Union Perspectives

There is hope for the toilers and soon to be toilers recently a mother of a 12-year-old young lady asked how to find to my blog. Her concerns were that there is no honest history books about labor and how we how we have gotten to where we are today. They do not trust our school history books to tell the whole story. This is good for to understand history one must realize that history books at their best is just a person’s view of what happened at a given time and if you have a hundred people viewing at once you get a hundred different views. So, for any given event one must look at as many views as possibly to understand what has taken place and maybe not to do the same thing or if it had a good outcome, try it again. This is why knowing your history is so important and why we need to know it. Not knowing our history can work against us if we are blind when studying history. Maybe there will be a 12-year-old person who will use history and the lessons learned to do well for the 99 pe...

The best vacation a working slave could go on is a protest for higher wages or a protest for the right to form a union. Consider it an educational vacation that a toiler can take their families and friends on and save money while increasing your chances of gaining more. The fight for workers’ rights and a living wage is worldwide. Some of the protests are against JetBlue fast food places, day laborers, postal workers, rail workers, teachers, nurses, car dealerships, in-home helpers, and lamp factory workers. These are just a few areas in the U.S., but Canada there is a teachers’ strike on wages and class size. In China, Apple parts plants are on strike; North London care workers are on strike regarding pay cuts; and then we have construction workers striking in Turkey. The death of ten construction workers is a result of profit driven greed and a disregard for worker safety while the toilers are still dealing with Ukraine and Russia, Poland. So if workers would like to do something goo...

The position of the service industry on wages is that tips are a built-in part of the workers’ wages. This analogy is used by Marriott and other hotel/motel chains, plus fast food chains, and restaurants. These are huge and very profitable corporations so how did these corporations convince their customers that they should be subsidizing their workers? There is nothing wrong with giving a little extra for good service whether at a restaurant or hotel, but these workers should be paid a living wage and not be dependent upon tips because there are people out there who don’t tip or tip so little, like the 20 cents an NFL football player left recently, that the worker is being screwed over twice. It is not the tipper’s responsibility to ensure the workers receive a decent wage, it is the employer’s. The corporations should not be left off the hook by trying to make or guilt their customers into picking up the tab, like Marriott is doing. It is leaving envelops in the room of paying custom...

Fifty-five years ago President Johnson declared his war on poverty. At this time there are 47 million Americans living beneath the poverty level. Does that number sound familiar, think Mitt Romney and his infamous talk with some of the 1 percent during his failed campaign for president. Billionaire Warren Buffet said there is a class warfare all right, but it’s my class that is winning. He is calling for higher taxes on the rich and the money to be spent on our crumbling infrastructure, free education, and higher wages. The tax on the rich under Johnson was 91 percent. It is now 39.6 percent for those who pay, but most of the rich pay nothing, in fact. There are many corporations that the poor end up paying for their subsidies and who do you think makes up the difference in these tax rate that is less than half of what it used to be? We also voted in GOP people who retooled our war on poverty to a cynical war on crime and privatized a lot of our prisons. The term criminal came to mean...

Why it is so hard for the toilers to understand that capitalist system and that it is rigged against them? The system is rigged in favor of the 1 percent. Even small business owners don’t understand this. This is not to say that the toilers cannot win the war of wage and living standards inequality. In order to do this, the toilers must understand the basic rules of the capitalist system. The governor of California, Jerry Brown, explained this is a speech the other day to some labor groups. He said if the consumers are up to their eyeballs in debt, aren’t making a decent wage, how the heck are they going to buy anything? If they don’t buy anything, the economy doesn’t go forward and doesn’t work. This was well said, but he could have also said that the capitalist system is driven 67.5 percent by spending, which proves that when insufficient wages are not high enough for the toilers to have enough money left over after paying for their basic needs (rent, food, debts) to purchase some d...

One big union, the dream of the Industrial Union, International Workers of the World (IWW); Eugene V. Debs said in a New York speech on Dec. 10, 1905, that the industrial workers are organized not to conciliate, but to fight the capitalist class … the capitalists own the tools they do not use and the workers use these tools they do not own and this is where the power is … no workers no one to use the tools. This is one reason one should never sign a contract, which gives away the workers’ ultimate power of withholding their labor when and where it will be advantageous to the toilers. An IWW poet wrote, “In our hands is placed a power greater than their horded gold; Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold; we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. For the unions make us strong. On April 23, 1910, another IWW member wrote, “With other of his class he built the road. Now o’er it many a weary mile, he packs his load chasing a job, spurred on by hunger...

The low-wage, fast-food workers put up a good fight in their two-day protests. Now they just need to keep it up with well-timed events, which hurt the pockets of the money people, like on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. The low-wage inequality of living standards is just not here in the USA, it is worldwide. Some countries have made great strides in dealing with the needs of their workers. What the wage slaves need to do is cherry pick the best ideas from all over the world and develop a strategy that will make the odds in their favor for winning against the greedy. Look at the Denmark’s wages in fast food, which is $21 per hour versus the U.S.’s $7.25 federally and $8 in California. The cost of a Big Mac in Denmark is only $5.18 versus a Big Mac in the U.S. is $4. Denmark’s fast food workers are unionized. Could this be the reason they receive a living wage when our fast food workers don’t? Then there is Germany, where the corporate leaders sit with the workers and decide what...

We must revisit the wage stagnation that has been going on for the last 34 years, which has exacerbated the wage inequality and lead to the decline of the unions from 35 percent in 1954 to a total of 11.3 percent of workers unionized or 6.7 percent if you count only the private sector workers. This decline has led to a downward trend of workers’ power to protect themselves from corporation greed; but what it has also done is decimate the middle class and those used to have now have been pushed down into the bottom of the social class of the have very littles or have nothings. Consider this: cash in a capitalist system is just like fertilizer to a farmer, the more cash you put in the pockets of the workers the healthier the capitalist system. If you withhold the cash it’s just like withholding the fertilizer from crops you end up with stunted plants and your economy won’t grow. Austerity is withholding fertilizer on steroids. So at this time there is just the 1 to 5 percent—and the bot...