Why doesn’t President Obama have a labor secretary like Frances Perkins in his Cabinet? Perkins was the first female Cabinet member under President Franklin Roosevelt, and there has never been a better labor secretary since. If the Obama administration does not start working for labor, then why will labor work for them, the Democrats, then why should labor spend its money on federal elections?
At this time the trend seems to be spending and working on carpeting the state legislation and government offices. This is working well for the GOP, and the labor people are seeing the results, which is detrimental to union labor. By working the states it can be more grassroots, which can more easily show our dues paying members results in their towns where the jobs are and could result in more union jobs and dues paying members. With this success then it could be transferred to the federal level of government.
Frances Perkins understood what the working wage slaves needed, which was federal labor laws. Laws that helped labor organizing for a better life. Now we do not need another election, we won and all we need now is another Frances Perkins to get us card check and tighten up the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rules, which have been shot full of holes and do not work for labor in this day and age. We need a prompt and honest hard debate about what is happening to our wage slaves working men and women.
Looking at our NLRB rules will begin the debate. All we need is the will from the Obama administration. Hell, Washington, D.C., loves hearings so why not this one? Now is the time to put the plight of the working people on the open stage where all can see and hear what has happened to wages and the trend toward part-time worker, which deprives wage slaves of benefits, health insurance and pensions.
If we do not address this soon we could be looking at another Jan. 13, 1874, when in New York City’s Tompkins Square when workers were told to attend a meeting, but, instead, were lied to and beaten.
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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