Are we, wage slaves, and retired former wage slaves ready for a general strike? If we are ready I think top of the list on the strike banner should be a minimum wage hike to at least $15 an hour then leave Social Security alone and next strong labor laws to protect wages and the right to have a union. Also to do away with the right to work state laws, which if you belong to a union and receive benefits then you should pay your share—no free rides. You know the GOP way: nothing free.
If we get the minimum wage raised we will have a lot of people thankful and see just what the power of union people can do. If the lower wage workers have $5 per hour more to spend it will be better for every worker and they can purchase better transportation to get to work and will spend more; and, in turn, help the consumer economy, which is what we have.
The more we buy the more someone has to make or supply, and around it goes; but with no spending power it just doesn’t work. The corporations go to undeveloped countries and try to get them to buy our products, which takes years and moves jobs overseas. When the corporations could do the same things right here just by paying more in minimum wage. The U.S. has a third world economy right now that can be tapped as customers, but in order for this to happen the wage slaves must do something over the top, something never done before like a countrywide general strike like the LongShoremen did in Washington state, but only on an even larger scale.
If we start talking about it now and pick the right time we would get the attention of the masses. This would be a real 99% event, and in the long run even some of the 1% would benefit whether they would want it or not. We need to do this before the next election.
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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