Union Perspectives

It’s time for labor to go for something very big in the U.S., which always seems to lag behind other countries when it comes to workers. Labor is on a very big winning streak and it’s just like the snowball rolling down a hill. The farther it rolls down the hill the bigger and more powerful it becomes. But if it stops, it will just melt away. The union snowball today is still rolling and getting bigger so let’s go for the four-day work week. The four-day work week gives workers more time with their families, enabling them to do more together, which could, conceivably, improve marriages and reduce juvenile delinquency rates. This work week could be a huge lift to the lifestyle of all workers and their families and the social infrastructure of their communities. There are so many unrecognized benefits to a schedule like this. Benefits and pay would remain the same as a five-day work week. The workers would have more time to participate in their children’s activities, volunteer to be a f

How did we get here and where are we headed? To understand this, one must go back to the year of 1651 to provide an account of political development of Europe and North America. A historian, Samuel Finer, left behind the history of government from the earliest times in a 1,701 page book, which went through the Liberal Revolution of the late 198th and 19th centuries that replaced the Patronage system with Meritocratic and a smaller government. Then the Fabian Revolution in the early 20th century created the modern welfare state. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan changed this government style to market/corporate-oriented governance. Each revolution tried to answer a basic question: what is a state for? Regarding liberty, in 1859 John Stuart Mill argued that the state was to prevent people from doing harm to others, which did some good, but as he grew older he became troubled by some profound questions. The questions mainly had to do with the persistence of poverty. Mill then wrote Mil