This is the best time in the last fifty years for the union people to get better contracts and for the nonunion workers to get their first union contracts. The stars have alined in the workers’ favor with unemployment at its lowest and lots of jobs not being filled.
There are lots of jobs not being filled. There are lots of low-end jobs out there ready to be filled so now is the time for the $15 to $24 hour wage to be established. If employees don’t receive this then they should strike like the food workers—essential workers—at Ralph’s, Albertsons, Vons, and Pavilions. The owners offered employees a 60 cent per hour increase. The workers want $5 per hour. This walk out would be grocery clerks, meat cutters, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. They are represented by seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union with 47,000 workers in all.
Albertsons owns Safeway, which became unionized beginning in 1935. Despite Albertsons making better-than-expected quarterly net profits with an increase of 243% from the prior year, the company decided to raise prices during a pandemic when the average person was struggling.
In 2021, this same company spent $1.2 billion on capital expenditures and paid $149 million in dividends.
It looks like they have their contracts close together so they can strike together. Strength in numbers.
Then there is Starbucks, who, I hope the employees are watching how the union works and get all of their shops into the unions. Next, there is Amazon. I know the unions are working on it.
This could be the year of the union’s comeback. Let’s make it happen.
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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