Union Perspectives

This is the best time in the last fifty years for the union people to get better contracts and for the nonunion workers to get their first union contracts. The stars have alined in the workers’ favor with unemployment at its lowest and lots of jobs not being filled. There are lots of jobs not being filled. There are lots of low-end jobs out there ready to be filled so now is the time for the $15 to $24 hour wage to be established. If employees don’t receive this then they should strike like the food workers—essential workers—at Ralph’s, Albertsons, Vons, and Pavilions. The owners offered employees a 60 cent per hour increase. The workers want $5 per hour. This walk out would be grocery clerks, meat cutters, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. They are represented by seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union with 47,000 workers in all. Albertsons owns Safeway, which became unionized beginning in 1935. Despite Albertsons making better-than-expected qua

The strikes for $15 to $18 an hour are mere incidents in the class warfare. The strikes are tests of strength, periodic drills in the course of which the workers train themselves for concerted action. This training is most necessary to prepare the wage slaves for the final catastrophe, the general strike, which will complete the expropriation of the employers. The violence of a strike is simply the folding of the workers’ arms or putting your hands in your pockets. This philosophy was eloquently voiced by International Workers of the World organizer Joseph Ettor. If the workers of the world want to win all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property or money possessed by the capitalists and oligarchies. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put their hands in the pockets of the worker