The GOP’s unintended consequences is having a devastating effect on our country. The GOP’s attack on trade unions led to a shortage of trained and skilled workers. The union trained workers go through an apprenticeship programs to ensure the workers are properly trained in their particular field. The GOP’s fight to keep wages low in restaurants and fast food places, for example, has lead to wage inequality, which copied with a deadly virus spreading across our nation is making employees reluctant to return to work.
Now the workers have the upper hand, and are taking advantage of the labor shortage by now demanding higher wages, unions, job safety, healthcare and pensions. These demands have spilled over into federal government jobs, such forest service firefighter called fire techs. Last week President Biden was appalled to learn that these firefighters beginning pay is only $13 an hour and promised to correct. It’s kind of the problem, these career politicians have no clue just how little these frontline workers make or the cost of groceries yet have no problem keeping workers at starvation wages. This low wage is why the federal government are having trouble hiring Hot Shot crews or keeping the firefighters it has as they leave to work with state fire departments.
Now, a lot of businesses have to pay money up front to get workers in to fill their job vacancies, and this can all be traced back to the leadership of the GOP and its austerity wages for workers, anti-union, anti-workers agenda. All of this GOP anti-worker tactics have lead to the fight to unionize Amazon at no matter what it takes. The unions have made the commitment to win no matter the time or cost. Having failed with the Amazon workers Bessemer, Alabama to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the Teamsters are making a nation-wide push to organize the Amazon delivery drivers. The drivers have complained about rigorous delivery schedules that force them to urinate in bottles just to keep up with their delivery schedules.
I have always said that we could not stop companies from leaving the U.S. for manufacturing for cheap labor to make the cheap merchandize, but these companies have to bring that merchandize back to the U.S. to sale is where the workers can get even by joining a union for better wages, working conditions, enforcement of labor laws, pension and healthcare.
For cheap labor to make a product might work for the anti-union corporations, but they still have to sell it and deliver it to make a profit, and this leaves the door open for the unions. They just have to force their way in and fight hard to stay in. When the unionized workers win and they will, the corporations can put the blame on the leadership of the GOP for not seeing the unintended consequences of their greed and actions.
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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