Union Perspectives

Where is the wage slaves’ leadership or leaders? Or will there be a leaderless movement, like the Wobblies used? Has the time passed for a leader, such as Martin Luther King, Eugene Debs, Bill Hayward, Reuther brothers, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, John L. Lewis, or Cesar Chavez, among so many others. Is it even possible for these types of leaders to serve in positions of leadership against the corporations that have bought and paid for law enforcement? Knowing this, wage slaves will have to depend on Anonymous and WikiLeaks types of guerilla warfare with a type of underground and Occupy movement that has no assets or set home base. A type of organization that is very mobile with very good intelligence and tactics, such as the four used in Art of War: #1) when the enemy advances, we retreat; #2) when the enemy halts, we harass; #3) when the enemy seeks to avoid a battle, we attack; #4) when the enemy retreats, we pursue. We need to train our fighters in Art of War strategy. If one woman st...

The stagnation of wages fits the narrative of class polarization. One of the reasons is the loss of unions. Our union workers were at 11.3 percent in 2013 versus 20 percent in 1983. This loss of good union paying jobs has taken money of out the economy. It is what the big nonunion box stores call “Merchant Capital,” which is the spendable income of the workers. As wages stay low or go even lower there is less and less merchant capital, and what money that is left then goes to the top 1 percent. Think Walmart’s $2.53 trillion, yes, Walmart, low pay, so-called “low prices,” and union-free business model delivers huge riches to the Arkansas Waltons. So, the day of denying the impact of rising income inequality is over. It is now destroying families. It is destroying other businesses, our democracy, and our country as we used to know it when we had a good robust middle class, a middle class that drove the consumer economy. To get this back, organized labor here and abroad must play a role...

Don’t forget your best defense strategy is a good offense strategy. So when the money people, who are mostly GOP anti-union people with a strategy of keeping the “have nots” in a defensive mode trying to protect what little they have. This is when a good offense toward higher wages, like $15 to $18 an hour will be the most effective way to defend what’s left and make headway toward a better wage and working conditions. This is the time for all wage slave workers to band together: union, nonunion, Democrat, GOP, independent, Green Peace or Libertarian, which all are being beaten down in life and on the job with low wages and the ones who don’t have jobs and are just trying to survive with no food stamps or unemployment checks. There is no reason why all workers and non- workers cannot work together and vote for people who will look out for your interest. People who have a proven track record and not one who say what you want to hear, but are actually working for the oligarchies, like...

In order to make fire or to put fire out you need the fire triangle: oxygen, fuel and heat. Take one away and the fire goes out. For the capitalists’ consumer system to thrive like fire it needs: money, demand and product, if you take one of these away and capitalism dies. Let’s look at what happens when 400 individuals accumulates more than $2 trillion and keeps it in their pockets year after year. This is the start of inequality, which causes poverty. The USA now is at the highest level of inequality in our history. We sit between Venezuela and Uruguay. We are even higher than every major European or East Asian nation in our inequality, which causes poverty through economic mismanagement. The corporations don’t spend their money; they just sit on it, which drains money from the economy and the “fire” goes out. With no corporations spending there will be no jobs, which means no workers spending, which means no demand for products (the fire is snuffed out). With fewer jobs and with t...

What do Cambodia and the U.S. have in common? One thing is the low pay paid to some of their workers. About 100,000 Cambodian workers are fighting for $160 pay a month, at this time they receive $100 a month, and workers say they cannot survive on this. This fight affects about 600,000 workers at 800 different plants. The 100,000 workers are in the street fighting for their co-workers, but you might be surprised to know that in the U.S. there are more than 200,000 workers making 22, 38 or 41 cents an hour. According to the USA Labor Department’s wage and labor division, there are around 2,000 certified employers paying more than 300,000 workers subminimum wages. One of the employers is the Goodwill Industries, a multibillion dollar nonprofit business that pays its disabled employees the low wages. These chump change wages are allowed under a Depression-era law, Section 14 (c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, employers can apply for a special wage certificate allowing them to...

Wage levels: how low would business executives of corporations and owners of businesses like wages to be. Most say $3 an hour or less or even no wage at all. They would like to replace wages with food, housing and basic needs and thus control the conditions that create instability among the workers. It would be like the like the work camp jobs, a true wage-less slave company, just like in the coal mines and logging companies of yesteryear when workers were paid in chips that had to be used at the company's stores. What the workers need to know is how they are perceived by their bosses. The bosses look at workers as “they are not people who you get to know” and will tell the workers that “this job is not a social problem.” You, the worker, are not to know about the corporation’s well-being. The corporations are getting business instruction about “bleeding the beast,” which is squeezing every ounce of work out of their employees. It is getting what you want out of people, such as ge...

If our workers here in the U.S. think their alone in their fight for a living wage and better living standards for their families, all they need to do is look at the rest of the world’s workers. Workers in places like Quebec, Canada, Egypt, Puerto Rico, Tunisia, Ukraine, South Korea, Belarus, Romania, and Bangladesh. We are all in this together, think about this, a five year study was done on Walmart’s Chinese imports which cost 133,000 American jobs, but it wasn’t just the U.S. workers that got screwed over, the Chinese workers weren’t paid a fair wage. These are just a few of the countries fighting the government and the oligarchies who control the large corporations, backed by sedition laws—laws impeding free speech and organization, deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order, which means anything they, the oligarchies, don’t like. The sedition laws put harsh restrictions on mass gatherings of workers. Remember laws and law enforcement a...

The war for $15 to $16 is on and a new enemy has surfaced. In the Art of War, you are to know your enemy. The wage warrior who will be leading the fight to kill any wage increase for the low wage workers is Richard Berman, who works for the restaurant industry. Berman runs a public relations firm. The 71-year-old Berman is a skilled spin master believes that workers are not paid for what they need, but for what they can contribute, which sounds logical until you use logic. What workers can contribute means a lot of different things, such as making who they work for a lot of money. If that is so then the workers should have a piece of that pie. Berman will push that higher wages will make jobs disappear, which is just bullpucky. It will create more jobs for when people have more money to buy products; someone has to make the products being bought or serve the customer at restaurants, which is where Berman will try to scare the workers into believing that new technologies will be used t...

Are American workers and the other world workers ready to join together to fight for bread? The workers were once literally fighting for bread when they were hungry. It seems at least in America, workers got to where they were not hungry enough and so our workers were happy to sit down and eat their cake. The perception is that unions have settled on just trying to protect what they have and no longer push for the amelioration of broader social inequalities, which are reflected in public opinion polls. Union approval rates have fallen well below 50 percent and continue to decline. Our unions must stop this decline by telling the union story of what the unions have done for the good of all workers here and around you’re the world. One thing we can do today is use our labor forces to help our low-wage workers fight for bread and the $15 an hour minimum wage would buy some of that bread and maybe even a little cake, too. Some or most of our unions have been standing in quicksand and sin...

Is it time to rethink our union? At this time union cannot support each other on strikes. In a lot of union companies with many different unions within them with most of these different unions expiring at different time, which means they cannot support each other in a strike because they would be breaching their contract and opening themselves up to being sued. In some cases they are held responsible for lost profits, court costs and other possible damages. The other thing is most unions with apprenticeship trainings are so good that a union worker can leave the union and become a foreman or start their own nonunion business. Some have even stolen tools to start their businesses. This is prevalent in all construction trades and it usually happens when we, unions, cannot keep our workers employed and when we can’t is when they, the nonunion, take over our training and use it against us. It's pretty pathetic when the U.S. ranks 21st out of 21 countries for union membership and cove...