Unions are making a comeback and have been driven by the low wage fast food workers, the ones who suddenly became essential workers during the pandemic. They recognized their worth and began the fight for $15-an-hour wages. It looks like with the new California fast food law, they could be looking at $22 an hour and a chance to unionize the entire fast food industry.
The next stop would be vacations, healthcare and pensions.
If this happens in California, the next states to follow would be Florida, Texas, New York, and Idaho. In California, there are a half million fast food workers. This law targets bonafide abuses, but also furthers union goals of collective bargaining with the entire industry instead of trying to organize fast food restaurants one at a time.
Workers are now thinking about what is best for them and their families, and are willing to fight for them adjoining or forming unions is the best way to go. The more workers that join unions will join because people tend to follow the path of those who lead the way, and everyone likes to be on the winning team.
California unions now need to go out into the counties with the largest cities, but have lost the north and east sides of the state to the nonunion people.
Now is the time for the AFL/CIO to work together with the fast food workers, that include Starbucks and Amazon to unionize.
When people are hungry they turn to the fast food for a quick bite or drink so if you’re dependent on that convenience, you should be willing to pay for it. The costs should skyrocket unless the corporations continue their greedy reign of cheap wages for strenuous work.
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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