Union Perspectives

The enemy of the toilers has finally figured out how to destroy our unions and the Holy Grail of liberal assets such as Social Security and the U.S. Postal Service. They are using the old Trojan horse tactic. What is happening is that the GOP has implanted the enemy inside these agencies as heads of the agencies. These people are not union protected and therefore are at-will employees who, for the most part, are at the end of their careers and are not willing to jeopardize their pensions to fight for their workers. In the case of Social Security workers their diabolical plan is to shut down the offices in which there are real people to guide retirees through the maze of red tape to get their Social Security they paid into the system or Social Security Disability Insurance. Their answer for why this is being done is automation is more efficient in doing a person’s job by computer or phone, which will then destroy the Social Security system. When the stories start coming out it may be to...

Where are the Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street people have they been driven underground? Have they lost support? Lost interest? Are they in jail? Are they still alive? Or are they just beaten and scared of what the 1 percent can do to them? Of all these things I could understand, but if they have been bought off by the 1 percent, that would be the cardinal sin and I would hope for all the world’s 99 percent that being bought off is not the case. They must be given credit of starting the conversation about wage and life style inequality between the 1 percent and 99 percent. And even with other distractions, such as the revolutions in Arab Spring, Ukraine, Liberia, and Afghanistan. Of course, the USA’s local problems, plus Palestine and Israel, are distractions, but even with these distractions the main cause of the problems for 99 percent people are all the levels of inequality between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. The 1 percent with all its money and power hording will continue to...

What would the world be like if the dream of the old International Workers of the World (IWW) could come true? The IWW thought that all toilers of the world were the same and all had rights and there is no need for country borders. All workers are brothers and sisters. So if this is true, there would not be a reason for war. All would have a place in the world, such as Israel, Palestine, Kurdistan and Ukraine would not be fighting to hold onto their spot of land in the world. It is always the toilers who do the fighting and dying for the people in the background, who pull the strings of war. How do the toilers get forced into killing their brothers and sisters? A lot of this is rooted in a lack of education and religion. As long as there are borders around countries, the string masters can manipulate the toilers to do their bidding. Sooner or later the toilers of the world will figure out that they are the ones with the power. When they do they’ll have to decide if they want to conti...

Old anti-union and protesters’ tactics still work and are used by the corporations and large and small governments, cities, counties, state and federal. A tactic from the old days was to keep workers and workers’ families from getting together and comparing notes. The bosses worked people sun up to sun down six to seven days a week. Today, workers work two to three jobs at a time. They also used people’s ethnicity to keep people apart, such as the Irish, Asians, blacks and browns. The idea was to keep the workers from forming relationships so the bosses thought if they could keep the workers overworked, uneducated and suspicious of each other. They, the 1 percent, control the masses. The only place toilers could go and be together was church, which was again split into different religions and should be taken with a grain of salt for many were controlled by the rich. Today’s protests we see the Wall Street protesters and the police tactics, which are getting closer and closer to our m...

The Art of War says that you must know your enemy and, yes, there is a war between the 1 percent’s very rich and the corporate chief executive officers against the toilers. The toilers do not know just who their enemies truly are because the anti-union, anti-worker corporations spend our money (from buying their products) to pound us with misinformation The inequality keeps the toilers heads bent low trying to just trying to scrap by with minimum wage jobs that they don’t have the time of energy to stand up, look around and compare notes with other toilers and understand what they, the 1 percent, are doing to us. The worst part is we give them the bullets (our money) to use against. When we do business with a store that belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, which is just a union by a different name. They use their dues to lobby against unions and higher wages for the workers, safety laws and benefits. They look out for themselves, not the workers who will eventually be their customers. ...

It looks like the working people who used to think they were contractors were scammed by their bosses, who kept the workers from earning a living wage and having union representation. They convinced these workers it was better to be independent than "work for the man." Someone (Teamsters) ran this up the flag pole at the National Labor Relations Board and guess what—the NLRB ruled that the Port truck drivers were employees and that they had the rights of union representation. The truck drivers have lost millions of dollars these past years because of this scam of being contractors’ status, which was just pure unadulterated bull crap. Unfortunately, the workers believed the scam to be true. At this time about two-thirds of the 75,000 port drivers in the U.S. are misclassified as contractors. This is not the only place where bosses try to beat the system by classifying workers as contractors. I found while organizing for the sheet metal workers that on prevailing wage jobs, s...

The people at the top the 1 percent are anti-union, anti-worker, and anti-tax are now anti-USA. Let’s start with corporations’ tax rate. Yes, it is 35 percent, but with loopholes some pay 20 percent and some pay zero. However, when adjusted for GDP (gross domestic product), our corporate tax rate is lower than that of most other industrialized countries and their economies. In the 1950s, corporate taxes accounted for 30 percent of federal revenues. By 2010, this rate dropped to just 9 percent. The difference has been compensated by taxing what is left of the middle class. To get where they do not have to pay any taxes, but still enjoy the infrastructure of the U.S. and the customer base plus the Armed Forces’ protection. They now are moving or planning to move their corporate offices to offshore tax havens while maintaining the benefits of U.S. legal protections (think patents) and basic research. This makes the chief executive officers and stockholders/share holders very, very rich an...

If any type of wage slave worker looks around they will see wage disparity, even within their own job types. If you are the lucky one with a good or better wage you cannot help but feel bad for the person doing the same job at a lower wage. I, as a firefighter, just recently off the fire line saw this very situation and have seen it many times before, but this time it just bothered me more. The last round of fires this year people were getting hurt and fire season is just starting in northern California. I think this is a place where unions should be looking into private hand crews and see what the workers’ wages are and do they ever get overtime or any benefits. I know most pay minimum wage. The workers sleep on the ground, eat at fire camps, and get lunches water at camps like the Cal Fire and volunteer firefighters get so why do the private contractors pay only minimum wage? I see that Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression Inc. has new transport buggies and pickup trucks so you would...

I am currently fighting fires in northern California. SO while I'm away, take a look at this article. Seems like we were ahead of ourselves with this knowledge! http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/06/lawrence-odonnell-wall-street-figured-out-that-income-inequality-is-bad-for-wall-street/ Another article for consideration that shows Canada labor is in the lead again! http://unifor.org/en/whats-new/news/bombardier-workers-stand-young-workers Here's another article to get your blood boiling. http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/08/05/minn-restaurant-charging-customers-minimum-wage-fee/ (my wife is taking care of the blog while I am away) Here's an AP photo of me and my chief, Theresa Carroll, fighting one of the big fires in Northern California: http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Western-Wildfires/e4d26fd159b8474b9200acc309a98915/44/0 For more fire photos, some with my fellow MCVFC firefighters: http://www.apimages.com/Search?query=western+fires&ss=10&st=k...