Union Perspectives

On June 27, 1905, Father Hegarty’s preamble to the International Workers of the World constitution opens with this sentence: “The Working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
So why are the old Democrats so worried about old guard Democrats so worried about taxing the billionaires? There is always another billionaire to replace one if should one move on from buying votes. The average fortune of the billionaire class is $5.3 billions an increase from $200 million in 2024. Social Justice is not possible without leveling the colossal accumulation of wealth and power that makes a mockery of the idea that we live in a democracy. The workers and unions must declare a class war and fight for what we want and need: good union jobs, four-day work weeks, good pensions, vacation time, healthcare for all with no out of pocket costs, elder care, free education up to an associates degree. The corporations we work for are the ones who benefit the most because they get better and hea...

Unions new slogan should be “Organize or Die.” We must be stronger by the 2024 elections because we don’t know for sure what the outcome will be. When we are striking or organizing, our workers will see the need to vote and vote for people who support workers. They see this when on the picket line or when working for a union they will vote for and to keep a union. This is when workers understand what is at stake and who their friends are. So, in the 2024 election, workers will have a friendly president and government or they will have a president who will turn government on unions and its members. Either way, now is the time for all unions and its members to come together least for this year. Unions that have problems with other unions have got to set aside their differences and issues at least for this year or we could very possibly lose our unions and the security unions provide to the workers. On the other hand, if union workers prevail in 2024 with the election of a Democratic pr...

Our Social Security is now at risk thanks to the Republicans. As France has now had their retirement age increased from 62 years to 64 years of age. The people of France fought and are fighting hard, but not hard enough or in the right way, it appears. Their leader circumvented protocol to ram this retirement age higher. Is there anything else they can do? We, here in the U.S., must look hard at how the French lost because if the Democrats lose the next presidential election, the oligarch’s control of the Republicans will use the French’s playbook to raise our retirement age to 72 and possibly cut our Social Security pensions. We need to get ready for the fight to save our Social Security and retirement age as we have them right now. The Republicans have been trying to to destroy Social Security since we started receiving it. It was our old age safety net. They will never stop just like they didn’t stop trying to overturn Roe v Wade, which no one thought could ever happen. At least n...

Why are the building trades not organizing? At this time when there are and will be lots of prevailing wage jobs starting. This is the time to go after non-union trade workers to get new members, which will turn into more union shops or out non-union shops out of business since they will not have trades people, who will work for them. We need to keep our money for organizing, and tell the politicians we will give you votes but not our money until you are elected and do something, like better fund the National Labor Relations Board and vote for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act or PRO Act. The trades people need to stop giving up on the rural part of the country, like the Democrats have done, retreating and holding up in cities with larger populations, which turned out not to be as effective a strategy as they thought it would be. All it did or does is slow the bleeding. So we, labor and labor friendly political people need to go back to the counties, like in far northern and eas...

Our country could go from a democracy to a dictatorship if the Republicans take the House, Senate and Presidency starting on Tuesday and into the 2024 elections. If the Republicans win, we could conceivably lose all of our social services, Social Security, Medicare, right to unions, among others. Should the working people, retired and unions members just wait for this to happen or start planning on how to keep our democracy or return fully to it? We will need a strategy on how and what we need to do. But first, we must find the right-wing GOP’s Achilles Heel. The Classical Greek myth illustrates well the vulnerability of the supposedly invulnerable, the warrior Achilles. The myth states no blow could injure and no sword could penetrate Achilles’s skin. When still a baby , Achilles’ mother dipped him into the waters of the magical river, Styx, resulting in the protection of his body from all dangers. There was however, a problem. The mother held Achilles by his heel and the waters of t...

It took a pandemic to get workers to realize how much power they actually have. Calling their movement “Striketober”, workers from John Deer Tractor, members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees in Hollywood, education employees, healthcare workers, prison guards, and employees from Kellogg and Nabisco, among others are realizing they have the power with employers to make or break the business. In August, 4.3 million workers walked off their jobs. This is the highest number of employees to quit their jobs in the 21 years that the Jobs Openings and Labor Turnover Survey has been tracking these jobs, according to Robert Reich, who calls this movement “an unofficial general strike.” Striketober is the war of the 99 percent vs the 1 percent, and the 99 percent must win to keep our country in a democracy. These strikers are examples of inequality that is ripping our country apart and other countries around the world. The top 1 Percent evaded $163,000,000,000 in taxes,...

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 ...

The filibuster must end in order to save our country. Some worry about what would happen if or when the GQP regains all the power again and what they will do with it and against the people. The Democrats must just do a better job and fight like hell for the people and not let the GQP get back into power. It is up to us, the unions and people who want healthcare for all, free education, a living wage, address climate change for clean air and water, the right to vote, and stop the never-ending wars. The filibuster is basically a form of obstruction and used to block legislation from proceeding to a vote. Republicans use this often, especially when the legislation will have a positive effect for the people or making voting easier or whenever Republicans want to have a tantrum. Those who do not pay attention to what happens in the Senate or don’t care so long as the immature Republicans are sticking it to the Democrats, and by extension, the people’s wellbeing, blame Democrats for not pa...

Labor unions need to recruit fighters, and educate them about union history. We don’t just need more membership, we need educated fighters who understand how politics work, how politicians and corporate media manipulate what the working people are told. They need to understand the GOP and the Democratic parties and who supports these politicians and who donates money to them. The Art of War says you must understand your enemy as well as yourself in order to win any fight against that enemy. This is the time for union members to think critical thinking skills, to examine what they are told and to critique systems of power, culture and political assumptions; to ask the broader questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. The unions formerly concentrated on the class struggle, and in those days unions filled its leadership with people who sought broad social and political changes and rights for the working class, but now these positions have been transformed into n...

Why have the Democrats and unions abandon the workers and people in rural areas thereby handing the GOP these areas and mid-west? On the union side, there is still strong union in the rural country, such as medical field, teachers, state workers, city, count and federal government employees, fire departments, law enforcements, and special districts, like water districts. Then these union members vote for the GOP. This is the failure of the union leaders’ fault for not teaching the employees what the unions are about and their history. And the Dems stay mostly in the large cities. They should be working with the unions in the rural areas and the mid-west to get people registered to vote and find good union leaders to run for elected positions, such as city councils, county board of supervisors, water or fire or school boards. Are we just afraid of losing or are we lazy and grab at the low hanging fruit instead of working for the votes and members? If we just give up on these areas, the...

The anti-union-right wingers have capitalized on how to vilify any one who stands in their way to get richer and gain more power. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan succeeded in making liberals feel ashamed of the word “liberal” and fearful of being associated with socialism. When that worked so well, the GOP started vilifying the word “union” in as many ways as unions drive up the costs of construction, that unions are just corporations and all union leaders’ want is your money in the form of dues. This effort worked so well they convinced unsuspecting workers to vote against their own best interests. Today, the workers are starting to see through all the rhetoric of the anti-working establishment. The teachers have started a new trend by winning higher wages and other benefits. Now, there are others feeling like they can win higher wages, such as $15 to $24 an hour. This will, in turn, be a good thing for elections turn outs to put the right people in office who will support workers, worke...

Rural America was seceded to the GOP by the Democrats, likewise the labor trades seceded the rural counties to non-union shops. In the old days, unions, in these rural areas, got bigger and bigger until they decided they could leave the rural counties' side, and compete in the large cities, foregoing smaller populated counties, which used to be union sanctuaries. This type of strategy is not working. Retreating never works. It is just like going into a fort or a castle, which sooner or later, the fortifications will be breached. All that is happening is just buying time and the Democrats and labor unions have both run out of time. It is time now for an offense and come out of the forts and castles and take back rural America. They, the labor and Democrats, should work together with all their resources combined, such as money and people power. If used wisely, they both could become relevant again in our rural countrysides. By attending all public meetings, using the time before ea...

Union leaders who jumped the gun on the 2016 election thinking the Democrats and Hillary Clinton would win and take charge of the U.S. Supreme Court will now pay for their very bad decision. Also, the leaders of some of the union leaders did not understand the feelings of their members on where their support lay, which was with Bernie Sanders. Labor went to court with three cases on labor arbitration agreements, which now will lose in the right-leaning Supreme Court and end up being the law of the land. In another case, the Court will decide whether public employee unions can collect fees from non-union members. If we lose this case, we can kiss the relevancy of labor unions goodbye. The law will bankrupt the unions and the loss of union membership will be catastrophic. These Court cases will be the Justice Department vs the National Labor Relation Board, which is a federal agency, will oppose each other in Court. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, this will be a fi...

The fight against “right to work” legislation goes back to 1968. In one of his speeches, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “That in our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as right to work. It provides no rights, and no work. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining. We demand this fraud be stopped.” It is has now been about 49 years, and the same playbook called, “Right to work” to destroy union is still being played. The GOP and corporate Democrats want to destroy unions by taking away the right to collect dues. People still fall for this self-destructive line without looking into what they are forfeiting in the process: healthcare and pensions. Fraud and who are to blame? It is the unions for not educating people, not just their workers? The attack and the fight against it has never stopped. In 1933, in his Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sai...

The GOP anti-union people will take over California by coming through the back door. This will be done by very wealthy donors supporting high profile school choice candidates. Looking ahead to 2018, some of the most active school choice donors are already contributing to pro-charter school candidates for state school chief and even for state governor. Some of these money people are Timothy Draper, who spent $23 million; Netflix founder Reed Hastings spent $5.8 million; Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the GAP store, spent $6 million; Jim Carr Walton and Alice Walton contributed millions to California organizations that advocate for school choice; and Michael Bloomberg, businessman and former mayor of New York, spent $2 million. Most of this money has gone to California Charter Schools Association committees. Do not expect the California Democratic party to protect you or even be on your side. The core of the Democratic elite are corporate whores. In a contested battle, the part...

Is California next on the Koch brothers’ agenda? The Republicans will have 33 governors in office, and in 25 of those states, the Republicans will also control both the governorships and the legislations. The Democrats have six governors and legislations, and the rest of the states are politically divided. Sam Lansing is chief operating officer at the Americans for Prosperity, a conservative super pac bankrolled by the Koch brothers, and he thinks now is the best opportunity to accomplish a lot of the big-ticket items in 10 to 15 states. People in these states will be steamrolled on policies, such as destroying unions, Social Security, Medicare, right to work laws, school vouchers to break the teachers’ union and private prisons, while giving tax breaks wealthy. How long will it be before the GOP and the Koch brothers start in on California and New York, which will now be considered their holy grail for destruction. They decimated the unions in the birthplace of public unions, Wisc...

One of the last things unions can get or have gotten for their members is job protection for 10 years or for life like France has, but this security is under assault. The French government has a bill which will, in the words of the anti-labor government, make France more competitive globally by extending the work, create less jobs and make layoffs easier. All this will do is enrich the companies and their greedy bosses. These French protests were as much against the political status quo as the labor bill. There’s no difference between the right-wing French Republicans and the left-wing Socialists parties. They are both the same just different names. Both are in the service of big business, which is just what is happening here in the U.S. with the Democrats and the GOP. But in France, the hard-left flank of the General Confederation of Labour, a national trade union, is holding nationwide strikes, which the government is saying it won’t back down. If the government wins in France, the ...

Labor the world over at this time has no friends in this corporate world, and there is no political part that will support labor because unions don’t have the kind of money politicians are looking for. The political parties now side with Wall Street, corporations, big banks and lobbyists for this is where the money and political power is and where laws can be written—laws that will make them more money. One only has to look at the U.K., France, Ukraine, Spain, Greece, Turkey, South America, and, of course, here in the U.S. where labor laws have been shot full of holes and probably do more harm than good. Now is the time for a revolution of minimum wage workers, students burdened by student loans, all labor unions, people on Social Security, veterans, minorities and all the rest of us to band together to bring voter pressure on the Democrats, if not them, then a new people’s party because what we have now is not working for either party, Democratic or GOP. Are we in the U.S. reverting b...

Are the days of a two-party system coming to an end? At this time the GOP is split between the Tea Party and the old GOP people. The Democrats are splitting between the centrists/Blue Dogs and the new young people’s party, the Revolutionaries. The wages slaves of the world are demanding a fair share in their lives that they are not getting from their government’s representation. Just look at Spain’s election, which shows strong support for two new upstart parties challenging Spain’s traditional two-party system. Then there is Ukraine’s governing coalition that lost its majority in parliament. There are different reasons for each country, but there is one that crosses lines, which trust and dissatisfaction with their elected politicians. Here in the U.S., we have a broken system in the Democratic party, which can rig elections by using super delegates. Super delegates were established during the 1972 election cycle when George McGovern and Jimmy Carter squared off. Using the 712 super ...

When did unions lose the support and backing of the Democrats? It was after Reagan dismantled the air traffic controllers, who by the way voted for Reagan for president and donated to his campaign. After Reagan got into office it was open war against unions by the GOP, whose followers cared more about guns than their paychecks, unions or pensions. They voted against their own best interest. With the decline in money to support unions, candidates (mostly Democratic) and even the ones who said before elections they would support unions, such as passing card check, when they were elected, but then reneged once elected. This really took off under Bill Clinton, who dragged the party to a centrist position to better serve his new contributors. He dumped the unions for Wall Street money and became a front man for Wall Street, big banks and corporations, such as Walmart. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz would never have gotten away with the biased and corrupt handling of the DNC that she ha...