Union Perspectives

Labor needs to back causes that the middle class and the Have Nots’ need to better their lives, like minimum wage of $15 an hour, free healthcare and college, right to form a union and a healthy world to live in. Unions also need to stand up with the students who want safe schools to go to. Let’s not make the same mistake labor made during the Vietnam war. Labor sided with the war and against the protesters, who were also mostly young people, and some unions members even participated in beating these protestors. This was a shameful day for labor. This time we need to get it right. These young people are our new leaders and will soon be able to vote. So far, these young people look like fighters, which is what unions need—voters and new blood, who know how to fight for their rights and what is fair. Labor missed its chance when Occupy Wall Street was protesting. Now we have March for Our Lives. Let’s not let this chance slip by. This is ready made for labor’s support. Unions are a...

You cannot use the gross domestic product (GDP) as a barometer of how a country is doing as a whole, and the well being of the people. The GDP deals in averages and aggregates. Aggregates hide the nuances of inequality, which is one of its prime faults. The GDP looks at the stock market and unemployment to gauge what is good or bad, but unemployment, which is currently at 4.1 percent is not a true number as many people are working at gig jobs and being paid in cash just to survive while hoping for a full-time job with healthcare and a pension, which by today’s standards are a pipe dream. Ten years ago, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy wrote that the gap between reported well-being and people’s lives experience was creating a gulf of incomprehension between the expert certain his knowledge and the citizen whose experience of life is completely out of sync with the story told by data of the GDP. The gulf, Sarkozy put into words, summarizes the anger that is currently tearing so ...