If the U.S. and the world over ever want to see a robust middle class again there must be jobs where a worker earns a living wage and has a full-time job of at least 30 to 40 hours a week, which should be counted as a full time and eligible for benefits. Workers who have to work two or three jobs just to survive does not a life make.
One must keep in mind that a minimum wage raise to $15 to $18 an hour will mean nothing if there is no union or way to fight for hours for even at 30 hours at $15 an hour is only $450 weekly gross. Employers cut hours, creating “McJobs,” but they keep hiring new workers—why? The answer is they are giving themselves a larger part–time pool, who are trained this way and if the wage slaves try to unionize employers think they will have union busters on hand. Also, the flexibility, which started about twenty years ago still works somewhat for white-collar workers, but is curse for blue-collar workers without a union because now the employers own the workers 24 hours seven days a week and the only way for workers to have some input is through a union.
Even in the U.S. Congress personnel there is pay and hours inequality. The Congress members make $174,000 a year and the workers who prepare and serve them meals, and bus tables make $11 an hour and nothing when Congress is in recess. I am not say these hard working people would do this, but I would have a hard time ensuring the food was superior for a congressman,woman or a senator who treated the food workers this way, and didn’t insist upon these workers being paid a living wage. Bon Appetite, you cheap 1 percent.
This goes right along with the decline in the wages of our college adjunct professors, who have become low-paid, part-time workers, lost the ability to become tenured, and have joined the fight against low-wages by establishing a movement called, “Faculty Forward” campaign.
http://facultyforward.adjunctaction.org/
These instructors are entrusted to teach our young to be the leaders and developers for our country as we retire. The Faculty Forward campaign is demanding $15,000 a course to cover all the work teaching a course entails; recourse for the for-profit higher education overcharging and under-educating students, like Corinthian Colleges, which has had to shut down; and making higher education for all students more affordable and accessible. Many of these instructors never considered the benefits of joining a union, association or auxiliary—until now.
Until workers realize that their fate is in their hands, things will not improve. Until workers realize that they are being taken advantage of by the greedy oligarchies, things will not improve. Until workers realize that they hold the solutions to their problems, things will not improve. It’s time to step up.
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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