Union Perspectives

Labor unions need to recruit fighters, and educate them about union history. We don’t just need more membership, we need educated fighters who understand how politics work, how politicians and corporate media manipulate what the working people are told. They need to understand the GOP and the Democratic parties and who supports these politicians and who donates money to them. The Art of War says you must understand your enemy as well as yourself in order to win any fight against that enemy. This is the time for union members to think critical thinking skills, to examine what they are told and to critique systems of power, culture and political assumptions; to ask the broader questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. The unions formerly concentrated on the class struggle, and in those days unions filled its leadership with people who sought broad social and political changes and rights for the working class, but now these positions have been transformed into n...

Workers need to understand that fear is a potent weapon in the hands of the powerful elites. In his book, Death of the Liberal Class, Christopher Hedges writes, the fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism was used to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech, habeas corpus. In the name of anti-communism, the capitalist class, terrified, of the numerous labor strikes after WWII, rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 along with a Congressional override of President Harry Truman’s veto. It was the most destructive legislative blow to workers until NAFTA. It was fear that in 2001 after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Bush administration were allowed to push through the Patriot Act, engaged in extraordinary rendition, and establish offshore prisons where we engaged in torture, which was against our code of conduct. Fear has led us to embrace the endless wars in the Middle East. It is the cowardice of the liberal class leaves the group prone to manipulati...

Why have the Democrats and unions abandon the workers and people in rural areas thereby handing the GOP these areas and mid-west? On the union side, there is still strong union in the rural country, such as medical field, teachers, state workers, city, count and federal government employees, fire departments, law enforcements, and special districts, like water districts. Then these union members vote for the GOP. This is the failure of the union leaders’ fault for not teaching the employees what the unions are about and their history. And the Dems stay mostly in the large cities. They should be working with the unions in the rural areas and the mid-west to get people registered to vote and find good union leaders to run for elected positions, such as city councils, county board of supervisors, water or fire or school boards. Are we just afraid of losing or are we lazy and grab at the low hanging fruit instead of working for the votes and members? If we just give up on these areas, the...

The time is now to take advantage of the old adage, “In all adversity there is a window of opportunity” in this case for change. There are a multitude of reasons why people are protesting in the street today, and all have a common adversary corporate greed. The last time corporate America was scared of the workers was when the CIO and AFL were going to band together. These two organizations had been at odds for years basically driven by egos, as the CIO workers were less skilled workers than the AFL workers, who were trades people earning more money,. The corporations took full advantage of the animosity, pitting workers against each other. Corporations did not want the two unions forming one large union. Workers figured they were pawns and decided to combine their efforts under one union baring both names: AFL/CIO with George Meany as the president. He was a plumber by trade. The corporations panicked after this happened and started an anti-union campaign, that continues to this day. ...

Now that I know the behind the scenes in professional sports, I will no longer spend my time watching the games. The owners of these teams, whether football or baseball, etc., typical of the greedy fund anti-union politicians, who support anti-people legislation, such as living wage and healthcare for all. Consider the time and expense for the average fan, the everyday fans, who are hard-working people buying the sports’ team memorabilia, tickets, overpriced junk food and drinks at the stadiums or the “snacks” and eats and drinks for tailgate parties or watching the game from home. Some might think this time could be better used in serving the community the fan lives in when the factor in the following. Team owners typically support and donate millions to elect people who are against the workers, what’s in the best interest for the workers and actively try to squash unions. The worst offenders are Charles Johnson, owner of the SF Giants; Woody Johnson, owner of the NY Jets got an amb...

"We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better." Thurgood Marshall. What will happen if trump steals the 2020 election? What will you do if trump claims victory again? Will you move to to another country? Most cannot do this. They maybe too old, don’t have enough money, are ill or do not want to move or can’t leave their extended families. Then the people who still have jobs and need to work cannot leave. So packing up and leaving just won’t work for most of us and a lot of us just don’t like the idea of running away from a tyrant and would rather stay and fight for their jobs, family, way of life, and their country. So hoping for the best on election day is good, but we need to be ready for the election not turning out the way we desperately need it to. Also, what if trump refuses to leave? What we should be doing is to start building our forces, planning a course of action to get his lard ass out of the White House, bu...

We elected a person four years ago that then pissed away four years of our lives, our treasury, our standing in the world, mishandling a pandemic costing almost 150,000 innocent lives and the soldiers who went to serve their country not realizing their commander-in-chief allowed a bounty to be placed upon their heads by Vladimir Putin. These set backs will take a decade or more to fix, the deficit probably longer. The damage done in the last four years has gained us nothing while it has made trump filthy rich by the myriad of ways he has overcharged the U.S. government through his hotels and golf courses. People are losing their homes for lack of rent or mortgage payments. Was it intentional to allow the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures a ruse by the republicans as a form of voter suppression? If you have no home address you can’t vote. Families are going hungry, food banks struggling to meet the need, and republicans are calling these people freeloaders who’d rather take free...

Are the Boy Scouts of the Border Patrol the new Silver Shirts of trump? The Border Patrol agency began an Explorers program, much like the law enforcement Explorers program, that offers young people, in the Border Patrol’s case, Latino youths training and mentorship and trump indoctrination. The Silver Shirts were members of the paramilitary group the Silver Legion of America, an underground racist organization founded in North Carolina by William D. Pelley, a journalist, in 1933. Pelley based the group on Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts, an Italian nationalist, fascist group. In 1935, a Nazi agent convinced heiress Jessie Murphy to give cash and the use of her ranch. The Silver Shirts wanted to use the 55-acre Murphy Ranch in the Los Angeles hills as a fortified world headquarters after the fascist global conquest. Pelley said he would save America from Jews and non-whites and called for a Christian Commonwealth in America that would combine the principles of racism, nationalism, a...

Tired of the inequality, people have taken to the streets. Black Lives Matter, but they need their white allies to stand beside them to win the fight against racism and discrimination. People of color need their white allies to speak up and stand up when they see injustices of any kind. We all need to fight against the system that put us into the streets and kept us down and disadvantaged. None of these inequities should one tolerated anymore. Black people began the fight, the rest of us need to support and continue to fight with them. With all these people in the streets, we are all part of the solution now. To get the people off the streets we have to hit critical mass. Then we need to reform law enforcement, the prison system, the healthcare system for profit; we need to reallocate the money that went toward militarizing the police toward social programs; a universal basic income of $1,500 to $2,000 a month for people 18 years or older; a federal government financial public works p...

May 1st traditionally celebrated the transition into spring, but the day became a union rallying call when a major strike took place with more than 300,000 workers leaving their jobs in 13,000 businesses across the U.S. It began in Chicago when 40,000 workers went out on an eight-hour strike on May 1, 1886 at the Haymarket Square. May 1 became International Workers’ Day to commemorate the loss of life and injuries sustained by protestors when a bomb went off and law enforcement used gun fire to squash the peaceful protest. Tomorrow, May 1, workers from Amazon, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Instacart, and FedEx, tired of feeling invisible and taken for granted by the corporations and the public at large, are set to go on strike. Many of these companies have not offered the best working conditions, but now with a deadly virus underway workers are being treated as if they are expendable. Suddenly deemed essential workers for a fraction of the wages, these workers’ health is being jeop...

The Postal Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, was enacted in 1792 when Congress passed the “Postal Service Act.” This Act established the Post Office Department. The republican party is still going after what they consider the holy grail of large unions and doing everything it can to bust the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) union at a loss of thousands of good paying jobs. There are two current factors pushing this effort to destroy the USPS. One cause of the current attack is based on the thin-skinned crybaby occupying the White House. His revenge against Jeff Bezo, who happens to own both Amazon and the Washington Post, is one driving force behind the current attack. The Post runs articles telling the truth about Trump so, in retaliation, Trump is demanding the Postal Service triple or quadruple shipping costs for Amazon packages and the Postal Services gets caught in the middle of these tw...

Our country is on life support thanks to the incompetency of the jester in the White House and the dunces that make up his administration. We are faced with a deadly virus of which we’ve not seen since the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and the ensuing economic collapse, both here and internationally. Trump says he couldn’t have known that the virus would reach our shores yet he did. Reports are saying he was informed in January, giving him plenty of time to activate a plan of action. But since he disbanded the National Security Council unit focused on pandemic preparedness, there was no one in charge to take the helm. Trump’s team was briefed on what to do should the U.S face a pandemic, but apparently no one was listening. Trump refused help from the World Health Organization. He did nothing so he, his family members and other Republicans could benefit from the ensuing crisis. Rather than listen to the experts, Trump chose to listen to and take direction from his son-in-law Jared Kush...