Union Perspectives

While working, you’re selling your life one hour at a time. What is an hour of your life worth? Remember you can never get that hour back, it is gone forever. When you set a price for your hour of life, how do you do it? Are you represented by a union? Or do you just let someone else set the price for your labor? However it is done, it is not working for you or any of the other workers. Nearly one out of every five workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living pay check to pay check. Most are working more hours than they worked decades ago with less vacation or sick leave days. The standard explanation for why all of this has come about is that workers are no longer worth as much as they were before the digital technology boom and globalization. So, they must now settle for lower wages and less security. But top executives of large corporations wage have gone up twenty times that of the workers to three-hundred times today. So who sets the one hour rate? Last year, Wall St...

The race for single-payer healthcare or Medicare For All it will be between the Bernie Sanders people, The GOP and the corporate Democratic Party. If the GOP wants to keep their seats in the Senate and Congress, they need something big, like healthcare that the people will be pleased with. The GOP is desperate, they have a loser of a president and they have failed to achieve any meaningful legislation. The GOP has said they want to replace the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare since it was passed with something better, but their definition of better so far was deadly for many. They just need to make healthcare for all ages and if they do this they will keep power for a long time. The U.S. pays more in healthcare than Italy, Britain, Japan, Australia, France, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, and many others. Our politicians have sold us out to the highest bidder, the insurance companies, and we need to make them pay for putting their pockets before our health. It is imperativ...

What can the young and retirees do to help themselves, their country and the world? First, they need to look at what would be good for them in their lives versus what they are told by talking heads on television, radio and the so-called free press. Some newer newspapers and magazines are still good, but one must look at who owns the media as a whole. Now, many of the young are still going to school, living in the “basement” of their parents’ home or couch surfing. Some are unpaid gamers and the workers, young and old alike, who are working for minimum wage, some at two or three jobs or at gig jobs; and then there are the retirees on Social Security. Capitalism is alive and well for those who have money. What would make life a little better for us? How about $15 to $24 an hour minimum wage, free education, healthcare for all, higher Social Security, and universal basic insurance. Are these things worth fighting for? If so, how and where do you start? Some people are working for non-p...

In America today, we have the Haves and the Have Nots, which is the very rich and the poor. What is missing is the middle, which is the group that makes it all work. They are the spenders who pay taxes, raise families. They are the supporters of the very rich and the supporters of the poor. This support system has worked very well until the very rich gets greedier and begins hoarding all the cash and cutting out the middle class with inequality. Inequality is done in many ways. Some is through laws enacted that shut down unions. This defund unions, but also stops worker training apprenticeship programs the unions provide. Shutting down these programs helps to turn our country into a wasteland of poverty. With the power concentrated at the top, democracy cannot thrive. This happened in the Guilded Age at the end of the 19th century. Now it is happening today. America cannot ever be great again until there is a large middle class with good wages, healthcare, free education, and good ...

All workers in the U.S need to know what the American Legislative Exchange Council (A.L.E.C.) is and what it is up to. This group is funded and put together by the right wing, anti-union people, like the Koch brothers. Its mission is to write legislations so state governments can pass into law. If that wasn’t even to deal with, this same group of libertarian oligarchs and other greedy rich people have formed a new group called American City County Exchange (ACCE) to write legislation for counties and cities to pass into law. The legislation is written entities that used to be nonpartisan municipal governments. This is to counter the National League of Cities, which is the voice of cities and counties. Some of the legislation the ACCE is putting out is to end the automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks, which is a precursor to a state becoming a right to work state, and that means the right to work for less. The ACCE distributes model legislation on everything from taxpaye...