Nick Hanauer is a visionary capitalist and a billionaire, who is warning his co-oligarchies that the pitchforks are coming for the plutocrats. You know the ultra-rich greedy oligarchies who are fighting the minimum wage hike to a living wage with some disposable income. If the tidal wave of wage inequality does not stop, then surely there will be pitchforks.
I understand some entrepreneurs’ thinking having been one myself. Unless your workers have a union, the worker is on their own. I remember once speaking with a non-union contractor about workers’ pay and I told the contractor that I thought his workers were worth more than he was paying them. His answer was, “I know they are, but I am not going to pay them more until they make me do it.”
It is sad some people think this way and have to be made to do the right thing. This is why it is so important for people not to get distracted or happy at the prospect of increasing the wages to $10 an hour or so. If the employers and government had your best they wouldn’t be slow walking the wage increase over a span of years, and this amount will only kick people off government assistance programs and leave the worker with no disposal income for durable goods to pump into the economy. Take the money, but keep on fighting. Things won’t improve in this country until the middle class is re-established and workers can afford to work one job, not two or three.
So there are three ways to help end the wage disparity. One is for the workers to ask for a wage increase using a union; two is for more smart entrepreneurs, like Hanauer, to agree to a living wage; and the third way is to wait until the pitchforks are stuck up the butts of the 1 percent.
As Hanauer says, “It is not will it happen, it is when.” With the anti-labor of the U.S. Supreme Court, the workers are starting to realize their only hope is the pitchforks. Is this what the 1 percent really wants for this to happen? Can you make it to your jet with your family in time while an angry mob carrying pitchforks is on your tail?
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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