Union Perspectives

In California there is hope for the $15 an hour minimum wage because we are seeing two unions fight for this new amount for minimum wage. One is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and it wants $15 by 2020. The other union is United Health Care Workers West wants to raise the wage by $1 an hour every year until it hits $15 an hour by 2021 and the SEIU’s state council is prepared to spend $20 million to $30 million on the campaign. This all sound good and productive, but why would these unions invest so much money to start such a low amount for the minimum wage? This slow walking of the minimum wage will do nothing more than bump workers off the assistance programs that allows them to work and eat or seek medical care without going broke? The Teamsters have a word for unions that cater to corporations’ interest and it is “business unionist.” The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, had it kept up minimum wage would be about $24 an hour, so these low increases will...

Will the framed Quebec, Canadian rail workers be Canada’s Haymarket Martyrs? At this time the Canadians government rail bosses are responsible for the 2013 derailment that killed 47 people, but the rail bosses are tying to throw the workers under the train. The workers are controller Richard Labrie, company manager Jean DeMeitre, and train engineer Thomas Harding, who all face charges as the bosses try to shift blame unto the these workers. Harding and Labrie are both Local 1976 Unite Steelworkers union members. They each face 47 counts of criminal negligence causing the 47 deaths. Conviction could result in life imprisonment. Minor former company official DeMaitre faces the same charges. This is to divert attention from the federal court in Quebec, they have approved the rail company to run trains with a crew of one. For safety reasons, there should be a four-person crew. Also, the rail companies have refused to replaced rusted out culverts under the tracks--as a cost saving measu...

A little known fight, which could endanger the lives of thousands and even entire cities, is being led by S.M.A.R.T. (the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation workers) representing 44,000 workers. The fight is in regards to trains running with just one person. Now just think of a massive, two-mile long train loaded with tar sands or other corrosive chemicals running through your town with only one person at the helm. What if that person had a heart attack, got injured or fell asleep? Trains used to run with a crew of five in the 1970s. Now it is just with a two-member crew, which is unsafe when you look at the derailments and explosions we’ve been having; in one 47 people were killed and most of the town Lac-Megantic, Quebec was destroyed after government officials had granted the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway a special dispensation to run with a one-man crew to save costs. This is an example of irresponsible greed at the expense of lives of th...

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...