Steps needed to revive the Have Nots and Have Littles to a middle class status include income inequality, which the movement for $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage will help with opportunity inequality. With more money and time, workers would have time to take night classes to improve their chances for a better job and will have more time when they don’t have to work two or three part-time jobs.
Then the workers need childcare, vacations and some type of pension, which will follow them from job to job like a hybrid Social Security without changing the present Social Security system. The fly in the ointment is there is just not enough jobs worldwide and here in the U.S. and there will be even less after the passage of Trans Pacific Partnership.
The capitalist system depends on the proletarians who need to be adequately compensated for their labor to have money to buy the products the capitalist system sales, which ironically are made by the labor of the proletarians.
One way is a hybrid capitalist system, such as workers being paid a non-labor wage, which provides substance to keep people out of poverty and not need many different types of government assistance—just cash once a month. Think of all the subsidies corporations get and give nothing back for this public money. They pay no taxes and have loopholes to get out of paying fines.
This then would free people to work temporary low-wage, part-time jobs. With their free time, the proletarians could provide free labor to the social infrastructure, such as firefighting or volunteering at a school, medical service, tutoring, couching sports, boys and girls club, scouts, the list goes on. These types of volunteer jobs have the potential to lead to a full-time job.
In the end, people who are better educated can move out of poverty, with better paying jobs, more purchases can be made thereby necessitating the production of more goods because there will more people purchasing more goods. More taxes paid by workers who make more money with the cash subsidies.
We have to make changes. Better labor laws, which give people the right to form unions or associations to represent them. These are all civil liberties that the proletarians have a right to. Also, another source of money to support these non-labor payments should come from rent for the use of our Commons just like the State of Alaska does for its people.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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