Union Perspectives

In all adversity there is a window of opportunity, a window the University of California’s student researchers crawled through during the pandemic to unionize. Throughout the UC campuses, almost 15,000 student researchers signed authorization cards to join the already 80,000 other academic workers across the country who unionized with the United Auto Workers. The time is right for trade and factory workers to ask for a union to receive better, fair wages, benefits and safety. These simple workers’ rights were why the UC student researchers unionized. They were doing the work but had no rights or protections for that work, they struggled to pay rent or buy necessities, so they were essentially working as indentured servants. At this time there is a shortage of workers. You can tell businesses and corporations are getting desperate when they offer potential workers anything from an iPhone to thousands of dollars as sign on bonuses. It will get better for workers when out country starts r...

The people like to be winners, but don’t like being on a losing team. It’s this way in sports and also politics. At this time it is the Democrats against the cult of Trump and the whipped GOP. The Democrats are winning at this point in President Biden’s administration, but the Democrats must pass Biden’s spending plan. The $4 trillion spending package has two parts: $2.3 trillion for jobs infrastructure and $1.8 trillion for an American Family Plan, which would subsidize child and elder care. This is a big winner for the Democratic Team, and offered in other developed countries. Biden is listening to Senator Bernie Sanders and seems to have learned the lessons from the Democratic defeats due to people grown tired of being taken for granted by their corporate-run Democratic party that had lost its way with Bill Clinton at the helm. Now, the GOP, after four years of doing nothing for the American people, want a $568 billion plan, which will do nothing, but make the Democrats look like ...