Union Perspectives

“Shape up” the old way employees were hired on the docks when there were no unions. The shape up used by Maritime companies would force dock workers to beg and bribe their way into a job each day just like farm laborers or day laborers do today. They usually stand in a parking lot or on a street curb early in the morning for a day’s work. I have found the shape up system being used at a junior college in northern California. It is used to hire adjunct instructors and other jobs called class aides. The way it works is the college has a tenured dean, who is in charge of so many departments, who hire department directors, who is an at-will employee with a yearly contract. Each director then hires adjunct instructors and their class aides and none of these wage slaves have protection or benefits and are at-will employees. The power is all with the deans because most all tenured workers are deans nowadays and on up the administrative chain, who are given a budget and this is the responsibil

Wage slaves are living in a precarious lifecycle and can only obtain part-time work, which is known now worldwide as “precarity.” This description now fits just about all wage slaves from skilled labor, manufacturing, fast food, farm slaves and even the professional managerial class slaves. This came about when workers are not hired in permanent positions, but are hired as temp workers—in reality these workers are hired into a temporary status, also called “permatemping,” which is the new anti-union model to keep unions out. This new status makes workers feel precarious about their jobs, this and the cuts in unemployment benefits makes it harder for workers to imagine surviving any job loss. For temp workers, there is the elusive hope that their job will turn into a full-time position, sort of like winning the megamillion lotto, but this is the hope that strings the suckers along. In reality very few will ever get full-time status. Some companies have four temp agencies supplying w

Wages and safety should be the owners’ responsibility: pension, healthcare, and seniority on the job should be the unions’ responsibility. If unions had the responsibilities of pensions and healthcare and a union member has to move to another area, their pension and healthcare follows them. With this scenario the power shifts to the member and union and not to the corporation or government entity. If the corporations or government control the pensions and healthcare, this gives them a wedge issue to use to split the single workers and family members or the new workers against the workers about to retire. If all unions, like the Building Trades, took control of their pensions and healthcare (healthcare might not be the issue now that it once was) it would take away the talking points about how unions are responsible for bankrupting companies and government entities with huge pensions, which nonunion workers don’t have. It is the pensions and healthcare that is used to turn public opini

Bullies: kids bully with their mouths and fists, billionaires bully with money. The DeVos, Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and the Walton family are just some of the oligarchy bullies, who see unions as an enemy of freedom and union leaders as thugs. Interesting the only freedom these billionaires are concerned with are their own. Their hatred of all things union and why they want to destroy unions is because they cannot control unions and unions are the only thing standing between their obscene wealth and making the U.S. a Third World country. To these greedy bastards money is the true power and with that they want to destroy the power source for the unions’ money by passing “right to work’ laws in Michigan and other states. If passed, these laws will essentially ruin unions and defund Democrats’ election contributions. The oligarchies are looking to the 2016 presidential race. They will push for less government, less taxes, fewer regulations, which all, in their selfish eyes, destro

To save capitalism as we know it today we must not get to the point where the world has an unconsumed surplus of products. What has kept this from happening so far is that we and others have been unloading the surplus on other countries, and to this we help develop the resources by shipping our jobs to these countries. We then extend this process to all countries on the planet until every country is producing every year and every day and an unconsumed surplus builds up, which corporations cannot dispose of in other countries. The reason for this is that corporations have raped and pillaged every country on earth of its cheap labor. Now you may ask, how do you dispose of the surpluses to keep the capitalist consumer system working? We’re already seeing signs that in the profits of some of the big box stores the profits are going down. One reason is that the ‘have nothings’ or ’have very little,’ the proletarians, have no purchasing power because of very low wages. Here in the USA, the s

Has the time finally come for the dreams of the International Workers of the World (IWW) for a world workers’ union. For a lot of IWW’s ideas was way ahead of its time. The old IWW wage slaves had nothing or very little money. They were just people who shared the dream of a better life for themselves and their families, and they felt that all wage slaves should belong to one union of the world, J.F. McDaniels wrote. There would be no borders of countries. Just like some unions in the USA. A sheet metal worker can move and work anywhere and his pension and healthcare follows the union member. They have an international union member, but they still must register with the local union. But, still, they can move and follow the jobs. This was part of the IWW’s dream in 1905, when the socialist, anarchists, trade unionist and revolutionaries met to lay the ground work for one big union combining elements of Marxian and Darwinian together. The IWW ideology envisioned a utopian society consist

Inequality means you get screwed. Large gaps in educational achievement and racial divides all make the reduction in inequality difficult. The poorest states in the USA are Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia and most of these are Red states or considered Republican non-union, but right-to-work states. The Republicans will tell you wage slaves that inequality is desirable. Inequality gives wage slaves the incentive to work harder and invest. But at some point, which is where we are now, the inequality of income and wealth becomes so wide as to harm society. When most all the economic gains go to the top; the wage slaves and everyone aspires to join the top percentage, but they no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. Moreover with the small number at the top 1 percent making most of the investment decisions the economy will go up and down. Also, with the 1 percent gains more wealth they also gain more political power in a disproportionate amount, whic