Union Perspectives

The fast food and restaurant industry today is as bad in working conditions as what author Upton Sinclair wrote in “The Jungle,” a 1906 classic about the meatpacking industry. The fast food and restaurant industry is the 21st century's version of "The Jungle"—a sweatshop where workers are enduring horrible health and safety conditions with no paid sick leave and no healthcare. Workers work sick with ailments like cuts, burns, flu, pinkeye and H1N1—do you think these maladies miraculously stay out of your food? It’s not the workers fault; it’s the owners for putting greed above your health. This is not good for the wage slaves nor their families and not to the healthy customers putting their trust in the food they receive. Owners expect customers to tip to compensate for the low wages. Tipping dates back to slavery and originated in Europe. When tipping was brought to America in the late 1800s to 1900s, the Americans at that time rejected the practice as undemocratic and...

One of the best solutions to inequality here in the U.S. and the world would be for everyone to have one share of the Commons, the wealth made from using what belongs to all of us our natural resources: air, water, gas and oil, among others. This is not a new thought nor is it welfare. Thomas Paine, 1737-1809, wrote that every individual is born with legitimate claims on natural property or its equivalent. A modern day exchange between two very conservative GOP Fox news commentators, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs, found that they agree with the concept of dividends for Commons. O’Reilly said, “It’s my contention that we, the people, own the gas and oil discovered in America. It’s our land and the government administers it in our name … land and water are the domain of we, the people.” Dobbs said, “The oil that we’re talking about belongs to us as you said … In Alaska, there is a perfect model for what we should do as a nation. We should have—let’s call it the American Trust. Have the oi...

The Democrats and the President need to step up to the plate and back the workers and unions in this class warfare. If Democrats can’t arrest the downward spiral of America’s economical lives of the 99 percent, maybe a new party is needed. The workers’ need is more than the minimum wage increase of $15 to $18 an hour. We need to restore workers’ collective bargaining in pay, benefits and hours. To do this we need stronger labor laws that protect us, the workers, and plug the holes in the existing laws that have been decimated in the last 40 years. The government should also re-establish the link between economic growth and Americans’ incomes. There is a way to tie economic growth to wages, which would be a shared prosperity for all. It’s been done before. We need a strong labor leader like President Franklin Roosevelt. When he was at Madison Square Garden; he singled out business and financial monopoly speculation and reckless banking as enemies of a social peace. Government by organiz...

The Great Strike of 1877 … People power is at its best when it is spontaneous and unorganized. This is when new ideas and new leaders are born and this is how the biggest strike started in the railroads and railroad yards of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which involved the Pennsylvania National Guard, federal troops, with a Gatling gun, who were trapped in a wooden railroad round house (the round house is used to turn train engines around). Strikers set the round house, box cars on fire, and then pushed these box cars into the round house, which forced the troops to flee to a U.S. arsenal. The damage was more than 100 locomotives, two-thousand freight cars, a grain elevator and the city’s main passenger depot—two square miles of America’s greatest industrial city lay in total ruin all because of the owners’ greed and underestimating the power of the people. This is why the anti-worker GOP and the 1 percent should look at the history of what happened when workers are pushed into a corner w...