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‘Traitor Go Home!’ GM Workers Kick Out UAW Hacks
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- 10 September 2010 323 hits
INDIANAPOLIS, IN, August 31 — “Get Out! This is our hall!” “Traitor!” “Go Home!” That’s how hundreds of GM workers greeted UAW International reps on August 15. The standing-room only crowd of hundreds of stamping plant workers, members of UAW Local 23, had no intentions of cutting their wages in half to save their jobs. As the International reps headed for the doors, the workers jumped to their feet and started chanting, “Take [UAW Local President] Ray [Kennedy] With You, Take Ray With You!”
As part of the GM bailout restructuring by Obama, this plant is to be closed. JD Norman Industries made an offer to buy the plant, but made 50% pay cuts a condition of the deal. Last May, the workers voted 384-22 against reopening their contract. Despite this, Kennedy and the UAW International continued to negotiate with GM and JD Norman, reaching a deal they planned on ratifying at the August meeting. This is what new UAW President Bob King calls the 21st Century UAW, where the bosses and the union partner up to screw the workers.
They gave workers one day’s notice and provided them with “highlights” of the proposed contract before trying to bum-rush them into cutting their wages in half. Instead, the workers told newly-annointed UAW Region 3 Director Mo Davidson to take a 50 percent pay cut. One worker said, “They’re not representing us, they’re representing their 17 percent stake in GM,” referring to the UAW’s stake in GM as a result of the federal restructuring and bailout.
The majority of workers here have high seniority and many are GM “migrants,” having moved from plant to plant as factories shut down. They are not afraid of one more closing. They have learned the hard way, from years of exposure to GM’s and the UAW’s “whipsawing” of one GM local against another, that concessions don’t save jobs.
By casting their fortunes with those of the auto bosses, the UAW has gone from 1.5 million members to under 350,000. 150,000 of those are in casinos, legal aid offices, college campuses, state and city workers and more. The domestic auto industry is over 50% non-union and the restructuring of the past few years has cost yet another 200,000 jobs and seen wages cut in half. The devastating racist nature of these attacks is evident in the streets of Detroit, Flint, St. Louis, Lansing and a host of other GM towns.
The current crisis of 30 million unemployed and underemployed will be with us for years. The UAW hopes to increase its numbers by partnering with the bosses and enforcing a low-wage economy. UAW President King hides behind the banner of “social justice,” but will put thousands in the streets to march for the same Democratic Party politicians who have failed workers so miserably while expanding the endless “oil war on terror.” GM workers are exposing the real nature of the UAW leadership. Building a mass PLP in basic industry will ultimately crush these maggots and lead the working class to power.
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Mosque, Tea Party Mania Shows: Racist Liberal War-makers: Evil, Yes; Lesser No!
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- 10 September 2010 320 hits
Who poses the graver danger to the working class?
Openly racist, right-wing politicians who oppose the building of a mosque near Ground Zero? Or liberal U.S. imperialists who fear that an anti-Islamic image may hinder their drive for Mid-East oil profits as they slaughter millions?
Is it Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, who led a 300,000-strong, lily-white Tea Party/religious revival on the Washington Mall to boost Republicans in the November elections? Or Obama-led Democrats seeking to rally millions more for looming wars with Iran, China, and Russia?
Is it conservative billionaires, like Charles and David Koch and Rupert Murdoch, bankrolling the Tea Party bigots? Or the far more powerful liberal Rockefeller faction, whose “charitable” foundations and think-tanks in fact further U.S. imperialism‘s mass murders behind racist characterizations of Arab, South Asian and Muslim workers in the media and in soldier training?
Both camps are sworn enemies of our class. Racist Tea Partiers target immigrants and unions but the Obama administration has increased fascist oppression of immigrant workers through using National Guard troops at the border and raiding factories, thereby terrorizing and deporting far more immigrant workers than the former could hope to (see CHALLENGE, 7/21/10).
While all these bosses are our class’s enemies, the Rockefeller-led liberal imperialists, with their empire challenged, control the U.S. war machine which can deal death and suffering to billions of workers worldwide. These liberal forces are the main danger to our class because they have a broader base in the working class through their mass organizations and therefore can mis-lead millions into supporting their policies and achieve ruling-class aims, much more effectively than the Tea Partiers.
Bosses’ Split Widens As U.S. Economic, Military Woes Deepen
The mosque flap reflects a crisis-driven, growing division between two capitalist factions, each trying to win popular support. Liberal politicians front for the owners of Exxon Mobil, JP Morgan, and the like, who need to re-enforce and expand their shrinking global spheres of influence through ever wider military invasions and occupations. War means “shared sacrifice” not only from the working class but also from companies in the form of higher taxes and tighter, centralized regulation.
War-making also requires workers’ obedience to the central government, including willing military enlistment, not just relatively meaningless flag-waving. To garner a voter base, however, conservative U.S. capitalists preach a “don’t-tread-on-me” anti-government creed to angry white workers victimized by economic collapse. The right-wingers say the U.S. can solve its military problems with “off-the-shelf,” low-tax “solutions,” with little sacrifice from bosses or workers.
Right-leaning bosses obstruct the imperialists’ war and regulation agenda for a variety of reasons. Some, like media baron Murdoch, are first-generation billionaires, still in the acquisition stage, battling regulation and taxes as obstacles to establishing a dynasty. Murdoch had to fight the Federal Communications Commission and liberal Ted Kennedy tooth and nail to buy up broadcast outlets.
The Kochs’ huge family-owned energy-textile-forest products business — which bankrolls the Tea Party — gains nothing from the main rulers’ developing expansion of their current Iraqi and Afghan campaigns. Koch Industries’ Mid-East footprint is confined to Turkey. Koch does not operate in Exxon Mobil’s, Chevron’s, (and British allies Shell’s and BP’s) oily treasure troves in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait or the Emirates.
In addition, the NY Times, the liberals’ leading mouthpiece (8/28/10) denounced billionaire hedge-funder Paul Singer as a top Republican contributor bent on reversing Obama & Co.’s recent attempts to forcefully regulate Wall Street. Hedge funds — essentially high-stakes gambling — make tons of money for investors but create none of the wartime manufacturing capacity and infrastructure the imperialist wing sorely needs and wants.
Bosses’ Dogfight Over Iran War Plans Behind Mosque, Electoral Battles
At the heart of the mosque debate lies the main U.S. rulers’ prospects for successfully occupying Islamic oil-rich Iraq and Afghanistan — key transport route for Central Asian oil and gas — and the direction of their next major conflict, with Iran’s nuclear-arming ruling ayatollahs. Anti-mosque, anti-tax conservative leaders want an “on-the-cheap” strike by Israel, costing no more than the U.S.’s already yearly $3 billion in military aid to that nation’s rulers:
“Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers co-sponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel ‘to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.’” (Foreign Policy, 7/26/10)
War-Making Liberals Need Boots on the Ground, Not Just Air and Sea Raids
Contrary to the right-wingers’ approach on Iran, Richard Haass, head of the arch-imperialist, Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank, worries about mosque protests sparking popular uprisings in U.S. imperialism’s most crucial region, hampering action against Iran: “Strident statements by Americans that appear to be anti-Muslim [have] the potential to take a toll on prospects for U.S. policies throughout the greater Middle East, including U.S. efforts designed to…stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and isolate Iran.” (CFR website, 8/23/10)
Meanwhile, imperialist guru Gary Hart — co-author of the Clinton-era Hart-Rudman reports which predicted 9/11 and prescribed police-state militarization — warns against the Tea Partiers’ “bomb-Iran-now” proposal. He favors rebuilding overstretched U.S. land forces for a more massive invasion and occupation of the oil and gas giant. Give it time, says Hart:
“Such an attack would place great stress on our military. We cannot continue the Afghan war, prop up the neighboring Iraqi government, and create a third battlefield in the Middle East. It is folly to assume that a U.S.-Iran war can be carried out by the Navy and Air Force alone.…We have at least a year, and probably more, to weigh Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions, and to rally regional and global opposition to them.” (Hart’s “Matters of Principle” web log, 8/23/10)
But Hart may very well be wrong about time being on the side of U.S. imperialists. China’s rapid rise and thirst for oil, and Russia’s determined re-emergence, both as U.S. rivals, fuel their ally Iran’s hostile ambitions. And Israel’s bosses, emboldened by their unpunished massacres of Palestinians, might not wait for Washington’s O.K. to bomb Iran. Nobody knows just what will happen.
Anthony Cordesman, a top analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — another Rockefeller-funded policy foundry — sure doesn’t. He says, “This is a ‘game’ without clear limits or rules, and where outside players like Israel can suddenly change the board.…‘stability’ can rapidly turn into large-scale violence” (CSIS, 8/13/10)
No matter what results, the inter-imperialist rivalry driving the U.S., Russia, China, Israel, et al, spells death and destruction for the working class worldwide. Siding with the Rockefeller-led liberals will intensify that slaughter.
Effective working-class action against the rulers’ wars does not hinge on whether or not to build a mosque near Ground Zero, or on voting for the “better” candidate. For us, the ultimate solution is a communist revolution to crush both the liberal and conservative political misleaders, and the war-making, profit-hungry billionaires they serve. Building PLP while exposing and attacking these anti-worker fakes in workplaces, barracks, schools and neighborhoods will bring us closer to that goal.
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Stella D’Oro Workers Still Fighting Back, Now vs. Union Pension Sellout
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- 10 September 2010 351 hits
BRONX, NY, September 1 — If you walked into this little restaurant, you wouldn’t notice him sitting there nursing a coffee. And you wouldn’t notice the steady stream of men and women that come in when they can, to either pick up or drop off the latest copies of CHALLENGES. They are former Stella D’Oro workers, who struck the company for 11 months only to lose their jobs when the company was sold and moved.
They are bruised, but not beaten, still fighting back. Now they are fighting the Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International union leaders, who have made it much harder for unemployed members to reach the “Golden 80” and qualify for a full pension.
“Golden 80” refers to a combination of age and years of service. So if you are 60 years old with 20 years of service, you qualify for a full pension. As of July 30, workers like the Stella D’Oro workers, who reach “Golden 80” while unemployed due to plant closings, will take a 40% cut in benefits, including those who only needed a month or two to qualify. If they hit “80” with less than 15 years of service, they will take a 60% cut. This is especially vicious as it targets the oldest workers who are the least likely to work again given the current economic crisis and mass racist unemployment.
One woman said, “I worked 27 years for this company and contributed to my pension. I need three months for Golden 80 and they want to give me 40% less!” The wife of a worker who was one month short of his “Golden 80” reported that this has made him physically ill, unable to sleep and suffering from high blood pressure. Another worker said, “We fought for a year and a half. We stood up for this union and they give away our pension!”
The union claims that the cuts were needed because the pension fund is in danger of going broke. But at the same time they were cutting Stella workers, they were cutting $300 supplemental checks to current Golden 80 retirees. Also, Stella D’Oro had to pay a $12 million penalty to the pension fund in order to withdraw from it. Yet, none of that money is being used to help the victims of the plant closing.
By mid-August the Stella workers were fighting back. They found a lawyer who has taken their case, but they will really need to rekindle the mass actions and militancy of their strike in the fight to protect their pensions. If they win, so will every BCTGM member.
As this fight unfolds, we are trying to organize Stella workers to join a contingent of unemployed workers in the October 2 march on Washington, D.C. (see page 1). Out of this struggle we will be in a better position to organize the unemployed, fight racist unemployment, and build the revolutionary communist PLP
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Multi-Racial Strikers Battle Union-busting Nursing Home Bosses
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- 10 September 2010 334 hits
HARTFORD, CT, August 31 — “All the owners care about is money. They don’t care about the patients and they don’t care about the workers!” So declared a nursing home worker on strike at the Spectrum-owned Park Place Health Center, one of four Spectrum-owned nursing homes in the state that have been struck for four months.
When Spectrum purchased the home following a fire a few years ago, the workers, members of SEIU District 1199, had a union contract. Spectrum has tried mightily to destroy the contract, and, if possible, to bust the union.
The bosses want to tie wages to Medicaid reimbursement, so if the latter increases, wages will increase a little, but if reimbursement declines, so will wages. Workers won’t be able to count on the wages they’ll receive. Furthermore, the owners’ plan will cut holidays.
“We want a fair contract. If we give back, it will just get worse and worse. This with the economy so bad and everything going up in price,” said one striker. “Some of the work is very hard, lifting patients, moving them from one place to another. If we get hurt, we get put on light duty and our pay is cut $4 to $5 an hour. If someone gets hurt, they won’t tell the boss because their pay will be cut, so people are working hurt, which is not safe for the workers or the patients.”
“To me,” said another striker, “it’s as much about the patients as it is about us. One patient came down to the picket line — what were the scabs doing that he got out? — to get shaved by his regular CNA (certified nursing assistant). She shaved him.” In another incident, a patient came down to the line short of breath. “We called 911 to get help for him while the scabs watched from the building,” said the striker. “We and the patients are like family.”
Scabs are crossing the line. One group comprises those who were working before the strike and did not honor the picket line. “The strike would be over if they had come out,” was one comment.
The others are young people fresh out of school who are told by the bosses that they will have permanent jobs if they cross the line. These people are generally dumped after three months before they qualify for medical insurance. As one woman said, “I feel sorry for these young people who were conned into coming here to work and then kicked out. On the other hand, they crossed our line, and it’s our job and our life, so too bad!”
The strike is the sharpest example of class struggle in Connecticut at the moment, so much so that before the Democratic gubernatorial primary, candidate Dan Malloy walked the picket line to “prove” he’s pro-union. PLP can play a role in this strike in exposing unions’ and politicians’ collaboration with the bosses, and showing workers that only a revolutionary fight can win workers’ power.
The workers, Latino, black and white, women and men, are united and optimistic. “We’re going to win. We’re not going to give up,” vowed one woman. PL’ers have been organizing strike support and introducing communist ideas to the strikers.
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Communists, Anti-Racists Confront Racist ‘Tea Party’
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- 10 September 2010 328 hits
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 28 — PLP boldly confronted tens of thousands of lily-white Tea Partiers streaming into a rally led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. We challenged the racists, haranguing them on a loud bullhorn for two hours and individually in their faces as they walked by. Speakers exposed the Tea Party as tools of big business, especially Koch Enterprises, a multi-billion dollar energy company that organized and funds the Tea Party with millions of dollars. (Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” New Yorker, 8/30).
PL’ers called for multi-racial unity to fight against racism and for jobs, affordable housing, and against the wars for oil. Some speakers called for the unity of all workers to fight for communism, a society run by the working class without profiting from anyone’s work, and condemned the racially-divisive message of the Tea Party.
We distributed over 400 CHALLENGES and 700 leaflets (including 300 the night before at an anti-racist gathering) explaining the fascist nature of the Tea Party. Our numbers grew when other anti-racists looking for a protest showed up. Our friends were furious at Glenn Beck’s attempt at hijacking the symbols of anti-racism by holding his rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
This location is associated with the end of slavery and was the site of Marian Anderson’s famous concert in response to the racist banning of her performance in Constitution Hall in the 1930s. The rally was called on the anniversary of the anti-racist March on Washington in 1963. Beck even got Martin Luther King’s niece (a right-winger who is estranged from her family) to speak favorably at the rally.
The Tea Party crowd was overwhelmingly white, middle class, and older. Most vigorously denied they were racist, while some were openly racist. Most wanted to “take back the country” and “return it to its roots,” a thinly-veiled call to return to segregation and even slavery. Almost all of them viewed undocumented workers as a major cause of the problems in society.
Other Tea Partiers were vague as to what the rally was about. Several said that they had voted for Obama, but were furious that he had sold out to the Wall Street banks during the crisis, and so had switched to the Tea Party. Capitalism in crisis drives people to take sharper positions, either to the left or the right. We have to be there to win increasingly angry workers to revolutionary politics, not fascism! We cannot abandon any workers to the demagoguery of fascism.
We struggled successfully with our coworkers, friends and neighbors and comrades from out of town to join us and not be intimidated by this emerging fascist movement. Our greatest victory was that the workers we brought with us got to see the danger of the beginning of a mass fascist movement up close and personal, which gave a sense of urgency for building PLP and the revolutionary movement.
Greater Dangers
The Tea Party and its allied Freedom Works support policies to enrich big business, especially aggressive southwest capitalists challenging the eastern Wall Street capitalists within the ruling class. The Tea Party and Freedom Works want to privatize social security, eliminate welfare, charge for currently free Internet services, eliminate environmental protections to control global warming, and restrict unionization. The longer-view liberal capitalists generally oppose these policies as unnecessarily disruptive, but they are moving in the same direction.
The Tea Party may have mobilized fascist foot soldiers, but the main danger remains with the liberal bosses currently led by Obama. They are the leaders of imperialist wars, massive cutbacks in services, and ongoing fascist repressive measures that in some ways have exceeded those of the Bush administration (for example creating a list of “terrorist” enemies and giving the green light to assassinate them anywhere in the world, not just on the battlefield).
These forces have mobilized labor unions and the NAACP for a mass march on October 2 to shore up the political power of their faction of the ruling class. We must be there to expose their efforts to mislead angry workers into the bosses’ election charade. What is called for is sharper class struggle in the streets and in the workplaces.
The Tea Party is similar to the movements that grew in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. We have started a fight-back movement, but we have to grow larger quickly to derail the fascist Tea Party through more vigorous struggle, similar to our campaigns against the Klan and Nazis.
With the economy going deeper into recession, more workers are looking for answers, and the Tea Party offers other workers as scapegoats. PLP can show workers that capitalism is the cause and that revolution for communism is the solution. Let’s bring that same message to the bosses’ demonstration on October 2.