Unions have begun organizing Walmart and this is a fight worth fighting, and if it is won all others will fall like dominos. It looks like the Walmart organizing effort was well planned. The Art of War says the Army who attacks can pick their time, in this case right before the holidays and the presidential election, and the places, stores, where workers are needed for the holiday hours. Other companies will not help, but will be happy to take Walmart’s customers and business. Knowing this, Walmart corporate leaders, threatened with a strike on Black Friday, are talking to themselves about whether to raise wages or bring in more part-time workers.
The workers have nothing to lose. They are already at the bottom of the economic ladder: no healthcare, no pension, no job security and the only power they have are their feet, and the solidarity of other wage slaves and unions. Now is the time for a full court press from all wage slaves to support the Walmart workers in the streets and with money, food, signs or whatever is needed for if Walmart falls there will be plenty of union work to go around for the economy will pick up and the need for unemployment will drop to 5-4 percent enough jobs for everyone and more money spent equals more things to be made, which equals more jobs and the cycle continues.
This will be a hard fought war of the wage slaves against the well-funded corporatists who have everything in their corner, such as laws, union busters, and money for replacement workers. People will go to jail, people will be beaten, and lives may even be lost. It will not be pretty, but all things of value are not free or easy. If they were they would already be done.
The organizing of our retail is on the scale of when the auto industry was unionized, which created the first middle class of working families in the U.S. Now we have a chance to do this again, rebuild the middle class, with the retail workers. Retail used to be union jobs with a living wage. The retail unions were killed by apathy, sleeping unions, weakened labor laws and right-wing court decisions.
We just forgot what the word “solidarity” means. It is the most important word in the language of the wage slaves.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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