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 Amazon need more than anything else is to be unionized, to be able to organize and to defend themselves and advance their own interests against the boss.
The head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest people in the world. His fortune is more than $90 billion, which mean, by screwing over the workers even more, he can and probably will become the first trillionaire. The Waltons of Walmart are notorious for underpaying their employees and forcing them to apply for government benefits so Walmart doesn’t have to pay a living wage. When is this greed going to stop?
Amazon and Walmart now have patents to have flying warehouses, which can hover at 500 feet over cities and dispatch a fleet of drones to deliver orders. Amazon’s Mothership is like a blimp. Walmart’s will hover at 45,000 feet and send out drones, as well. Then, we are facing more jobs losses in the trucking and taxi cab industry. Self-driving vehicles are eliminating the need for humans.
When this happens, the only job left will be going into the service industry, gig jobs or starting a business. There will not be a way to make a living with just one job. What will happen to the capitalist system? There has to be money going around to support even Amazon or Walmart’s blimps.
Will we institute a universal basic income (UBI) system? Or will people just fight each other and starve and die off in this fight? With these developments, climate change and war, maybe we can see the future as no jobs, floods, stronger hurricanes, earthquakes, no healthcare or housing, do we still have time to turn things around?
The very rich are already taking care of themselves with their bunkers, and they think we, the 99 percent, don’t know and a lot don’t know so maybe the rich are smarter than the 99 percent. Maybe this is why there are the Have Nots. We just are not as smart or ruthless as the rich or maybe we’re just not paying attention or watching Fox News or listening to corporate propaganda and not voting in our best interest and, instead, falling for the lies and manipulation of the wrong 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...
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