Union Perspectives

What would Mother Jones think or say about the states, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and Arkansas, that have changed the labor laws regarding children? Many other states are working to roll back child labor laws so children can work in meatpacking plants, auto factories, logging, construction sites and bars, which would leave children to open to be exploited or injured like in the days that Mother Jones fought most of her life to get children out of these dangerous jobs and into school. At this time, sixteen year olds can serve alcoholic drinks, fourteen year olds can work in meat packing factories and it’s all being pushed by corporations. The U.S. Department of Labor says there has been a 69 percent increase in companies illegally employing children since 2018. Some blame the child labor trend on the 3.5 percent unemployment rate and the lack of workers so naturally children should forego their futures for the sake of corporate greed and claim children can get valuable work experience and he...

What happened to our celebration of May Day? The celebration of workers’ pride. I know when I worked, we all wore our hard hats with union stickers indicating our locals. We never took them off when we went to get a drink or take a break or had lunch. It was a symbol of pride. I remember in school during the 1950s, we celebrated May Day, but from I’ve seen, it’s not celebrated or explained in school. Some teachers might have the young students make spring hats, but that has nothing to do with why May Day was established. May Day or Workers’ Day or International Workers’ Day is a celebration of the historic struggles gains made by workers. In the U.S., May Day became a day to celebrate workers/laborers in 1889 to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. Today, celebrating May Day is done all over the world except, apparently, here in the U.S. If seems as if workers are looked down upon with disdain, like losers for not working harder to become rich like others have achieved. ...

The professional sports teams’ unions could help their fans, by advocating on their behalf. It is the fans who pay for their very good wages through their purchasing power. Take baseball, they need fans who make enough money to afford the coast of tickets, parking and hot dogs at the stadiums. The Major League Baseball Professional Association should make sure that players aren’t forced to cross other unions’ picket lines as both the Yankees and Dodgers did last year at Boston hotels where workers were on strike. It would have been a significant gesture for a few Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox players to show up and join the hotel workers’ picket line. One way to avoid putting major league players in this embarrassing situation would be to insert language in their contracts that requires teams to stay in union hotels and prohibits therefrom staying in hotels where the workers are in the midst of labor disputes with management. Maybe if the players were given a little education on th...

Are towns with companies where most people work better off than towns with no companies? I have seen the towns with no large companies that lasted longer because they have to diversify and not depend on one or two places for people of the town to work. I came from Dresden, a little town in Ohio. It had a company at each end of the town. One was a woolen mill. The other was a paper mill. Dresden sat between two larger towns, about 15 miles apart. Slowly the two mills shut down, but then a new company came about as a result of a local man David “Popeye” Longaberger, who started the Longaberger basket company. It became a billion dollar company and most of the town’s people worked for this company or at other businesses owned by Longaberger. When Longaberger died, the company he started in a garage started to go downhill, especially after his daughter shifted manufacturing to China, destroying the uniqueness and brand of the baskets they made. Luckily, there were the two towns borderin...

President Obama has sold out unions’ pensions when he signed a must pass omnibus bill, which has the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014. The bill strikes down an enshrined American ideal that money earned for a pension can’t be pulled out from under our feet like a rug once we retire. That promise, once codified in law, was upended by the passage of this reform act. This act will effect some 400,000 participants by cutting benefits for some retirees now, some up to 60 percent. This is the central state pension funds, which is predicted to be insolvent in 10 years and this fund is the canary in the mineshaft as similar multiemployer pension funds are now at risk. If these funds go bust, mortgages won’t be paid, prescriptions won’t be filled, utility bills and groceries will be a regular hardship. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell hates unions so there will be no hope there, and Hillary Clinton is no fan of unions either. This just leaves Bernie Sanders and no one is ...

Wage slaves who have the illusion that their problems can be solved through electing reformist politicians must remember that the nature of capitalism is not to allow mass needs preference over corporate profits. Demands for services change in social conditions will be vigorously opposed by the ruling class—Koch brothers, Wall Street and all the others. The capitalist-designed electoral system is used to corrupt elected representatives of both parties. Even my hero President Franklin Roosevelt, who purported to assure labor the right to organize trade unions and to bargain collectively with bosses, but it was a hollow promise. In the practice he continued to use the deferral government as a strikebreaker agency, simply using subtler methods than previously used for such purposes. The year 1934 was a hard fought year for labor, but they won while even taking on the National Guard in Toledo, Ohio. May 1934, labor fought the Guard with bare fists and rocks in the 6,000 Auto-lite strike an...

How the nonunion, Rand Paul supportering groups and the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation and a newly former nonprofit, Protect My PayCheck, are working together to influence local governments at the city and county levels the same way it was done by state legislatures with Right to Work. Today in Kentucky, Fulton, Simpson and Warren counties, have voted to implement the Right to Work laws. This could be the way California workers could be beaten and see our unions destroyed. Supporters of the these worker-harmful laws say, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are next and that Protect My PayCheck is promising to pay for the legal battles of any local government that tries to implement this legislation. There are numerous counties in California that have bought into the "State of Jefferson" mentality thinking they could control their own local governments, but this short-sighted vision doesn't take into account how to fund their independence an...

Stand with Walmart workers this BLACK FRIDAY! All across the country the UFCW and Walmart employees are scheduling Black Friday protests to bring attention to the unfair and inhumane treatment Walmart workers receive from this company. Walmart rakes in more than $16 billion in annual profits yet the most of its workers earn less than $25,000 a year, forcing them to either work more jobs or to receive government assistance. The dream of a national strike or protest about wages and workers’ rights, like France and other countries do, has always been thought of as impossible here in the U.S. Now with large mass corporations like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, McDonalds, Taco Bell, and Burger King, which are all across the U.S., it’s now feasible to have a national protests on the Black Friday. So far this year at least 27 Walmarts across the U.S. are scheduled to have Black Friday protests and we can only hope there will be more at other corporations that are exposed for paying slave wag...

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...

Could the oligarchies buy a state as large as a country? California is the next battle ground between the corporate oligarchies and the wage slave proletariat. The 1% oligarchies went into the heart of where the government unions started: Wisconsin and won. So what would be the 1% GOP’s Holy Grail now? I think it is California If they can take out California and break the unions and the Democratic Party; they will pretty much have control of all the wage slaves. They will start breaking down our society and our social infrastructure, such as our schools in which only the top 1% or 3% will be able to afford to educate their family members. Then the gap will widen to include healthcare, pensions and of course wages where the only jobs will be like in the old days. The armed forces (oh wait, it is there already) the old days and the sad thing is most of California workers and retired people have not thought of this or do not think it could happen here. It has already been tried with the ...

It is time for retired workers to park their motor homes and dock their boats and hit the streets in support of other union workers and the 99%. Besides the support, it will be good physical exercise and give the participant a good feeling about their contributions to the cause. It might even be fun for the retirees, but for sure it would be pay back for us retirees who have healthcare and a good pension. I hope we have all been good union people, but I am pretty sure some of us have sinned and shopped at WalMart and not at our union stores! Most of us have not spent time in jail or been beaten up for being a union member trying to protect our jobs like our forefathers; but now our union brothers and sisters are getting framed on charges, such as the Longshore union in Longview, Wash., and the American Crystal sugar workers, who are locked out and cannot get unemployment. The sugar workers are trying to survive on $100 a week from the unions and their savings. They need food. And s...

Labor has few places where we can call attention to the needs of the workers. One of the places that unions do have control is the Longshoremen; they control the docks, the shipping out and the goods coming in from China or wherever. This is a very important high ground for labor for when being attacked, you want the high ground (Art of War). Is this why there is now dissension on the docks of Longview, WA. As I understand it, a new company took over the dock and brought in another so-called union to do the work. The Longshoremen’s union is fighting back very hard, in the tradition of the Wobblies, to keep their work. What and why did this happen? Is this a divide and conquer, antiunion, GOP-corporation-driven strategy? We do not need this at this time. If it is just union driven, our union leaders need to step in and resolve this conflict. If it is antiunion driven then labor needs to cut them off at their knees. The Wobblies would not have stood by and allowed this to happen. Do ...

The old cliche, “In all adversity there is a window of opportunity,” has never been more relevant than today. We are in a good position for the corporations and G.O.P. have shown their hands. Will we repeat the past and miss our opportunities again? You would think that if you were in a poker game and all the players’ showed their hands except for you that you could win if you stayed in the game; but history has shown that in the past labor has folded and left the game. Now, folding if your hand is not strong at the time is a good play sometimes, but to leave the game is not good poker if you know what their hands are every time. We know what their hands show for they have shown them in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, and many other states. This isn’t the first time unions became complacent and failed to see what was going on around them. One has only to look back in history at the missed opportunities. Examples of missed opportunities include, the AFL-CIO’s plan t...

Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” is a must read for all war colleges and large corporation executives, and there is no doubt that it would also be found in the GOP’s playbook; but it can also be in our playbook. For it states, if we know yourself (our labor history) we can win half of our battles, but if we know ourselves and our enemy (the GOP) we have a better chance to win all our battles. Just look at what the GOP union busting did recently. It went to Wisconsin and drove a knife into the very heart of the birthplace of the government employee unions. Now we have to counter. What we should do is pass card check in every state and then organize all the retail box stores, which buys most of their products from overseas. Corporations can move their factories overseas, but the corporations have to bring the products back to the U.S. to sell. Here is where we the workers can even it up. We must organize those corporations. We do have retail, department stores, restaurants, and grocery sto...