Union Perspectives

A common practice by corporate greed is to have the minimum wage worker help pay for the bonuses a lot of corporation executives receive, unknown by the common man or woman. It is called the dead peasant life insurance policies, which a lot of companies take out on their employees without the employees knowing they do this. So a minimum wage employee making $15 thousand to $18 thousand a year would be worth $1 million to the corporation if they die. Walmart is famous for this. Is the corporation you work for doing this? It would be good if the wage slaves made $15 to $16 an hour as a minimum wage so they could buy life insurance for their families. This is just one more reason that the wage slaves must take back their commons and workplace and until we do this, this is the way we will be treated—just like slaves—worth more dead than alive. So now you can see why the large corporations do not want health insurance or Obamacare. The prerequisite for an ideology is the possession of a ...

The strike or temporary walkout: why workers fear doing it and how to alleviate their fear. One way to picket a fast food or any low wage place is to recruit people from like-minded businesses. This way it is hard for owners to retaliate against workers asking for a $15 an hour minimum wage. So, workers at Burger King can picket a McDonald, and then the workers of McDonalds picket at Burger King. Another thing is to find out what other organizations would support increasing minimum wage to a $15 an hour and trade off might be just the exposure of their membership, such as faith-based work centers. You can leverage your manpower to help each other to see that there is no retaliation. This is not a new strategy. These are time-tested tactics used by the Knights of Labor in the 1880 and the International Workers of the World. The tactics were used to gain freedom of assembly and speech. These tactics will get around the outlawing of solidarity of workers that the National Labor Relations...

Most all labor laws that were passed to enhance labor are now a deterrent to labor, such as the National Labor Relations Act, National Labor Relations Board, no strike contracts, successorship laws, and arbitration. These were the laws that were supposed to help labor, which have now been gutted. Then there were the anti-labor laws and amendments, such as Taft-Hartley Act, which labor referred to the Slave Labor Act, and MacKay Doctrine (MacKay Radio Decision),. Most all labor laws passed for labor or against labor was about the worker being able to strike. In 1947, 230 bills were introduced in Congress and state legislatures all to gut labor and to curb union power. Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 prohibited hot cargo agreements, where union workers would not handle nonunion goods for solidarity strikes, which benefitted industry-wide strikes, which far exceed a strike on just one company. The law unions’ fear most is the provision that authorizes law suits against un...

If the USA is a consumer economy, then there must be good wages paid to the consumers to drive the economy. The business community thinks they have the right to pay anything they wants in wages, but what they don’t want to consider is that their businesses is not totally theirs if in order to conduct their business they use the commons (e.g. roads), which is paid for by all the U.S. people who actually pay their taxes or at least subsidized by the people like the railroads and post office, law enforcement, schools, bank regulators, Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration, to name a few. Without most of these things there would be no way to have or conduct a business. The taxes to support our schools that train the workers in math and English the companies then hire. Without good wages as the base pay it must be very solid or the consumer economy will crumble and with it the whole system. The more we make the more we spend and the more we must produce, which is...

The leaderless world revolution and the armies are all around us just waiting for a trigger or tipping point to march and they are all leaders so how are they controlled? It looks, to me, like they have taken a look at history and have written a play book that has taken old tactics that worked and came up with new ones and with that they have added and use our new technology. What we are seeing is it is very hard to kill the snake when you cannot find its head. Brazil is a good example of a tipping point, upping the cost of public transportation that millions of low wage workers would have to pay and then humiliating one person by pepper spraying her in the face for no reason other than they think they can and get away with it. I wonder what the cops were thinking when they were pushed into the ocean up to their waists—power to the people. This is just the start of the Have All against the Have Some and Have Nots. For us, wage slaves, have a right to have a say and a right to an equa...

Lady Justice is supposed to be blind. So all law abiding people have an even chance for justice and if usually starts with judges of the court, which should not be obliged to anyone other than Lady Justice and the money to elect judges should be public money not corporation money from oligarchies bent on controlling the country. When the moneyed 1 percent starts funding the election of our judges then Lady Justice will no longer be blind and she will see the large piles of money to be made or put toward elections. The 99 percent wage slaves are in for a losing fight for their share of the economic pie. The oligarchies can just buy the whole damn pie by electing the judges, who will uphold the claims of the 1 percent every time and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) will keep helping the state governors pass laws, which will be upheld by the 1percents’ judges. If this is what is happening, it will only leave the wage slaves and the ‘have nothings’ with only one way to fight an...

It is past time for all unions and want-to-be unions to quit shooting each other in the foot. All we have to do is look back in history and see what we did wrong and what our leaders at that time did some of which still haunt us to this day. For example, one of the leaders was George Meany, head of the AFL/CIO at the time, gained control over the unions. Looking back we should have embraced Walter Reuther of the UAW. Reuther saw that we had to bring all wage slaves up to a living standard whether or not they were unionized, and we workers had a good chance with Eugene McCarthy when he ran for president. McCarthy was pro union, more than any other candidate except for maybe Roosevelt. But the unions decided to support the GOP. How did this work out for us? Hell, we even had labor unions vote for Ronald Reagan and then Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union's contract even after they voted and spent money on his election. Still the unions have not learned for the postal work...