Union Perspectives

Lose your democracy and you will lose your rights to have guns, free speech or even the right to assemble in a group. Most people are not paying attention to how precarious a situation our country is in right now thanks to the GOP, corporations using Donald Trump’s insatiable greed and disregard for the principles this country was founded upon. The U.S. has outlived our democracy by a long time. From the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli in the Prince, Machiavelli writes there are three types of government: principality, aristocracy and democracy. However, there are actually six types of government because principality can easily become tyranny; aristocracy can become an oligarchy with ease; and a democracy can turn into an anarchy with little effort. This is where we find ourselves today—on the edge. We’ve seen it Washington, D.C., recently when they wanted to kill our elected Congressional members and even Vice President Pence. So, what kind of government would these insurrectionists ...

If new states were ratified into the Union, it would mean additional senators and could make it easier to pass laws that really help the 99 percent, like single-payer healthcare, voter rights, labor laws, better union protections, and a living wage. This is the precise reason republicans do not want Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. added. Now is the time to add these new states as we have Senator Bernie Sanders and the Squad there pushing for necessary reforms on the people’s behalf. First on the list should be Washington, D.C., with a population of 5,322,000, which is larger than Vermont with 629,932 or Wyoming with 582,328, according to 2020 Census. So, why is D.C. not already a state? One argument against making it a state is that the Founding Fathers wanted it separate as the capital of the United States, and it was formed as a federal district by using land from both Maryland and Virginia in 1790. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since 1917 when Spain ceded the island to the ...

Unions must be smarter when they end their contracts in order to have more power at the table. The Holy Grail would be if all unions contacts ended at the same rate nationwide. To start this we would let the local labor councils like the one in Shasta County in far northern California, which has the Five Counties Council. This council includes represents the unions of school, water, fire districts and cities and counties. The plan would be to get all the labor unions within the different entities to have their contracts end on the same date or as close together as possible so the employees of cities, districts and county would have more power together than alone. County and cities usually divide up the departments and not all are under one union and this benefits the government agencies, not the employees. If the different unions negotiated to end the contracts at a predetermined date, the Five Counties Council could arrange a walkout if needed and the power would be back with the w...

In 1797, Thomas Paine wrote, “Every individual is born with legitimate claims on natural property or its equivalent.“ With all that is going on in Washington, D.C., that has all our attention, we should not forget what is really important to the 99 percent, which is the economic inequality. What we need to do to fix it is a new bill of right or sorts that would include, such things as universal basic income (UBI), minimum wage of $15 to $24 an hour, universal healthcare, free education, more unions, and to rebuild the wealth of the 99 percent. We need a housing plan like the old G.I.Bill, which paid G.I.s to go to school and made it easier to buy a house with very little costs upfront. We need to vote in people who will support this bill of rights for the 99 percent. We are never going to have enough jobs for everyone and even the jobs we have or will have will not pay enough to live on. Most jobs will be part time with no benefits and most people will have to work two to three jobs...

Just watch what is happening in France to understand what is going to happen in the U.S. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, sold himself as a radical democrat for the people, but he is governing like a monarchy. He has culled the ranks of local authorities, slashed local budgets, and replaced the housing tax that funds local government with a promise of a block grant. French history teaches that when a monarch oppresses the people, the people revolt. France’s mayors gathered for a congress in Paris last week. They bristled at being labeled spendthrifts and set themselves in opposition to Macron. They will find allies in workers’ unions and the media, since Macron hasn’t held press conference since his inauguration. This is just some of the things that are happening in the U.S. Our people were promised things by our new occupant of the White House is now acting like a monarch. A lot of the people who voted for him are starting to see just what they really voted for and it was not jo...

The dreams the old International Workers of the World (IWW) could very well come true because of the capitalist attacks against workers worldwide. At this time, the French workers’ unions are under attack by President Macron, who is out to destroy unions. Then there is the Spanish government’s all out efforts to prevent the referendum on Catalonia’s independence, but 2.3 million people braved law enforcement attacks and voted for independence. The fight was lead by dockworkers, firefighters, public workers and most of all labor groups. Then we have the Kurds, who are fighting for an independent Kurdistan. The Kurds are 30 million strong and have no country to call home. The Kurdish struggle shows that it is possible to stand up to oppression and win. Poland has been slipping into an authoritarian rule for the last two years as the country’s government is cracking down and restricting people’s human rights and ignoring the European Union’s insistence that the government refrain fr...

With the Trump election, we here in the U.S. must brace ourselves for privatization of our security and government services. Also, there will be a huge push in union busting activities and we will see more states pushing right-to-work laws, which will smash unions by reducing union dues. We are seeing this in Australia, Britain, Greece, and Israel. These trends are now driving violations of labor laws, which is responsible for underpaying workers, and now Israel has the highest poverty level among developed nations, and it has the highest level of inequality among children. Privatization is the fastest path to the bottom of the economic ladder. The model set by President Ronald Reagan and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who both followed the hardline economist and privatization nutcase Milton Friedman, who has been one of the ones who have widened the inequality gap here in the U.S. and the world over. With the Trump election, we will see privatization and wars on ster...

The world’s toilers have the same problems with work safety, like the Ukraine mine workers, Turkey’s mines and West Virginia’s mines. Then there are the oil refinery workers and the train workers hauling Bakken shale oil from the Canadian tar sand, which are wrecking at an alarming rate in the North American. So far in 2015 there have been eight so far in 2015 train wrecks, four in Oregon Illinois, West Virginia and two in Ontario. All these wrecks at a time when owners want to cut staff to one on the trains. This is just a fight to stay safe and alive on the jobs. Then we get to wage inequality and a living wage along with toiler’s rights in the work place like the West Coast dockworkers all 20,000 of them. The airport workers, who are making $8 to $10 an hour, should be making $15 just to make it. Also, Israel’s chemical workers walked out to block layoffs of about 840 workers—and the fight goes on and on. A meeting about the future of railroads’ safety, workers, community and the en...

In the fight for Ukraine’s sovereignty are we seeing the handprint of the U.S. oligarchies? Are the U.S. oligarchies pushing the Ukraine government to slash mining jobs by selling off or shutting down state owned mines, cutting social benefits and carrying out other austerity measures to shore up profits for the capitalists and meet loan conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund? Despite the fact that austerity has been proven time and again that it does not work. Once again, the toilers at the bottom are the ones to take the hit and the fight even carries over to the wage slaves in Russia where U.S. sanctions are squeezing food prices; meat and poultry prices have skyrocketed by 17 percent. It is just like all wars where the wage slaves are the ones who give their lives for the oligarchies of the world. This is where unions must be strong. It is the only hope for the families of the Ukrainian and Russian poor. These fights are worldwide, such as with the Kurds, Turkey, Gr...

We need to get our shit together, and unless we are together we will continue to be stomped on by the 1 percent. One way to get our act together is organize our efforts to keep track of what the different organizations are doing, a clearing house of sorts. The workers of the world must expand and reinforce the war on inequality. The workers must carve out some of the cash that the oligarchies and corporations are hording. The wage slaves of the low wage jobs will have to force wage hikes by strikes, walkouts and withholding their labor. If you are making minimum wage, you probably can’t fill up a gas tank even at $3 a gallon, the average tank would be about $54—about a day’s work. So, minimum wage workers walkout will hurt the fast food, Walmart corporations’ executive officers more than you for you need the money, they worship money and they have to report to stockholders, which can get them fired. You just missed a day of work, or didn’t have work the day of the walkout, but their ...

Organizers of unions must look at new ways to organize new members for nothing stays the same and trying to do and use the same methods that no longer work is the definition of insanity. Organizers have depended on the National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) laws to give workers the right to unionize and protect then, but using the NLRB as a fortress to protest will not work today. In any fortress there will sooner or later be destroyed either by being overrun or by just poking holes into it and making it no longer defensible without upgrades, like new, stronger laws. The NLRB is dying so organizers must change their tactics. The SEIU, between 1995 and 1999, unionized 74,000 home healthcare workers in Los Angeles. The labor movement will be in low wage employees working toward $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage plus benefits. The once powerful trade and industrial labor unions, which built the middle class, are no longer able to protect the interests of the American workers and this also is...

The stock market is close to a never before high of 17,000. Wall Street still will not support Main Street’s minimum wage increase, which should be even higher than the $15 to $18 than advocated and now some say should be more like $22 an hour if the minimum had kept up with inflation. Never the less, it is now been shown the need by workers and businesses that there has to be cash in the pockets of the spenders to save the capitalist consumer society. The Stock holders of large corporations should be the ones pushing their CEOs (chief executive officers) to raise the workers’ wages, especially when their wages are so high that they border on obscene. What is it with these CEO thinking they deserve such high compensation while others, the ones who do the work, are being paid chump change? Are these CEOs so greedy and heartless that they turn a blind’s eye to the suffering of others? Do they really think they are the only ones entitled to the good life? They don’t feel the pain the re...

In all wars the battles decide who wins so you must win the most battles and the most important ones and the battle to unite the working class against the divide and rule strategies of the capitalist class upon which their domination rest. It is a battle the wage slaves must win. If you don’t fight, you don’t win—period. If someone you know doesn’t understand why the minimum wage needs to raise, wait until the end of the month and then ask again. The cost of everything is going up; some of the costs are understandable, but some are not and corporations are using any excuse to raise prices, but not workers’ wages. How the hell are we supposed to survive> The employers try to turn workers who are black, female, gay, Mexican, or immigrant into scapegoats as distraction for the lack of good jobs creation along with the strategies the oligarchies blame Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act and the minimum wage, but the minimum wage raises are coming and the spending power of the toilers w...

Janet Yellen is the new Federal Reserve chair; the first woman to hold this position of the world’s largest economy. She has three major goals as head of the Fed that will help the working wage slaves, but with her 36 years of experience and knowledge of the monetary system she can pull it off. One is to get unemployment down from 7 percent to 5-4 percent, which is in contrast to her predecessor Allen Greenspan, who wanted to keep unemployment at 6 percent, which always favored the money over the workers. Yellen’s number two goal is to get the flat wages up to a living wage with some disposal cash. Her third goal is to get the housing market growing again, which will be a huge boost in jobs, building, and also in needed goods for housing construction, like lumber and appliances. For the workers to have a person in the top position of finance who understands the need of the workers has never happened before. With the push by fast food for $15 an hour, some states, federal government a...

To save capitalism as we know it today we must not get to the point where the world has an unconsumed surplus of products. What has kept this from happening so far is that we and others have been unloading the surplus on other countries, and to this we help develop the resources by shipping our jobs to these countries. We then extend this process to all countries on the planet until every country is producing every year and every day and an unconsumed surplus builds up, which corporations cannot dispose of in other countries. The reason for this is that corporations have raped and pillaged every country on earth of its cheap labor. Now you may ask, how do you dispose of the surpluses to keep the capitalist consumer system working? We’re already seeing signs that in the profits of some of the big box stores the profits are going down. One reason is that the ‘have nothings’ or ’have very little,’ the proletarians, have no purchasing power because of very low wages. Here in the USA, the s...

Why doesn’t President Obama have a labor secretary like Frances Perkins in his Cabinet? Perkins was the first female Cabinet member under President Franklin Roosevelt, and there has never been a better labor secretary since. If the Obama administration does not start working for labor, then why will labor work for them, the Democrats, then why should labor spend its money on federal elections? At this time the trend seems to be spending and working on carpeting the state legislation and government offices. This is working well for the GOP, and the labor people are seeing the results, which is detrimental to union labor. By working the states it can be more grassroots, which can more easily show our dues paying members results in their towns where the jobs are and could result in more union jobs and dues paying members. With this success then it could be transferred to the federal level of government. Frances Perkins understood what the working wage slaves needed, which was federal lab...

There can be no doubt that we, the 99%, are in a class war and the oligarchies are draining the treasury of the 99% and the unions, which a classic way to win a war (Art of War). When we, the 99%, have to defend our labor rights, voting rights with a court system that is slanted toward the corporations - Citizens United - (which only supports the 1%) then the oligarchies can, with unlimited money, buy lawmakers, governors, judges and presidents of the United States, which creates a plutocracy-type government. We are very close to a plutocracy government and getting closer with each election. The Koch brothers and Karl Rove’s GPS Crossroads are dedicated to this end. One of the things that can turn this around is the 99%, OWS movement, with the help from labor. Right now labor is working at a disadvantage because of some labor contracts that labor has entered into, such as no strikes, but they might just Wobble like in the old days of IWW movement or when a state or other entity votes...

We must be on guard against the GOP and corporate backers of the plutocracy way of government. Plutocracy is the governing by the ultra rich and corporations. For they have a very effective strategy for how to divide and conquer, as defined in the book “Art of War.” One way they are accomplishing this is to put Obama and the Democrats in a position where they will have to do something that will anger our base. Another way, for whatever reason, is to attack unions and the working class by going after our rights. Case in point, is when California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, veto the card check (Employment Free Choice Act) for the farm workers. The Democratic party at the local, state and federal levels have not done one thing for the unions or the working class for a long time. In order for unions or workers to hit the street in support of the Democratic party and donate money we will need to have something to show that the Democrats are supporting us. Without our support the r...