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.
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...
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