Jack interviews Labor Fightback Network representatives on their recent conference in Cleveland on the Alternative Visions Radio Show, and discusses recent grass roots worker-community movements and debates how to resurrect the US union movement.
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SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT
Host Jack Rasmus interviews guest members of the Labor Fightback Network and their recent conference held in Cleveland. The Network is an organization of local union activists, elected officers, and select union representatives attempting to return the US union movement to a tradition of independent political action, progressive economic demands like ‘Medicare for All/Single Payer’, and labor community alliances. Jack interviews Alan Benjamin, a member of the LFN steering committee, on the program of the organization. A lively discussion follows on the need to resurrect the labor movement in the US, now at a nadir, and restore it to the role it once had. Discussion ranged from new forms of independent political action occurring, movements for $15 minimum wage, single payer, efforts to draft Bernie Sanders as a candidate for a Peoples Party, the accelerating rise of membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, grass roots electoral efforts like the Richmond Alliance, and others. Rasmus argues union resurrection in US history were always associated with new organizational forms—from the Knights of Labor to the AFofL to the industrial union CIO—and today a new organizational form of struggle will be required once again, not just the traditional union structure that remains. Benjamin differs and sees a resurrection and lead by the union movement itself. Both agree new resistance from below, led by young workers, is beginning to occur. (For more information on the Labor Fightback Network and its program, go to the website, http://laborfightback.org.
(Next week’s August 18 Alternative Visions radio show will feature activists from inside Venezuela and a first hand report on what’s really happening there not available in the US mainstream media)
Dr. Jack Rasmus @drjackrasmus
Jack Rasmus 
TRADE AND SERVICE UNIONS
DEFINITION: A number of persons joining together for some common purpose.
TYPES OF UNIONS: Private and public
FACTS: Private and public unions negotiate with employers to obtain specific goals for those persons being represented.
Subjects for negotiations include wages, benefits, and working conditions.
If negotiations result in additional costs to an employer:
a. A private employer will absorbed those costs or will pass some or all to the customers.
b. A public employer will have its “rainy-day” funds reduced or will raise additional revenue from its taxpayers.
ANALYSIS:
a. If a private employer absorbs additional negotiated costs, margins will be affected, which will reduce taxable income, which will cause a reduction in the value of the employer’s business. If the employer passes on the additional costs to its customers, it would be inflationary and the customers would have less spendable funds for other expenditures, which may adversely affect the economics. In most instances of higher costs, those costs will be passed on to the customers.
b. If a public employer raises additional revenue from its taxpayers, the taxpayers will have less spendable funds and that may adversely affect the economics.
c. When a politician, economist, or anyone else calls for “high-paying” union jobs, they are implying that there be a shift of wealth from customers to the “high-paying” union jobs.
mz
mikiesmoky@aol.com
February 26, 2011