What does the USA, Sweden and Switzerland have in common? It is the fight about the inequality between labor and the oligarchies. Today in Switzerland, one of the fighters against inequality is Marilule Wili. Years ago, many of fighters of inequality came from Sweden.
In 1905, the USA had a labor hero by the name of Joe Hill, but he was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillstrom in a Gävle, a Swedish village. He came to America and first reached prominence on the West Coast while he worked to organize the International Workers of the World (IWW) Wobblies; and Hill was also a song writer and was known as the “Troubadour of Discontent."
Hill was framed for murdering a grocer and his son and shot to death in Salt Lake City, Utah. After his execution thousands of Wobblies made him their martyr and his work continued on. His last famous words just before he died were, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize,” and it looks like the spirit is still here and in Sweden.
So the wage slaves should all be watching Swiss voters. Wili belongs to the Generation Basic Income, an activist group working to amend their Constitution that guarantees every citizen $33,000 a year. The group has gotten the necessary 100,000 signatures to place the initiative on the ballot in two or three years for the country’s voters. Maybe the Swiss’ idea will catch on in the only two European countries, Italy and Greece, that don’t have a minimum wage to keep people out of poverty.
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...
Comments
Post a Comment