People Before Profit blog

French strikes: the end or beginning?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:11:00 +0000

News Analysis

PARIS — During France’s powerful public workers’ strikes of November-December 1995, the political waters were somewhat muddy. On the one hand, President Jacques Chirac had based his recent election campaign on the theme of opposing “social fracture” and disharmony. On the other, newly appointed Prime Minister Alain Juppé had just launched a violent attack on welfare and on public workers’ pay and retirement benefits.

This year, however, things seemed much clearer.

Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), was elected president in May on the basis of an aggressively anti-worker, anti-social-entitlements program. The formation of his government, led by Prime Minister François Fillon — initiator of the retirement system “reform” of 2003 that sparked strikes at the time — did not leave any doubt. The class war had been announced, and everyone expected a renewal of open social conflict.

That conflict erupted Oct. 18 with a day of strikes and huge mobilizations. More than 300,000 workers from the public and private sectors demonstrated together — workers in transport, energy, metallurgy, chemistry, health, education, culture, distribution ... even the employees of McDonald’s — for the defense of public services and workers’ purchasing power, jobs and pensions.

The fronts of struggle quickly multiplied.

On Oct. 25, Air France’s cabin crew workers, whose productivity is up but whose purchasing power is down, struck to obtain wage increases. They shut down over a quarter of the airline’s flights for nearly a week.

For several weeks, college and high school students had already been mobilizing against the pro-privatization law on “freedoms and responsibilities of the universities” advocated by Valérie Pécresse, minister of higher education. Their solidarity strikes closed many schools and campuses, including the Sorbonne in Paris.

The strikers were soon joined by hospital, post office, telecom and museum workers, along with performing artists, lawyers, judges, commercial fishermen and even tobacconists.

In parallel with these events, resistance to rising government anti-immigrant repression continued. The repression of undocumented immigrants is led by Brice Hortefeux, head of the newly created Immigration and National Identity Ministry. One example: In Lille, police seized immigrant hunger strikers from their hospital beds and threw them into jail.

The conflict grew more intense on Nov. 14 with a strike by workers at the EDF-GDF (electricity and gas utility), SNCF (railroads) and RATP (the subway), whose government retirement benefits are under severe assault. Seventy percent to 80 percent of these workers walked out for eight days, paralyzing the transportation network.

Many labor activists drew the connection between these strikes and subsequent civil service workers’ strike, leading to a solidarity march of more than 700,000 people here on Nov. 20.

In the face of the government’s hard-line, pro-big-business position, the leadership of the trade unions had a clear responsibility to promote the unity of all of these struggles to rebuff the attack. Many activists observed that, just as the chiefs of the European Union are about to impose a new version of their previously defeated anti-worker constitution — in spite of the French “no” vote of the May 2005 — it is time to consolidate unity against the neoliberal, conservative policy of social regression.

However, what happened instead was the agreement by many trade union leaders, including Bernard Thibault of the left-led CGT union federation, to discuss the takeaway proposals on a case-by-case, company-by-company basis.

Such a move, veteran activists said, objectively undermined the building of a common front for the defense of pension and social security systems. The divergence between these union leaders, anxious to “sweeten” neoliberal reforms, and their own membership bases suggests that a deeper radicalization of the struggles may soon take place.

In the meantime, the divisions resulted in a setback. Workers in the transport sector returned to work Nov. 26. Despite some concessions won by the workers, Sarkozy has vowed to continue his “reforms.” The outcome of continuing discussions among the unions, the employers and the government remains uncertain.

One thing is particularly clear, however: the strikers who stood up to resist the assault on retirement benefits and public services were on the front line in the defense of all working people.

Rémy Herrera is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research and teaches at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

America is missing its middle

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:03:00 +0000

Worker’s Correspondence

If your Oreo didn’t have the sugary white middle, wouldn’t you notice? If, over time, your car tire middles collapsed, you would notice. So why for so long has our country’s middle been allowed to disappear without notice or correction?

Our present trade agreements have allowed large corporations to outsource too many of our manufacturing jobs. Low wages, no worker protection laws and very little quality control predominate in the countries to which our working middle-class jobs have gone.

The end result is twofold. We now have products coming into this country at alarming rates that have to be recalled due to insufficient regulatory monitoring of the materials used in these manufactured goods and foods. We also have joined in a global wage race toward the bottom.

The recent contracts between the UAW and GM/Chrysler/Ford are perfect examples of what is happening. Chrysler has already negotiated plant deals with Chery Motors in China while cutting its workforce here. All three have negotiated and agreed on two-tier wages and attrition programs to bring the pay scale and number of U.S. employees down.

Our economy is growing according to Wall Street. So is the distance between the corporate profit margin and wage/cost of living increases. Average Americans are being asked to take lower pay and live in an inflationary world; CEOs continue to take bonuses while cutting their domestic workforce.

Have our presidential candidates even noticed the missing middle?

Until and unless our elected officials reconstruct our trade agreements, requiring that the same regulatory quality standards be held for companies importing goods as we hold our own “Made in the USA” products, the working middle class will be missing.

Until we stop tolerating a working wage that is becoming increasingly less than a living wage, the working middle class will be missing. Until globalization no longer means we are required to become a country that cannot afford its own goods and services, America will have no middle.

Our democratically elected officials must be made to see the missing middle. Without its middle, our country no longer breathes democracy into its body. We no longer have a balanced society where life, liberty and pursuing happiness is not bought and paid for by the wealthy only. Without its middle, our country fails.

Robin Bouchard-Little (rbouchardlittle @aol.com) is a freelance writer from Ohio whose husband is an autoworker.

Attention Ohio readers: If you have a story to share, contact Rick Nagin, ricknagin@yahoo.com, (216) 881-5350

Fix the health care system

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:00:00 +0000

ASHTABULA, Ohio — Health Care for All was the topic at the Town Hall meeting here Nov. 10 at People’s Missionary Baptist Church.

The meeting, endorsed by the NAACP and the Ashtabula AFL-CIO and Retiree Council, featured an impressive panel of public officials and community leaders who presented strong arguments for repairing our broken health care system. United Auto Workers union leader Dave Pavlick, state Sen. Capri Cafaro and state Rep. George Distel, both Democrats, described health care problems in Ohio.

“There are millions of people in the country without health insurance,” including 13 percent of Ashtabula County residents, Distel told the audience. He emphasized the importance of citizen involvement in the legislative process. “By working together, we can get to where we need to go,” he said.

The UAW’s Pavlick said, “We don’t have a functioning health care system in this country — we have a barely functioning sick-care system.” He spoke in favor of the Ohio Health Care for All Act, SB 168 and HB 186, recently introduced into both houses of the Ohio Legislature.

The plan would cover hospitalization, preventive care, prescription drugs, home care and all other medical services regardless of income or employment. There would be no premiums, co-payments or deductibles. “Payments would be made from a public fund, with the billions of dollars in profits the insurance companies take from [health care] going instead for patient care,” Pavlick said.

Participants in the meeting added their names to petitions to put the issue on the ballot if the Legislature fails to act.

Semanthie Brooks from Senior Voice and the Benjamin Rose Institute warned that Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan added to Medicare, is draining the Medicare Trust Fund with excessive charges from insurance and drug companies, and needs to be changed.

Bills SB 2219 and HR 3932 would “establish a prescription drug plan with a premium everyone can afford, and will greatly reduce the financial drain on Medicare,” Brooks said. “Privatization in health care is not going to work for us.”

Steve Inchuck from Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s office said the traditional Medicare program is very efficient and cost-effective, and recommended support for the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All bill, HR 676. He said that with the savings included in the bill, the $2.2 trillion a year currently being spent on health care would fund care for all U.S. residents.

Church deacon and Ashtabula County NAACP President George Wilson, who moderated the program, urged all present to go out into the community and “spread the word.”

Attention Ohio readers: If you have a story to share, contact Rick Nagin, ricknagin@yahoo.com, (216) 881-5350

Shut down NLRB for renovations, Ohio unionists demand

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:57:00 +0000

CLEVELAND — A spirited crowd of Working America, Jobs with Justice and local unions’ members picketed the federal building here Nov. 19 to protest a new raft of anti-labor decisions by the National Labor Relations Board.

They beat drums, chanted and carried signs reading “Shut down the NLRB for renovation.”

“The Bush labor board is the most anti-labor board in decades,” Harriet Applegate, executive secretary of the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor, told the demonstrators. “It’s really the National Employer Relations Board.”

Citing 61 new decisions issued in September, Applegate said the new policies make it harder for workers to form unions and recover back pay if they are fired for supporting a union. They also allow employers to discriminate against job applicants with union sympathies.

“Big business is at war with the workers,” said Anton Farmby, city director of SEIU Local 3. “The board appointed by President Bush is worse than having no labor board at all.”

Such demonstrations took place in 20 cities and towns around the country, including Washington, D.C.

“We’ll be back! We’ll be back!” the crowd chanted as the rally wound up.

Attention Ohio readers: If you have a story to share, contact Rick Nagin, ricknagin@yahoo.com, (216) 881-5350

Collapse in mine safety, report says

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:50:00 +0000

Bush administration is root cause, expert charges

PITTSBURGH — “The collapse of MSHA began when Bush appointed David Lauriski in 2001,” says mine safety expert Jack Spadaro. “That set in motion all the processes and disasters in coal mining making headlines now.”

MSHA is the federal government’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. Lauriski was a former mine company executive.

Just before Thanksgiving, the inspector general for the Labor Department released a 65-page report adding more pieces to the puzzle of why more coal miners are dying at work, despite the revolution in mining technology and tightened safety laws.

In 2006, the year of the worst coal mining disaster in decades at the Sago Mine, inspectors failed to examine 1 in 7 of the country’s 731 mines, according to the report. Crandall Canyon Mine, site of an August cave-in that took the lives of six miners and three rescuers, was on the list of 102 mines that were either not inspected or not inspected properly under the law. The number of coal miners who died at work doubled in 2006 to 47.

The report said that lack of funding and mismanagement by the Bush administration are responsible for declining safety standards in coal mining, reversing 30 years of progress ushered in by the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977.

“People inside MSHA are upset and many are leaving,” said Spadaro in a telephone interview. “They are dedicated, trying to do a good job because they know the decisions they make are life and death. It is the top of the agency that is incompetent.”

Spadaro has 38 years of mining engineering experience, including seven as the superintendent of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, which trains mining inspectors. In 1993, Spadaro was awarded “Engineer of the Year” by the National Society of Professional Engineers.

While coal production and profits for coal companies rose 9 percent between 2002 and 2006, the number of MSHA safety inspectors plummeted by 18 percent, from 605 to 496, for all 731 mines.

The report drew fire, though, for whitewashing the procedure to determine if a death in the mines is a “chargeable death.” For instance, if someone comes onto mine property and falls into a shaft, that may not be a chargeable death.

After reviewing 152 chargeable death decisions between 2004 and 2006, the report did not find any problems. But an independent investigation by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette found that nonchargeable deaths had increased, and the criteria for “reportable deaths” had narrowed significantly.

MSHA tinkered with the fatality numbers to generate press releases heralding an increase in mine safety. Then Sago blew up in January 2006.

“Coal mines are no safer now than before Sago,” Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union, charged. “Large chunks of the Miner Act [recent upgrading of the 1977 Act in the wake of Sago] are not yet in place. Right now we are in a ‘study’ period, and it will be at least three years from June 2007 before any positive changes are in place for communications and other reforms are implemented. That was added on to the law at the very end. Delays can cost lives.”

It was a related development in coal mining that put the zing in Smith’s voice over the phone. On Nov. 21, administrative law Judge Paul Bogas decided in favor of the union and against Massey Energy, the fourth-largest coal corporation in the United States.

“It was a body slam,” said Smith on Bogas’ decision to reinstate 85 miners back to their jobs after Massey fired them for union sympathies. The miners worked at Massey’s Mammoth Mine, formerly called Cannelton. He also ordered Massey to sit down and bargain a contract with the UMWA at this mine. “It is difficult — with the Bush NLRB — but this is a foot in the door with Massey,” he said.

Massey is a notorious union buster in the coal fields, a major political player in West Virginia politics and a leader in the controversial mountaintop mining technique, where coal companies blow off the entire tops of mountains for coal underneath.

dwinebr696 @aol.com

Fans back writers in week 4 of strike

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:43:00 +0000

NEW YORK — A thousand striking writers and their backers rallied in Washington Square Park here Nov. 27 to kick off the fourth week of a strike by the Writers Guild of America against an array of U.S. media conglomerates.

The first strike by Hollywood writers on both coasts in 20 years began Nov. 5, disrupting soap operas and talk shows. It is now cutting into the ability of producers to make everything from movies to profits.

The strike started because producers and networks refused to negotiate satisfactory methods to pay writers for material that ends up on the Internet.

Writers are part of a volatile industry. Without job security, they depend on residual payments — which is what payment for material used on the Internet would be — to handle financial needs ranging from health care to children’s school expenses.

The media moguls have claimed that high-tech methods they use to market writers’ work are too new for them to be able to come up with satisfactory compensation structures.

“That’s exactly what big companies told workers at the beginning of the last century,” Rocco Fazzolari told the World.

Fazzolari, a former extra on “The Sopranos,” was at the Washington Square rally in another double role — as a member of the Screen Actors Guild and as business manager of Local 122 of the United Industrial and Service Employees Union.

“All my roles come together as a union man,” he said. “When this country industrialized, the bosses didn’t want to share the wealth that came from the new manufacturing technology. It’s the same thing now. They’re greedy and they don’t want writers, actors, or any workers for that matter, to get a fair share.”

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who has turned down offers to appear on “Ellen” and “The View” because the union is striking those productions, received prolonged applause as he climbed the podium in Washington Square Park.

“As president,” Edwards declared, “I will fight to make sure the creators of wealth, the workers, get their fair share of the wealth they create. I will sign legislation that makes it illegal for someone to walk through your picket line when you are on strike and take away your job.” He pledged that if CBS workers go on strike before an upcoming presidential debate in Los Angeles, he would withdraw from the debate.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told the crowd, which was full of New York trade unionists, that “power concedes nothing without a struggle and workers would be nowhere without unions.”

Unions represented at the rally included the Screen Actors Guild, SEIU, District Council 37 (city employees), United Federation of Teachers, New York State AFL-CIO, New York City Central Labor Council, Carpenters, Unite Here and many others.

Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, drew prolonged applause when he said, “The struggle of an $11.90 per hour restaurant worker is linked to the struggle of the writers. Progress comes when we lift the bottom up. That benefits everyone and it is the united labor movement we see here that understands this.”

Tim Robbins, the actor, told the crowd that “without writers we would have no programs, bad jokes, crap movies and an endless string of ‘reality TV’ shows.”

“Without unions and without a labor movement, we would have worse and worse poverty and endless horrible wars,” he said.

The crowd responded with chants of “What do we want? A fair share.” Perhaps the reverberations reached up the street to Madison Avenue, home for some of New York’s biggest media moguls.

jwojcik @pww.org

Labor leaving no stone un-turned

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 06:32:00 +0000

Organized labor is flexing its muscles, showing that it is tired of taking it on the chin. If the unions have their way, between now and Election Day, even the ultra-right lock on the White House and Congress could be broken.

Unions flexed their muscles in off year election campaigns that ended in victories Nov. 6. Thousands of union members combed neighborhoods, button-holed people at worksites, and operated phone banks to rack up wins for labor at the polling places.

Nowhere was this truer than in Kentucky where incumbent Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher is now job hunting. “This was payback time,” said Bill Londrigan, Kentucky’s AFL-CIO president. Fletcher was hated by labor because he had cancelled collective bargaining rights for state workers. He had privatized Medicaid and had advocated wage roll backs for state workers.

His opponent, Democrat Steve Beshear, won by a 20 point margin. Fifty eight percent cited the economy, education or health care as their top reason for voting for him.

Cusp of a major shift

The figures support conclusions drawn right after the election by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who said, “We’re on the cusp of a shift that could re-define American politics for decades to come. Working people want real health care reform that covers every American. They want their freedom to form and join unions restored. They want to stop the hemorrhaging of good, middle class jobs out of the country and they want a secure retirement.”

If labor achieves its aim of duplicating the way it operated in Kentucky this year all over the country next year, the right wing could be in serious trouble.

Seven thousand union members who live in the Bluegrass state worked on labor’s campaign. They distributed 465,000 leaflets on a one-on-one, face-to-face basis at worksites and at people’s homes. Some 65,000 of those distributions were done on Election Day. In the last four days of the campaign 2,100 union members made 75,000 phone calls to “pull” union voters out to the polls. On the last Saturday, 440 union members talked to 8,000 union families in their homes.

Close NLRB for ‘renovations’

Labor’s growing offensive against the right seems to be leaving no stone unturned. On Nov. 16 unions staged mass marches and rallies in more than 20 cities across the country, demanding that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) be “closed for renovations.”

The unions were saying, essentially, that when you have a corporate-friendly NLRB in charge of protecting workers’ rights, it is akin to the old tale of the fox guarding the henhouse.

In Nashville, Tenn., it was a very evil looking six-foot-tall fox that took on the role of the NLRB as union members marched in front of the board’s regional offices to protest its long line of anti-labor decisions since President Bush took control.

The decisions the unions are out in the streets protesting include the board’s elimination of the right of some 8 million, including nurses, building and construction trade workers, journalists and others, to form unions by expanding the definition of “supervisor.”

The NLRB has issued 60 rulings that make it harder for workers to form unions but easier to get rid of existing unions, that make it easier for employers to escape liability for breaking the law and weaken already ineffective remedies, and that make it easier for employers to discriminate against union supporters and replace strikers.

Three thousand trade unionists marched and rallied at NLRB headquarters in Washington D.C. while thousands more marched or rallied at other events in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., St. Louis and Tampa, Fla.

In Albuquerque, N.M., union members were joined by community and religious activists and city and state lawmakers in a rally outside the federal building, drawing cheers and honks of support from pedestrians and drivers passing by.

NLRB chairman, Robert Battista, who is supposed to be unbiased and neutral when it comes to workers, unions and labor law, issued a statement calling the protests “shrill.”

New level of militancy

Labor’s upsurge is not just limited to elections, fighting for manufacturing jobs, fighting for labor organizing rights, for health care, for fair trade policy and fighting against the anti-union efforts of the Bush administration. The fight for wages and justice at the workplace is also high on its agenda these days.

Recent and current strikes seem to display a new level of militancy.

In the first strike in its 121-year history, the stagehands’ union local in New York has shut down much of Broadway, while a walkout by 12,000 Hollywood writers is creating problems for television and film producers.

These strikes come close on the heels of strikes by 74,000 workers at General Motors and 45,000 at Chrysler.

When 350 stagehands went on strike Nov. 16, closing down 27 Broadway shows, it was after the producers announced a policy that would reduce the number of stagehands per production as well as the overtime that stagehands would receive.

G.M. and Chrysler workers went on strike after the auto makers demanded reduction of their responsibility for retiree health plans and a lower wage scale for new hires.

Whether the strikes result in victories is a question but what is not in question is the high level of readiness by both unions and their members to use the strike weapon when they feel it is necessary.

The Writers Guild took to the picket lines after Hollywood producers refused to increase the payments they give writers from sales of DVD’s and refused to offer extra payments when many works were used in new media like the Internet or cell phone transmissions. Many writers were furious that the producers continued to offer them only 5 cents in payment per DVD.

Sleeping giant awakes

The highly publicized strikes are by no means the only ones that show a new level of union militancy. Six hundred nurses went on strike two months ago at Appalachian Regional Healthcare, a chain of nine hospitals in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. The strike was their response to management demands for higher health insurance premiums, less holiday pay and cuts in paid hours.

Finally, the heightened activity by labor includes a dramatic increase in organizing.

In the last year alone, unions have organized tens of thousands of low-wage workers, particularly at hotels, in child care, janitorial service and home health care.

When you put all these trends together, many observers say, you see a sleeping giant waking up.

John Wojcik (jwojcik at pww.org) is the People’s Weekly World labor editor.

School workers tell Aramark no free lunch

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:13:00 +0000

PHILADELPHIA -- More than 1,000 workers and their supporters marched to Aramark Tower here –the food service company’s national headquarters—in a spirited demonstration to protest the corporate giant’s refusal to refund $7 million they say it owes to the School District of Philadelphia. The chants of the demonstrators, members of Unite Here and Service Employees union SEIU, echoed off the walls as darkness fell.

The school district cancelled its contract with Aramark in September saying that Aramark had not provided the contracted services for the agreed price. Rather than refunding the money, Aramark wants an additional $2.4 million dollars from the school district.

Lynne Fox, president of the Philadelphia Joint Board of Unite Here, told the World that Aramark should be held accountable for the money it has cost the school district. “This leaves a huge hole in the budget,” she said. The union has 2,300 members who work for the school district, but she emphasized that the demonstration was not only on behalf of the union’s members, but in support of the students and community as well.

According to a leaflet distributed at the rally, Aramark earned $1.6 billion dollars last year and its CEO made $16.1 million.

The demonstration was jointly organized by Unite Here and SEIU and attended by supporters from others unions. The crowd included striking union members from New York City and New Jersey. Speakers reminded the crowd that, in addition to its failure to fulfill its contract with the school district, Aramark was the only Center City building owner not to settle with its maintenance workers, who are members of SEIU, when most owners agreed to contracts in October.

Unite Here General President Bruce Raynor and Philadelphia AFL-CIO President Pat Eiding addressed the crowd along with Helen Gym of Parents United for Public Education and a speaker from the Philadelphia Student Union.

Big rail strike rocks Germany

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:45:00 +0000

BERLIN — It’s the biggest labor struggle in years in Germany, and it’s not over yet. On Nov. 28 the locomotive engineers and other train personnel just closed down much of the railroad system for 62 hours for freight and 48 hours for passenger transportation and may do it again next week, possibly without the limited strike length used up till now.

Unless the railroad company comes up with a new offer, the workers may close down municipal train service, long-distance passenger service and freight transportation all at the same time, holding out as long as the railroad company stays stubborn.

It’s a dramatic strike, the biggest in years, but it has several complicated angles. Most complicated: a major demand of the locomotive engineers is recognition of their own union, which is a breakaway from the general transportation workers’ union and represents about three-quarters of the 20,000 engineers.

When the West German trade union movement was revived after the war, it was based on a federation of 16 industrial unions. Several have amalgamated since then, and two giants are especially strong — IG Metall for workers in the metalworking industries and one called ver.di for public service workers. Their size is part of their strength, but nearly all unions have been suffering big losses in recent years, caused by giant layoffs, outsourcing, joblessness in general and also lack of militancy by some of the unions.

The locomotive engineers accuse their industrial union Transnet of just that — lack of militancy, and especially neglect of their particular position. Driving a train is a highly skilled job and always a huge responsibility, since mistakes on freight trains and even more on passenger trains can result in countless deaths. But the engineers get wages as low as staff in the stations and elsewhere, a measly rate of about 1,500 euros a month, sometimes with workweeks of 55 hours or more.

Since Transnet was not representing them satisfactorily, they decided to go it alone and formed their own union, the GDL, which is in a strong position; without them a train can’t move. But this raises the question of splitting the labor movement and has cut into support for them to some degree.

But a high proportion of the general public has been supporting them all the same — their wages are very low by average standards, and the railroad company is very unpopular. It has used non-members and some sections of its staff who are not allowed to strike to keep part of the trains running on an emergency basis, and this has been more successful in western Germany than in the East, where most engineers are in the locomotive engineers’ union.

Of course, the company has also been counting on opposition to the strike from people whose travels and everyday commutation to work and back have been disrupted. This has certainly been having some effect but the engineers have a big strike fund and are very determined to win out, come what may.

Another angle is that German railroads, with only minor exceptions, are managed by a state-owned corporation. Theoretically, the government should be either supporting the workers or working for some acceptable compromise.

The government’s first efforts in this direction didn’t work, and it seems to be leaving the victory to whoever is strongest. But during the seven months this conflict has been simmering or going on, the minister of transportation in the Cabinet, a Social Democrat named Tiefensee, has gone along with the tough-talking head of the railroads in an attempt to privatize the industry — if not the entire railroad system, then at least all the rolling stock, leaving the government only with the tracks and stations.

Since more and more people have come to see this as a rip-off, with bad results for the workers and the public, the decision had to be postponed, but it is still on the agenda of the railroad company boss and most of the government (despite opposition by Social Democratic rank and file).

This is relevant to the strike in part because the head of the Transnet union has also supported privatization, despite what it would mean to his membership.

There are rumors this weekend that the company is beginning to modify its stubborn stance and come up with some counterproposals for negotiation. But the threat of an unlimited railroad strike is, at this writing, approaching as fast as any high-speed locomotive.

BOOK REVIEW: Four centuries of U.S. working-class literature

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:31:00 +0000

In his poem “A Worker Reads History,” Bertolt Brecht wrote:

Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? The books are filled with kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

In the last 50 years or so, much has been uncovered about the role of working people in creating our history and culture, but much remains to be discovered.

With the publication their new anthology, “American Working-Class Literature,” Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy and Oxford University Press have made a major contribution to uncovering literature by and about American workers.

There have been other anthologies of American working-class literature like “Proletarian Literature in the United States,” “New Masses Anthology” and “Writing Red,” but this new anthology is undoubtedly the most comprehensive collection of U.S. working-class literature ever published. There is no way to do justice to this rich book in a short review.

Previous anthologies have tended to focus on the proletarian literature of the ’30s. This 960-page volume includes more than 300 works from the Colonial Era to the present.

In their introduction, the editors carefully define the three words in the title: American, working class, and literature. “American” literature is defined as literature that was “produced or published in the territory that now comprises the United States,” which suggests that “U.S. Working-Class Literature” might have been a more appropriate title.

Quoting the Marxist economist Michael Zweig, they define the “working class” as “people who share a common place in production. … They produce the wealth of nations, but receive from that wealth only what they can buy with the wages their employers pay them.”

“Literature” is defined broadly to include poetry, novels, short stories, autobiographies, dramas, reportage, letters, speeches, manifestos, oral histories and songs. The editors write, “An important claim of this book is that the working class is not only a class that works — that produces goods and services; it is also a class that produces culture, including literature.”

The book is generally organized chronologically, and the seven chapter headings give some idea of its contents and themes: “Early American Labor, Hard, Bound, and Free, 1600s-1810s”; “New Kinds of Work, Old Practices, 1820s-1850s”; “Beneath the Gilded Surface, Working-Class Fictions and Realities, 1850s-1890s”; “Revolt, Repression, and Cultural Formations, 1900-1929”; “Economic Depression and Cultural Resurgence, 1930s”; “Affluence, Cold War, and the Other America, 1940s-1970s”; and “The New World Order and Its Consequences, 1980s-2005.”

Each chapter has an introduction, putting the chapter’s selections in historical context and highlighting key themes.

Occasionally, recent works are included in chapters dealing with a specific historical event. For example, Mary Fell’s 1983 poem about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is in the chapter covering 1900-1929.

Like Mary Fell, many of the recent writers were unaware of the earlier literature about those events, which shows why an anthology like this is so important. Up until now, much of this literature has been buried and forgotten.

Although the selections span four centuries, common themes emerge. As the editors write, “Through often-lyrical and feisty language, these workers witness the conditions of working-class lives, the power of resistance, and the necessity of struggle — not only in a political or labor context, but also in the dailiness of ‘making do.’ These voices emerge despite efforts to silence them through strikebreaking, militias, red-baiting, corporate dominance and political unwillingness to name the class that ... encompasses the majority of Americans.”

In addition to selections by anonymous and little-known authors, the anthology includes selections by writers who will be known to many readers of the People’s Weekly World, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie, Mike Gold, Tillie Olsen and others.

Hopefully, the excerpts in this anthology will inspire young people to read classic novels like “The Jungle,” “Jews Without Money” and “The Grapes of Wrath.”

The book is designed in part as textbook for use in academic settings, and it will be a useful addition to courses in U.S. literature, cultural and working-class studies, U.S. history, and labor history. Teachers and professors in those fields should consider adding this book to their reading lists and urge their libraries to purchase it.

But the book is not just for academics and students. It is for anyone who wants to read literature by and about the U.S. working class. Such readers will also be pleased by the illustrations and photographs that grace the book’s pages.

Unfortunately, some community libraries have refused to order the book on the grounds that it is “too academic.” The notion that working-class literature is “too academic” is ridiculous, but it is part of the effort to silence the voices in this anthology.

Urge your library to order this book. If they won’t order it, ask them to get it through an interlibrary loan. This is a book that belongs in every public library.

American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology Edited by Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy Oxford University Press, 2006 Softcover, 960 pp., $52.95

Two tales of one city: First the death, now the resurrection

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 07:00:00 +0000

NEW ORLEANS — It wasn’t the hurricane that almost killed this city. From day one, after Katrina, the Bush administration used this town as a laboratory to experiment with every type of right-wing social engineering scheme imaginable, and if it weren’t for the labor movement and its allies, they just might have succeeded.

Trafficking in human labor is one of the countless ways that big business succeeds in lowering wages, busting unions and hiking profits. A city and a people lying prostrate and almost helpless after a mega-disaster offered the perfect place to try this. Remember, the aim was to get labor that was not just cheap, but also completely disposable.

Apache and immigrant workers recruited, ripped off

A private contractor traveled all the way to an Apache reservation in Arizona to recruit 65 Native Americans for “good paying construction jobs” in New Orleans. When the Apaches pulled their vans up at the contractor’s address in town here, they found that the outfit that had recruited them was gone.

They went to FEMA for help and, not surprisingly, the agency didn’t know what to do, so it referred them to a church. The church hooked them up with a private contractor who had been handed control of City Park, a public park four times as large as New York’s Central Park. The contractor had turned the park into a refugee camp for cheap, disposable labor.

He took the Apache workers to Wal-Mart, where they were forced to purchase tents that became their homes. They had to pay the contractor $350 per month for the tent space he rented them in the public park.

Thousands of “disposable” immigrant laborers lived in the park with the Apaches for over a year after the storm. They waited every day for contractors who came by and held auctions, after which the low bidders among them got work. With federal immigration agents saturating the city, many never knew if they’d be back sleeping in the park that night or in a jail, waiting to be deported to Mexico or Honduras.

The auctions continue to this day at Lee Circle and at other locations around the city.

FEMA facilitates wage cutting

FEMA gave Patrick Quinn III, a hotel magnate and billionaire, $6 million to house people at his Astor Crowne Plaza hotel here after the hurricane. Most of the African American and white tenants staying there were, of course, both homeless and jobless. With his hotel full of people eager to work he applied to the U.S. Department of Labor for permission to hire Brazilians on H-2 visas because he could get them to work for $6 an hour or less.

The Bush-controlled department granted him permission despite the law that says such permission can be given only if the employer certifies that no other source of labor is available. The Brazilians, of course, were a better option for Quinn. They are as close as you can get to slave labor because if they disobey the boss he has the power to fire them. Once out of work, people with H-2 visas must return to their country.

A plumber’s view

I spent several hours Oct. 18 touring the city with Dana Colombo, an active member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters union. He pointed to the 100-year-old Charity Hospital, still shut down. It was the largest public hospital in the Gulf Coast region.

We passed the pumping stations near the levees. “Those pumps are 100 years old,” Colombo said. When the levee breaches were fixed after the storm, the pumps gave way, he said, “leaving neighborhoods under water even longer than they had to be.”

“Imagine how many jobs there would be if the government wanted to start a real jobs program,” he commented.

We drove through the New Orleans East neighborhood and Gentilly, Colombo’s neighborhood. For block after block there were still hundreds of empty houses, many still spray painted with the number that stood for how many bodies had been found in the dwelling.

We passed the high school he graduated from. It was still shuttered.

Night of the evacuation

Colombo’s wife had rushed him out of the house the night they evacuated. “The last thing I did,” he said, “was to pick up the bottles of beer I was brewing and put them on the kitchen countertop — I figured they’d be safe if we got water out of the basement and up into the kitchen.”

When the family returned after several weeks, the beer was gone, along with all the windows, the doors and one of the walls.

Murphy Oil has a refinery near his house and it dumped 50,000 gallons of crude oil into the swirling flood waters. The oil settled around hundreds of homes in Colombo’s neighborhood. Before he got back, the company dumped tons of sand to absorb the toxic sludge. Murphy Oil offered Colombo and everyone else $10,000 to settle out of court. He and his neighbors turned down the offer and are fighting it out in court.

Waste, corruption, cronyism

We drove past the St. Bernard housing development. “This gets me mad,” Colombo said. “I’m a plumber and a builder. These houses were built 75 years ago out of brick and mortar and they are solid as a rock. The plumbing is fine. They were home to hundreds of families who have not been allowed to return.” Acres and acres of the sturdy brick buildings are surrounded by barbed wire fences.

“If they hadn’t suspended prevailing wage laws, if they hadn’t turned money over to corrupt contractors who use cheap labor, these houses would be re-occupied by now and everyone in them could be employed at a good job,” Colombo said. “If the government gave the money it squandered on contractors directly to the people, each person who lost a job or a home could have gotten $100,000.”

Some of the people who had lived in the St. Bernard development are camped out in abandoned houses across the street from or on streets surrounding the perfectly good but barricaded housing. They call it “Survivor’s Village,” and they intend to stay put until they are allowed back home.

Conscious destruction of housing

Alec Revels, 17, and his brother Tim live with their mom in a small one-bedroom apartment not far from the barricaded housing development. His mother pays $1,000 for the apartment. “We’re in this neighborhood now because we couldn’t find anything in the neighborhood where our house was destroyed,” he said. “One-bedrooms there are $2,000. I couldn’t get back into my old school, and because of the high rents we had to move here.”

Marc Sear, 23, an African American, was changing a tire across the street from the sealed-off housing. “I grew up there,” he said, “and since we can’t move back in, I’m living in a FEMA trailer out here. We want to go home.”

Labor fights back

The labor movement in New Orleans has launched a fight back against the right-wing offensive in the city. They have reached out to nontraditional workers’ organizations and to civil rights groups in their effort to turn things around.

Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, said, “We weren’t going to let them take away with the stroke of a pen what labor has built up over 100 years.”

Tiger explained how, with the help of the national labor federation and political leaders such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the labor movement was able to reverse the Bush administration’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon law here. That law requires payment of prevailing wages in construction jobs funded by the federal government. The Bush administration had tried to permanently trash the law for the benefit of private, no-bid contractors, many of them with ties to the administration.

Civil rights struggle

Tracy Washington, a prominent civil rights attorney in New Orleans, told how civil rights lawyers went to court to stop the demolition of houses to which the original owners had not yet returned. “They tried to take away even the property rights of African American homeowners,” Washington said. “The city allowed bulldozing of homes without even bothering to find out where the owners were.”

Civil rights groups, backed by unions, have managed to stop the indiscriminate bulldozing of unoccupied homes. Washington herself won the first such favorable ruling in U.S. District Court from Judge Marty Feldman. “He is a conservative,” she said, “but the type of conservative whose property is something you just don’t mess with.”

Teachers fight for public schools

Brenda Mitchell, president of United Teachers of New Orleans, is leading the fight to restore not only her union but public education itself in this city. After the storm, all public school teachers were fired and the union membership went from 4,700 to 0. The public school system was dismembered and replaced with three chaotic systems — a state-run “Recovery” district, a charter school system and a very small New Orleans-run public school system.

“We had to start all over again to organize the union, and we are doing it in all three school systems,” Mitchell said. “As of Oct. 15, we are back up to 1,125 union members and the schools we are in are the schools that are doing best.”

Transportation workers on a roll

Joe Pieur, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1560, carries on a similar struggle. “We had 700 members and 1,200 buses transporting 197,000 people a day before the storm,” he said. “Now we have 214 members transporting 30,000 a day. That’s pretty good, considering how, at first, they tried to destroy our union and public transportation altogether.”

Organize, organize, organize

Saket Soni, lead organizer of the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, represents a group that fights for the rights of immigrant workers in New Orleans. “The solution to the problem is to organize,” he said. “For this we build unity and all of us, labor unions and civil rights groups, are working together. This is important because New Orleans is not just a place for the right wing to carry out its social experiments. It is a city, a home for many people who have needs, hopes, dreams and aspirations.”

John Wojcik (jwojcik @pww.org), People’s Weekly World labor editor, reported this story while attending the International Labor Communications Association convention in New Orleans last month.

From Oregon to Virginia, voters reject Republican right

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:36:00 +0000

Voters in the Nov. 6 off-year election made clear once again that they are fed up with the pro-corporate policies of the Republican right and looking for positive changes like ending the Iraq war, rooting out corruption and saving the environment.

Voters in Helena and Missoula, Montana, overwhelmingly approved referenda calling on congress “to authorize and fund an immediate and orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq in a manner that is fully protective of U.S. service members.” Helenans passed the measure with 61.8 percent of the vote, while Missoulians passed an identical measure with 64.1 percent of the vote.

“By passing these referenda, the citizens of Helena and Missoula have called the Montana delegation and the president to account for the war in Iraq. We have exercised our right and responsibility, as citizens, to petition our government. It is now time for our elected officials to listen to the voice of ‘we the people,’” said John Mundinger, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

Missoula and Helena are the first cities in Montana to hold a citizens’ vote on withdrawal from Iraq.

Victories for Democrats in Kentucky and Virginia were a signal that the Republican’s “Southern strategy” may be running out of gas. (Also check out Emile Schepers and Michael Adam Reale stories at www.pww.org.)

Other election notables:

• Baltimore voters elected Democrat Sheila Dixon as mayor, the first African American woman ever to hold that post. Organized labor was solidly behind her candidacy.

• Texas voters approved five state bond initiatives, including $3 billion for cancer research and $5 billion for road construction.

• In Oregon, Big Tobacco spent $13 million defeating Measure 50, a plan to provide health care for 100,000 uninsured Oregon youngsters, paid for with a tax on tobacco products. But Oregonians voted 61.4 percent for Measure 49 to protect some of Oregon’s most beautiful open spaces and wilderness from greedy developers.

In the Pittsburgh mayor’s race, missteps by 27-year-old Democratic Mayor Luke Ravenstahl led Republicans to believe that they had a chance in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. Their candidate, who worked for Republican Sen. John Heinz and the elder President Bush, ran on a platform of privatization and merging the city into Allegheny County. Voters re-elected Ravenstahl to another two-year term.

Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Bill George hailed labor’s get-out-the-vote effort in electing pro-working families candidates to municipal and county offices and to the courts. Judge Debra Todd, daughter of a steelworker, and Judge Christine Donahue, daughter of a coal miner, were among those elected “helping assure respect for the rights of working families on the courts.” The statewide gains have energized labor for the 2008 general election, George said.

Election Day 2007 was not without voting machine problems, starting with Cleveland. Notorious for the debacle at the polls in 2004, their electronic system crashed twice during the count, despite only a 15 percent turnout in the 2007 cycle.

Computerized voting machines failed in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Indiana and Georgia.

Unionists energized for election battles

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:51:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) — Off-year election results in state and municipal races on Nov. 6 show union voters are already energized for 2008, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says. And they also show unionists and the country want “a clear rejection of Bush administration policies,” adds federation Political Director Karen Ackerman.

Ackerman, Sweeney and others spoke in a telephone press conference after election returns came in from New Jersey local races, the Virginia Legislature, gubernatorial contests in Kentucky and Mississippi, mayoral races in several large cities and ballot initiatives in many states.

The most notable results were in “red” states. In Kentucky, former Lt. Gov. Steve Beshear (D), making his first statewide race in 20 years, handily ousted scandal-scarred GOP Gov. Ernie Fletcher. Beshear’s winning margin was around 20 percent.

In Utah, one of the “reddest” states for anti-worker GOP President George W. Bush in 2004, the Utah Education Association and its allies waged a successful campaign to defeat a plan to give taxpayer-paid vouchers to attend private schools to the parents of every child in the state, destroying public education.

Vouchers, passed early in the year by the GOP-run state Legislature — but only by one vote in the state’s House — lost by 62-38 percent. The ballot measure lost in every Utah county.

In Virginia, where unionists are only 4 percent of the workforce, their get-out-the-vote efforts, phone banks and precinct walking helped overcome GOP campaigning against immigrants. Virginians ousted five GOP state senators, changing party control there to the Democrats for the first time since 1991, and cut the GOP margin in the state assembly.

In New Jersey, 33 more unionists joined 400 already elected to local offices.

“There were 350,000 union voters out of a total of 1.05 million in Kentucky,” Ackerman said, including unionists, members of their households, retirees and 50,000 Kentucky members of Working America, the AFL-CIO’s affiliate for people who do not have union locals. “And 77 percent voted for Beshear. That’s an astounding number.”

And in Kentucky and Virginia “we’re gearing up for Senate races” and the presidential race next year, she added. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has $9 million in the bank and who has won past elections easily, faces Bluegrass State voters next year. Virginia’s GOP-held U.S. Senate seat is open.

“Working people are driving a major change in the political landscape. We’re on the cusp of a shift that could redefine American politics for decades to come,” Sweeney predicted. Voters, he added, “sent a powerful message that if you attack working people, you do so at your peril.”

In the Utah vote, 60 well-heeled right-wingers pumped $3.8 million into their pro-vouchers campaign, and their ad blitz tied opposition to vouchers to “liberals” and unions. It didn’t work due to what NEA’s White called “our new ground game.” Unions and their allies, including student groups and school boards, spent just over $3 million.

White explained the Utah campaign featured micro-targeting of pro-education voters, especially in rural areas, along with close coordination with the AFL-CIO. That micro-targeting identified — and sent tailored mailings to — persuadable voters or to pro-worker voters who, however, were unlikely to go to the polls in years past.

Micro-targeting will be particularly useful next year, White added, because NEA, unlike the other big teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has a high proportion of rural members and chapters in every state. That could help turn out pockets of pro-education voters who have previously been unidentified. She said NEA would continue and expand both micro-targeting and cooperation with the AFL-CIO in 2008.

“We paid special attention to rural areas. We pointed out there weren’t even private schools available for some of these parents to send their kids to. Some would have had to drive hundreds of miles — and we showed them that on our web site,” White said. The results were led by vouchers’ 4-to-1 loss in a rural southwest Utah county.

How do you answer the racists?

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:25:00 +0000

In the 2008 elections, the reactionaries are hoping to divide our progressive class with the immigration “wedge” issue. From what I have seen around North Texas so far, it is working pretty well for them. If one looks at history, it’s easy to see how the old pogroms against Jews were cooked up. It wasn’t sufficient to have a nasty bunch of violence-prone ignoramuses around — they have pretty much always been around. What’s essential for pogroms is encouragement from the ruling class through their government and media spokespersons. The most important signal the bosses send out is that they won’t enforce the laws on civil rights and civil liberties. That’s the “go ahead” for the brutal racist gangs.

We’re going in that direction here, and it could easily get worse during the coming election year as the right wing uses simplistic anti-immigrant rhetoric to desperately maintain its grip on state power. There is an ideological remedy at hand, and I’m hoping it finds regular employment as the situation develops. The remedy is to honestly connect the upturn in the numbers of poor immigrants with the neoliberalist policies of the ruling class, especially those controlling the transnational corporations.

While many American workers may be, and seem to be, confused on the subject of immigration, they are actually quite clear on how much they hate the transnational corporations and their imperialistic “free trade agreements.” Those who realize that it is neoliberalism in the United States that destroys the economies in non-industrialized countries and drives their people here have a better understanding of what is happening and what to do about it.

For some workers, it might be easier to understand what is happening in some other industrialized country, because the situation seems to be about the same for them as it is for us. The European transnationals are driving people out of Africa and Asia just as clearly as the U.S. transnationals drive them out of the Central and South American nations. It isn’t a matter of “illegal” versus “legal,” nor even a moral matter. The question before the workers is this: “How long will we allow imperialism to destroy the only defense we have, our natural unity with the rest of the working class from all nations?”

Jim Lane is a labor activist in Dallas.

Two-tier wages: a community-killing virus

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:08:00 +0000

Workers’ Correspondence

Lockport, N.Y., was once a seemingly growing, family oriented, peaceful community. The historic homes were beautifully maintained and added to the small city’s culture. Original buildings and its lock system along the Erie Canal were preserved for historical value.

Lockport was the type of small city you wanted to live in: growing old with your children and grandchildren, all close by for family reunions and the Fall Corn or Apple Festivals. That is, until a major workforce was slashed by numbers and by viral pay cuts at two different auto parts plants, Delphi and American Axle.

In 2003 and 2004, new contracts were negotiated to implement the two-tier wage system, the same two-tier system recently implemented in the new Big Three auto contracts. New hires were to receive the second-tier wage, $14.50 an hour, approximately $10 to $14 less than the first tier.

Incentives (buyouts) were offered to those close to retirement, enabling the companies to cut their workforce. In Delphi’s case, the workers, when asked to ratify the contract, were told that it would keep Delphi from having to file for bankruptcy. American Axle workers were told it would keep their plant open and viable.

Just two years later, Delphi filed for bankruptcy, and American Axle has all but shut its doors, with only a handful of workers and a few security staff remaining as of August. Within four years of the original contract with Delphi, two supplemental, unratified (by UAW members) contracts were signed and implemented, bringing the first-tier pay scale down to the second-tier $14.50-an-hour level. These pay cuts have taken the working-class family into an even lower class position, just above poverty level.

Since the two-tier wage system went into effect, this once beautiful, small, historical American city has become a crumbled, dilapidated and sad community. Historical homes have been left to rot and to be foreclosed upon in large numbers. Local businesses are slowly either leaving or have just plain closed.

According to U.S. Census Bureau reports in 1997 and 2002 (the next census report is due to be released early 2008), in 1997, manufacturing companies in Lockport totaled 71; in 2002 the number was 43. Accommodation and food service establishments in 1997 totaled 133; in 2002 there were 57. Retail trade companies in 1997 were numbered at 210; in 2002 only 81 were left. The shrinking of a working-class wage in this wonderful city has cut it deeply, leaving it to continue its bleeding to this day.

Families have been hard hit in this area. The cost of living hasn’t gone down; however, the average wage has. In 2005 the median household income of Lockport, N.Y., was $47,000. The median house value was $93,000. Now, after the two-tier virus has taken full control, the 2007 median household wage is $35,000, and median house values have dropped to $63,000.

This same virus is spreading across all of America, taking with it the important working middle class of America and its values. The new contracts with the top three U.S. auto companies include the exact same viral two-tier wage system that has all but killed one small city, and probably many others just like Lockport.

At what point does America wake up and realize globalization does not mean we have to lower our values and quality of life, becoming a two-tier nation. Once that happens, the constitutional right of “the pursuit of happiness” will become one for the first-tier wage earners only, leaving the remaining Americans to become crumbled and dilapidated much like my old home in Lockport, N.Y.

Robin Bouchard-Little ia a freelance writer, wife of a GM/UAW worker, and mother of two, living in Parma, Ohio.

28,000 home child care workers organize in N.Y.C.

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:02:00 +0000

NEW YORK — In the biggest successful organizing campaign in New York City in almost 50 years, over 28,000 home child care workers have joined the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the largest local in the American Federation of Teachers.

The union had teamed up in this drive with the Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national community-based group. Bertha Lewis, executive director of New York ACORN, said, “This partnership between ACORN and the UFT shows that great things can be accomplished when progressive labor groups and community organizations work together.”

The child care workers are presently earning a bit more than the federal poverty level and have no health coverage, sick leave or vacation pay.

Luz Alvarez, 53, a provider in Manhattan, is ecstatic. “Thank heaven, we finally have a union,” she said. “I’ve been a provider for eight years and in that time I’ve had one vacation, which was to attend my daughter’s wedding. The union can help us go in and negotiate a salary and other benefits so that we can take a vacation once a year and take a sick day without losing pay.”

The drive was helped by Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who issued an executive order that enabled the workers to be organized. Providers in New York state outside of New York City will be organized by the Civil Service Employees Association. The CSEA, part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has already organized 7,500 of the 25,000 providers who live and work upstate. The governor’s action was a reward for the strong support for his election that he received from the labor movement in New York.

Several observers noted that the entry of the child care providers, many of whom are poor women of color, into the already diverse 150,000 member UFT can only strengthen the union and the larger union movement. They said it shows that victories lie in people of various backgrounds and situations joining together and fighting for a better life together.

Tammie Miller, 40, a provider from Brooklyn, put it this way: “We are the children’s first teachers, so we represent hope in their lives, just as the UFT represents hope in our lives.”

She continued, “Being in a union was just a dream at one point, and now it’s here.”

nyfriends @pww.org

We will take New Orleans back

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:30:00 +0000

NEW ORLEANS — It’s back to school time every fall all across America: you pack their lunches and send the kids off to school. Unless you live here.

Two years after Katrina tore through the mouth of the Mississippi, a New Orleans parent, after running an obstacle course that can take many months, is only sometimes able to place his or her child in a school.

As the Category 5 hurricane bore down, Gwen Kimbal, 47, cried as she loaded her car with clothing, her two children and a grandchild. She cried because she had to leave her mother, who had kidney disease, back at the hospital.

“I looked at my babies when I got in that car and I said to myself, ‘No Superdome for them,’ and I drove north for 10 hours, stopping only when the traffic didn’t let me move,” she said.

Gwen and her family slept on a friend’s floor in Little Rock, Ark. Two weeks into their stay they learned their house in the Lower 9th Ward had been washed away by the water that breached the levees, and in the third week they learned Gwen’s mom was among those who had died in hospitals without power, water, food, medicine or doctors.

Stacking things against you

For a few months Gwen’s young son Michael attended school in Little Rock. She decided to bring the family back to New Orleans because her skills as a painter and carpenter landed her a job and a small house in the Gentilly neighborhood. I talked to her there Oct. 18, shortly after she got home from work.

“Our economic well-being required that we come back, but they stack things against you,” she said. “They’ve made it almost impossible to get a child into a school.”

Chaos and privatization

Only five of the public schools open in the city are part of the New Orleans Public School System. In September 2006, each of the principals told Gwen that her son would have to remain home for anywhere from six months to a year.

“What kind of civilized society tells a working mother that there is no place for her child in a public school and that she could just as well keep him home?” Gwen asked.

There are 24 charter schools in the city, some federally funded and others run by private contractors. Gwen tried every single one. All had waiting lists, one with 300 names. It took from October 2006 through January 2007 to complete her fruitless search of the charter school system.

Finally, she decided to look into the 25 schools that are part of the “Recovery School District,” schools run by the state of Louisiana. She got Michael into one of them in March.

“Things were bad there last spring, but now they are a total and shameful disgrace,” she said. “There are 750 kids in the school and on some days not a single teacher shows up. They herd everyone into the gym or the auditorium for the whole day. There’s no homework, no education, no nothing going on there.

“I cry again every night because I see a future for my beautiful baby, my Michael, as a smart, strong healthy African American man and this system, placing no priority on education, sees his future in a prison cell,” Gwen said.

Planned disaster

Did it have to be this way? The woman with the answer and the union leader in the forefront of the battle for public education in New Orleans is Dr. Brenda Mitchell, president of United Teachers of New Orleans. I talked with her Oct. 19 after she addressed a group of labor journalists meeting in the city.

Her union had 4,700 members before the storm and represented teachers while it fought for good schools. On issues of class size, quality teaching materials and innovation in education, the union and the state education department were often at loggerheads, with community and parent groups seeing the union as their advocate too.

“The state superintendent of education told me two days after the storm that there would be no schools whatsoever in New Orleans for at least a year,” Mitchell said. “It was all about breaking the back of the union so they could break the schools, keep African American workers from coming home and set up a free-market reign of terror.

“Our membership went down to zero; they set up three chaotic systems and they brought in volunteers and inexperienced, uncertified teachers, creating a disaster.”

Teachers union rising

Mitchell and other union activists started to rebuild the union from scratch. They got support from teachers and parents in each of the three school systems and now have 1,125 members. They have, through the courts, forced the state to pay $7 million in grievances to teachers who were summarily dismissed after Katrina. They have won back sole collective bargaining rights in the five schools that are part of the official New Orleans public school system, and the schools where their numbers are strongest are showing some of the best academic results.

“It’s not just teachers, moving ahead,” Mitchell said. “The labor movement in this city is alive and well. Our union, the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, the longshoremen, the pipefitters, the seafarers, the electrical workers — all of us are back. We’ve taken our unions back and we will take this city back.”

Mitchell said, “I’m tired of singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and I am definitely tired of crying. We’re fighting and we are going to win.”

jwojcik @pww.org

Children suffer in immigration raids

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:12:00 +0000

For every two people detained in immigration enforcement operations, one child is left behind, according to a recent report, “Paying the Price: The impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children,” released by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute.

The report finds that two-thirds of these children are U.S. citizens, and notes that most are under age 10.

“Five million children living in the U.S. have at least one undocumented parent,” said Rosa Maria Castañeda, co-author of the document and researcher with the Urban Institute.

Castañeda told the World in a phone interview, “It was important to look at the impact of children very seriously and intensely and to consider how they are affected.”

“These are the most vulnerable in society,” she said.

The study points out that immigration raids directly affect children’s psychological, educational, economic and social well-being. Such raids greatly impact immigrant communities, school systems, social service providers and religious institutions, which have acted as first responders for many families during immigration arrests. Immigration raids, says the study, create economic distress and emotional trauma for children.

Urban Institute researchers studied three communities that experienced large-scale worksite raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents within the past year: Greeley, Colo., Grand Island, Neb., and New Bedford, Mass. A total of 912 people were arrested and 506 children were directly affected.

Many schools, child care providers and extended families were also affected. In each case they served as important safety nets for children whose parents were detained.

On the day of the raids in all three areas, school districts made sure that children were not dropped off to empty homes or left at school overnight.

The report criticized ICE’s processing and detention procedures, which routinely deny detainees telephone access, and the holding of many detainees outside their home states, making it difficult for those arrested to contact their families or other caregivers to arrange for child care.

The majority of children, after ICE arrests, remained with a second parent. However, in Grand Island, 17 percent of children affected had both parents arrested.

Resources of extended families and friends were depleted quickly, and support from nonprofit groups generally lasted only three or four months, yet some parents remained in detention for up to six months, the report noted.

Many children experienced emotional trauma from their parents’ sudden absence, often personalizing the cause of separation and feeling abandoned. Many remained fearful that their other, non-detained parent could be abruptly taken away from them.

For these reasons and others, many national immigration rights groups have called for a moratorium on all ICE raids and deportations.

In her research, Castañeda spoke with 30 immigrant families. One parent told Castañeda that her 10-year-old son was fearful and showed signs of anxiety, especially when police sirens were heard outside their home. He ran to his room and hid, the parent said.

In another case, a child was extremely confused, not understanding why his father had to go away because they came to the United States to have a better life and not to be separated.

In all three cities, immigrant families hid in their houses and were reluctant to open the door to visitors offering assistance for weeks after the raids.

Mental health experts noted that the parents’ fears and the events surrounding the raids led to the children having depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

The report includes a series of recommendations for policymakers, local officials, service providers and the ICE to ensure that children are protected when raids occur. For example, the report says ICE should assume that children will be affected whenever adults are arrested in worksite raids, and a consistent policy should be arranged when handling detained parents.

Also, it says Congress should provide oversight of immigration enforcement and ensure that children are protected with adequate resources for schools and local agencies that respond to children’s needs. Schools should also develop safe places for children to go in the event of a school-hours raid, the report says.

Finally, the report urges social service and other public agencies to prepare plans to respond to ICE raids and develop outreach strategies to assure parents and other caregivers that it is safe to seek emergency assistance and support for children.

In light of the report, NCLR has asked Congress to hold hearings as soon as possible regarding the status of children in the aftermath of raids.

Castañeda said the issue is nonpartisan, and children’s needs should be the fundamental consideration.

plozano @pww.org

Gulf workers confront race to bottom

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 05:23:00 +0000

NEW ORLEANS — Renaissance Park in Baker, La., has a name that does it no justice.

Home to Catherine Pitt, 31, an African American mother and her two children, it is row after row of cramped FEMA trailers sitting on a flat field encircled by barbed wire and patrolled by armed Blackwater USA security guards.

At 5 a.m. every morning, hundreds awaken and travel from there to a job somewhere in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast region.

At 5 a.m., Oct. 18, however, Catherine and hundreds of others stayed behind in Renaissance Park. I visited her in the afternoon. She is no longer able to get to the job she landed a year ago at the downtown Westin Hotel because the bus she rode is on a discontinued line.

“The cheapest alternate route, the cost of day care and the rent add up to more than I was making there,” she said.

While, at 5 a.m. every morning, African Americans remain behind the barbed wire at the camp, locked out of work in the city they toiled in all their lives, Latino immigrants gather in downtown New Orleans beneath a 60 foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. I was there at 5 a.m., too.

The granite image of the general, facing north, was constructed right after the Civil War by plantation owners memorializing their “hero” in the “War against Northern Aggression.”

At 5:30 a.m., a school bus carrying contractors pulled up at Lee Circle, where they got out to inspect the immigrants gathered there. When they weeded out ones who didn’t look young, strong or healthy enough, they began the bidding.

“Who will work for $5?” No one stepped forward.

“Who will work for $5.50?” A big group stepped up.

“Who will work for $6?” Still more came forward.

“What about $7?” The rest stepped up.

There were enough in the $5 and $5.50 groups. Those were taken. The others were left behind.

“Only half of those picked up will get paid anything at all,” said Saket Soni, lead organizer of the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice. “The rest are deported before payday.”

On Oct. 18, Soni met with 70 labor journalists, including myself, at a convention here of the International Labor Communications Association.

Among other topics, he discussed the situation at Renaissance Park and the buying of immigrant labor by the low bidders at Lee Circle. “The pattern of this reconstruction,” he said, “is to systematically lock out hundreds of thousands of African Americans and to systematically lock in and exploit hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.”

Soni said, “The problem was not that the government was inept or that it didn’t do enough. The problem is that the government acted quickly to implement a right-wing plan to create an expendable work force and a race to the bottom. They took advantage of the storm to carry out a social experiment they never would have dreamed possible otherwise.”

He explained that the first step in the plan was to suspend the Davis-Bacon law, a law requiring payment of prevailing wages.

The second step was the suspension of affirmative action guidelines for federally funded projects — telling employers that it was OK to discriminate against Blacks and replace them with cheaper immigrant labor.

The third step, Soni said, was the establishment of a “no-bid contracting regime” to destroy the rights of workers and their unions.

The fourth step, he said, was the creation of an “immigration enforcement saturation zone,” enabling contractors to exploit immigrant labor and hook up with the government to have workers deported before payday.

I walked along the riverfront, Oct. 19, looking for one of the restaurants that Soni, in his talk at the convention, said were experts in running the “race to the bottom.” I passed the Riverside, a well-known seafood restaurant.

There was a long line. They take your name and you can wait at the bar. The bartender who is white said all 25 on the kitchen staff were Brazilians here on H-2 visas and that they earned $6 an hour. “They got rid of the Central Americans a year ago,” he said, “they were too much trouble. They paid them $8, but a lot of them were illegal.”

“Who worked in the kitchen before the Central Americans?” I asked. “The Blacks,” he said, “They were making $10, but, naturally, they got rid of them because it was cheaper to hire the Central Americans.”

“The Blacks had already taken a cut before they were fired,” the bartender explained. “Before the hurricane they got $14 an hour. They were cut back to $10 after the storm.” I left the place before they called my name. The bartender will soon be in the line of fire, too, I thought.

I phoned Soni and told him I had found a New Orleans restaurant that had taken advantage of the right-wing social experiment he had talked about and that it had, in two years, reduced its kitchen staff wages from $14 to $6 an hour. “What will they do next?” I asked.

“They can get prison labor for $5.25,” he said.

jwojcik @pww.org