People Before Profit blog

Kucinich gets ovation at UE meet

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 03:34:00 +0000

PITTSBURGH – Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, brought cheers from delegates to the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers 68th convention here recently, challenging them to consider “a new vision for America” and to put “a people’s president in a workers’ White House.”

Kucinich charged that the other Democratic nominees for president were shortchanging the debate within the Democratic Party by confining the discussion to “narrow choices and false choices.” The debate is too often about what type of private health insurance will be available, “not whether we should create a transformation of a system that has obviously failed,” Kucinich said. Or the debate is about fixing NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, not about getting out, he said.

“As president, my first act in office will be to cancel NAFTA and the WTO,” said Kucinich, ridiculing the suggestion by Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) that he would work to fix NAFTA. “You can’t fix NAFTA. This promise of free trade is an illusion,” he added. The delegates erupted in applause.

Kucinich directed some of his sharpest criticisms at former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. He pointed out that Dean, who is a physician, regards a universal, single-payer health care plan as “tilting at windmills.”

“When a doctor says that, it’s time to get a second opinion,” Kucinich said. “Unless a Democratic candidate is willing to step forward and challenge this system, he has no business carrying the banner of this party.”

Kucinich also criticized Dean for refusing to cut Pentagon spending if he is elected president. “Dean says he won’t touch Pentagon spending but he’s for a balanced budget. Do the math,” he said, adding that he would cut military spending by 15 percent and transfer the funds to education for children.

Kucinich said that his presidency “will be about restoring the dignity of the American worker. We have a right to a job, decent wages and benefits, the hope of owning a home, of sending our children to a decent college.”

“We have to let the people know we have the ability to create the America of our dreams, we have the capacity to do it,” said Kucinich, who received a prolonged standing ovation at the conclusion of his remarks.

Shortly after the Ohio congressman left the convention hall, the UE delegates adopted a statement of support for Kucinich’s candidacy. Recognizing that the union has never made a presidential primary endorsement, the statement reads, “We are, however, proud to strongly urge UE rank-and-file members to seriously consider his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

Kucinich “is to be commended for his participation in the primary contests,” the statement continues. “His campaign effort is injecting into the primary process a sense of urgency with regard to the need to tackle the various crises facing working people, including the imperative to remove Bush from office in the November 2004 elections.”

The UE delegates then passed a motion to take up a collection for Kucinich’s grassroots campaign.

The author can be reached at jthomp690@yahoo.com

Amtrak unions plan one-day protest strike

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 02:59:00 +0000

Six unions representing 5,000 Amtrak employees have announced that Amtrak employees will withdraw their services from the railroads on Oct. 3 in what the Transport Workers Union calls a “one-day political protest.” The unions are demanding that Congress authorize the necessary funding to keep the system running.

“Amtrak is on its way to oblivion if the Bush administration and Congress have their way,” said TWU International President Sonny Hall. “The budget President Bush is proposing for Amtrak is totally inadequate and will push Amtrak over the edge to its ultimate demise. This is a threat to our national security, and it is in direct opposition to the will of millions of Americans.”

According to Amtrak President David Gunn, Amtrak requires $1.8 billion to maintain its current operations. However, President Bush proposed only $900 million, as did the House. The Senate will likely earmark only $1.35 billion. “Why would the most prosperous country in the world abandon rail passenger service as a transportation option, especially in light of Sept. 11?” asked Hall. “But that is exactly the road we are traveling on.”

Hall pointed out that a majority of the House members signed a letter pledging to vote for $1.8 billion for Amtrak, but “the Republican leadership used procedural gimmicks to prevent a vote on that figure,” he said.

Earlier this month in an Amtrak “Employee Advisory,” Gunn said, “Our infrastructure and equipment is in such dire need of repair and investment that on any given day something could fail – as it already has – and large parts of the system could be shut down.”

Hall said the workers want to give the riding public a preview of what life will be like without Amtrak. “If they get an injunction against us it will prove our point – that Amtrak is too important to allow it to be destroyed.”

Other unions in supporting the work stoppage include the Brotherhood of Maintenance and Way Employees, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the National Council of Firemen and Oilers, Service Employees International Union, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees.

The author can be reached at fgab708@aol.com

Australian teachers defend public schools

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 02:34:00 +0000

Teachers in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia have conducted 24-hour work stoppages and nationwide protests as part of the Australian Education Union’s (AEU) efforts to make education a top-level national priority. The historic action last week by teachers in defense of Australia’s public schools was a resounding success. An estimated 100,000 teachers took part in the coordinated strike.

The recent job actions by Australian teachers’ unions have been undertaken in defense of the public education system. The teachers targeted state Labor Party governments, which they accused of colluding to keep wages down in the face of a national teacher shortage.

In New South Wales (NSW), indications are that support for the stoppage was the highest ever, with many schools reporting 100 percent of teachers out. More than 20,000 NSW public school and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) teachers converged on Parliament House to condemn the state government’s “despicable” pay offer and to deliver thousands of letters demanding salary increases.

Chanting, “We are here, we are strong, your 3 percent is just plain wrong,” the teachers marched from Hyde Park. The teachers have launched a case for a 25 percent wage increase. Higher wages are necessary to attract new teachers and retain the present workforce, they said.

Maree O’Halloran, president of the NSW Teachers’ Federation, said if they failed to win their case, or if a significant pay raise was funded by making cuts elsewhere in the education budget, teachers were ready and willing to stage further strikes next year.

“If there’s not the outcome that public education needs, then action is more than likely from the beginning of the 2004 school year,” O’Halloran told reporters.

In Victoria, at the same time as the action in NSW, 10,000 teachers and support staff filled the Vodafone Arena in Melbourne. They vowed to continue their campaign for wage justice and quality education services. They voted unanimously in support of a resolution demanding that state and territory Labor governments honor their electoral commitments to make public education a “number one priority.”

Mary Bluett, president of the AEU in Victoria, told the mass meeting of teachers that the dispute had an historical significance. Bluett said it was the first time that teachers had engaged in a national strike. She said it was also the first time that primary and secondary teachers, pre-school teachers, support staff and principals had united in a campaign to defend the future and quality of public education. The meeting condemned state and territory treasurers for agreeing to cap public sector salary increases to inflation.

The Victorian Government offer of a 2.25 percent wage increase with an additional 0.75 productivity payment was “an insult,” AEU Victorian Branch Secretary Ann Taylor told the meeting.

In West Australia (WA), public school teachers held a half-day stoppage, vowing to escalate industrial action in their pursuit of a 30 percent pay claim. About 7,000 teachers attended a stop-work meeting at Subiaco Oval. West Australian teachers are seeking a 30 percent pay raise over three years, while the government has offered raises of up to 14.3 percent over two-and-a-half years.

Their meeting endorsed an ongoing campaign of rolling work stoppages, including a possible statewide strike in the fourth term, which begins next month, and a rally at Parliament House on Sept. 24. AEU National and WA President Pat Byrne said teachers would also escalate their political campaign, targeting all sitting members of State Parliament.

Byrne said about 70 percent of WA teachers had walked off the job, and she hoped their actions had sent a clear message to the state government.

This article was reprinted from The Guardian, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia.

Remember Seattle? March to Miami!

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 02:13:00 +0000

The Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment (ASJE) launched its March to Miami just after Labor Day in Seattle, where Teamsters and environmental activists first marched together to protest transnational corporate arrogance and the World Trade Organization. The March is caravanning across the northern tier of states to Minnesota, then heading south through Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Atlanta to the next meeting of the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA) trade ministers in Miami, Nov. 20-21.

Events along the way include rallies, teach-ins, and “blue-green summits” that address fair trade issues and are intended to inspire and solidify regional labor/environmental organizing committees with specific projects based on the experiences of ASJE’s Working Groups on energy, global trade, “rogue corporations,” and forest and jobs restoration. Stops along the March will educate constituencies about the dangers the FTAA’s “trade-in-services” provisions pose to our public services, construction trades and domestic manufacturing. The March will also swell the flow of people converging on events in Miami.

The AFSE hopes to highlight the local efforts of blue-green allies such as the AFL-CIO’s citizen referendum to stop the FTAA, the Immigrant Rights Freedom Ride, the International Longshore Workers Union’s American Solidarity campaign, as well as state-level fair trade campaigns, anti-globalization groups, and environmental organizations.

For decades, polluting profiteers have claimed that we must choose between “jobs or the environment.” Corporations have used this as a wedge issue to divide labor and environmentalists. The successful merging of these two movements into an alliance around something that is vital to everyone – good work in a healthy community – gives hope that working together, “common” people have the power to challenge corporate hegemony.

ASJE’s mission is to nurture this new possibility by building a strong and broad-based national network of local and regional blue-green alliances. For more information on the Alliance and its founding principles, see www.asje.org. If your organization would like to join the March and help plan a local event, rally or educational blue/green forum, contact Dan Leahy, executive director of ASJE at (503) 736-9777, or e-mail him at leahyd@evergreen.com.

The author can be reached at zacd1@juno.com

Freedom Rides hit the road

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 01:44:00 +0000

Jubilant send-off rallies in four West Coast cities Sept. 20 launched the first contingent of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR), the most dramatic and ambitious campaign for rights of foreign-born workers and their families in U.S. history.

In mobilizing to focus public attention on the injustice of the nation’s current immigration policy, the IWFR is taking a page from the Freedom Rides of 1961 in which Black and white protesters rode through the South challenging segregated buses and waiting rooms.

Goods and services produced by undocumented immigrants in the U.S. work force are the basis for much of the prosperity in this, the richest nation of the world. Yet the very existence of these nine million workers and their families is deemed “illegal” and they are forced into a shadowy world of super-exploitation, without access to the

tools of life – driver’s licenses, higher education, medical care.

At the same time, recent court decisions have lifted sanctions on employer violations of on-the-job rights of undocumented workers in every sphere – pay standards, union organizing rights, safety, and discrimination. With immigrant workers a major force in key sectors of the economy in every region of the country – food processing, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, health care, and service work, winning immigrant workers’ rights has emerged as a life and death issue for America’s labor movement as well. Terrence O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ Union says, “No worker in America is safe until the immigrant worker has the right to stand up to his boss and demand his rights.”

Legalization and the establishment of “a path to citizenship,” including voting rights, tops the IWFR’s agenda, according to Freedom Ride Chair Maria Elena Durazo, head of Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. Equally important, she says, are the goals of re-unification of families divided by unjust immigration laws, and full and equal rights for immigrant workers on the job. Durazo, who has traveled the nation on behalf of immigrant rights, told the Los Angeles send-off rally, “We want to be treated as all Americans because we do what all Americans do in this country.”

The goal of the ambitious action is more than making a one-time statement, says Durazo. “We are building local coalitions of existing immigrant rights groups, labor unions, religious and community groups to broaden the consensus for immigrant rights,” she told the World. To accomplish these goals, Durazo says, “We need a new Congress and a new White House.” She sees the Freedom Ride as an important part of the build up to the 2004 elections.

Buses of immigrants and supporters, leaving from ten cities, are traveling across the country and will arrive in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 1, where they will undertake two days of lobbying before a final mass rally in Queens, N.Y., on Oct 4.

Each bus has a unique route and the over 100 sites visited along the way will highlight a struggle of immigrant workers.

On a glorious afternoon that bathed the nation’s west coast in early autumn sunshine, send-off rallies in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, showcased the remarkable diversity of the nation’s immigrant population and their particular and common struggles.

With gospel singers, balloons, and huge labor contingents of unionists in bright-colored T-shirts, the city of Los Angeles demonstrated all-out support of its 140 riders. Mayor James Hahn delivered a city proclamation declaring Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Day.

Eliseo Medina, national vice president of the SEIU, called on every immigrant to get involved in the elections, working against the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and for the defeat of Bush in 2004. He stated, “While immigrants may not be able to vote, they can phone voters, walk door-to-door and get out the vote.”

Grey Pichinte works two jobs to make ends meet. A janitor and member of SEIU Local 1877, she told the World why she is taking two weeks off work and leaving her family to fight for the rights of immigrant workers like herself. “We clean hotel rooms, we work in restaurants, we support the economy and we deserve justice,” she said.

Bay Area Freedom Riders and 5,000 supporters gathered at Yerba Buena Gardens, where a waterfall surrounds the engraved words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. A Native American drum group accompanied the riders marching to a Civic Center welcome by Governor Gray Davis, Rep. Barbara Lee, (D-Calif.), and Delores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers.

Immigrants from Arab or majority Muslim countries face particular problems. Many have been deported based on minor visa violations, tearing apart whole families. Navil Ahmad, representing the Council on American Islamic Relations, said he is going on the Freedom Ride to see families re-united, regardless of immigration status.

Ahmad has also experienced racial discrimination on the job, he said, including denial of promotions. “We want to spread the word across the country about equal rights for everyone, so that all voices can be heard,” he said.

“I have been in the U.S. for three years and hope for a better future, because it is now my home,” said Juan Carlos Huezo, an airport security worker in the Bay Area and member of SEIU Local 790. Huezo said he is happy to be a Freedom Rider because he sees it as a way to help people to become citizens. He said many of his co-workers are afraid to speak out for fear of damaging their ability to be joined with their families. “I still want to be able to go back to El Salvador to see my great-grandma who raised me,” Huezo added.

The Seattle rally, held near the International Fountain, was attended by 350 people including the Seattle Labor Chorus and the Total Experience Gospel Choir.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) called the Freedom Ride a way of organizing “the resistance that needs to grow before the next elections.”

“I am an immigrant and proud of it!” Philippine-born State Sen. Velma Veloria said. Veloria is one of the riders from Seattle.

Also riding will be Maria Fuentes, a janitor and a very determined member of SEIU Local 6. Fuentes has been fired several times for union organizing among immigrant janitors in nearby Bellevue.

One bus of LA Freedom Riders will hit Dallas, Texas, Sept. 27. The city’s unions were proud to put up the money to pay for their overnight accommodations, Jim McCasland, of the Dallas AFL-CIO, said at a City Hall press conference.

The conference, called by Councilman Steve Salazar, displayed the unprecedented breadth of the North Texas Coalition supporting the IWFR. Speaking for the Dallas Catholic diocese, Sister Nancy Sullivan said, “We stand firm that the human rights of immigrants come from God and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

UNITE! organizer Willy Gonzalez invoked the time-honored slogan of the workers’ movement, saying,“‘An injury to one is an injury to all,’ has no exceptions.”

The president of the Alliance of Dallas Educators, Aimee Bolender, said immigrant children “need rights and freedoms to develop to their full potential.”

Dr. Scott Moulton of the Texas Doctor’s Council reported that immigrants suffer a horrendous accident rate in Texas. “Many die at their jobs,” he said. North Texas Jobs with Justice will work just as hard in opposing the FTAA as it did to make the IWFR successful, said activist Gene Lantz.

On Sept. 27 and the following days, another wave of buses will hit the road from Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Boston, and Miami, and stops will include historic sites of Civil Rights struggles.

“The first freedom rides occurred in the 1840s and were a protest against Jim Crow laws imposing segregation in train and carriage travel in Pennsylvania, New York and New England,” said Rev. James Lawson, one of the co-ordinators of the 1961 Freedom Rides. During the 1961 Freedom Rides, although buses were burned, and riders savagely attacked, the right to access to public accommodations was established. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, millions of African American citizens across the South won the right to vote.

Evelina Alarcon, Marc Brodine, Jim Lane, Judith Le Blanc and Lucille Whitney contributed to this article. The author can be reached at rwood@pww.org.

Labor and Patriot Acts I and II:

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 04:21:00 +0000

A case for political action

President George W. Bush heads the most viciously anti-worker, anti-labor administration we have seen in a long time. He and his corporate backers are hell-bent on blocking any new advances for labor and on rolling back existing labor rights.

Last year’s use of a Taft-Hartley injunction against the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) in the name of “national security” is but one example of Bush’s readiness to use the force of the state against labor. So, too, was the stripping of 170,000 federal employees of their unionization rights under the pretext of enhancing “homeland security.”

Yet another illustration was the performance of Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao at the February meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council where she launched into a vicious attack on the International Association of Machinists for alleged corruption, clearly signaling that unions were fair game for government snooping, investigation, and intimidation. “In all my years ... I’ve never seen a secretary of labor who’s so anti-labor,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told reporters at the time.

Labor, Bush clash on many fronts

Organized labor and the Bush administration will continue to clash on several vitally important matters:

s The economy. Every aspect of the Bush economic program represents a danger to the interests of working people, and thus economic issues top labor’s challenge to the Bush agenda.

s The rights of immigrant workers. Organized labor has correctly seen the organizing of immigrant workers, be they with or without papers, as essential to its own growth and survival, and the necessity of the legalization of the undocumented so that organizing can proceed without their being intimidated by management because of their legal status.

The Bush administration has pulled out of talks with the Mexican government on this subject, even as it steps up attacks on the foreign born across the board. It has barred non-citizens from working at airports and cracked down hard on the undocumented.

In response, several unions have launched large scale mobilizations in defense of immigrants’ rights such as last year’s SEIU-sponsored “Reward Work” campaign and this fall’s projected Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride, initiated by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union. Both show the priority the labor movement has assigned to this issue.

s Peace. The Bush administration’s “preemptive war” doctrine, along with the shift of federal spending from domestic needs to the military, threatens the interests of working people in fundamental ways, and thus will motivate labor to step more and more to the forefront in the antiwar movement. Labor opposition to the Afghanistan war was small-scale, but picked up steam with the buildup to the war with Iraq. The emergence of the U.S. Labor Against the War coalition, with its call for a Labor Assembly for Peace to take place in Chicago on Oct. 24-26, is a development of profound historical importance.

Labor and civil liberties: some background

When government went after the foreign born in 1919, organized labor was the real target. In the period immediately following the First World War, the Russian Revolution and postwar unemployment produced a “Red Scare” in ranks of the ruling class worldwide.

President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, used tactics not unlike those of Attorney General John Ashcroft to go after foreign-born union agitators as “Bolshevik terrorists.” But the Palmer raids and the other repressive measures taken by the Wilson administration and its successors did not just target the foreign-born, they were used to stop undermine 1919 steel strike, for example, thus hurting both native born and foreign-born workers.

So, too, with the McCarthyism of the 1940s and ’50s. Although the Hollywood persecutions and blacklist got much of the headlines, they were not motivated by the fear of “communist” ideological influence in film scripts, but by the post-war upsurge in the ranks of labor.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee postured about hunting down spies and subversives. But their real prey were left-wing labor activists and leaders. McCarthyism destroyed whole unions (such as the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers portrayed in the film “Salt of the Earth”) and did so much damage to the labor movement that it did not recover, even partially, for a generation.

Today’s assault on freedoms

And so it is today. Under the Bush administration, constitutional rights and civil liberties are once again under vicious attack. New, repressive instruments are being forged that can and will be used against unions and union members.

Consider a few aspects of the USA Patriot Act, a law that poses great dangers for labor. The Patriot Act created the new category of “domestic terrorism.” It defines “terrorism” as actions that are intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” This definition is so vague and broad that all sorts of acts by union members both here and abroad – nonviolent picket lines, demonstrations, rallies, civil disobedience and strikes – could conceivably be characterized by the government as acts of terrorism punishable by law. Resisting the boss becomes “terrorism.”

Under this pretext, unions and union activists could be subjected to an array of surveillance, wiretaps, detention, seizure of assets and denial of due process rights.

Nor is that all. As some labor activists have noted, the draconian measures available to a repression-minded government under the Patriot Act might combine with the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Controlled Organizations) Act that allows prosecution based on association with any organization that is believed to be harming someone else’s economic interests through illegal pressure tactics.

Further, in the area of international labor solidarity, a union could be accused of providing material support to foreign labor organizations designated as “terrorist” by the State Department.

And now comes ‘Patriot Act II’

The Bush administration is not yet finished with its attacks on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. On March 7, the Center for Public Integrity revealed that the Department of Justice is developing what has come to be called “Patriot II,” tentatively titled The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Patriot II goes well beyond the USA Patriot Act to include the following shocking items:

s The government would give itself the right to effectively revoke the U.S. citizenship of people it accuses of consorting with terrorists and deport them. This would include not just non-citizens, but U.S. citizens as well, both born and naturalized. One clause of the draft legislation states that people could be deported even to areas without an organized form of government (Antarctica? The moon?).

s The power of the attorney general to deport the foreign born without due process would be increased even more. Essentially, he would be able to simply declare that any non-citizen is a security threat and throw them out of the country without further ado.

s Existing court orders limiting political spying by police would be abolished. This would unleash local police for wholesale abuse of constitutional rights against organized labor and everyone else. Recent experiences with dockworkers in Charleston, S.C., show that local authorities, given these powers, would be able to use them to further the interests of employers and employer-linked political forces.

s Public access to information about dangerous conditions in industry would be severely restricted, under the pretext of not allowing potential terrorists to have such information. Unions and environmentalists would also have trouble getting such information and government whistle-blowers who released such information to the public could be prosecuted.

Mounting a fightback

If these attacks on the Constitution are to be defeated, the first step is to build a firewall strong enough to stop any new legislation from being passed. Patriot Act II has, by the very nature of its proposed measures, given the game away to major sectors of the U.S. public, and they are voicing their opposition. In response, Attorney General John Ashcroft has made a nationwide tour, stumping for its support, and President Bush used the Sept. 11 anniversary to plug for the passage of such repressive laws.

Patriot Act II can be stopped, but not without hard work and struggle.

Secondly, it is not too early to be fighting to repeal the USA Patriot Act (‘Patriot I’). This effort is already well underway. To date, more than 160 city and town councils, plus three state legislatures (Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont) have passed resolutions calling for the defense of the Constitution and the repeal of the USA Patriot Act. Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, San Francisco and Denver are among cities that have approved such resolutions, while Chicago and many others are working on similar resolutions. These resolutions can all be read on line at www.bordc.org.

Labor’s defense of freedoms

The dangers of Patriot Acts I and II has not gone unnoticed in the ranks of organized labor. The AFL-CIO has deplored the legislation as well as the Homeland Security Act, and unions are adopting their own resolutions. Not surprisingly, the ILWU was among the first to act. In an article in the November 2001 ILWU Dispatcher, Washington Representative Lindsay McLaughlin invoked the fighting history of his union to point out the dangers the Patriot Act. He wrote:

“The first President and leader [of the ILWU] for 40 years, Harry Bridges, was an immigrant. The government tried to deport him. It tapped his phone, locked him up and tried to destroy the ILWU and the movement it represented. But after a couple of decades of harassment and court battles, justice prevailed. If the government had had these new ‘anti-terrorism’ police powers at its disposal during his trials, does anyone believe Bridges and the union would have prevailed? The attorney general will use this law to get rid of immigrants with political views he doesn’t agree with. Count on it.”

And this before Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the ILWU that it was undercutting the war against terrorism by its stance in negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened to send troops to control the docks!

Several unions, along with a wide range of civil liberties organizations, are co-sponsoring a conference on defeating the Patriot Acts set for Oct. 16-18 in Washington, D.C.

The San Francisco Labor Council named a committee to study the issue. Committee members consulted with civil liberties experts and issued a detailed report on the ways in which these laws can and will be used against organized labor if they are not stopped. The concluded:

“The proposed Patriot Act II, coupled with the Patriot Act I and RICO, creates the legal architecture for a police state in the United States. The purpose of this legislation is to allow for U.S. global expansion unhindered by organized domestic opposition. These laws and proposed legislation are clearly intended to prevent resistance to U.S. corporate control and allow preemptive attacks on those organizations and individuals the government considers a threat.”

Emile Schepers is the program director of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

UAW announces tentative pact

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 04:10:00 +0000

DETROIT – In a prepared statement made in the early hours of Sept. 15, United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger announced a tentative agreement between the union and Daimler Chrysler. Later in the day, the union announced that it had also reached an agreement with Ford and Visteon.

“We’re proud of the agreement and are satisfied that it’s a good agreement that addresses the needs of our membership – active and retired – and accomplishes our bargaining goals,” Gettelfinger said of each.

UAW bargaining goals included preserving existing health care coverage, job security, health and safety protections, and pension protections.

The details of each tentative agreement won’t be made public until the membership votes on them.

Yale pensions a national issue

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 03:55:00 +0000

Retirement into poverty, or retirement with dignity? With one quarter of Yale’s employees likely to retire in the course of the next contract, this critical issue for workers everywhere has become pivotal in the strike against Yale University and its teaching hospital.

From sit-ins to hunger strikes at Yale offices, retirees have electrified the strikers and dramatized the issues for the whole community.

Yale workers are fighting for their pensions at a time when retirement security is under attack everywhere. Defined benefit plans, like Yale’s, are being replaced by 401(k) and other contributory plans that leave workers at the mercy of the stock market.From Enron to the steel industry, workers have seen their “secure” pensions go up in smoke. Fewer employers are offering any pension plan at all. And the attack on Social Security will undoubtedly resume as soon as the 2004 elections are over. Workers are postponing retirement or going back to work; the proportion of older Americans in the workforce is rising, even while jobs are vanishing for younger workers.

This is a big concern for Yale workers, too. Virginia Henry, a Yale custodian, says, “I worry that at 65 years old I’ll have to get another job. For many of us, this [contract] is our last chance to achieve a good life after Yale.”

In 2002, the average union worker who retired from Yale with 20 or more years’ service got a pension of only $7,452 per year. Including Social Security, they are now living on an estimated $20,000. Lower-paid workers, of course, receive less. Under Yale’s offer, I estimate average pensions for new retirees at about $9,300 per year – $23,000 or less with the addition of Social Security.

Yale has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on full-page ads that give examples of workers who will receive $32,303 to $35,896 upon retirement. They get this figure by using workers in the top labor grades, with a full 30 years’ service, and by making various assumptions about Social Security and retirement options. None of these are typical of Yale retirees.

Lab Assistant Leona Polite says, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay my bills – utilities, insurance, car repairs, taxes, medication. Everything is going up except Yale’s pension.” Her fears are justified.

Harry Kashtan retired from the Yale library in 1989 with a pension of $7,104 per year. “My pension is so small my wife and I can’t afford to visit our grandchildren. We can’t afford repairs on our home and we even qualify for state assistance,” he says.

With no cost-of-living adjustment, Kashtan’s pension has remained frozen at its 1989 level. It has lost one third of its value since 1989; he would need another $3,432 per year to have the same buying power today. And Kashtan is lucky – inflation has been relatively low in the 14 years since he retired. If inflation rises to the levels of 1975-1985, a pension will lose half its value in only 10 years. With record budget deficits and a weak economy, gambling one’s retirement on low inflation is a poor bet.

Can Yale afford better pensions? It has reportedly offered its president a pension of $500,000 per year when he retires – fifty times what a typical worker will get. And according to the union, although Yale hasn’t made payments to its pension fund for the past three years, it still has a $200 million surplus. But Yale recently changed the way they calculate their pension fund, and the $200 billion surplus has conveniently disappeared.

Yale is trying to use the bad economy, including the widespread threats to workers’ retirement, against the unions. “Yale workers are greedy to be asking for more, at a time when other workers are taking cutbacks,” is the message implied in university statements. But that’s not the way the national labor movement and the New Haven community see it.

The Yale strike has become a national strike because the unions are taking on issues of national importance. The victory of Yale’s workers will help set a higher standard for other employers, and will strengthen the labor and community movements in their efforts to protect and strengthen Social Security and improve pension protection for all workers.

The author can be reached at economics@cpusa.org

Miners rally for retirees

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 03:52:00 +0000

TUCSON, Ariz. – Hundreds of retired copper workers and their supporters rallied at the Federal Courthouse Sept. 8 to voice their outrage at ASARCO’s recent decision to unilaterally slash health insurance benefits for retired copper mine and smelter workers. ASARCO, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Grupo Mexico, has attacked its retirees by unlawfully modifying its health care plan, forcing them to pay as much as $5,000 per year in exorbitant premiums and deductibles.

Grupo Mexico is a complex of mining interests dominated by the billionaire Larrea family of Mexico City. The notorious union busting Phelps Dodge Corp. also has significant interests in Grupo Mexico.

The rally coincided with the filing of a federal class action legal complaint by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and other unions and individual retirees asking the court to declare the company in violation of its contractual and statutory obligations to employees. Leading the fight is the Solidarity Council for Justice, founded by eight union locals representing ASARCO/Grupo workers.

“It’s just one more screw in my back,” said Dick Cvitkovich, referring to the planned company take-backs. Cvitkovich, a disabled heavy equipment operator, rank-and-file activist, and union officer with the Operating Engineers, is a Vietnam veteran who worked for 30 years at ASARCO. “I gave them my body and they literally ruined it. And now, if the ... changes go through, my entire pension will be eaten up by additional insurance costs. They’re cheating me out of my retirement.”

Speaking in support of the retirees were Democratic state Sen. Pete Rios, Arizona AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Mike McGrath, and Arizona coordinator of Steelworker Organization of Active Retirees, Celestino Torres. “We are not going to let them steal our pensions,” Torres said.

Robert Manriquez, president of USWA Local 5252 at ASARCO’s Ray mining and smelting complex, stressed the importance of the support the retirees have received from younger workers. “We’re all in this together,” he said.

Solidarity Council leaders announced an international “Campaign for Justice” to demand that ASARCO and Grupo Mexico rescind the decision.

“I’ve just returned from Mexico,” said USWA District 12 Sub-director Manny Armenta. “There I spoke with union leaders from ASARCO/Grupo unions in Mexico and Peru. We all agreed that we have problems with these companies.”

The author can be reached at stelnik@webtv.net

Labor Nation agency slammed

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 03:43:00 +0000

CHICAGO – “Is this a union town?” asked Tim Leahy, secretary-treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). “How strong is labor if places like Labor Nation supply scabs? This fight isn’t just a fight just for today, it’s also a fight for the future.”

Leahy was addressing 100 demonstrators picketing the Labor Nation day labor agency here Sept. 5. The company is supplying 40 scabs to replace striking workers at the Congress Hotel.

One hundred thirty hotel workers, members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 1, struck June 15 after the hotel cut wages by 7 percent and eliminated family health insurance. The hotel’s action went against the prevailing agreement between the union and the city’s largest hotels.

The demonstrators, representing striking workers, the CFL, Jobs with Justice, Coalition for the Homeless, Workers’ Rights Board and ACORN were delivering a letter signed by labor and community leaders to Labor Nation, demanding that they cease strikebreaking activities. But the company locked the door.

“You can count on me,” declared Sharon Williams, a Congress Hotel striker. Williams was referring to the slogan of Labor Nation – “Count on us.” She continued, “If they don’t stop sending in scabs, we will be back out here.”

“Is this what day labor agencies are all about?” asked Leahy. “To supply scabs is a disgrace.”

John Donahue, director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, said low wages are fueling homelessness. “Seventy-five percent of those in shelters are working but can’t pay rent,” he said. The hotel’s cut in wages could force workers into homelessness, he said.

Jamie Owen Daniel of the Workers’ Rights Board said that if Labor Nation does not respond, the next step will be to begin contacting its clients.

In a separate statement, state Sen. Miguel del Valle said Labor Nation may be violating the law by not informing its workers that they are being sent into a strike situation.

Solidarity with the strike has been stepped up in recent weeks. In addition to the daily picket line, over 20 strikers and supporters were arrested on Labor Day for blocking traffic on Michigan Avenue.

The author can be reached at jbachtell@rednet.org

Verizon unions claim victory on security

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 02:17:00 +0000

The five-year agreements signed Sept. 5 between Verizon Communications and its workers’ two unions, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was hailed by both unions as a victory in tough times. Seventy-nine thousand workers in the company’s “core” business – land lines and residential service – in the northeastern United States are covered by the contracts.

Claiming that the industry is changing and its core business shrinking, Verizon, the telecommunications industry’s profit leader, had been looking for major concessions including big co-pays in insurance premiums and changes in contract language that would allow layoffs and the freedom to move union jobs to other regions. But neither workers nor retirees will pay health care premiums under the new accord, although in some cases employed spouses will pay a $40 monthly premium. The contract’s job security provision, which led to an arbitrator ordering the reinstatement of 3,200 laid off workers last July, was retained.

The CWA, which represents the bulk of the company’s union membership, said that key to its success were intensive on-the-job worker mobilizations throughout August as well as the launch and progressive implementation of a “Community Strike Against Corporate Greed.” The community strike, supported by New York Jobs with Justice, was the first stage of an economic boycott against Verizon, which asked customers to sign a card pledging that they would switch their phone service to another unionized carrier in the event that contract negotiations broke down.

Union activists expressed concern that the new contract’s job security provisions do not apply to the several thousand workers expected to be hired over the next five years, replacing unionized workers encouraged to retire by an aggressive buy-out program.

In other contract provisions, unionized employees will receive annual 2 percent pay raises and cost-of-living increases in the final four years of the contract. A one-time payment averaging $1,600 per worker will be made in lieu of a first year wage increase, but will not be rolled into the workers’ base pay. Under the old contract, salaries for the Verizon operator and technicians were in the range of $45,000 to $60,000, according to a report in the New York Times.

The significance of a separate agreement signed between CWA and Verizon Wireless, the number one retailer in local and wireless services and a 55 percent Verizon-owned enterprise, goes far beyond the 51 members it covers. The contract’s guarantee of seniority rights for the wireless workers will be an important tool for the union in its on-going organizing campaigns in this almost totally unorganized sector of the telecommunications industry.

Working families victorious in Senate

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 02:14:00 +0000

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – The “public be damned” attitude of the Bush administration was dealt a set back Sept. 10, when the Senate voted 54-45 to maintain the current overtime pay laws covering eight million U.S. workers.

“[This] is perhaps the most important victory that we have had for working families in some time,” Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) told reporters. Applauding the lobbying campaign by America’s working men and women, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called the Senate vote a “tremendous victory” and singled out Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin for leading the fight and Republican senators “who broke ranks with their leaders and the White House to vote to protect American families and their families instead of boosting corporate profits.”

The Harkin amendment, attached to a $138 billion spending bill for labor, health and education programs, effectively blocked the Bush administration’s ability to change the overtime rules established in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Harkin amendment allows the Labor Department to expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, but stops it from denying overtime pay to those who are entitled to it now. The legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives to work out a compromise.

Bush’s proposed rule change would be devastating for young, two-income families like the Kurtyczs of Norwalk, Ohio. Robert Kurtycz, 25, is a union member, but his wife, Holly is a nurse in a non-union hospital. She stands to lose 25 percent of her income under Bush’s scheme, which would deny her overtime pay for hours worked beyond the standard 40-hour workweek.

If the Bush administration were to be successful, said Sweeney, it “would also rob our economy of yet another incentive for employers to create jobs, as it encourages employers to work existing employees longer hours rather than hiring new workers.”

Currently, 8.9 million U.S. workers are collecting unemployment checks due to plant closings and lay-offs. Economists estimate that 15 million workers are actually jobless. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count workers whose benefits have expired or first time job seekers.

With the appropriations bill on its way back to the House, Sen. Harkin said he sees a “a good chance” to expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay after 40 hours and to bar the administration from reducing the number of qualified workers. President Bush said he will veto the entire bill if the provision is included.

For months, the AFL-CIO, its affiliate unions and allies have waged a relentless lobbying effort to halt the latest Bush attack on workers’ living standards. Letters, e-mails, faxes, and shoe leather on the floors of Congress consolidated the Democrats. The lone Democrat to vote with Bush was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. Six Republicans, including Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, broke with the administration.

Tim Waters, national coordinator for the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Rapid Response, the union’s rank and file network of shop floor activists, told the World that both Alaska senators voted with working families. “It shows the state of economy,” he said. “Both Alaska senators voted against Bush, even though workers in that state tend to be higher paid members of the Teamsters and other unions. Unions are not just there for the smaller picture, but to provide a voice for all workers.”

The author can be reached at dwinebr696@aol.com

10,000 marchers back Yale strikers

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 01:48:00 +0000

New Haven police arrest 100

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Downtown New Haven came to a standstill Sept. 13 as the nation’s labor movement turned out more than 10,000 union members from the Northeast and as far away as Nevada and Florida in support of striking university and hospital workers at Yale University.

The busloads of needle trades workers, carpenters, laborers, steel workers, transit workers, healthcare workers, hotel workers, and students crossed industry lines and geographical boundaries in the cause of equality and workers’ rights.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and four international union presidents set the example by leading over 100 workers in civil disobedience at the end of a spirited march which filled the city streets for nearly a mile. As the workers sat down in a major intersection,

they held hands and faced outward to the crowd.

“We have no choice but to fight,” said one clerical and technical worker who was arrested. Many of the workers had never taken part in such an action before. The demonstration was one of the largest in New Haven’s history.

Picket signs highlighted the $42,000 monthly pension Yale President Richard Levin will receive as compared to $621 for the average union retiree. A quarter of the unionized workers are expected to retire during the life of the next contract.

The labor rally kicked off a national campaign aimed at the 16-member board of the Yale Corporation. Actions are taking place this week in Boston, San Francisco, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati and Edmonton, Canada.

On Sept. 17, the Connecticut AFL-CIO marched from their annual convention to join striking workers and retirees holding a daily vigil at President Levin’s office until decent pensions are won.

National attention has also been focused on the university’s discriminatory hiring practices. Only 3 percent of Yale workers are Latino in a city with 20 percent Latino population. Hiring from the community, training and upgrading is a union demand.

Community leaders and elected officials reacted in outrage when the university brought a group of Latino workers, hired by a janitorial contractor in place of the largely African American striking workers, provocatively across a picket line on Sept. 8.

Following a press conference organized by the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus issued a public letter to “strongly condemn Yale’s cynical and disrespectful treatment of Hispanic/Latino workers.”

Within two days, 13 Puerto Rican, Mexican and Guatemalan workers walked off the job and joined the union. They reported bigotry and abuse from Yale managers. “The same way we came in the back door, we want to come in the front door,” said Angelica Aponte at an emotional press conference on the New Haven Green. “We want union jobs at Yale, not scab jobs.”

“These are our new sisters and brothers,” proclaimed Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 35 President Bob Proto, welcoming the workers as heroes.

“I am forever proud of Local 35,” said HERE President John Wilhelm at a special picket line vigil and rally on Sept. 11. “You did not stoop to divide and conquer tactics.” Remembering the 105 members of the two striking unions who were killed in that tragedy, Wilhelm said, “It falls to us to honor them by making sure there is justice in America, justice in New Haven and justice on this campus.”

The striking workers are holding firm despite daily propaganda aimed at scaring them to go back to work. Some clerical and technical workers who stayed on the job attended the Saturday labor rally. “I couldn’t go out this time with emergency family bills, but I do not support the university,” said one worker.

Striking clerical and technical workers have had some success at convincing co-workers who did not originally strike to come onto the picket line and join the strike. Large national contributions to the strike fund have made it possible for the union to provide substantial “picket pay” and other aid to forestall evictions, foreclosures or repossessions.

Strikers have also received support from over 100 professors who called on the university to negotiate or submit to binding arbitration, and who are holding 300 classes at off-campus locations including restaurants, churches, community centers and City Hall.

Students from 21 campuses organized by United Students Against Sweatshops participated in the labor rally and march.

National union presidents arrested include HERE President John Wilhelm, Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern, Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees President Bruce Raynor and Carpenters President Douglas McCarron.

The author can be reached at joelle.fishman@pobox.com

Faking it on jobs again

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 05:54:00 +0000

Opinion

Fake President Bush is at it again. He’s starting to seriously worry about unemployment and jobs – the destruction of jobs will likely help defeat him the same way the sagging economy helped defeat his dear old Dad. He doesn’t want to do anything real to create jobs or to stop the destruction of jobs – that would anger his big business boosters.

But he wants to look like he’s doing something, without really doing anything. Voilà: he’s creating a high-level government post in the Commerce Department – an assistant secretary who is supposed to help keep and expand jobs, or at least that’s what we’re supposed to think.

What he actually said, though, was that this assistant secretary would focus “on the needs of manufacturers.”

If anyone hasn’t noticed, Bush’s policies, while couched in language geared to make us think Bush cares about regular folks, are all geared to help big business and big business profits. The tax cuts, the rules and regulations changes, all are directed at boosting the bottom line of corporate accounting sheets and lining the pockets of the already obscenely wealthy few.

There’s absolutely no reason to think that this new position will actually do anything. Doing something about jobs would mean restricting the right of capital to flow overseas. Doing something would mean erecting obstacles to speed-up. Doing something would mean matching French workers’ 35-hour workweek with no cut in pay. Doing something would mean taxing the super-profits of the wealthy and big corporations to fund a massive public works jobs program. Doing something would mean scrapping Bush’s aggressive plans for the FTAA and other “free” trade schemes that drive wages and working conditions down to the lowest common denominator, rather than raising living standards for workers both here and abroad.

The new Bush appointee won’t do any of these things.

He or she will talk endlessly about job creation without creating even one job; talk endlessly about helping workers by helping corporations (who will lay off more workers and intensify speedup to make more money); talk endlessly about how much Bush cares about workers.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, focusing “on the needs of manufacturers” won’t necessarily help even one worker or create even one job. This is another boondoggle masquerading as “compassionate conservatism.”

Bush attributed the job loss (to the tune of three million jobs lost since he came into office) to productivity gains and to jobs flowing to cheaper labor markets overseas. But both of those are the results of Bush’s pro-business, pro-“free” trade policies. The people who are right now contributing millions of dollars to his re-election campaign are the same people exporting jobs, laying off workers, and enforcing longer work weeks and inhuman speedup.

No doubt Bush would like to see workers take wage cuts and work even harder – that would help the manufacturers, but it wouldn’t help the workers who are the victims of this speedup. Nor would it create any new jobs.

What workers need is jobs. What companies want are higher profits. Those are often two diametrically opposed interests. Guess which side Bush always ends up on?

The Bush tax cuts were supposed to create jobs – they haven’t. The trade agreements were supposed to create jobs – they haven’t. Bush’s “defense” policies were supposed to create jobs – instead they just soak up more and more tax dollars and take them away from human services programs.

Poor Bush – no matter how much of a PR shine he puts on his policies, they just don’t do what he says they will – and that means he’s in trouble in 2004. He deserves no less.

Marc Brodine is chair of the Washington State Communist Party. He can be reached at marcbrodine@comcast.net

A voice for all workers

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 05:50:00 +0000

Opinion

Everyone deserves a voice on the job, the freedom to choose union representation and the promise of equal treatment at work. However, discrimination in the workplace and anti-union tactics against organizing efforts continues to plague our country even after years of gaining major legislative victories and mobilizing workers in our communities.

It’s a shame and a crime that in the year 2003, workers – mostly Hispanic women – like those employed at Cintas, the largest laundry rental supplier in the U.S., face constant employer interference, harassment and the threat of losing their jobs as they stand up to improve their wages, health insurance benefits and working conditions through unionization.

Hotel workers often fare no better. In many hospitality chains across this country, immigrants turn to the industry for an opportunity to improve their economic situation and the lives of their families. Many of them, working in markets with low union density, endure some of the lowest paid jobs with little or no benefits while working under the constant fear of deportation. I should also note that immigration factors into the construction industry with its own challenges of day labor.

Many of us tend to forget that we are a nation built on the blood, sweat and tears of immigrant labor. All of us, with the exception of Native Americans, have roots in other countries. Our grandparents and other relatives most likely struggled against workplace discrimination as they were turned away from jobs based on their ethnic background, religious affiliation, race and even gender.

The Labor Movement has stood up for these workers’ civil rights time and again, and was often at the forefront of legislative initiatives to gain workplace advances including defending the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Family Leave Act, just to name a few. Obviously, unions and their members could not have achieved this alone. They needed help from close allies, people of faith, and other activists who share our common goal of social justice.

Today, we find ourselves once again turning to these groups to demand fairness for all immigrant workers. Currently there are close to 30 million immigrants living in the United States, the most in our country’s history. These people work hard in jobs we all depend on, such as janitors, waitresses, nursing home aides and more. They pay taxes and contribute to our communities. However, too often, unscrupulous employers exploit these workers and treat them as second-class citizens and even as “slave” labor.

The only way to combat this type of unfair treatment is to provide legal status for undocumented immigrants so that it will make it harder for employers to intimidate all workers who demand fair pay and the freedom to join a union.

We all win when immigrants join unions, because they fight to lift the standards for better wages and benefits in our communities. Their organizing efforts, in essence, increase the bargaining power of our unionized members, strengthen the industries where they work and boost our economy overall. They also add to our political ability to promote a working family agenda, especially as we currently face an anti-union administration and Congress in Washington, D.C.

With that said, I would encourage everyone to participate in the upcoming AFL-CIO Freedom Bus Ride this fall. This national event, modeled after the Civil Rights Freedom Rides of the 1960s, will bring hundreds of thousands of union members and activists from all over the country to demand legislation directed at ensuring the citizenship and equal treatment for immigrant workers. We will raise our voices to enact penalties for employers who seek to violate labor laws based on a worker’s immigration status, and address the backlog of people waiting to legally join their close relatives in our country.

The Labor Movement has always held firm to the motto that an injury to one is an injury to all. This is our chance to protect the rights of our fellow workers, improve the working conditions of our members, and ensure respect, dignity and social justice for all people. We must remember that we live in a country that must let freedom ring for all, not just a privileged few. Our Freedom Ride will show our nation and the world that unions once again did our part to lead the way. Please make plans to join us and help support the rights of immigrants everywhere.

Tim Leahy is secretary-treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor, www.cflonline.org. The above Labor Day message originally appeared in the CFL’s Federation News and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Teamsters mark 100th anniversary

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 04:38:00 +0000

Workers’ Correspondence

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) celebrated its 100th anniversary on Sept. 6 in Washington, D.C. There were more than 3,500 Teamsters in attendance from all across the United States and Canada.

There were many exhibits showing where the Teamsters had started, and how the Union had improved the lives of workers over the last 100 years – from team drivers who worked 16-hour days for two dollars in 1903, to fighting for equal pay for equal work for women and minorities.

The exhibits showed the Teamster blood that ran in the streets of St. Paul, Minn., in 1934 for the right to organize. And it went on to the national master agreements that improved the living standards of hundreds of thousands of Teamsters. These were hard fought battles and hard won victories, through much sacrifice, for working men and women in solidarity.

The celebration also looked to the future and the battles to come, with keynote speakers Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Rep. Dick Gephardt, Rep. John Lewis, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

The celebration emphasized the fight to protect overtime, for fair trade not “free trade,” to strengthen the right to organize, and placed a real emphasis on defeating the ultra-right, anti-labor administration of George Bush in 2004.

– A Teamster

Land to the tiller! Mexico and land reform

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 03:40:00 +0000

Mexican farmers have promised militant demonstrations at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Sept. 10-14, against the corporate-controlled globalization policies that are ruining them. A long history precedes this development.

The old, Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, used to say “poor Mexico – so far from God, and so near to the United States.” Even with 100 million inhabitants, making it the 11th most populous country in the world, Mexico’s economy – including agriculture – is hugely influenced by what happens in the U.S.

From 1910 to 1920, Mexico fought a bloody civil war, partly over who was to reap the rewards of the rich Mexican soil. The most radical forces in La Revolucion were those grouped around Emiliano Zapata. Their central demand was “land to the tiller.” Zapata’s “Ayala Program” called for redistribution to peasant farmers of land that had been seized from them by big landowners. Though Zapata was killed, the symbolic power “agrarianism” has sunk deep roots in the national, political culture, including in the Constitution.

In the 1930s, left-wing Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas del Rio distributed millions of acres of land to poor farmers, but after he left office in 1940, the land reform effort petered out.

Post-Cardenas governments of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) paid lip service to “land to the tiller” until 1982, when, unable to pay foreign creditors, they took a definite turn toward the policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. government.

The following president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, became an enthusiastic neo-liberal globalizer. Salinas entered with gusto into the negotiations with the United States and Canada on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Salinas’s secretary of Foreign Trade, Dr. Jaime Serra Puche, predicted that NAFTA would drive 13 million Mexican farmers and their kin off the land. This he said was good, because it would shift the rural economy away from producing food for Mexicans and toward production for foreign markets, thus helping Mexico’s foreign trade problems. These country folk would go to the cities, which was also “good” because it would create a new source of cheap labor, thus attracting foreign investment in industry.

To date, approximately six million Mexicans have been driven off the farms since the implementation of NAFTA, because while Mexico stopped the little support it was giving its farmers, the United States continued to subsidize its corn production. Mexican farmers were undercut and ruined by cheap corn from the North.

The downward pull on incomes created by the mass exodus from the farms has worsened living conditions for Mexican urban workers. The result has been a large increase in the immigration of poor Mexicans into the U.S., just as the U.S. has entered into a major anti-immigrant campaign.

Before 9/11, George W. Bush and Mexico’s President Fox had been negotiating a deal in which up to five million undocumented Mexicans would be legalized. However, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced recently there would be no big initiatives on the U.S.-Mexican immigration issue in the near future. Rather than challenging this, Fox’s foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, is going along with this and discouraging Mexican immigrants from hoping for any breakthroughs at the November meetings on immigration between the two countries.

However, Mexico and the United State appear to agree on the need for a new contract farm labor, or “bracero” program. But if it is anything like the old bracero program, it will be little better than 21st century slave labor. Most of organized labor in the United States is opposing it and instead calling for a harder fight for legalization, including organizing a coalition to support the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org

Verizon workers in tentative settlement

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 03:28:00 +0000

Unions representing about 78,000 Verizon workers in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states reached a tentative five-year contract agreement with the giant telecommunications company on Sept. 4. The deal was announced by Verizon and the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Next week’s PWW/NM will carry an article on the terms of the proposed settlement.

Labor calls for Yale strike support

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:05:00 +0000

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – As spirited picket lines and marches fill the campus at Yale University, national support and unity continues to grow for striking service-maintenance, clerical-technical and hospital dietary workers.

Several thousand striking workers received a big boost this week as financial contributions poured in from around the country, enabling a substantial increase in strike benefits, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney declared a major labor mobilization for noon on Saturday, Sept. 13, on the New Haven Green.

“The Yale leadership must understand that the union movement is united in making sure the Yale workers build a better future for themselves, their families, and their community,” said Sweeney. “This is a fundamentally important struggle for all of labor.”

The striking workers are members of the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and Service Employees International Union District 1199.

The university has sought to undermine workers’ unity. The administration has spent over $2 million on daily full-page newspaper ads and other propaganda to create the impression that union workers are greedy and already have excellent benefits. Yale’s administration claims “business as usual,” but daily pickets and rallies, 280 classes being held off campus, and “Yale Settle” buttons worn by non-unionized staff tell another story.

Yale’s tactics backfired Sept. 9 when the university, whose workforce is less than 4 percent Latino despite New Haven’s large Latino community, used campus police and vehicles to transport across picket lines dozens of immigrants employed by a temp agency. Anger and horror at the escapade brought a large group of the city’s African American, Latino and white clergy and community leaders together to denounce this practice at a noon hour press conference.

“We are shocked and dismayed that Yale would actually do such things,” said Rev. Agustin Rojas of St. Rose of Lima Church in Fair Haven. “It is not right that they use Hispanics to make themselves richer and bring division between African Americans and Hispanics.”

Speakers called upon Yale to sign a union contract that includes decent wages, pensions and job security, and to hire Latino and immigrant workers into unionized jobs with full benefits. The Yale strike has highlighted the need for union organization among immigrant workers, an issue already under discussion in local grassroots organizing for the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

“We are Black, Latino and white pastors, and we stand in unity with all workers,” said Rev. W. David Lee of Varick AME Zion Church. Addressing the immigrant workers directly he said, “We want to help you join us on the picket lines, and become entitled to the financial help and other assistance all striking workers receive. Don’t be used by Yale.”

At the time of the 1996 strike at Yale, casual workers, many homeless, were hired for some custodial and ground keeping jobs. Casuals were not eligible for union membership, but HERE Local 35 members convinced many to stay out and join the picket lines. In the midst of the strike they voted to join Local 35. As a result, about 200 casual workers, many African American, have become permanent Yale employees with union benefits and protection.

Yale’s attempt to bypass union wages and benefits by hiring temporary workers and subcontractors is ongoing. Whole departments of clerical and technical workers are threatened, and entire buildings have been contracted to outside custodial companies as the university and hospital complex continue to expand. Last week, hundreds of Yale strikers marched on newly renovated Sprague Hall on the central campus during an opening night performance, to protest the use of subcontractors there.

A huge medical research facility which opened last spring is maintained by non-union contractors who pay minimum wage to the largely Latino immigrant workers. During a strike rally at the Yale medical center, custodian and union leader Mark Wilson pointed to the building and vowed to cheers that New Haven would not be divided on racial lines and the union would organize the subcontracted workers. For Latino workers, a union contract means an average pay increase of 32 percent.

The Yale administration suffered further setbacks last week in its efforts to dominate the city of New Haven. Union members and supporters defeated Yale administration-backed candidates in Tuesday’s primaries for several seats on the New Haven Board of Aldermen.

The author can be reached at joelle.fishman@pobox.com

Calif. labor on recall: We know how to say no!

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 03:32:00 +0000

PLEASANTON, Calif. – The sun was hot but the angry shouts of “No recall!” from thousands of workers at Labor Day rallies and picnics in Northern California were even hotter.

Sacramento celebrated with a picnic at Land Park where 2,000 union families enjoyed games, face painting and a magic show. Bill Camp, executive secretary-treasurer of the Sacramento Labor Council, told the crowd, “This recall is being funded by millionaires for the purpose of stealing your job, your wages, your health care. We’re here to make politics work for union jobs, union wages and benefits.”

Judy Goff, executive secretary-treasurer of the Alameda County Central Labor Council, fired up a picnic crowd at the Alameda County Fairgrounds here. “We have a huge task ahead of us,” Goff said. “Our COPE phone banks are open until we defeat this recall. … We are all-out to defeat Prop 54. They [the Republican right] have attempted to take away affirmative action. Now they are trying to take away the only way we can prove discrimination.”

Jabbing the air, she added, “We stand together, equal as workers. We will not tolerate the elimination of anti-discrimination laws.” The multiracial crowd cheered.

Goff introduced Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) who “stood alone” on the House floor and said “No” to the war on Afghanistan.

Lee told the crowd, “All of us today are saying ‘No. No to this recall. No to Prop 54.’ I know how to say ‘No.’ Labor is unified and that is why we are going to win. We live in a multiracial democracy. How dare Ward Connerly try to take it away.”

She scorned muscle-man Arnold Schwarzenegger, the leading GOP candidate for governor. “Today is the beginning of our effort to terminate the Terminator!” The crowd erupted in cheers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.) said she was heading back to Washington, D.C., “to fight George W. Bush who doesn’t believe in the eight-hour day. … They talk about Gov. Davis but they don’t talk about Bush who has cost us three-and-a-half million jobs. … With your help, we are going to defeat the recall and reelect me to the U.S. Senate.”

Goff introduced Bay Area workers locked in struggles for union recognition. Chuck McNally said he was fired on “trumped up charges” when he attempted to organize workers at the Berkeley Bowl, a gourmet grocery store, into the United Food and Commercial Workers. “They spied on us. They try to do anything and everything to block us,” he said. He urged the crowd to join a picket line at the posh Claremont Hotel where workers have been fighting for recognition of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 2850.

California AFL-CIO leader Art Pulaski and Gov. Davis arrived from an earlier rally in Los Angeles. Pulaski hailed Davis for signing 300 bills in the past four-and-a-half years to benefit workers. “They want to take away prevailing wages and health care.” The crowd roared, “No! No! No!”

Davis took the microphone and defended his record. The crowd answered, “No recall.”

When Davis left the stage, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante was introduced by Teamster leader Chuck Mack. The labor movement, Mack said, stands “foursquare against the recall” but is also urging a “yes” vote for Bustamante to prevent the Republicans from stealing the governor’s mansion “by default.” Bustamante told the crowd he was “not a friend of labor, I am a son of labor.”

Listening to the speakers at the Alameda Fairground was Sarah Coyne, a member of Painters Local 741. “I think we are very fortunate to have a Democratic governor who restored the eight-hour day that Pete Wilson took away,” she said. “I’m absolutely opposed to the recall.”

Steve McClenathan, president of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 24/7, said, “I think the Republicans want to turn California into another Italy where there is a new government every 18 months.” The original purpose of recall, he said, is being perverted. “We’re seeing the disastrous consequences when a minority will be choosing the governor if Davis is recalled. He won fair and square. Not everyone is happy. But you wait four years until the next election.”

Davis and Pulaski raced into San Francisco where they addressed hundreds at a concert featuring Holly Near, Labor Rockin Solidarity Chorus, folksinger Utah Phillips and other labor movement singers. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and Supervisors Matt Gonzalez and Mark Leo joined San Francisco Labor Council leader Walter Johnson in denouncing the recall.

The author can be reached at greenerpastures21212@yahoo.com. Nell Ranta in Sacramento and Bobbie Rabinowitz in San Francisco contributed to this article.