Union Perspectives

Then the rulers and bosses seek to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the Have Nots and working class whose labor is or was the source of their wealth. The capitalist governances in Europe are united only in their determination to make working people bear the brunt of their greed. Within the European Union, which includes the 19 member Eurozone, the capitalist in each country plus the U.S. go after the wages and living conditions of the working people within their borders and the anti-union ruling class of the larger powers seeks to reinforce their domination and deepen the exploitation of the toilers, such as removal of obstacles to laying-off workers, weakening unions, and their collective bargaining rights. Then when the power of the people is gone the banks can then force the countries and cities to sell or privatize their assets, such as Athens, Greece, which must privatize its some 55 billion in government assets. This is what is now happening in some U.S. cities. The prolet...

We, proletarians, are now trying to fight the second Gilded Age. The workers have lost the muscle and drive to confront a system run by and for the very rich 1 percent and the people who should be sided with the Have Nots and labor has been brainwashed into believing that they should be supporting the corporate domination of the economy and against Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps even though most of the proletarians are receiving or will be receiving Social Security, Medicare and food stamps. Do people get dumber with age instead of getting smarter? Or is it the corporate media like Fox brainwashing these people who are recipients of some type of pension from a government or union and they don’t understand that they have been suckered by the likes of the Koch brothers. Then there are the veterans, who buy into the same kind of crap by listening to radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, who are broadcast overseas to our troops, but not the progres...

Minimum wage should be called a living wage. Some employers say $15 an hour is too high and that people won’t buy their goods if they have to pay their workers $15 an hour minimum wage. If this is true then maybe this is a business that should not have employees and maybe that business should just be an owner-based company and no employees. I’m sure the owners would soon figure out a way to not have to work and figure out how to pay someone to do the work for $15 an hour and still make a profit, just a little less than the large amounts made by screwing the workers over. Businesses always find ways to stay in business when fuel and increase costs in goods needed for production, but it is just the wages that seems to put them out of business. It is like President Roosevelt said if a business can only afford to pay starvation wages they should not be in business. I think the $15 an hour minimum wage Genie is out of the bottle ad there is no stopping the movement unless the workers becom...

The new attack on unions is Verizon’s move to cut pensions and healthcare, which Verizon says it needs to do to keep up with its competitors. If it wins, its cuts will be a death spiral to the bottom for union workers. There are two ways for unions to win: one is to stand fast; the other is to put pressure on the nonunion competitors or a combination of both. Workers must know that these attacks on them come from the GOP’s call for austerity and that ideology imported from Europe, mainly Angela Merkle’s Germany, and big banks, which is being forced upon countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. These banks and corporations would very much like to import austerity here into the U.S. to break unions. This is or should be the tipping point for workers to go on the offensive instead of always playing the defensive game. A good offense will always defeat a defense. And at this time it looks like workers and labor unions have retreated to large cities and abandoned the rural count...

Has labor forgotten the past or has it just been sleeping or both? For what is happening today had already happened in the years between 1919-1929. Overproduction in general, as a matter of fact, was one of the largest micro organizations whose poisons were set free by the economic crash of 1929. We prided ourselves on being the most productive nation on the planet. More and better goods were produced at greater speed and efficiency during the 1920s than at any time in our history. This was a good thing only if the producers could sell what they made or grew, and during the ‘20s they could not. They could not sell enough at home, wages were low and falling because of the loss of union power and membership so workers could not afford to buy the very goods they were producing. The triumph of the industrial Republicanism after the end of World War I had nearly killed the labor movement. But, after World War II, with the help of the New Deal and some new labor laws, labor fought back and ...

The fast food and restaurant industry today is as bad in working conditions as what author Upton Sinclair wrote in “The Jungle,” a 1906 classic about the meatpacking industry. The fast food and restaurant industry is the 21st century's version of "The Jungle"—a sweatshop where workers are enduring horrible health and safety conditions with no paid sick leave and no healthcare. Workers work sick with ailments like cuts, burns, flu, pinkeye and H1N1—do you think these maladies miraculously stay out of your food? It’s not the workers fault; it’s the owners for putting greed above your health. This is not good for the wage slaves nor their families and not to the healthy customers putting their trust in the food they receive. Owners expect customers to tip to compensate for the low wages. Tipping dates back to slavery and originated in Europe. When tipping was brought to America in the late 1800s to 1900s, the Americans at that time rejected the practice as undemocratic and...

One only has to look at Europe to see what is in store for the proletariats in the U.S. Look at the similarities of the proletariats of Europe and here. The GOP wants to eliminate minimum wage completely along with labor unions while cutting funding for all social programs. Also, in Europe there are countries like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain that are now being black mailed by an international group of corporate chief executive officers who are not even elected and they are not accountable to anyone except to the banks and their own interests. The people in these countries now have no rights or hope for a better life or even a job. When this is done then these people have no country. They’re just living in a place with no rights or future. If the capitalist system of the world hopes to exist the oligarchies must change their money making ways and invest in jobs and quit using their money in loans or getting rich off the interest, paying no taxes and making poor people wo...