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.
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...
Comments
Post a Comment