Union Perspectives

On a night in February 1933, Frances Perkins sat in front of the newly elected 32nd president of the United States as he told her that he wanted her to be the new Secretary of Labor. Perkins told President Franklin Roosevelt she would take the job if she could do it her way. Perkins wanted: a 40-hour work week, minimum wage, work compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance. The opposition to Perkins demands came from courts, businesses, labor unions--yes, labor unions, conservatives, and the chamber of commerce. Even with all this opposition against Perkins, a lot was accomplished. Today, we are trying to protect our Social Security, which we pay into, and even to expand it. We also want to go back to providing free college, like we used to have before politicians, like California Governor Ronald Reagan, redirected the money for f...

The new attack on unions is Verizon’s move to cut pensions and healthcare, which Verizon says it needs to do to keep up with its competitors. If it wins, its cuts will be a death spiral to the bottom for union workers. There are two ways for unions to win: one is to stand fast; the other is to put pressure on the nonunion competitors or a combination of both. Workers must know that these attacks on them come from the GOP’s call for austerity and that ideology imported from Europe, mainly Angela Merkle’s Germany, and big banks, which is being forced upon countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. These banks and corporations would very much like to import austerity here into the U.S. to break unions. This is or should be the tipping point for workers to go on the offensive instead of always playing the defensive game. A good offense will always defeat a defense. And at this time it looks like workers and labor unions have retreated to large cities and abandoned the rural count...

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 only has to look at Europe to see what is in store for the proletariats in the U.S. Look at the similarities of the proletariats of Europe and here. The GOP wants to eliminate minimum wage completely along with labor unions while cutting funding for all social programs. Also, in Europe there are countries like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain that are now being black mailed by an international group of corporate chief executive officers who are not even elected and they are not accountable to anyone except to the banks and their own interests. The people in these countries now have no rights or hope for a better life or even a job. When this is done then these people have no country. They’re just living in a place with no rights or future. If the capitalist system of the world hopes to exist the oligarchies must change their money making ways and invest in jobs and quit using their money in loans or getting rich off the interest, paying no taxes and making poor people wo...

Why do the wage slaves of the world continue to stand still for the way corporations like WalMart treat their workers? When they pay “starvation wages,” work their employees part time to keep from paying benefits and now cutting part-time workers’ health coverage. This latest move affects 30,000 employees or about 5 percent of their workers. This follows on the decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to completely eliminate health benefits for part-time workers, which also pay “starvation wages.” These corporations could not stay in business without the work of the Have Nots, Have Littles and Have Nothing. As long as we shop at these businesses they have no reason to change their business practices of screwing over the lowly workers. Instead, they’re letting the public, the Have Littles and the Not Have Much foot the bill for the low-wage workers to receive food stamps and other government assistance that the workers wouldn’t need if they were paid a living wage. When we subsidize ...

Fifty-five years ago President Johnson declared his war on poverty. At this time there are 47 million Americans living beneath the poverty level. Does that number sound familiar, think Mitt Romney and his infamous talk with some of the 1 percent during his failed campaign for president. Billionaire Warren Buffet said there is a class warfare all right, but it’s my class that is winning. He is calling for higher taxes on the rich and the money to be spent on our crumbling infrastructure, free education, and higher wages. The tax on the rich under Johnson was 91 percent. It is now 39.6 percent for those who pay, but most of the rich pay nothing, in fact. There are many corporations that the poor end up paying for their subsidies and who do you think makes up the difference in these tax rate that is less than half of what it used to be? We also voted in GOP people who retooled our war on poverty to a cynical war on crime and privatized a lot of our prisons. The term criminal came to mean...

One ethical argument for redistributing the income from rich to poor comes from the psychological truth: the nineteenth century’s so-called utilitarianism in which a law should be to produce the greatest possible happiness equally. Taking a thousand dollars from someone who’s rich and giving it to someone who is poor might diminish the rich man’s happiness slightly, but would certainly increase the happiness of the poor person far more. Taxing the wealthy to help the poor therefore increases the sum total of happiness. The economic justification for organizing the economy in such a way that the oligarchies did not accumulate a disproportionate share to begin with and also to maintain enough total demand for products and services for if the spenders have no money to buy their share of happiness then the economy the economy does not work. This is why the minimum wage must be raised to $15 to $18 an hour across the USA and most of Europe. Some do see the need for the wage slaves and the ...

If you want to see a true example of apathy, look at a typical postal worker. The USPS eliminated 37,000 jobs last year and will keep eliminating jobs. In any other sector of the labor force, an elimination of this kind is done under the guise of saving money by downsizing and privatization. Keep in mind, the real reason is to break the largest existing union, which will lessen money for the anti-GOP fight. Also, look at where the GOP wants to put USPS wants to put offices—in private mini-post offices within non-union Staples stores. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Staples in floundering. The company initially had 2,000 stores in 26 countries, and now Staples is closing 60 more stores worldwide this year, 15 in the U.S. and 45 in Europe, in an attempt to save 250 stores. Staples’ pays $8.25 an hour versus the $25 an hour for union postal workers. So how will taking away $25 an hour pay from 37,000 workers going to help the economy? Again, this attempt to move the USPS into Stapl...

The old International Workers of the World would be proud of the way wage slaves today are standing up for their rights in countries, such as Bangladesh, most of Europe, Israel, Palestine, and now South American countries, such as Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, who are now fighting for the rights of day laborers, back pay, who work on the ports. They are being supported by the Longshoremen’s union. This is world solidarity among the wage slaves. The way it is supposed to be, and we should not forget the Ukrainians’ fight for the right to protest. Yes, the tide is turning slowly in favor of the wage slaves, but we must remember what Karl Marx and Frederick Engles said in 1848: That now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. The fight must keep moving forward to even up the disparity of a few with so much and so m...

The Dow Jones drops 318 and experiences the worst day since June. The Stock Market is down and people are asking why. It is very simple; you just have to go to the very bottom of the capitalist system, which is the wage slaves, who are the consumers in a capitalist consumer system. So the answer is obviously wage inequality. The greed of the oligarchies has caused the Stock Market to fall and it will continue to fall until the greedy loosen their pocket strings. China’s manufacturing has dropped, and as a result the country now uses less oil, iron, coal, which puts wage slaves out of jobs and creates a ripple effect upon other countries, such as those in Europe. These countries are also seeing a drop in consumerism. It all goes back to disposable income in the pockets of the “have nots,” who actually spend the money. U.S. workers should be making $15 to $16 an hour, which would be a huge money infusion into our capitalist consumer system. However, with no money to spend we end up w...

The leaderless world revolution and the armies are all around us just waiting for a trigger or tipping point to march and they are all leaders so how are they controlled? It looks, to me, like they have taken a look at history and have written a play book that has taken old tactics that worked and came up with new ones and with that they have added and use our new technology. What we are seeing is it is very hard to kill the snake when you cannot find its head. Brazil is a good example of a tipping point, upping the cost of public transportation that millions of low wage workers would have to pay and then humiliating one person by pepper spraying her in the face for no reason other than they think they can and get away with it. I wonder what the cops were thinking when they were pushed into the ocean up to their waists—power to the people. This is just the start of the Have All against the Have Some and Have Nots. For us, wage slaves, have a right to have a say and a right to an equa...