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 to replace their jobs, like tabletop computers screens to order food. Hell, you might as well just go use a vending machine.
Fox News and Berman will spin it. Just don’t believe it. If the minimum wage rate had gone up at the same pace as productivity gains the bosses made on the backs of workers, it would be $18.28 an hour today.
As social pressure mounts, President Obama and the Democratic Party politicians are proposing a paltry raise of the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It is just slow walking minimum wage. It needs to be $15 an hour slow walked to $18.28 an hour.
We have an election in two months, where the hell are the building Trade Unions? Members and organizers should be touting their wages, benefits and seeking out new members and union shops. So far, I’m only hearing crickets. While the Trade Unions sit back, the UAW have been striking and winning big benefits for their members. Then there is the Teamsters, who have taken on the Holy Grail—Amazon, the corporation. Again, just crickets from the Trade Unions. Then there is the Minnesota State model—-we can win more together than we can on our own. So why are all unions not working together? Why are all unions not talking with each other? There are two months left until the election—an election that could conceivably be the death null of unions. If we lose this election to the GOP, Trump and Project 2025, our unions will be destroyed and we’ll be back to the days of trying to make ends meet as the GOP will cut our wages, benefits will be eliminated and there will be nothing we can do abou...
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