Union Perspectives

Senator Bernie Sanders will be our next president and we need to start planning now for how we will get single-payer healthcare, $15 an hour minimum wage, free college, immigration reform and taking on the banks and Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, prison/justice reform, and reduce the military industrial complex by making the Middle East deal with their problems instead of relying completely on the U.S. These are just some of the things that need to be done. Also, we, union workers-retired or still working, must ensure that Sanders doesn’t forget us and will push for card check, which President Obama promised and then sold us out. In his campaign platform, Sanders also states, aside from the above items, but also passage of the Work Place Democracy Act to strengthen the role of unions, he leads the fight for $15 and a union for fast food workers and federal contract employees, and supports the Employee Free Choice Act or card check, and equal pay for women. With all of this to do,...

If the capitalist system is dependent on 67.5 percent spending, which is provided by the habits of the proletarians then shouldn’t the proletarians have jobs or a hybrid system of work in which they are paid a living wage of $15 to $18 an hour minimum or a temporary job or some payment for non-labor to put money in the spenders’ pockets. The money hoarders do not want to invest in factories, they want to invest in bonds, stocks or extend credit line loaning money to countries that cannot repay or student loans. So what needs to be done is to tax the cash hoarders so governments worldwide can start rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure worldwide. Here in the U.S. we need to rebuild our bridges, highways, water mains, sewers, electrical grids, railroads, schools, waterways, fiber optics, clean energy and all the jobs that would be created if we invested in these areas. If the government focused on these areas, then it would create opportunities for investors to be able to maintain or s...

Are the workers and countries of the world returning to tribal governments of the old days where countries were made up of family tribes and religions? Just look at places like the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan all are reverting to the past like Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Turkey and the list goes on. Are the large countries starting to fade? Are they getting too large to defend or control? Are governments too polarized to govern? Has the 1 percent billionaires of the world gained control and only want more money and power over the workers? And if this is the case it could be the tipping point for the loss of a civilized world and the beginning of a world filled with ISIS types who just hate and kill for their ideology. When money and power is worshipped over the good of people, there will be a revolt and will it be peaceful or a bloodletting? The days of large countries dominating small countries are over. Just how long can the U.S. hang onto our satellite countrie...

It is time to prime the pump of the economy with cash just like you would prime a water pump to get water from a well. The cash needed to prime the pump for the capitalist economy will have to come by way of higher wages for the poor working, such as a minimum wage of $15 to $18 an hour. The wealthy do not spend money like the poor, and anyone not in the multi-millionaires club are considered the poor. The poor are the spenders and drivers of an economy because there are more of us than of the wealthy. The poor’s spending does two things: increase tax revenue and provide jobs to produce the items spenders purchase that ultimately make the profits the wealthy hoard and stash in overseas banks. When people are paid more they buy more, more taxes accrue and there is a huge savings by people not using government assistance. This will then provide cash for our governments to start rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, such as the pot-hole filled roads, rusting bridges, polluted water, ...

If our workers here in the U.S. think their alone in their fight for a living wage and better living standards for their families, all they need to do is look at the rest of the world’s workers. Workers in places like Quebec, Canada, Egypt, Puerto Rico, Tunisia, Ukraine, South Korea, Belarus, Romania, and Bangladesh. We are all in this together, think about this, a five year study was done on Walmart’s Chinese imports which cost 133,000 American jobs, but it wasn’t just the U.S. workers that got screwed over, the Chinese workers weren’t paid a fair wage. These are just a few of the countries fighting the government and the oligarchies who control the large corporations, backed by sedition laws—laws impeding free speech and organization, deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order, which means anything they, the oligarchies, don’t like. The sedition laws put harsh restrictions on mass gatherings of workers. Remember laws and law enforcement a...

The vilification of the union name and labor movements started around World War I, when the U.S. government broke the back of the International Workers of the World (IWW). Some of IWW members were against the war despite that fact that many IWW members served honorably in military. The next onslaught against labor was brought on by the actions of Jimmy Hoffa for abuse of the Teamsters’ union members pensions. The McClellan Committee, led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the McClellan investigation was over, Senator Barry Goldwater went after the Reuther brothers, mostly Walter, who was the United Auto Workers president. The AFL then supported the Vietnam War and fought in the streets against fellow union members, who were mostly Democrats protesting the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. This did not earn the AFL any points with the GOP; in fact, they viewed the AFL members as suckers. Walter Reuther was sickened by the news coverage of union workers beating up protesters. He said it ...

If the USA is a consumer economy, then there must be good wages paid to the consumers to drive the economy. The business community thinks they have the right to pay anything they wants in wages, but what they don’t want to consider is that their businesses is not totally theirs if in order to conduct their business they use the commons (e.g. roads), which is paid for by all the U.S. people who actually pay their taxes or at least subsidized by the people like the railroads and post office, law enforcement, schools, bank regulators, Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration, to name a few. Without most of these things there would be no way to have or conduct a business. The taxes to support our schools that train the workers in math and English the companies then hire. Without good wages as the base pay it must be very solid or the consumer economy will crumble and with it the whole system. The more we make the more we spend and the more we must produce, which is...