most likely taking the job of a paid w...

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...

The war for $15 to $16 is on and a new enemy has surfaced. In the Art of War, you are to know your enemy. The wage warrior who will be leading the fight to kill any wage increase for the low wage workers is Richard Berman, who works for the restaurant industry. Berman runs a public relations firm. The 71-year-old Berman is a skilled spin master believes that workers are not paid for what they need, but for what they can contribute, which sounds logical until you use logic. What workers can contribute means a lot of different things, such as making who they work for a lot of money. If that is so then the workers should have a piece of that pie. Berman will push that higher wages will make jobs disappear, which is just bullpucky. It will create more jobs for when people have more money to buy products; someone has to make the products being bought or serve the customer at restaurants, which is where Berman will try to scare the workers into believing that new technologies will be used t...

Are American workers and the other world workers ready to join together to fight for bread? The workers were once literally fighting for bread when they were hungry. It seems at least in America, workers got to where they were not hungry enough and so our workers were happy to sit down and eat their cake. The perception is that unions have settled on just trying to protect what they have and no longer push for the amelioration of broader social inequalities, which are reflected in public opinion polls. Union approval rates have fallen well below 50 percent and continue to decline. Our unions must stop this decline by telling the union story of what the unions have done for the good of all workers here and around you’re the world. One thing we can do today is use our labor forces to help our low-wage workers fight for bread and the $15 an hour minimum wage would buy some of that bread and maybe even a little cake, too. Some or most of our unions have been standing in quicksand and sin...

California minimum wage is going to $10-$12 is just enough to move workers off of government assistance, such as food stamps, but still does not give the workers disposal income, which will boost the economy with more jobs and more taxes for local and state coffers. It would be a step in the right direction to stop the taxpayers subsidizing corporations that pay low wages to their workers. Millionaire Representative Ron Unz, of Silicon Valley California, wants to raise the California minimum wage to $12 an hour. Governor Brown wants to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10 an hour; Seattle, WA., mayor wants the minimum wage to be $15 and this is where it should be, $15 to $16 at this time. The increase is being slow walked, but it is going to happen. Whichever state does it first will be the winner. Their jobs and their economy will be a huge success for the state, and if California voters would do the $15 an hour minimum and the legalization of marijuana, California workers and the g...

Why would a company that has work for 100 wage slaves at 40 hours a week hire 200 part-time workers at 20 hours a week? One is to stay away from them getting full-time status. Another reason is to have another trained work force in case half of their workers go on strike for higher wages and benefits. In the days of the 1920s and ‘30s there were companies which provided replacement or strike breaking workers at a price and some of these companies’ owners become very rich and famous, think Papa John’s Pizza. Today this is harder to do so the next best thing is for the Walmarts and low wage fast food companies to have another work force already in house either part time or temporary workers. Wage slaves must keep this in mind when there is the same amount of work and the companies are cutting your hours and if this happening then they are preparing for a strike. So when you see this happening workers should make their move before the replacement workers are trained, which the present wo...

The $15 to $16 an hour minimum wage that the low-wage workers are asking for has a lot of positive to it, such as helping to end corporation welfare and these large corporations like Walmart paying below living wages and then the tax payers having to supplement their workers by way of food stamps and Medicaid, school lunches. Usually the cost for a low-wage worker is about $10,000 a year so if the corporations paid a living wage like they should, that corporation welfare money could go toward other things, which would benefit all of the 99 percent, and, of course, better wages would mean more jobs and maybe some families could go back to a one-wage earner per family, which would be good for the children, in some cases. In order to get the win on wages each wage slaves must want it and be willing to make the commitment just like going on a diet, quit smoking, getting sober. Each person must do it and then find others with the same will and tenacity to stay with it until you win. But jus...

The Tooth Fairy recipients will get a 23 percent increase in payouts for each tooth, which is now worth $5 a piece, and some people are thinking fast-food or low-wage workers should work for minimum wage. In some states, low earners are getting just a little above what a kid gets for a tooth. Now the owners and bosses should be the only tight asses against the $15 to $16 living wage, but I am appalled at the stupidity of some low-wage workers, who think the $15 to $16 an hour would be too much. You would think these ignorant people owned the companies. The naysayers don’t understand that the world is made up of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and they sure as hell are not, or probably will never be, the 1 percent. The 1 percent does not need any help fighting to keep the minimum wage as it is. In fact, they would like to have it lower or none at all where you become a true wage slave. The only reason I can think of for why a ‘have very little’ would not want a $15 to $16 wage is if ...