Union Perspectives

For the last twenty to thirty years, labor fell victim to cultural amnesia. However, labor is seeing a resurgence as it remembers what strong unions can do. Labor is back in a big way, and we are winning with public support. It’s looking like the stars have come in line for labor is kicking ass. We cannot slow down and we must go for the big things, like a four-day work week with same pay, healthcare for all, free education to a bachelor’s degree or a trade school, child care and elder care. These are things commonly provided to workers in other counties. We must get most of our contracts to end on April 1 at 12 in 2025. Brothers and sisters, this is real power and we will use it to labor’s benefit. We must build hardcore unions and then fight to get these rights enshrined into law, if not the Constitution. To do this, we have unionize workers; Then we have to educate these employees about unions, and how to keep them; Educate them about the importance of voting and voting for those ...

This new government administration has a lot of big and little things it can and must do to keep the voters on their side. First among them is that they must beat the virus and at the same time keep people sheltered and fed. This can be done by executive orders and pumping money into where it’s needed most. Yes, the Biden administration is doing a lot of good, but to reach the masses, it must go further. Start with helping unions by tightening up the National Labor Relations Board and its members and rules; and pass card check for unions, which would take the place of union elections and make it easier for workers to unionize. We need President Biden to declare a state of emergency and begin to address climate change to help save the planet while also creating new jobs in green energy, rebuilding our infrastructure with more eco-friendly products. There are a lot of products out there that can replace the old, more damaging products, like these few types recycled steel, using bamboo,...

While working, you’re selling your life one hour at a time. What is an hour of your life worth? Remember you can never get that hour back, it is gone forever. When you set a price for your hour of life, how do you do it? Are you represented by a union? Or do you just let someone else set the price for your labor? However it is done, it is not working for you or any of the other workers. Nearly one out of every five workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living pay check to pay check. Most are working more hours than they worked decades ago with less vacation or sick leave days. The standard explanation for why all of this has come about is that workers are no longer worth as much as they were before the digital technology boom and globalization. So, they must now settle for lower wages and less security. But top executives of large corporations wage have gone up twenty times that of the workers to three-hundred times today. So who sets the one hour rate? Last year, Wall St...

The race for single-payer healthcare or Medicare For All it will be between the Bernie Sanders people, The GOP and the corporate Democratic Party. If the GOP wants to keep their seats in the Senate and Congress, they need something big, like healthcare that the people will be pleased with. The GOP is desperate, they have a loser of a president and they have failed to achieve any meaningful legislation. The GOP has said they want to replace the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare since it was passed with something better, but their definition of better so far was deadly for many. They just need to make healthcare for all ages and if they do this they will keep power for a long time. The U.S. pays more in healthcare than Italy, Britain, Japan, Australia, France, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, and many others. Our politicians have sold us out to the highest bidder, the insurance companies, and we need to make them pay for putting their pockets before our health. It is imperativ...

Why single-payer/Medicare for all would save money and help the capitalist system. One, if no business or corporation, like the auto plants did not have to pay health insurance, they could sell their vehicles overseas cheaper. If all the people had health insurance, a person could start a business and not worry about having to provide health insurance for themselves, their families and their employees, which would put more people to work and their jobs could be backfilled by another worker. People who could retire, but must keep working until Medicare covers them could now retire without worrying about their healthcare. They could retire and open a job up for someone new.  Countries with universal healthcare are: Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Solvenia (where Trump's current wife is f...

The Bernie Sanders supporters must be ready for the long-haul fight. Just electing Bernie is just the start, the beginning of the revolution. A true revolution carries the mission until complete change is carried out and taken hold, which means we will have to elect a true Democratic Congress and Senate. Not only do we need to rid the Congress and the Senate of Republican politicians, but also Blue Dog, centrist, and corporate-beholden Democrats, if we want to see the change needed. When we clean house, then we can see real change with free education. Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Chile and Brazil all have free college education and the main reason is that their governments aren’t controlled by corporations and the stock market. When your politicians aren’t beholden to corporations, it’s amazing what can be accomplished. Those who say increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost jobs; you have to ask why would these people say such a thing. When you pull...

Low wages and debt go together to make the 1 percent very, very rich. To begin with, the rich pay the wage slaves very little, which then promotes the toilers to use debt to survive. Case in point, with no extra cash for repairs and a broken washing machine, for example, the cost to repair the machine is a one-time large cost that seems greater than buying a new machine for a low monthly payment. This way, the 1 percent makes more money in two ways and makes the toilers actual wage slaves. This enslavement starts very early with school debt so that young workers start out in debt with an average of $31,000 to $100,000 and higher depending on the field of study, which, without a very good paying job, leaves them as wage slaves for many years. We are nearing the end of economic/industrial growth, primarily, but not only for ecological reasons. When growth stalls, lending opportunities disappear. Since money is essentially lent for existence, debt levels increase faster than the supply ...

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...

What happened and is happening in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal has already happened here in the U.S. The blatant facts are it is not the fault of the borrowing people or countries; it is the reckless lending by German, U.S. and other banks or lending institutions, like Goldman Sachs. Greece should have never been let into the Euro and only met the membership criteria by working with Goldman Sachs to cook its books much to the detriment of the Greek people. The books were cooked to hide Greece’s debt with currency swaps after the 2008 crisis. The banks that lent so recklessly were bailed out and Greece was left holding the bag. The idea that Greece is to blame for its woes and should do like Ireland did is wrong. If this all sounds like we here in the U.S. have heard and seen this financial criminal behavior before, we have and again the banks and Wall Street were bailed out and the people were thrown out of their homes. At this time in Spain, nearly 350,000 Spani...

Labor needs a worldwide movement and now is the time for the world’s labor and the proletarians are ready. Labor needs to be unified, such as Germany, South Africa and Brazil. The U.S. unions need to have a better unified political agenda. The U.S.at this time is ranked at the bottom in workers’ rights by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). We rank four out of five in ITUC’s categories, and the ones who are five have no rule of law, like Somalia and Ukraine. The fours also include countries like Iraq, Peru, and Mexico. This should be a reality check for the U.S. unions. This was started when the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955 and never could agree on a common strategy for the common good of labor, but maybe labor is starting to wake up to the reality that labor needs to bring everyone into its fold. A good start is the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, which will probably be won by the people using Sycthanian tactics with significant structural reform in American politi...

Money is the fuel of the capitalist system, but if money is loaded into a boat and most of it is loaded to one side, the boat will capsize and sink. For the boat to float the money must be at least a little evenly spread out just to keep it afloat and if it does not even out then the boat will list to one side and just go in circles. Wage inequality is a perfect example of a listing boating ready to sink the economy. Wage inequality promotes austerity that sinks the boat even quicker. The $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage along with a free education to the bachelor’s level could rectify and keep the capitalist system afloat. If this would come about we then could start training our workers like our union construction trades have done. Each trade has their own four-to-five-year apprenticeship training programs. Then they become a journeyman worker, such as sheet metal, plumber, carpenters, iron workers, electricians, heavy equipment and construction, among others. This should start in hig...

The young people have started to join up with what is left of the old toilers. The young will be a formidable force for they have nothing to lose in this fight and everything to again. Look at Hong Kong where the young man, Joshua Wong, who started planning the current protest when he was just 15 years old and in two years of planning, put the protest in motion. He now, at age 17, is the same age that most governments like their soldiers to be because most young people this age think they are invincible. These are or can be the shock troops of the non-violent civil disobedience way to win the 99 percent over the 1 percent war. Now we just have to wait and hope for women equal to or better than Joshua Wong, who is leading the protest in Hong Kong, and hope that his arrest is just temporary, and if not then have them step up to the challenge and keep fighting. The toilers of the world are indeed on the march worldwide. There were hundreds of thousands marching in New York, USA, against ...

The low-wage, fast-food workers put up a good fight in their two-day protests. Now they just need to keep it up with well-timed events, which hurt the pockets of the money people, like on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. The low-wage inequality of living standards is just not here in the USA, it is worldwide. Some countries have made great strides in dealing with the needs of their workers. What the wage slaves need to do is cherry pick the best ideas from all over the world and develop a strategy that will make the odds in their favor for winning against the greedy. Look at the Denmark’s wages in fast food, which is $21 per hour versus the U.S.’s $7.25 federally and $8 in California. The cost of a Big Mac in Denmark is only $5.18 versus a Big Mac in the U.S. is $4. Denmark’s fast food workers are unionized. Could this be the reason they receive a living wage when our fast food workers don’t? Then there is Germany, where the corporate leaders sit with the workers and decide what...

We must revisit the wage stagnation that has been going on for the last 34 years, which has exacerbated the wage inequality and lead to the decline of the unions from 35 percent in 1954 to a total of 11.3 percent of workers unionized or 6.7 percent if you count only the private sector workers. This decline has led to a downward trend of workers’ power to protect themselves from corporation greed; but what it has also done is decimate the middle class and those used to have now have been pushed down into the bottom of the social class of the have very littles or have nothings. Consider this: cash in a capitalist system is just like fertilizer to a farmer, the more cash you put in the pockets of the workers the healthier the capitalist system. If you withhold the cash it’s just like withholding the fertilizer from crops you end up with stunted plants and your economy won’t grow. Austerity is withholding fertilizer on steroids. So at this time there is just the 1 to 5 percent—and the bot...

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 ...

Is it time to rethink our union? At this time union cannot support each other on strikes. In a lot of union companies with many different unions within them with most of these different unions expiring at different time, which means they cannot support each other in a strike because they would be breaching their contract and opening themselves up to being sued. In some cases they are held responsible for lost profits, court costs and other possible damages. The other thing is most unions with apprenticeship trainings are so good that a union worker can leave the union and become a foreman or start their own nonunion business. Some have even stolen tools to start their businesses. This is prevalent in all construction trades and it usually happens when we, unions, cannot keep our workers employed and when we can’t is when they, the nonunion, take over our training and use it against us. It's pretty pathetic when the U.S. ranks 21st out of 21 countries for union membership and cove...

The true wage slave is a good union worker who usually serves a four to five year apprenticeship then begins his or her career in the building trades or other type of specialty work, such as a machinist. Once they finished their apprenticeship they are invested in their pensions, and, in most cases, with a retirement at around the age of 52 to 55 years old. If they leave the trade they cannot draw their pension until they reach 65, which keeps stability in the work force. Part of the unions’ responsibility is to ensure workers’ keep current with their training, keeps them healthy with healthcare, and even providing substance abuse care for members—so in essence unions create the perfect wage slaves. With these benefits in place, it makes it very hard to leave a union job hence unions create dedicated wage slaves and a stable work force. So why do corporations think destroying the unions is good for business? When the very people who support businesses are the ones who are getting thei...

One thing that might help the 99ers and our countries workers get back to work is to not cut wages to keep work here. The corporations and the right say cutting wages stimulates job creation. This is a lie. Soon the 99ers will have no money to buy anything. What we can do to make our corporations more competitive in the world is have single payer-national healthcare or at least right now expand Medicare coverage (lower the eligibility age). This would take the burden off the corporations that provide healthcare which would drop the employee cost. Germany has high labor costs, but it is doing very well in the global economy. It is the most successful social democracy in the world right now. It has a large trade surplus and one reason for this is it has a whole different type of corporations with workers making up one half of the board of directions, and the workers have privileged positions in the company and real power and responsibilities. The Germans also have government sponsor...