Union Perspectives

Why do wins and gains for the wage slaves turn into losses? To understand this one only has to look back to the old International Workers of the World (IWW) and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and countries like Ukraine and the Arab Spring. The old IWW used the soapbox approach on street corners to arouse exploited workers to a spectacular and sudden fight for free speech, higher wages. And for ten years they had wins, but then failed to hold their membership. Just like the IWW, OWS also had wins in getting the 99 percent fired up over wages, Wall Street greed and they had cell phones all over the U.S. to motivate people, but again OWS failed to hold the people together. Even countries like Ukraine who fought a hell of a fight and changed its government, and now it is in trouble as it careens toward a civil war. The Arab Spring, which again changed its government, but now are in trouble. Why is it these groups didn’t plan or ever think about what they will do when or if they win, like put...

To save the world from itself there needs to be less greed, which would lessen wage and life inequality. Less greed would curtail climate change, which would save our farming land and farmers of the world. As the rains leave a region, the people leave the land and travel to cities and other countries looking for relief. This is what happened to a lot of the Syrian people. Then we need to expose and understand the ideology of radical religion and how it controls the masses and who benefits from it and why it works. When refugees have moved to another country, many times those refugees are segregated to a specific area and not given opportunities to assimilate by being hired for jobs or other ways to better their lives. The young people become discouraged and are more susceptible to the allure of fanatical groups, like Daesh, to feel like their lives matter. Unfortunately, these groups use these young idealists as fodder for their machine. Their lives are not valued by these groups any ...

It’s the young people of the world who will save us from the corporate world of the money people. Just look at the historic election of Burma. Then look at the young people of the U.S. who are backing Bernie Sanders for president, which will start a revolution. The young have figured out how to organize for power, how to get it, and to use it to end economic inequality and to believe that a broadly engaged electorate in which power is reactively equally distributed. The people with the power and money find themselves in a dilemma: we want them to share their money with people who have less money or power but they don’t want to despite knowing it would benefit the common good. This is where the ideology part ways, but the young wage slaves who have all but lost hope have now found some leaders in our world who understand their needs. Bernie Sanders’ efforts to build a broad national coalition can reverse our march toward increasing inequality and concentration of power among the elites....

Wage slaves who have the illusion that their problems can be solved through electing reformist politicians must remember that the nature of capitalism is not to allow mass needs preference over corporate profits. Demands for services change in social conditions will be vigorously opposed by the ruling class—Koch brothers, Wall Street and all the others. The capitalist-designed electoral system is used to corrupt elected representatives of both parties. Even my hero President Franklin Roosevelt, who purported to assure labor the right to organize trade unions and to bargain collectively with bosses, but it was a hollow promise. In the practice he continued to use the deferral government as a strikebreaker agency, simply using subtler methods than previously used for such purposes. The year 1934 was a hard fought year for labor, but they won while even taking on the National Guard in Toledo, Ohio. May 1934, labor fought the Guard with bare fists and rocks in the 6,000 Auto-lite strike an...

In California there is hope for the $15 an hour minimum wage because we are seeing two unions fight for this new amount for minimum wage. One is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and it wants $15 by 2020. The other union is United Health Care Workers West wants to raise the wage by $1 an hour every year until it hits $15 an hour by 2021 and the SEIU’s state council is prepared to spend $20 million to $30 million on the campaign. This all sound good and productive, but why would these unions invest so much money to start such a low amount for the minimum wage? This slow walking of the minimum wage will do nothing more than bump workers off the assistance programs that allows them to work and eat or seek medical care without going broke? The Teamsters have a word for unions that cater to corporations’ interest and it is “business unionist.” The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, had it kept up minimum wage would be about $24 an hour, so these low increases will...