Skip to main content

Eating your seed corn

The $15 to $16 an hour minimum wage fight must have a large outreach of community-based support and education of the public in the overall good that will come from higher wages for the lower wage workers. There are 46 million people in this country living in poverty. Between 2009 and 2011, all the new income generated in this country went to the top 1 percent making the income inequality in this country greater than in any other developed country. It looks like some of the corporations are starting to see the benefits of more money in the pockets of our wage slaves will help not only the workers, but will mean more profits for the corporation. It will not mean fewer jobs, but not more jobs to keep up with the customer demands for the food industry and manufacturers. I think the corporations are really starting to see the benefits of paying a good living wage and benefits. Some of these corporations are Costco, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Raley’s, among others. They see that one of the ways to keep and expand their business is to keep good workers. The days of the old Wal-Mart model of profits on the backs of workers only works for a short time. When wages are kept suppressed sooner or later the customer will run out of money, which is the Wal-Mart customer base. Wal-Mart just declared its profits were down this year. So this is the tipping point for wage slaves, but you must keep up the public education on how the minimum wage increase will benefit everyone, even local governments, plus state and federal governments. The more people off of public assistance will mean the more paying their fair share of taxes, which should make the GOP happy. So at this time most of the businesses understand the good of this increase and the workers do. There will still be a he fight against the increase so we must reach out to all organizations that will support us. We must all be able to define our position verbally, and in order to do tis we must educate ourselves. I would hope all our local labor councils and union would support the $15 to $16 an hour wage increase fight for we all win in the end if the minimum wage is increased. In a customer-driven economy, keeping wages below a living wage is like eating your seed corn for in the end you will have nothing to plant. It only works for a short time until the seed is gone. As Joe Hill, of International Workers of the World, once said, “Workers of the world awaken! Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradles to your graves? Is the height of your ambition to be good willing slaves?”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It's Time To Pick A Side

It’s time to pick a side. You want to have and keep unions with good wages and pensions, then it’s time to pick a side. You want to keep Social Security for yourself and family, it is time to pick a side. You want to get or keep Medicare and Obama’s Affordable Care Act, then it’s time to pick a side. It is us against the billionaires. The very rich got that way off the backs of workers, and now want to strip everything away from those workers. It’s time to pick a side. The very rich can buy countries, then make the people get on their hands and knees and grovel and beg for scrapes that usually go into the dumpster. It’s time to pick a side. Is this what we want for our family and our future? It’s time to pick a side. Get ready to fight for you and your families’ lives. There is no middle ground with these greedy people for they want it all—all the money—all the power—all the land so where does this leave us when they have all the commons, like water, land and airways? It’s time to pick...

Time for an Offense

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...

Senator Bernie Sanders & Team

The AFL is with Senator Bernie Sanders and it is the people’s only chance to push back against Elon Musk, who wants to dismantle our government. Musk family is said to have left South Africa because they could no longer exploit The native/black Africans so he bought Trump and now he’s laying waste to America in the name of progress. With Senator Sanders’ leadership and backing of all labor unions, we could put together the whole of 99 percent of the people and beat back the 2 percent destroying we what once had and stood for while also saving Social Security, healthcare for all, elder care, child care, while working on the climate change crisis (we are running out of time, as the weather is showing us). The workers need to go big, such as a four-day work week like other countries have; universal basic income (UBI) and Medicare for all for unhoused people, which would help get them off the streets. UBI goes right back into the local economies, which supports jobs for the other working p...