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, homecare, car wash, and quickie lube job—these are the people the unions and their members should be trying to bring into their fold. We, the unions, need them as bad as they need us.
Unions need to always be organizing otherwise they get rusty and lose their skills, and people who are good at organizing will lose interest in being associated with inactivity. Organizing is considered a diminishing skill, which needs to be a never ending job keeping up with the GOP anti-union tactics for the corporations.
This is the right time for a worker revolution. We have the tools of communication (cell phones and social media), just this alone is much more than we had in the 1920s-‘40s when unions were at their strongest. Also, keep up the ongoing fight for USW refineries, longshoremen, Ukraine and Turkey coalminers, and, of course, the fight against austerity in Greece. These are some of the fights we know about. The people must win.
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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