Union Perspectives

Unions are coming. The workers worldwide are rising up to fight for better wages, healthcare , pensions, union rights, housing and climate change. They are also tired of wars and the exorbitant cost of education. People the world over want a government that represents the 99 percent and not the 1 percent who just want more money to buy more power. This is a real class warfare and we, the people, will win with strong unions, which work and support all workers, unionized or not. At this time, we have the auto workers fighting over tier workers who work by another worker doing the same job but for a lower wage. This is done not only to save GM money, but also to cause division among the work force. The General Motors workers won because all the workers stayed together. Then the Black Jewel miners are still fighting for their wages. They will win if all with a message of solidarity, money, which can be sent to: With Love From Harlan P.O. Box 1621 Harlan, KY 40831. Checks should be payabl...

Reports are coming out of the government saying the economy is good, but tell that to the people who are working at Lowe’s, a retail giant company, which is scheduled to layoff thousands of workers from the assembly lines to janitors. Many of these employees have worked full time for the company for years putting together girls, wheelbarrows and other products. The company plans to outsource the assembly of products to the companies that pay lower wages and fewer if any benefits. Lowe’s is in competition with Home Depot to boost its profits off the backs of workers. The company has already closed 140 stores during the last year. The workers will not get severance pay instead they will get up to two weeks pay. The loss of jobs within the retail industry is just beginning. Some workers are being fired as 7,500 stores are closing this year. Many have depleted once thriving shopping malls. The rising dominance in retail sales of Amazon and Walmart turning to robotization instead of empl...

All workers need to have and study a book about labor history, what worked and what did not as written in the book “Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology” by Joyce L. Kornbluh. She outlines how workers fought for the right to unionize, and safe workplaces that the GOP are working overtime to erode. When I Was going to night school on the GI Bill, a person in my class, who was a human resource worker at Point Mugu Navy Base in Oxnard, CA, told me why the antiunion people were beating labor’s ass on most fronts in the work place was because the union-busting people studied labor history and used it against workers. They knew what worked and didn’t work and acted accordingly. Most labor people don’t know their labor history. If you don’t know yourself you will lose half of your fights. If you don’t know your enemy you will most likely lose all of your fights. In Kornbluh’s book, she shows how education of the workers during the 1800 and early 1900s on the tactics unions used, like direct ac...

When labor and unions are diminished, inequality goes up. Just look at South Korea. They are facing the same thing as the U.S. where the 1 percent are getting richer each day while what’s left of their middle class is growing poorer by the day. This is a very rich country that could be the poster child for how the capitalist system should work to the betterment of all, but instead greed has taken over and the wage slaves have had to go to the streets. At this time, South Korea is in the same fight as us with the need for a living wage, healthcare, pension, free education, the right to form a union, free assembly and free speech. The people, led by unions, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, are accusing the government of passing policies that weakens democracy, changes labor laws to benefit the corporations/wealthy and rewrites the country’s history to a conservative bent. Han Sang-gyun is calling for a general strike against "labor conditions that only fattens ca...

This could be the year of the Have Nots, Have Littles and even the Used to Haves. The year 2015 will have some good things moving for them, such as in many places the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage has or is being adopted and other wages hikes are being slow walked. Gas prices have put a little extra money in the pockets of U.S. wage slaves. Finally there is talk of free junior college education for everyone, even old people! There is healthcare for more people than ever before. There is a pushback against law enforcement brutality against blacks, poor and anyone recording them. And it looks like Anonymous has our backs. It also looks like workers the world over are talking to each other and supporting each other, like Hong Kong, Ukraine, France, UK, Turkey, Greece, Africa, Canada, Mexico and South America; but, we need to get ready for spring and the fight ahead. The wealthy are going to fight back with everything they have and they are experts in convincing the average person to...

The workers of the U.S. and the world are fighting, but steadily losing the fight. We now have no help from any type of government. The government and its elected officials are bought and paid for by Wall Street, Big Banks, corporations and the 1 percent. Neither party in the U.S. will now help the workers or unions. The unions are now seen as impotent in the eyes of the GOP and now a large part of the Democrats. With the loss of members comes the loss of money, which makes the unions irrelevant. At this time, the way things are going it is looking like the only thing left for the wage slaves of the U.S. and the rest of world is the streets with pitchforks. Art of War says you should never push your enemy into a corner with no option but to fight to the death. This is what is being done worldwide, in places like Ukraine, Hong Kong, Turkey, Greece, Mexico, South American countries and even in Canada. Maybe this is what the wage slaves needed to get motivated, to awake them to the fact t...

We need to get our shit together, and unless we are together we will continue to be stomped on by the 1 percent. One way to get our act together is organize our efforts to keep track of what the different organizations are doing, a clearing house of sorts. The workers of the world must expand and reinforce the war on inequality. The workers must carve out some of the cash that the oligarchies and corporations are hording. The wage slaves of the low wage jobs will have to force wage hikes by strikes, walkouts and withholding their labor. If you are making minimum wage, you probably can’t fill up a gas tank even at $3 a gallon, the average tank would be about $54—about a day’s work. So, minimum wage workers walkout will hurt the fast food, Walmart corporations’ executive officers more than you for you need the money, they worship money and they have to report to stockholders, which can get them fired. You just missed a day of work, or didn’t have work the day of the walkout, but their ...

When losing the war, the opposition takes advantage of the latest scare tactic, anything from ISIS to Ebola, to change the focus of the debate and hope the public will just fade away and lose interest. The media, if it weren’t owned by the same few corporations, would keep the focus on by labeling the topics as unfinished business, just like it is done on a business agenda for meetings. Agendas always separate the items by discussion and action items, and ends with unfinished business. Unfinished business can be tabled to the next meeting or the next day. At this time, the most feared movement, which puts terror in the hearts of the 1 percent, is the war on inequality. The 1 percent hopes the subject of inequality will lose its steam by forcing the public to focus on storms, killings, stock market, election polls, and anything else. So the wage slaves must always find a way to refocus the debate back to the fight for a minimum wage of $15 to $18 an hour. It’s like making a snowball ro...

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 ...

There is hope for the toilers and soon to be toilers recently a mother of a 12-year-old young lady asked how to find to my blog. Her concerns were that there is no honest history books about labor and how we how we have gotten to where we are today. They do not trust our school history books to tell the whole story. This is good for to understand history one must realize that history books at their best is just a person’s view of what happened at a given time and if you have a hundred people viewing at once you get a hundred different views. So, for any given event one must look at as many views as possibly to understand what has taken place and maybe not to do the same thing or if it had a good outcome, try it again. This is why knowing your history is so important and why we need to know it. Not knowing our history can work against us if we are blind when studying history. Maybe there will be a 12-year-old person who will use history and the lessons learned to do well for the 99 pe...