Union Perspectives

If you have a job that doesn’t pay enough to live on or to take care of your family would $5,000 or $20,000 extra for a family of four help if you received this once a year? This could be done in in the U.S. by charging rent for the use of our commons and for carbon taxes, financial transactions, intellectual property and technological infrastructure seeded with public money. Then there is also our natural resources, such as natural gas, oil, iron, gold, silver, copper, trees, water, clean air—all of these and more is considered sovereign wealth, which belongs to every U.S. citizen. Each citizen should have one share in America and receive each year dividends. Just like the corporations, which are using our commons for the most part free and it is time for them to pay up. This is what is done in the state of Alaska with its oil product. The citizens receive about $2,000 each a year as compensation. Most wage slave people here in the U.S. and around the world do not understand the conce...

Union workers do not want to be seen as the 1 percent of the wage slaves because of their good pay, pensions and healthcare. The way to not be seen as the 1 percent of workers is to give back to the workers that don’t have a union working for them. Unions can do this with money support and support in the fight for $15 to $18 an hour. The unions can educate wage slaves on tactics and legal advice in their support. Union workers can also show and help the low wage workers how to start or join a union or even a group that will stand up for what the wage slaves need. Wage inequality is a worldwide scourge and will only be stopped by the people. The government can help, but the workers must make them. Governments will not volunteer to do it on its own. There is a need for large changes, like free education, single-payer or universal healthcare, and card check to make unions’ certification faster. The largest pool of low paid workers is found in the fast food, restaurant, farm, retail, hom...

The $15 for ’15 campaign is moving in the right direction, but we know most of the gains are being slow walked. A case in point is Walmart, which has made some movement and also some fast food corporations, but believe this—this movement is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it is because they are being hurt in their profit margins. The wage movement has come from workers’ protests and the loss of business due to the way businesses are treating their wage slaves. There is a long way to go to close the inequality gap. But the pro corporate people are gearing up with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council or A.L.E.C. The group has come up with a strategy to bolster the power of big business. GOP lawmakers plan to introduce an A.L.E.C.–backed bill that would ban Community Benefit Agreements or CBAs. CBAs are one of the few options local activists have to fight for higher wages or affordable housing. But A.L.E.C.‘s CBA ban, which specifically prohibits a local minimu...

A little known fight, which could endanger the lives of thousands and even entire cities, is being led by S.M.A.R.T. (the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation workers) representing 44,000 workers. The fight is in regards to trains running with just one person. Now just think of a massive, two-mile long train loaded with tar sands or other corrosive chemicals running through your town with only one person at the helm. What if that person had a heart attack, got injured or fell asleep? Trains used to run with a crew of five in the 1970s. Now it is just with a two-member crew, which is unsafe when you look at the derailments and explosions we’ve been having; in one 47 people were killed and most of the town Lac-Megantic, Quebec was destroyed after government officials had granted the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway a special dispensation to run with a one-man crew to save costs. This is an example of irresponsible greed at the expense of lives of th...

The toilers of the world fighting just to stay alive in countries like Ukraine, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Iraq, Turkey, Greece and the USA. What would stop all or most of the evil that hovers over the heads of these wage slaves would be good paying, safe jobs, good governments, which looks out for the toiler. But in order to get there, the world needs good peace-loving and smart leaders, not leaders or government officials who are bought by corporations. All toilers need to be educated in labor and government history, and must pay attention to what is happening with labor on a daily basis. One way is through the Militant newspaper and the column, “On the Picket Line” by Maggie Trowe, which relates the labor news from all over, like the dockworkers in the U.S. or chicken butchers in Israel, Walmart and Kellogg workers in the U.S., Canadian grocery workers and the steelworkers union is in a fight with Chevron at the Richmond refinery in the U.S. Jim Payne, Steelworkers Local, s...

The fight for a living wage goes on. On March 18, 1968, days before his murder, Martin Luther King Jr, told striking workers it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and getting part-time income. King is remembered as the outstanding leader of the Civil Rights movement before his assassination had moved to arguing that just wages were essential for a just society. King considered poverty wages not only immoral, but also criminal. In fact, even Adam Smith, one of the fathers of capitalism, believed workers should earn wages that must at least be sufficient to maintain the worker otherwise it would be impossible for them to bring up their families. During Smith’s day it was assumed that children should have a parent at home—mother to care for them. Smith, a Scottish philosopher in the 1770-80s and is deemed the "father of modern economics," seemed also to ponder the meaning of subsistent and low wages that ought to allow credible people who are working in th...