The strike or temporary walkout: why workers fear doing it and how to alleviate their fear.
One way to picket a fast food or any low wage place is to recruit people from like-minded businesses. This way it is hard for owners to retaliate against workers asking for a $15 an hour minimum wage. So, workers at Burger King can picket a McDonald, and then the workers of McDonalds picket at Burger King.
Another thing is to find out what other organizations would support increasing minimum wage to a $15 an hour and trade off might be just the exposure of their membership, such as faith-based work centers. You can leverage your manpower to help each other to see that there is no retaliation. This is not a new strategy. These are time-tested tactics used by the Knights of Labor in the 1880 and the International Workers of the World. The tactics were used to gain freedom of assembly and speech.
These tactics will get around the outlawing of solidarity of workers that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s took away. The bottom line is using these new-old tactics you can bring back the strikes and not break labor laws or jeopardize your job if you even have one or worry about losing the minimum wage one you have. The gamble is worth fighting for a $15 an hour wage than staying at $7.50.
At this stage, the “Have Littles” and the “Have Nots,” I think it would be best to maintain a loose structured leadership and no assets in order to be able to use strikes and quick walkouts. This way no one is in charge, which means there would be no one to sue and no assets to worry about losing.
The other thing that must be worked on is the public support, and a $15 an hour minimum wage for the “Have Little” workers should not be hard to sell for more money in the pocket of the wage slaves the more money spent in the community. The more money spent, the more jobs—everyone wins: businesses, taxes paid to local governments, which means better schools, roads, healthcare, and pensions and so on. Now I think the tipping point in this is that older workers are now forced to work at minimum wage jobs and they are better educated and more experienced in worker history and remember when they were paid better wages, pensions, healthcare and unions.
They would like to take back the workplace that has been stolen from them by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Commission) and the U.S. Supreme Court rulings I think the fight is on. The oligarchies against the wage slaves and people of power will win. Everything we need to know is in labor history books, and how to fight in the Art of War and the Prince by Machiavelli.
We, low wage workers, should be tired of licking the bowl of life and not getting any of the cake.
There are three phases of a general strike and unions must plan for one. Those three phases are: 1. general strike in an industry 2. general strike in a community 3. general national strike We need to move away from being on the defensive and move toward a good offensive. The American Federal of Labor (AFL) could not have held a general strike if it wanted to because they had thousands of different contracts that expired at different times of the year. This was done deliberately so that there is no consolidation of power for a general strike. Also, nowadays, there is no law agency that will support labor, except the National Labor Relations Board (NLBR), which has been under attack and in decline for years. This leaves the burden of change up to unions, and unless unions work together, little will change. We essentially have a combination of job trusts, which are not as strong as contracts, and the courts can break easily because the NLBR will be further weakened and essentially elim...
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