“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 demonstrate their demand for union recognition. Maybe the unions will have to organize self-defense guards.
Just the other day pro-Russians went to the mouth of a Ukraine mine and told the miners to take down the Ukraine flag or they would throw explosives into the mines, but the miners had a defense unit, which drove the Russians away. Is this what the world’s workers will need to protect themselves from beatings, killings, and frame ups while trying to protect wages? In the Occupy Wall Street movement, they had some lawyers to help the protesters arrested. The lawyers were on scene to watch, but with today’s anti-workers groups, this might not be good enough.
The fight to raise the minimum wages to $15 to $18 an hour, healthcare, and free education will be brutal verbally and physically. The oligarchies will not submit easily, for they worship their money like some worship their gods with fanaticism and it’s very hard to negotiate with fanatics. It will be class warfare—it will be the 400 with the money against the 99 percent. I like our chances, but we must plan, educate and have the whole 99 percent: the have nothings, have little, used to have and want to haves.
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...
Comments
Post a Comment