Union Perspectives

Why is Denmark the happiest place to live? Unions and employers in Denmark have no minimum wage, but both have agreed on a wage of $20.30 (U.S. equivalent) an hour (1.00 Dutch Krone (DKK) = 0.183640 U.S. dollar, which means their economy is a lot stronger than ours). Denmark also has free education for everyone of all ages and academic levels in its country of 5.6 million college-age students 18 years or older. College students who live on their own receive a monthly stipend of $1,028 (U.S. equivalent), but those living with their parents receive half that amount. The government has persuaded unions to accept a flexible labor market using a model known as “flexicurity,” companies can quickly lay-off workers during downturns in the economy, but workers receive training and help looking for new jobs. They also receive a benefit of $1,902 (U.S. equivalent after taxes) a month for up to two years. Employees also receive free healthcare and a generous pension system with fuel subsidies and...

The plight of the Do-Nothing people: Edmund Burke said that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” So this is the mission of the Doers to get the Do-Nothings to start supporting the high wages of $15 to $18 an hour and a return to free education. One way is to never struggle without stopping to catch your breath and take inventory of where you started and how far you have come, like trying to climb up a mountain without stopping. You must first visualize there is a top, like seeing $15 to $18 an hour and free education as the top of the mountain, climb to a plateau. We have reached a plateau of $10 an hour, some even at $15 an hour, but we cannot rest on the plateau for long for if we do the opposition will have time to regroup and counter attack our efforts. At this time, the Have Nothings, Have Littles, Used to Haves, and the Want Mores are winning the wage fight, but the money people are slow walking the wage increase by dragging their fee...

There is no in between in this class warfare. You are either with the unions or against; you can’t be whatever’s convenient for your self-interest. The exploitation of the proletarians by the oligarchies, who are anti-union GOP capitalists, will lead to the proletarians’ demise. Even though some companies are slow walking the increase in minimum wage hoping that the proletarians will let down their demands for the $15 to $18 an hour. Capitalists should look at Lincoln’s statement on May 19, 1856 when he said, “Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.” For the proletariats to understand their opponents better, I would suggest you read, The Prince, written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold onto power. The Haves with their arrogant opulence, its police, its courts—up to the Supreme Court, and its churches, claims of morality, law and order. These all secures the Haves’ status quo. But, the power of the Have Nots rests with their numbers. It has been said that the Haves,...

Commerce Department on free trade—steel imports; the claim is China is dumping inferior steel in the USA and has caused economic damage to the U.S. steel industry. The Commerce Department will make a decision on tariffs for this steel on July 11 of this year. The decision on steel will either make or break the U.S. steel industry or what is left in this country. There have been steel plants shut down because of the lack of tariffs to protect our steel manufacturing. One of the largest battles at this time is in the Iron Range in Minnesota. The Minnesota governor Mark Dayton is saying the dumping of steel has been going on for 10 years. This is costing mill towns to just go dark and causes thousands of working families to go broke and lose everything they worked for. A San Francisco bridge used cheap and inferior China-made steel, which was welded together by Chinese workers. The fact that it is Chinese is not the issue, the issue is corporations buying cheaper steel from another count...

“Trade unions must convince the world at large that their efforts far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions,” Karl Marx. Union steelworkers in Greece fight being framed-up by the Ellimiki Halivourgia steel mill where the workers are fighting a 40 percent wage cut. The riot police stormed the picket line and arrested six people at the gate. This was inspired by the dogma of the law and order of the government of the anti-union oligarchies who own the government of the employers. They are using back to work orders with threats of jail. The threats are also used against all union that try to support their fellow union members, like public transportation workers, longshoremen, and farmers. This is not new to the world for on May 26, 1937, ten strikers fell dead under police bullets at the Republic Steel’s south Chicago plant in the USA and scores of their fellow strikers were wounded. They had come, 300 of them in a peaceful parade to demonstra...

Empire: No doubt one is a wretched plebian harassed by debts and military service, but to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws, according to Sigmund Fraud in The Future of Illusion, 1927. This is the thinking of the GOP’s Tea Party people, who believe we are the best country in the world and all other countries should be like us. These people they are a part of an empire and think it will never end. This is again an illusion told to the uninformed GOP followers who blindly listen to the talking heads who are funded by the oligarchies. The GOP Tea Party members are not the only people with an illusion of an empire. Our union leaders also fall into this trap by not voicing their opinion on U.S. trade and foreign policy for it is usually so bad and explosive that is normally avoided in polite company within the union movement. Every action or failure to act has consequences and labor silence on questions o...

Today, our Commons are mostly invisible in life in the United States, but about two billion people around the world depend on Commons for their livelihood, like water, fisheries, farmland, roadways, air and other natural resources vulnerable to theft and seizure by corporations that want to do fracking, privatizing, or monetizing every aspect of these resources. The push for privatization is a way for corporations to plunder our commonwealth and life blood ends up with such results as our groundwater sold for brand-label bottled water, the patenting of the human genome, and the replacement of shareable agricultural seeds with proprietary GMO (genetic modified organisms) that must be bought year after year. The word Commons was termed in the 16th-19th centuries by the English gentry. They would seize the village pastures, forests, and waterways for their private use. These seizures were called “enclosures.” This drove the people who now were dispossessed from their Commons to the citie...

It is time to prime the pump of the economy with cash just like you would prime a water pump to get water from a well. The cash needed to prime the pump for the capitalist economy will have to come by way of higher wages for the poor working, such as a minimum wage of $15 to $18 an hour. The wealthy do not spend money like the poor, and anyone not in the multi-millionaires club are considered the poor. The poor are the spenders and drivers of an economy because there are more of us than of the wealthy. The poor’s spending does two things: increase tax revenue and provide jobs to produce the items spenders purchase that ultimately make the profits the wealthy hoard and stash in overseas banks. When people are paid more they buy more, more taxes accrue and there is a huge savings by people not using government assistance. This will then provide cash for our governments to start rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, such as the pot-hole filled roads, rusting bridges, polluted water, ...

The Great Strike of 1877 … People power is at its best when it is spontaneous and unorganized. This is when new ideas and new leaders are born and this is how the biggest strike started in the railroads and railroad yards of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which involved the Pennsylvania National Guard, federal troops, with a Gatling gun, who were trapped in a wooden railroad round house (the round house is used to turn train engines around). Strikers set the round house, box cars on fire, and then pushed these box cars into the round house, which forced the troops to flee to a U.S. arsenal. The damage was more than 100 locomotives, two-thousand freight cars, a grain elevator and the city’s main passenger depot—two square miles of America’s greatest industrial city lay in total ruin all because of the owners’ greed and underestimating the power of the people. This is why the anti-worker GOP and the 1 percent should look at the history of what happened when workers are pushed into a corner w...

There is not much the oligarchies fear or respect, but one is strong unions, who are organized. Oligarchies don’t care that unions represent the interests of hard working people who earn them their wealth. They don’t respect unions because union members know and trust each other. They have a fairly good education regarding their line of work and want a better life for themselves and their families. Also, union members will fight for their countries and jobs when called upon. Just like the miners, rail workers, and other workers in Ukraine who are pushing back the Russian-back separatists. Also, the miners in Turkey are fighting for job security, both in maintaining their jobs and in doing their jobs in the wake of the 300 miners’ deaths. The mine collapse was due to safety cuts caused by greed and indifference toward the miners. Turkey is not the only country with poor mining safety. In the U.S., mines have a lack of safety enforcement and a rise of Black Lung disease killing 10,000 mi...

Ever think about why free education ended at the high school level in California and why we do not have free higher education? It is because the money people needed their wage slaves just smart enough to do the bulk of the work to make the oligarchies and corporations wealthy. The management positions would be reserved for family members and others who come from wealth and can afford an education. In 1847, the first public university, Baruch, was established in New York. In 1862, the first Merrill Act was established that established public universities through federal land grants. At that time, many states opted to charge for education, except for California. Three months after California established its public university system in 1868; it decided to make its university system, the largest in the country, free. That was until 1966 when Ronald Reagan ran for governor; he attacked free education just as he attacked “welfare queens” in his campaign for president and the GOP uses immigr...

The stock market is close to a never before high of 17,000. Wall Street still will not support Main Street’s minimum wage increase, which should be even higher than the $15 to $18 than advocated and now some say should be more like $22 an hour if the minimum had kept up with inflation. Never the less, it is now been shown the need by workers and businesses that there has to be cash in the pockets of the spenders to save the capitalist consumer society. The Stock holders of large corporations should be the ones pushing their CEOs (chief executive officers) to raise the workers’ wages, especially when their wages are so high that they border on obscene. What is it with these CEO thinking they deserve such high compensation while others, the ones who do the work, are being paid chump change? Are these CEOs so greedy and heartless that they turn a blind’s eye to the suffering of others? Do they really think they are the only ones entitled to the good life? They don’t feel the pain the re...

Are we about to enter into a class war? We are living in three different countries, but the same USA. All have sharply different lifestyles across the nation, and even worldwide. The most affluent have been seceding from the rest of the country into their own separate geographical communities with tax bases or fees that can underwrite much higher levels of services. The business class and ultra-wealthy have moved into office parks and gated communities and rely increasingly on private security guards instead of public law enforcement. They can afford private spas and clubs rather than using public parks and pools. Their children go to private schools or elite public schools within their upscale communities rather than attend city schools with working class children. Being rich now means having enough money that you don’t have to encounter or interact with anyone who isn’t in their social class. So, now the rich are totally out of touch with the poor, the minimum wage workers and the o...

The $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage and why it is so important not only for the workers, but also the U.S. economy’s health and revitalization, and also that of the rest of the world. Marriner S. Eccles, Federal Reserve Board chairman from 1934 to 1947, retired to write his memoir and reflect upon what caused the then greatest economic trauma ever. He thought the major cause of the depression had nothing to do with excessive spending in the 1920s, but a massive accumulation of income by a few, which siphoned purchasing power away from the many and left it in the hands of a few. Let’s look at an example of pay for some chief executive officers (CEOs) in 2013. Aetna’s CEO—understand that he didn’t earn it; he was paid it—$30.7 million or $90,029 per day. WellPoint’s CEO collected --$17 million or $49,483 a day. Centene’s CEO received $14.5 million or $42,483 per day. Cigna’s CEO pocketed $13.5 million or $39,589 per day. United Health’s CEO made $12.1 million or $35,484 a day. Humana’s C...

Economic thoughts of a great Federal Reserve Board chairman from 1934 to 1947: Chairman Marriner S. Eccles was way ahead of the times regarding the workings of the economy. He was a millionaire by the age of 24 and a tycoon by age 40. When conventional logic was for austerity during the Great Depression, he reasoned that investments in jobs take place in a climate of high prosperity for when the purchasing power of the masses increases the demands for a higher standard of living enables them to purchase luxury items. At this time we have millions of our people who don’t have enough purchasing power for even their barest needs. Eccles is one of the architects of the New Deal, despite being a wealthy man. Just like today, back in the 1930s, some business leaders believed that a depression was the God-given scientific operation of economic laws and not manmade. These laws could not be interfered with because they represented the biblical story of Joseph and the seven bountiful years fol...