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 is best for the corporation and the workers. It seems that this is working very well for both sides. There seems that in some cases worker co-ops have worked well for some workers. But, whatever the way the toilers use to better their lives the commonality is that the toilers must all be together to win. People power is hard to beat if used smartly.
We must not mistake privilege for liberty, the money anti-labor people wants protection from government intervention to counter union movements for the 1 to 5 percent, but no protection for the 99-95 percent. This is what the toilers are up against when they protest. The cops and National Guard are used by the union busters, which the toilers pay for with their taxes. We need to even this out by some better and fair court decisions and new labor laws to plug the holes, which have been blasted by the anti-worker U.S. Supreme Court.
In the last 60 plus years beginning with President Eisenhower and some of his policies that began the attack on the workers, but we can change this by the ballot box or the street. It may be too late for the ballot box because of the Koch brothers and their fake organizations created to fool the unsuspecting voter. This leaves the streets and makes the fight worldwide just like the old International Workers of the World said it would be years ago. As a demonstration of this, workers from Denmark came to the U.S. to support our workers in their fight for a living wage.
We have maybe one more chance at the ballot box. We need people like Big Bill Hayward, the Reuther brothers, Eugene Debs, Jack London, Thomas Haggerty, and Mother Jones. These are the types of people we need today. They are out there; we just need to find them.
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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