Why don’t we, labor wage slaves, have organizations, other than labor unions, fighting for our workers? The right wing has not only anti-labor think tanks, but also many undercover organizations, such as American Legislative Exchange Council; the right wing group the Lincoln Club of Orange County, California; Manufacturers Association; and the local, national and international Chamber of Commerce.
These are just a few of the organizations that have come out from under their rocks and are getting laws or propositions on the ballot before we wage slaves even know what’s happened. This always puts us on the defense, which we must stop in order to counter their actions. They have the money, but we have the people. Whether or not they lose they will have depleted our treasury and worn our people out.
What we need to do is take the fight to them, which will remove what they are doing to us. We could do this by using our labor councils and spin off organizations to work on propositions and laws to benefit us, the working people, such as raising the minimum wage to a living wage of $14-$15 an hour in cities and counties; and card check. This can be done and then the oligarchies would have to start spending their money and resources. They just have money. We have some money but a lot of people. We could turn the fight upside down now that we have won the election and have the momentum.
Unions are in a crisis. Union organizers are being stretch to the breaking point. We have a lot of retirees, most with little to do, and they are a resource being wasted. They should be recruited to work with union members, teaching them the ropes and union and American history. By using the retirees, they are kept involved; their union bonds are reinforced; and they are reminded of where they came from. By ignoring them we are leaving them to fall under the spell of Fox News and anti-union labor factions and then they vote against their best interests.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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