SHIFTING WEALTH TO THE TOP The rising tide of wealth in the U.S. does not lift all boats. Far from it, the bottom 80% of income earners have lost ground while the top 1% have made trillions of dollars of new wealth. Even though the dot-com bubble burst, and there have been various Wall Street scandals which have dried up a few of the insider wealth streams to the investor class, the rich who got much much richer have retained most of that wealth while the working class and the poor have lost ground. The Republican Party has declared war on working people and the poor, and their effort to Shrink government to just a few institutions to benefit the investor class, and Shift the tax burden onto the working class, and Shaft anyone who needs government assistance of any kind is destroying our democracy and turning the United States into a two-tier society.

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BUSH UNEMPLOYMENT: UP UP AND AWAY?
from AFL-CIO/WAI data

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BUSH ADMINISTRATION: ALL LIES ALL THE TIME The George W. Bush administration has used non-stop Orwellian doublespeak in calling black white and up down as they pursue their chosen policies of tax-cuts for the rich and monstrous deficit-spending to shift wealth even more to the investor class, radically shrink the size of government general welfare programs, and pass on largess to chosen and politically-connected industries and defense-related contractors such as Halliburton. The people should make no mistake, the Bush administration has not blundered into turning a huge surplus left by former president Clinton into a vast chasm of debt in just over 2 years (and it is only partially a consequence of the "war on terror") ... it was done by design folks. The right-wing ideologues who hold sway over most Bush policies seek to severely cut the size of government by creating a fiscal disaster since they know the people don't support it and they can never get the votes to do it in Congress.

BORDERLESS CORPORATIONS It is time to create opportunity and secure rewards for American working people - the most productive in the world. Corporate profits have been at record levels for decades, yet rewards earned were not given. American corporations have become trans-national and the game is now avoiding U.S. taxes by moving money offshore and pitting workers of the world against one another to drive down overall wages and benefits in the Western world. The rich, now in many ways a borderless corporate class, have declared class-warfare on working people and the poor as they line their pockets with ever more money.

TIME-SHAVING Is your employer stealing from you? Work an 8-hour day but only get paid for 7 1/2 hours or even less? A nefarious new pattern of business owners (and managers under their direction) deleting time worked from employees' time records has emerged (and alteration of employee time records violates the law). Your paycheck may not be right. It is called time-shaving, and businesses seek to save on payroll costs and improve profitability by taking money you've earned. WalMart, America's largest employer has been caught doing this again and again.
Find Out More, search the web for "WalMart workers" and "Taco Bell workers settlement"
... and read my own story at Splichal Labor Crimes

WORK=FAIR MISSION STATEMENT The corporatocracy and the rich, along with their agents the Republican Party, have been waging class warfare on working people and the poor. this is not hyperbole, and it's time it stopped. But people like you need to get angry about it and DO something about it.

Less than 14% of workers in the U.S. today are union members. During the 1950's, when America's middle class was really formed and grew, union membership was over 30%. Corporate tax rates during that time topped out at about 40%, yet that era's economic expansion was the greatest until that of the 1990's. Corporate tax rates now top out at about 13%, when crafty corporate attorneys can't knock that even lower. A New Labor Agenda is needed to revive the union movement and bring focus to the needs of workers as well as articulate the relevance of unions in the modern 21st Century global economy.

As distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston points out in his new [2/04] book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else the rich have the resources to get the tax code changed to benefit them, and boy have they. Working people must band together with clear focus and with a clear agenda, which the WORK=FAIR campaign provides, to compel revision of the tax code to a progressive system which spreads the burdens fairly.

Further, unions need to evolve into service institutions which appeal to a broader spectrum of workers. WORK=FAIR seeks to provide a vision, a framework, a philosophical foundation - an entry point - for unions in American workers lives, and as a guiding vision for workers of the world. A strong union movement is needed as a healthy check against corporate and investor class greed as well as employer abuse. A grassroots campaign, WORK=FAIR seeks to shape the national political debate on worker issues by introducing the proper political rhetoric into public discourse on labor issues, and to seek the creation of pro-worker policies in the private sector and pro-worker legislation by the government. WORK=FAIR seeks to re-establish the principle of a hard day's work earning a fair day's wage, fully reflecting America's core values of freedom and fairness.

Flat tax systems are regressive and benefit the rich at the expense of the working class and poor and are FLAT WRONG and we must remember that top tax rates for individuals during the Kennedy administration were 91% and that didn't seem to stop economic growth or wealth creation then, when wage gains closely matched productivity gains and workers formed the Middle Class.

THE DEBT TAX The massive deficits Republicans seem to like to run up year after year, which add to our multi-trillion dollar national debt, are due partly to the continual tax cuts Republican presidents give to their favored class of the investors ... but all this debt puts real burdens upon regular folks ... in the form of a debt tax. Here is a link to an article on the subject by Byron Auguste and Mark Strama: The Biggest Tax is Debt. The article begins: "IN RECENT YEARS, much has been made over the repeal of the estate tax -- or 'death tax.' Much less attention has been paid to a far more pernicious tax -- the 'debt tax' -- which is bigger than the estate tax, capital gains tax, and so-called 'marriage tax' combined..." the article continues, "American taxpayers paid $332.5 billion in interest last year on the national debt. This huge payment, equal to 11 percent of the total federal budget, does not improve education, enhance homeland security, or rebuild Iraq. It merely services the $6.6 trillion (and growing) national debt. These interest payments are a "debt tax" -- a tax that drains income without producing any material benefits for taxpayers. Today's average American household pays an astounding $3,153 in taxes annually just to service the debt -- about enough to lease a car for a year."

OLD GUARD LABOR IS OUT OF IDEAS James Hoffa is content to sell out American workers by signing on to the phony Bush energy program and support raping the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for 2000 Teamster jobs and his moment on the White House driveway all by himself when developing renewables and hydrogen could employ potentially millions. AFL-CIO's John Sweeney, to his credit, has reviewed WORK=FAIR (in '98, through his environment assistant Jane Perkins) but not yet adopted it's New Labor Agenda nor known what to do with it. Big Labor is TIRED LABOR and these old guys run institutions which are largely self-serving and focused on organizing low-skill segments of the workforce so they can manipulate ethnic votes for the Democrats while the need to organize information workers, highly stressed healthcare workers and other white collar workers goes undone.

A NEW LABOR AGENDA Part of the reason the U.S. labor movement finds itself at a such a low ebb historically is its seeming inability to project dynamic new ideas and strategies - to seem relevant to modern hi-tech and service sector workers. Thus a specific set of goals is needed to bring focus to the labor movement and to energize workers in the United States and around the world. Further, the tough-guy, mobster image of unions is a turn-off for today's service workers - it is looked upon as ridiculous.

THE CORPORATE THREAT: WTO, NAFTA, GATT
FREE TRADE ONIONS SICKEN HUNDREDS IN THE U.S.
The so-called global economy has changed the way the world does business, particularly with the development of information technologies which have changed communication, production, and inventory methods and strategies; delivery systems, methods, and timetables; management strategies and techniques; and increased the relentless urge for profitability by corporate giants which dictate most of these changes and manipulate legislative bodies into writing laws which favor their desires since mega-corporations X,Y and Z have the money to have people in front of the tax-writing committees of every state legislature and the US Congress 24/7.

Workers are the primary victims of the greed driving this evolving global economy, with trans-national corporate entities pitting workers from one country against another to drive down overall labor costs: reducing job security, wages, and social welfare benefits in much of the industrialized West - as they move money offshore to avoid US taxation. The global institutions and agreements set up by the corporatocracy, the World Trade Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (in addition to earlier organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) seek to ensure systems of capital movement that benefit the wealthy elites and undermine individual nations' laws. In the U.S. our food safety, environment, road safety, commerce and labor laws are directly under assault from WTO, GATT, and NAFTA. Thus U.S. workers must use the same information technology to stand their ground against corporate influence eroding their standard of living and making their jobs less secure. Workers of the world must unite in a global strategy to restore the American concept of a hard day's work deserving a fair day's wage - and America must lead the way.

WORK=FAIR IS YOU Created by a worker for workers, WORK=FAIR has had the interest of national political leaders in the Clinton White House (since 1995!) and national union leaders such as John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO - who don't know what to do with it. Corporate influence on the political process (candidates need corporate money to fund their ads and other campaign expenses), ossified thinking, and a failure to truly understand the nature of worker discontent by national political and labor leaders means it is up to working people to make the goals of WORK=FAIR a reality by pressuring union and other labor leaders and thinkers. Modern Labor needs and introductory step to introduce workers to unionism. WORK=FAIR is the informational campaign to do it.