It looks like Ukraine might be saved from Russia’s Putin by union steelworkers. One of the richest oligarchies in Ukraine has asked his union steelworkers to start patrolling the cities and forcing the Putin people out of the government buildings taken over shortly after Putin violated Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea.
Using the union members is working because it is working people taking care of working people, and not the government, who some in Ukraine don’t trust or agree with their handling of the situation. The union steelworkers are buying time for things to settle down and the Ukrainians to decide for themselves just what is best.
Unions seems to be the way to solve a lot of problems for the working people, such as getting a living wage, mine safety in U.S. and Turkey, which just lost hundreds of miners. Then there is the fire safety in the clothing sweatshops worldwide. The wages and safety for workers will not be solved by governments for they are controlled by the money people.
You only have to look at the Swiss who just voted down a minimum wage hike, which would have been the world’s highest paid minimum wage of $25 U.S. or 22 Swiss Franc. You have to wonder how much government and oligarchies’ pressure was applied to defeat the initiative for a high wage. As the economy accelerates it is just zooming past the working class. The oligarchies are getting richer by the day and the workers are not even out of the starting gate. In fact, most are not even at the gate.
The only way the workers can get in the race, they, the workers, will need the unions help. The oligarchies are underestimated the unions strength, which can be used to the workers advantage. The fast food workers will be deciding factor on the fight of inequality between the 1 percent and the 99 percent.
The workers will need all unions to come together to win this fight for $15 to $18 an hour. This will set the tone for years to come and accelerate union membership and further establish the unions’ credibility.
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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