Union Perspectives

Rural America was seceded to the GOP by the Democrats, likewise the labor trades seceded the rural counties to non-union shops. In the old days, unions, in these rural areas, got bigger and bigger until they decided they could leave the rural counties' side, and compete in the large cities, foregoing smaller populated counties, which used to be union sanctuaries. This type of strategy is not working. Retreating never works. It is just like going into a fort or a castle, which sooner or later, the fortifications will be breached. All that is happening is just buying time and the Democrats and labor unions have both run out of time. It is time now for an offense and come out of the forts and castles and take back rural America. They, the labor and Democrats, should work together with all their resources combined, such as money and people power. If used wisely, they both could become relevant again in our rural countrysides. By attending all public meetings, using the time before ea...

Some times when bad things happen it is for the best in the long run. Once when working with my tools as a union sheet metal worker, my tools were stolen. My co-worker told me it was the best thing for me because my tools were so old and outdated, basically crap. Fortunately for me, my insurance covered the cost for new tools. Two back-to-back hurricanes, Irma and Maria, decimated Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, could be a good thing in the long run. Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was crap before the hurricanes, but the wreckage gives it an opportunity to rebuild it in a stronger, more efficient way. The government owns the utilities, such as roads, electrical grid, schools, and water and sewer systems, and allowed the infrastructure to become so fragile by underfunding since 2006. The government cut spending by 12 percent, laid off one quarter of the government work force, jacked-up sales taxes ad reduced pensions. With these layoffs, there’s no one to run the sewage system, and none o...

Union leaders who jumped the gun on the 2016 election thinking the Democrats and Hillary Clinton would win and take charge of the U.S. Supreme Court will now pay for their very bad decision. Also, the leaders of some of the union leaders did not understand the feelings of their members on where their support lay, which was with Bernie Sanders. Labor went to court with three cases on labor arbitration agreements, which now will lose in the right-leaning Supreme Court and end up being the law of the land. In another case, the Court will decide whether public employee unions can collect fees from non-union members. If we lose this case, we can kiss the relevancy of labor unions goodbye. The law will bankrupt the unions and the loss of union membership will be catastrophic. These Court cases will be the Justice Department vs the National Labor Relation Board, which is a federal agency, will oppose each other in Court. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, this will be a fi...

Where have all the jobs that pay a living wage gone? We know that greed has sent a lot of jobs to countries that accept cheap wages for their workers and to the non-union southern states. Now we are seeing robots changing the employment landscape and eliminating jobs in factories. Even with all this, there were still the brick and mortar jobs selling the cheaply made products from overseas. Now these jobs are going by the wayside with Amazon and Walmart companies investing in E-commerce. This has started a retail apocalypse on thousands of mall-based stores shutting down. JC Penney’s 138 stores, Sears 150 stores, Kmart 3,500 stores. Then the Kroger company, the largest grocery store chain, sales plummeted 25 percent erasing more than $7 billion in value. These jobs will go to $7.25 an hour minimum wage and workers will be hired by Amazon for warehouse jobs. These jobs are in a cutthroat competition and is based on keeping out unions at all costs. What these workers at Walmart and Ama...

Anger and distrust is destroying the workers, both unionized and non-union. Even some unions are split, and some unions are fighting each other, which then makes the non-union workers distrust our unions even more. Our anger is misdirected by intention. If the money people can keep us fighting amongst ourselves then we won't see how they are screwing us over. This distrust started in the U.S. and worldwide with the anti-union line of Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher government along with the anti-union policies of Ronald Reagan's administration. But the assault actually began in the late 1940s, and escalated in the late 1970s, and has gotten progressively worse since 1981 until now. Polls have revealed some dissatisfaction on the part of our members and nonmembers alike with the way unions are run and governed. Unions are doing a poor job of presenting their members and giving members a say in how a union should operate and not telling union members what the unions are doing...