Slave Labor and Slave Wages

If the republicans have it their way then unions will be a thing of the past and we will be back to slave wages for the working poor and the middle class. Work environments will become dangers and in some cases life threatening just in order to cut cost of production. In many states right now labor union members are taking to the streets to protest the republican’s uses of a corporate created financial crisis to force unions to give up rights hard won by our fathers and grandfathers.

Our parents and grandparents gave up their safety and in some cases their very lives in order to secure a more perfect Union where workers had rights to a safe work environment and a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work. Now republicans would do away with those rights in order to balance state budgets on the backs of the workers while giving huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations who created the financial crisis in the first place.

Main street voters have now taken to main street avenues to protest for the freedoms and the rights won long ago. The republicans call union workers rich yet they are the ones receiving the tax benefits from corporations and the wealthiest voters in this country.

It has long been common knowledge that educators in this country are forced to take a pay cut in order to teach in the first place. Retirement benefits were the only saving grace that a teacher could look forward to after spending twenty to thirty years at a below industry wage. Now republicans are pointing out that industry employees do not have those same benefits yet they say nothing about the gap between what teachers are paid now and what people out in the industry are being paid who have the same level of education and the same number of years in a position. They don’t show graphs of the different between the amount earned over a working life time for teachers and people with the same level of education and work experience who work in the industry.

Voters need to ask themselves who created this mess and what is their reasoning for attacking the people who educate our children. Why are non-labor union employees in the U.S. industries forced to have no retirement benefits at the same time that large corporations are raking in millions of dollars in profits? Why are large corporations hording huge profits while employees go without jobs in this country? Are we really going to continue to allow republicans to destroy the American dream just to balance the current state budgets at the expense of the middle class and the working poor all the while the rich just keep getting richer?