The fight about inequality in the coming year will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of wage slaves pushed to the wall by bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity. This will be punctuated by street battles with ultra-rightist movements fighting against unions, militants, revolutionary socialists, women, blacks, gays, immigrants, Jews and others.
This will happen even in the most stable democracies if the working class fails to take power out of the hands of the oligarchies. This is why the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage is so important at this time. For one reason, it is a rallying point, and two, it will show the workers they can have a better life if they set aside all other differences and work together.
The pressure is beginning to pay off as evident in a recent survey of American millionaires, 51 percent think inequality is a major problem for the U.S. About two-thirds also think higher taxes on the wealthy and a higher minimum wage are ways to narrow the inequality. Almost 60 percent of the American people polled think the minimum wage should be raised beginning at $10.10.
We need to take advantage of existing groups working toward reforms, such as the millions of workers who have taken to the streets over immigration reform, which is given very little attention on television, but it did take the oligarchies by surprise. This didn’t come out of the blue. It has developed in response to the money employers and their quarter-century long anti-labor offensive which drove down wages and all social benefits, imposing literally life threatening production speeds and denying simple dignity to the toilers on and off the job.
We need to support the $15 to $18 an hour fast food workers strike just for all the reasons mentioned above.
The survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union work force. In a survey, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. So, as an old sheet metal organizer, I say we need to go all out in organizing while the soldering iron is hot, to use a sheet metal workers tool. We should organize all workers no matter where or what kind of work they do. All workers have the right to belong to a union and all should support each other. If you, in your work place, do not know how to form a union, then do what Napoleon’s military adopted adage, ‘Jump into the battle and then figure it out.’ One of the best ways to organize is worker to worker and plan it out over a meal or coffee and talk to other union workers to see what would work best for you and also what unions are winning at this time. Just go for it. When things are in disarray, like the shit show in Washington, D.C., they might not even know what you are doing until it is too late for them to push back aga...
Comments
Post a Comment