Union Perspectives

Where have all the jobs that pay a living wage gone? We know that greed has sent a lot of jobs to countries that accept cheap wages for their workers and to the non-union southern states. Now we are seeing robots changing the employment landscape and eliminating jobs in factories. Even with all this, there were still the brick and mortar jobs selling the cheaply made products from overseas. Now these jobs are going by the wayside with Amazon and Walmart companies investing in E-commerce. This has started a retail apocalypse on thousands of mall-based stores shutting down. JC Penney’s 138 stores, Sears 150 stores, Kmart 3,500 stores. Then the Kroger company, the largest grocery store chain, sales plummeted 25 percent erasing more than $7 billion in value. These jobs will go to $7.25 an hour minimum wage and workers will be hired by Amazon for warehouse jobs. These jobs are in a cutthroat competition and is based on keeping out unions at all costs. What these workers at Walmart and Ama...

How income inequality could be stopped. On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his famously productive Model T assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan $5 per eight hour day. That amount was almost three times the amount typical factory employees earned at the time. In light of the audacious move, some lauded Ford as a friend of the workers, others called him a madman or a socialist or both. It’s not difficult to imagine which group said favorable things about Ford and which didn’t. The Wall Street Journal called his action an economic crime. Ford thought it a cunning business move, and history proved him right. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to pay $575 for a Model T. Ford was neither a madman nor a socialist, but a very smart capitalist who profits more than doubled from $25 million in 1914 to $57 million in just two years. Now just think if the Walmart Waltons would raise the wages three times higher like Ford ...