Union Perspectives

For the universal basic income (UBI) to work it must be for all—the very poor to the very rich and those in-between. If the rich do not want the UBI, they can opt out and used elsewhere. If all received UBI, no group of people can be named or vilified for taking the money. The unions should want a UBI because if there were a UBI, unions could focus on work place safety, training, productivity, healthcare and pensions. The unions would no longer be vilified for wanting higher wages than the nonunion workers. The unions need to get behind the UBI as part of their strategy for the future and their survival. Union employees could possibly start their own business like I did when I received the GI Bill money to go to school. The GI Bill provided enough for me to go to school, buy groceries while working for a sheet metal union job during the day. The people who are going to fight against a UBI would like to divide workers, unemployed, rich, race, poor, gender, lifestyle, union and nonun...

The class divide is creating a class warfare that is pitting your children against the rich children, who will have more money, better healthcare, education, food, housing, entertainment, vacations and finding a rich, well-educated mate than their poorer cohorts. If the rich should run afoul of the law, they can hire the best attorneys and not have to rely on court appointed attorneys. HBO had a documentary by Marc Levin called “Class Divide” which looked at this phenomenon with the perfect example — 10th Avenue and 26th Street — which showed an elite school, called Avenues, on one side of the street, and on the other side was the public housing development, Chelsea-Elliot Houses, home to 2,500 people, most from the working poor. Now, the “Used to be Middle Class” children and their families are facing a similar situation as the government looks to cut funding to education, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, unemployment, disability insurance, government aide programs, geography and...

If the U.S. and the world over ever want to see a robust middle class again there must be jobs where a worker earns a living wage and has a full-time job of at least 30 to 40 hours a week, which should be counted as a full time and eligible for benefits. Workers who have to work two or three jobs just to survive does not a life make. One must keep in mind that a minimum wage raise to $15 to $18 an hour will mean nothing if there is no union or way to fight for hours for even at 30 hours at $15 an hour is only $450 weekly gross. Employers cut hours, creating “McJobs,” but they keep hiring new workers—why? The answer is they are giving themselves a larger part–time pool, who are trained this way and if the wage slaves try to unionize employers think they will have union busters on hand. Also, the flexibility, which started about twenty years ago still works somewhat for white-collar workers, but is curse for blue-collar workers without a union because now the employers own the workers 2...

What do the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the $15 to $16 an hour have in common? Some of things, I see, are the education of the young activists, who are discovering that their fight has been fought before, and will always have to be fought. The inequality of good wages and standard of living is now wider than in past years. The fight is never ending. It is like the country of Holland fighting the sea to keep it back. They can never rest, and the Dutch accept the fight as a way of life f or the alternative is the end of life as they know it. This is the mentality our young wage slaves must learn in order to survive in the employment world. The fight is a very long and never ending one. When we let up on this fight, we end up where we are today, fighting our way out of the gutters once again. The Occupy movement was just round one and a winner for the wage slaves because it gave people a confidence boost and education, which started a conversation on what is wrong with the USA and the ...

The labor movement had two important wins, which were largely responsible for the creation of the Middle Class. They were the organizations of the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers union and the government unions: state, federal, county and city. These wins mean that the workers now had good wages, healthcare and a pension when they retired. Now what happened? Did the state workers forget who was their enemy and then elected people who voted against them? The GOP and the federal workers, Post Office mostly, did the same thing—elected the wrong people. Whose fault is this; well mostly the workers and also their leaders for not educating their members. Now we workers have another chance at rebuilding our Middle Class by organizing Walmart, which is the new equivalent of the old Ford Company, and the fast food workers. The advantage the wage slaves have are the corporations can make the product out of the company, but the corporations must sell the product here and this ...

The corporate oligarchies’ plan is to turn the American worker into an uneducated, underclass, subsistent wage slaves, which will put the American Dream out of reach. Even at this time the Dream is a lie still being told to our young people today. The money hogs’ worship of profits has brought a plague upon our country, the environment, and our cities. While the oligarchies are doing this to us, the Wall Street speculators loot and pillage to the point we now know their plan and whether they know it or not it is a self-destructive plan. We will have to help them self-destruct for the oligarchies are working out of the old play book where they want to feed us 24-hour television and run up our credit card debt, work to pay off our loans and be grateful for the scrapes the corporations GOP toss us. That is their old short-term strategy, but we, the 99%, and unions have a grand strategy that is nonviolent shift in power by attacking the columns that hold up the power structure. Those colu...

Was Henry Ford smarter than the Walton family the Walmart owners? Henry Ford was ruthless in his opposition to unions and union contracts, hiring thugs called “Ford Service Workers,” who used any and all manner of force to keep out unions for years. But when Ford settled his first union contracts with the auto workers it was one of the best union contracts in the U.S. When reporters asked Ford why he settled and why at such a good wage, Ford told them he wanted his workers to be able to afford to buy his cars. This kind of thinking is what made the Middle Class; but the Walmart people do not see what Henry Ford saw: the workers as customers. Walmart sees workers as cheap labor. Underpaid labor does not buy TVs, and other luxury items. They just barely can buy their necessities. Could this be the reason Walmart started selling food? The low wages Walmart pays and the enticements for workers to spend their meager earnings is akin to the days when companies owned the houses and stores whe...

People hit the streets in New York’s financial district, Wall Street, and it’s about time the labor unions joined in. It will take all of us to win this “class warfare.” Whether they, the protesters, know it or not they are showing the old Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World or IWW) Spirit. In their passion and their organization skills. The occupation of a financial district is only beginning for it is going to spread across the country. This is our American Autumn, the same as the Arab Spring in the Middle East protests; and yes, it is class warfare and we should not be manipulated by the GOP and corporations into saying that it is not class warfare. The GOP and corporations are afraid that if we realize and understand what is going on then we will have an American Autumn, and start taking back our rights and start rebuilding our middle class by pulling the poor from the muck the GOP and corporations have pushed them into. I don’t know if our young organizers have studied th...

Saturday, August 6th, 2011 Friends, From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated. Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "I...

One of the great things about our judicial system is that if you are right or wrong anyone with enough money can get heard at the final stop in the court system. The U.S. Supreme Court and, this is good except when our unbiased Supreme Court is not unbiased, such as it is now. For now the injustices that are being imposed upon our citizens, women’s rights and union workers do not dare go to court for fear their case may end up in the Supreme Court with a final decision that is ruled against women’s and union rights. We must get the Supreme Court back to an unbiased court. How do we do this? Keep a friendly president in office with a congress and senate that backs the president. In the meantime we will not have the legal process to help us so we will just have to work on winning the public’s opinion with the truth and the consequences of the GOP against the middle class and retired people. Remember the Supreme Court giveth and Supreme Court taketh away. And then consider ... Why...