Union Perspectives

Worried about your future and that of your children? Get involved. The future is for the young and if the young don’t step up and take control, the future won’t be worth living. Young people in their 20s and 30s should be the people running for office in local boards, such as water, fire, utilities, school and city and county office. If they were elected to county board of supervisors or city councils, they appoint planning commissioners, which regulates economic, infrastructure and construction development within the limits of the county or city jurisdiction.  Young people who are in junior college should run for elementary through high school boards. I think they could bring a lot to the table on what is needed in education today. Even if they are not elected, they could attend the school board meetings and speak up, especially during election forums with their fresh ideas and experience. If they decide to run for office, they could ask for money on social media to fund their run fo...

The fight for $15 to $18 an hour and the eradication of wage and lifestyle inequality will need education, ideology and tactics. The duty of the militant minority is to promote class-consciousness and solidarity among the wage slaves fostering in them a revolutionary spirit to fight for what is their civil rights. This can be accomplished in two ways: education in theory and education in class warfare. In this way, the wage slaves will become conscious of their power as one, and will learn the class nature of the capitalist state, which will gain them greater insight into the nature of the class struggle. The old International Workers of the World (IWW) believed such an education as essential before the class war could be won. The IWW organized propaganda leagues and industrial education clubs for the purpose of education (think mobile phones today). We could send out brief messages, such as sit down and watch your pay go up, emancipation, educating, and organization. This should be th...

To save the world from itself there needs to be less greed, which would lessen wage and life inequality. Less greed would curtail climate change, which would save our farming land and farmers of the world. As the rains leave a region, the people leave the land and travel to cities and other countries looking for relief. This is what happened to a lot of the Syrian people. Then we need to expose and understand the ideology of radical religion and how it controls the masses and who benefits from it and why it works. When refugees have moved to another country, many times those refugees are segregated to a specific area and not given opportunities to assimilate by being hired for jobs or other ways to better their lives. The young people become discouraged and are more susceptible to the allure of fanatical groups, like Daesh, to feel like their lives matter. Unfortunately, these groups use these young idealists as fodder for their machine. Their lives are not valued by these groups any ...

Climate change is here in the name of a drought and heat, which has provided the tools for extreme fires. In California, fires have already cost many lives, injuries and hundreds of millions of dollars so far. The final tally is still to be determined. So far, in California six civilians and two firefighters have died, and many were injured. In the Lake County alone, 1,958 structures were lost, 93 damaged and 2,953 structures threatened, displacing almost 3,000 people without homes, and the fire season is not even over. Also, wildland fires are now worldwide so climate change does not only involve us, here in the U.S., but its impacting people worldwide, especially New Zealand, Spain, Indonesia and Singapore so far. We, in the U.S., have the most problem facing firefighters in what we call wild land-urban interface, which is homes built in or very close to the forests. At this time there are about 10 million homes built in fire-prone rural areas an addition to the 6 million built in 1...

The $15 for ’15 campaign is moving in the right direction, but we know most of the gains are being slow walked. A case in point is Walmart, which has made some movement and also some fast food corporations, but believe this—this movement is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it is because they are being hurt in their profit margins. The wage movement has come from workers’ protests and the loss of business due to the way businesses are treating their wage slaves. There is a long way to go to close the inequality gap. But the pro corporate people are gearing up with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council or A.L.E.C. The group has come up with a strategy to bolster the power of big business. GOP lawmakers plan to introduce an A.L.E.C.–backed bill that would ban Community Benefit Agreements or CBAs. CBAs are one of the few options local activists have to fight for higher wages or affordable housing. But A.L.E.C.‘s CBA ban, which specifically prohibits a local minimu...