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 sinking while not realizing it or just denying it to themselves. So just stop and think in 1957 union found that Americans had a 76 percent positive feeling about unions. What happened? Maybe too much time eating cake or just apathy. Whatever it is it is time to move out of the quicksand before it is too late.
So union should be among the fighters for the $15 to $16 an hour minimum wage and organize just like Joe Hill told us to do before he was shot to death. Did Joe Hill die nothing?
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...
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