The fight to keep the prevailing wage in a little city has been ongoing for three years. The fight is between a supposed nonprofit corporation and the City of Redding against the unions in northern California. The so-called nonprofit, Turtle Bay Museum, wants to build a 5-star Sheraton hotel as a funding source for its enterprises. The case went to the courts and labor won.
Now the Turtle Bay wants to go back to court, but this time labor is in for the long hall. This win for labor or loss will affect all of California, and could even set a precedent for the rest of the nation. For this reason alone labor must win, and in this case Turtle Bay needs the hotel more than the labor needs the jobs for labor will not miss out on a thing if this hotel is not build.
They have nothing now so if the hotel isn’t built they won’t be out of work, but if the prevailing wage is overturned, unions will lose a lot more than this one job. We can kiss the prevailing wage jobs goodbye, and construction jobs will truly be slave wages. The irony is that the prevailing wage was written by GOP-elected representatives: Davis and Bacon. The GOP seems to have forgotten this part of its history. Maybe a history lesson is in order.
I am sure the Tea party faction of the GOP of today would have invited Davis and Bacon for dinner without the two men knowing they were on the menu. The GOP does eat its own. I wonder when the GOP members will figure this out and start to support their own best interest.
The hotel, if prevailing wage is in place, would put $1 million to $3 million in the pockets of our local workers, which would be spent in Redding and the taxes would go to Shasta County and sales taxes to the City of Redding. So it this going to be another dumb, stupid T-party shoot yourself in the foot tactic that we tend to do up here most of the time?
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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