Union Perspectives

In a previous post I wrote about the GOP’s strategy to go the birth place of union activities and begin dismantling workers’ rights and protections. There is a war going on but unions and progressives aren't paying attention. We’ve seen how the GOP in Wisconsin dismantled public employees’ bargaining rights. Now the GOP is going into Maine, the birthplace of the oldest child labor laws, and seeking to weaken the law that protect children form exploitation. Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, wants all workers younger than 20 years of age to make less than minimum wage. He wants to increase the work week for teens from 20 hours to 24 a week and increase the work hours on a school night from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. The pay would be whatever the employer determined for the first 180 days of employment. After 180 days, the employer could conceivably fire the teen and hire new teens for 180 days again. The common thread is that these two states are birthplaces of the labor laws: public employ...

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...

Chamber owes us: In Jim Zauher’s business column, the Aril 3 Record Searchlight, he writes that business is an ally not a foe of the unions, and this is as it should be. However, Zauher missed an important point and that is: the business/customer relationship is not a one sided affair. Without the workers and customers to buy the product the business wouldn’t exist. If not for the people with money to spend where would the business be, especially in Shasta County and its cities: Redding, Anderson, and Shasta Lake City. Just about every business belongs to and pays dues for membership to the Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has historically been the largest foe of the unions and even nonunion working people, but especially union workers, which have good wages, pensions and health insurance (why haven’t we heard from the doctors who benefit from the union workers’ health insurances?). It just baffles me why businesses are not showing up at the Redding’s city hall and helping people ...

Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” is a must read for all war colleges and large corporation executives, and there is no doubt that it would also be found in the GOP’s playbook; but it can also be in our playbook. For it states, if we know yourself (our labor history) we can win half of our battles, but if we know ourselves and our enemy (the GOP) we have a better chance to win all our battles. Just look at what the GOP union busting did recently. It went to Wisconsin and drove a knife into the very heart of the birthplace of the government employee unions. Now we have to counter. What we should do is pass card check in every state and then organize all the retail box stores, which buys most of their products from overseas. Corporations can move their factories overseas, but the corporations have to bring the products back to the U.S. to sell. Here is where we the workers can even it up. We must organize those corporations. We do have retail, department stores, restaurants, and grocery sto...

Redding public union workers are under fire and so are other city workers in the state. Costa Mesa just laid off 213 city employees and outsourced 18 city services; among them firefighters. One city worker who received a pink slip jumped to his death from the civic center in Costa Mesa, Friday, March 18, 2011. This is one cost of outsourcing. Some people in Redding now want a charter city, which will give the city a way to get rid of union workers rights and Project Labor Agreements. This will also give the cities the way to stop paying prevailing wages, which was established under the Davis-Bacon Act (both of whom were Republicans). The relentless attacks on workers is not going to stop until we are all aware to what is happening and start fighting back. There are many peaceful ways to do this, such as the way we vote. We only have to look at the history of labor to see how our union forefathers and mothers gained the rights that are now under attack. In Record Searchlight’s Mar...

The worker pays taxes, many corporations don’t. In fact, some corporations benefitted greatly from the $700 billion government bailout, and most haven’t paid the money back nor any taxes. Not only did Bank of America received a $45 billion bailout, not paid one cent back, but its leader came out against organized labor -- the common working person. Yet, many workers still do business with B of A and trust it with their money.  Other giants that do not pay taxes are General Electric, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Boeing, and Exxon-Mobile -- Republicans recently refused to cut the subsidies paid to oil companies, which are seeing a huge profit, once again off the backs of the common worker. With political favoritism like this, we have met the enemy and it is the GOP - and some Democrats.  As individuals there isn’t much we can do to fight against the system, but as a united front we can bring about change. As soon as we heard about what Bank of America was doing against the working c...

Does the person who is president matter when it comes to the detriment of the average worker? Yes, it does matter. The president is the one who selects the candidates for the U.S. Supreme Court; and remember, the Supreme Court giveth and taketh away. Examples of this ‘give and take’ that have hurt the workers include:  The 2000 Supreme Court ruling that gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore The 2010 Supreme Court ruling that gave Citizens United aka corporations the same status as a person and that corporations could give unlimited political campaigns contributions without revealing the source. In 1959, the Supreme Court invoked the Taft-Hartley Act against steel workers.  In 1938, the Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes are illegal. In 1924, the Supreme Court ruled that child-labor laws were unconstitutional. In 1915, the Supreme Court upholds ‘yellow dog contracts,’ which forbids membership in Labor Unions. In 1905, the Supreme Court held that a maximum hours...