Union Perspectives

When did unions lose the support and backing of the Democrats? It was after Reagan dismantled the air traffic controllers, who by the way voted for Reagan for president and donated to his campaign. After Reagan got into office it was open war against unions by the GOP, whose followers cared more about guns than their paychecks, unions or pensions. They voted against their own best interest. With the decline in money to support unions, candidates (mostly Democratic) and even the ones who said before elections they would support unions, such as passing card check, when they were elected, but then reneged once elected. This really took off under Bill Clinton, who dragged the party to a centrist position to better serve his new contributors. He dumped the unions for Wall Street money and became a front man for Wall Street, big banks and corporations, such as Walmart. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz would never have gotten away with the biased and corrupt handling of the DNC that she ha...

We, here in the U.S., have our very own Greece. There is the destruction of the city of Detroit, which has been raped and pillaged by hedge fund vultures who are major donors to both political parties, which means the politicians then pass laws to protect hedge funders’ money, that is usually invested in bonds. On a bigger scale there is Puerto Rico, which has labored under colonial rule since Christopher Columbus landed on its shores in 1493 and claimed it for Spain. After the Spanish American War in 1898 the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico in the treaty of Paris and ruled it as a territory since. Puerto Ricans are considered natural born citizens, but like all stepchildren they must abide by U.S. laws without a voting member in Congress. For decades the island was a jewel of the Caribbean with the highest per capita income in Latin America, but in 1996 when a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to a 10-year phase out of section 936, a tax exemption for U.S. manufa...

In a small town in San Francisco’s East Bay, the 22,000 workers, 2,227 of who are minimum wage workers, received a bump in pay. Emeryville, CA, is home to the highest minimum wage in the county at $15 an hour. Emeryville’s wage hike went to $14.44 overnight where Los Angeles’ $15 will make an appearance in 2020. Seattle’s wage hike to $15 is also being slow walked to 2017, but the genie is out of the bottle and the workers have gotten a taste of what a living wage can afford them and others see their gains and now know it can be done—done without having their wages slow walked. Now eight cities in San Francisco's South Bay are contemplating raising its minimum wage. What some of the wage slaves, who make more than $15 an hour, don’t understand is when the people earning $9 an hour wage that goes to $15 it will push all other wages up, and they probably will not even after ask for as raise. Case in point, dishwashers now make $15 an hour and then the cook, who has always made $15 t...

Where's all the cash? Hint, it's not in your pocket. The need for cash is necessary to alleviate the war on the poor. The latest facts show 1.5 million households with 3 million children have cash incomes of less than $2 a day. The number we usually use to measure third- and fourth-world poverty. Then in order to get the cash to pay rent in some dilapidated housing, buy diapers, and even tampons. They will have to sell their blood or their food stamps at a deep discount and the desperately poor people are willing to lose about 40 percent of the value of their food stamps, which is the going rate to trade some of their stamps for cash. There is about 15 million people who are in deep poverty with annual incomes of about $10,000 below half the poverty line for a family of three. A lot of the $2 a day people are single mothers without a high school diploma whose jobs have been in decline. This is one of many reasons that we need $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, single payer healt...

Our country is on the brink, balancing on the precipice of feast or famine. If we don’t fix things as they are, we will fall completelyinot an oligarchy. We need to understand what needs fixing in order to know about the wrongs and what they are. Also how we, the U.S., stacks up against the rest of the world. Do you know that 50 percent of all 25 years olds still live with their parents, and a total 47 million of our citizens and one out of five children live in poverty, which places us 36th among the 41 wealthiest nations? If you have no debt and $10 in your pocket, you are better off than 25 percent of your fellow citizens. The average family’s credit card debt is $16,000. Sixty-two percent of our citizens live from paycheck to paycheck, which 21 percent have no savings. Forty-three percent of households spend more than they earn. Median wealth of middle class households dropped 28 percent from 2000 to 2014. Today, 51 percent of workers make less than $30,000 a year. The U.S. now ran...

How did government handle the unemployed and homeless throughout the country in 1913-1914? In the Los Angeles Plaza where 1,000 homeless and unemployed held a demonstration. The police, with clubs and revolvers drawn, broke up the demonstration, killing one worker, clubbing many others and arresting 75 others. The newspaper said the demonstration was peaceful until the police arrived. In San Francisco, CA, where the homeless and unemployed were led by the International Workers of the World (IWW) and with Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert R. Parsons, was arrested at the head of the demonstration. The protestors and police clashed with the police and Mrs. Parsons was arrested. But not before voicing demands for work and food for the homeless and unemployed. Then an IWW contingent left San Francisco to go to Sacramento, CA. They proceeded to camp on the Southern Pacific Railroad sand lots. General Charles T. Kelly and W.A. Thorn and several other leaders were arrested on...

The class war struggle of yesterday and of today are eerily similar. The International Workers of the Word (IWW or Wobblies) believed implicitly that the class struggle was inherent in the very nature of capitalist society. The economic laws of capitalism, the IWW pointed out operated the same in America as in the rest of the world, and American society like all societies was divided into two classes: the exploiters and the exploited. The capitalists and the workers. Every segment of life was viewed by the IWW as reflecting the conflict of the two classes. They ran ads in newspapers for big class picnics, obituaries of dead IWW members, Wobblies spoke of the deceased as indefatigable warriors in the class war, and usually closed their solemn ceremony by saying, “Our duty is not to mourn, but to go on where fellow workers left off, determined to show the ruling class that his work has not been in vain.” In the eyes of the IWW, the capitalism class was the ruling class and the governmen...

Wage inequality, which has led to flat family incomes and has led to $115 billion in federal loans for college. These college loans equal $7 million in student loan defaults and this in turn had led to a new industry which feeds off student loan debt. The companies are debt collectors who make calls for government contracted debt collectors. The companies making these calls are just one part of a system feeding on federal student loans. There are also debt services, refinance lender firms that help former students avoid defaulting on their loans and for profit schools that makes money as borrowers try to repay more than $1.2 trillion in government backed education debts. The beneficiaries of the loan programs are for the most part not the students, they are companies like debt services like Affiliated Computer Services Inc. Now part of Xerox Corporation and Education Management Corporation, which operates for for-profit colleges and whose largest shareholder is Goldman Sachs Group In...

A plutocrat is someone who is very rich and supports the Have Littles known to most of the rich as the workers or wage slaves. One rich plutocrat’s is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist, who is supporting among other things the $15 an hour minimum wage to take effect immediately. Hanauer is not a fan of slow walking the wage hike. He understands good wages will build the middle class and grow the economy. The other side thinks growth produces a thriving middle class. According to Hanauer this is not true. It is wrong and backward. A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing one can do. For this ideology, Hanauer has been called “America’s premier self-loathing plutocrat,” a description he relishes. Hanauer argues dramatically raising workers’ minimum wage to $15 an hour will not lead to fewer jobs as his opponents claim, it will lead to more jobs because workers who have more money ...