April 15 is the big one! This rally will be worldwide for the fight for $15 an hour minimum wage. This fight is for not only fast food workers, but for all low-wage workers, such as adjunct professors at colleges, who are now part-time and non-tenured with no pensions, home healthcare workers, airport workers, childcare workers, Walmart-Target-Kmart-Home Depot, workers, car wash workers, auto lube workers and the list goes on. Corporations have decimated the pay of workers by demeaning the jobs as only unskilled or uneducated or student work jobs as if that had anything to do with the work being done.
There will be actions on 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the U.S. and abroad. There will be around 2,000 groups, including Jobs with Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support, as well. This will be the largest mobilization America has ever seen in decades.
This push is being headed and supported by the Service Employees International Union. This rally should be supported by people and money by all unions and labor councils, like the AFL/CIO, for this is labor’s chance to show the workers’ union and non-union that we, the labor unions, are for all workers and that we have the power to win.
We, wage slaves, will not let the Scott Walkers pit worker against each other—hence the right to work laws he recently signed. Also, this is the right time for the Democratic Party to take a stand for the workers. It is time to show just which side you are on: big money or the workers and their families. If Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken can do it, so can the rest of the Democratic politicians. Even Socialists like Kshama Sawant and Bernie Sanders have taken a stand for workers, so you can also.
There should be letters to the newspaper editors supporting the $15 and hour minimum wage, the right to form a union, as a civil right, and don’t forget we are owned the rent for the use of our Commons from the corporations making huge profits from what belongs to all of us.
What do you plan to do on April 15—fight for $15 or just pay your taxes?
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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