Unions must be smarter when they end their contracts in order to have more power at the table. The Holy Grail would be if all unions contacts ended at the same rate nationwide. To start this we would let the local labor councils like the one in Shasta County in far northern California, which has the Five Counties Council. This council includes represents the unions of school, water, fire districts and cities and counties.
The plan would be to get all the labor unions within the different entities to have their contracts end on the same date or as close together as possible so the employees of cities, districts and county would have more power together than alone. County and cities usually divide up the departments and not all are under one union and this benefits the government agencies, not the employees. If the different unions negotiated to end the contracts at a predetermined date, the Five Counties Council could arrange a walkout if needed and the power would be back with the workers.
Each union would want the best time for its employees, for example teachers might want to wait until spring, retail workers might want to wait for the holidays, building trades and fire districts might want to wait for spring and water districts in the summer—if each union has a best time or even two seasons the power could be split up to every other year.
The more counties we get to participate, the closer we get to a statewide strike. The more statewide strikes in other states could lead to a nationwide strike. With he goal of developing a strategy to implement strikes from seaport to seaport so labor can make an impact and win its’ labor agreements. There are ten major seaports throughout Oregon, California, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and Louisiana if they all went on strike, the impact would be staggering and would bring the 1 percent and corporations to their knees.
This could start to make an impact within two years for most labor contract are for two years. It all starts at the local level and builds out the borders and then fill in the center. This is the only way to beat the corporations and the oligarchy. If this does not work, there will be a peasants revolt.
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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