the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 29, 2012
Republicans despise working people. That’s obvious. When in control, they siphon off public money from education, Social Security, Medicare, public projects, and public services. They divert that money to the villains who created the economic crisis in which we are submerged: the biggest banks, the biggest corporations and the wealthy. The Republicans take the country to wars aimed at imposing U.S. corporate domination over the world. They try to strip women of their freedom to decide for themselves what will be done to their own bodies. They work to keep racist attitudes alive among white working class and poor people.
It couldn’t be more obvious, the Republicans despise us.
The Democrats came in four years ago, claiming they stood for change. For the first two years, they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, as well as most state legislatures–and for the last two years, they controlled the Senate and the presidency.
What changed? Democrats continued Bush’s policies. They pumped more money into the banks, and handed more tax money over to the corporations. They widened Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They increased Bush’s attacks on public school education. With attacks on women’s rights, on the unions, on the black population and on immigrants all escalating, Democrats proclaimed themselves on our side–and did nothing.
Isn’t it also obvious? The Democrats despise ordinary working people every bit as much as the Republicans do.
They both ask for our votes, and both think we are blind, deaf and dumb.
No, we’re not. Most of us–working people and the poor–feel in our bones that these parties don’t represent us.
The problem is, who else is there?
Who else? Us, that’s who. We have ourselves, the working people of this country. We make the factories, offices, stores, services all run. We have numbers, we are concentrated in the very center of the economy. We make everything run.
That puts power in our hands–to be more exact, that can give us power when we realize we can depend on ourselves.
We have to talk seriously to each other about what we all need. And first of all, what we need are jobs and decent wages.
Every person who wants to work should be able to work. Today, there’s no material reason that there couldn’t be enough jobs for everyone.
The bosses for years have cut jobs, putting the work of three workers onto two.
Well, reverse that, undo that, take the work done today by two workers, split it up into three jobs. Why not? Work would be easier and everyone without work could have a job.
We work hard for our money–we should have decent wages. Our labor produces enough value that we could all have a pleasant life. No one working a full-time job should be paid less than what’s needed to provide an adequate life. No one should see their wages lose out to inflation.
It’s obvious that the people who today benefit from the current situation would not willingly give us those things–and many more things we need, like an adequate education for our children.
That’s why we have to talk together among ourselves about what we need–above all, about what we can do. That’s why we have to look not to other people, but to ourselves, to the power that working people have when we organize together.
The bosses certainly despise us–so do those two big parties that represent them. But we should be proud of who we are and of the power we have to build this life we all need.
Oct 29, 2012
As usual, the “good” news comes BEFORE the elections, and the “bad” news comes AFTER.
Social Security officials just announced a 1.7% cost-of-living raise for 2013.
First off, this raise is too small! Social Security just so happens to use a COLA formula that understates healthcare inflation. Yet the older people are the ones worst hit by runaway healthcare costs.
Second, Medicare premium increases may eat up the entire 1.7% raise. Officials know it. According to the government’s own website, ssa.gov, “For some beneficiaries, their Social Security increase may be partially or completely offset by increases in Medicare premiums.”
Adding insult to injury, this tiny 1.7% raise will bump some elderly and disabled people out of eligibility for social programs.
The qualifying income for state programs seldom adjusts for inflation. So each tiny increase in Social Security pushes a few more elderly and disabled people out of programs like Medicaid and home help. Also, food stamp grants may be cut.
So when states brag about “balanced budgets,” remember this. They are balancing their budgets by throwing older and disabled people to the wolves.
Oct 29, 2012
Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France bicycle race seven times, has been stripped of his titles after an investigation by the U.S. anti-doping agency.
The official leaders of cycling are upset and talk about the “greatest crisis” in the history of this sport. At the same time, they say that it will allow the bicycle races to continue on a healthier basis. That’s doubtful.
Doping scandals occur repeatedly in cycling and all sports. A large number of champions are stripped of their titles and prosecuted. The number of those who are doped without being caught is undoubtedly even much greater than the number caught.
Everyone knows it.
The report of the U.S. anti-doping agency shows that Armstrong had many accomplices among racers, doctors and, obviously, among officials. Remember what Hein Verbruggen, the former president of the International Cycling Union said in May 2011: “Lance Armstrong never doped. Never, never, never.”
Faced with an enormous scandal, cycling authorities want us to forget their responsibilities. So they call Armstrong names and take his titles away.
Sports isn’t just a spectator sport, as people often say. It has become, first and foremost, a capitalist business. It has all the crooked deals, all the cheating, all the mafias that are normal under capitalism. Armstrong is being called a liar and a cheat. But the real lying cheat is the capitalist society that fashions sports in its image.
Clean and popular sport could certainly exist ... in another society.
Oct 29, 2012
Bosses of major companies have begun using corporate funds to campaign for their candidates.
Heaven forbid! If you are a worker at Georgia-Pacific, Cintas, Koch Industries or a host of small companies, your mailbox may contain a letter urging you to support your boss’s choice of candidates.
One boss said that if Obama ever levies a higher tax against him personally, he will lay off workers. Another defends his threat to cut jobs if Obama wins by saying that it’s not using threats: “it’s like telling your kids to ‘eat your spinach, it’s good for you.’ ”
So much for “If you know what’s good for you!” from your friendly job-cutting, profit-sucking boss. Spinach will be all we’re left with if we depend on either candidate or their corporate messengers to save us.
Oct 29, 2012
Baltimore, the city that claims to be broke, is making a 35-million-dollar gift to Under Armour corporation to help them expand. Under Armour is a billion dollar a year sportswear manufacturer.
Baltimore’s budget is supposedly short 60 million dollars this year. The city has imposed furlough days on employees, charged them more for health and pension benefits; contracted out and laid off. The city has shut libraries, rec centers and two fire stations. And all these attacks are supposed to be caused by a shortage of revenue.
But Under Armour gets 35 million dollars up front from the city. This sweetheart deal was pushed with promises that city residents would get a chance at 400 to 500 new jobs as the company expands.
Maybe a few. But all past promises of more jobs by companies that get special deals turned out to be lies.
Baltimore politicians have all kinds of special deals for companies: tax increment financing, low-cost bonds, enterprise zones or payments-in-lieu-of-taxes, PILOTS. That’s why the city is short of money year after year.
Oct 29, 2012
Last month, Democratic Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council cut the city workers’ pension system, increasing retirement age of new workers from 55 to 65. And existing city employees will face increases in their pension contributions from 6% to 11%. And spouses of retired workers will no longer be eligible for city-funded healthcare.
But these cuts to benefits were not enough for the wealthy. Not quite–billionaire Richard Riordan and his billionaire buddy Eli Broad came up with a new ballot measure that would increase contribution of the city workers’ pensions from 11% to 14%. And the new workers would have only a 401(k) system, which is gambling in the stock market.
The same day the council approved the pension cuts, they voted to extend a so-called "business tax holiday" for companies from 2013 to 2015. Initiated in 2010, this tax break gives about 17 million dollars to businesses every year.
This money lost to the city will be recovered from pension cuts or other cuts to workers’ income. Put another way: the money cut from pensions will be channeled to already filthy rich people.
Oct 29, 2012
Jean-Claude Brizard was the CEO of Chicago public schools for barely 18 months before Rahm Emanuel showed him the door. Brizard is being made the scapegoat for this year’s strike. You might think he’d be mad, since he only ever did what Emanuel told him. But then he’s getting paid an additional $250,000 severance, on top of the same amount in last year’s salary and the $30,000 he received to take care of “moving expenses.” That money, which could pay the salaries for teachers who would actually still work in Chicago schools, will probably keep him quiet.
Brizard’s replacement is Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who just came from Detroit, where she helped hand almost half of the schools to charters. Before that, she headed Cleveland public schools, where dozens of charter schools replaced public schools. Like Brizard, Byrd-Bennett went through the Broad Foundation’s training. We’ve seen the Broad playbook: attack the teachers, attack the unions, expand meaningless testing while cutting the budget, open more charter schools. There’s no reason to expect anything different from Byrd-Bennett: same stuff, different pail, as they say.
Oct 29, 2012
On October 22nd, an Italian court sentenced seven scientists to six years in prison for not predicting the April 6, 2009 earthquake, which destroyed L’Aquila and many villages around it, causing 309 deaths.
It’s really an outrage. The scientists had said before the earthquake that no one can predict when and where an earthquake will hit with precision.
But they also said that L’Aquila lay in a dangerous zone where there would be a severe earthquake sooner or later. So buildings should be constructed with this problem in mind.
When the 2009 earthquake hit, the poor quality of a number of modern buildings caused them to collapse on their occupants. These new buildings had been built ignoring anti-earthquake norms, sometimes ignoring the most basic rules of safety, shown in a student dormitory and a hospital.
Blaming the scientists is a way to hide those truly responsible for the deaths and damage: the builders and politicians. It has nothing to do with reality–or science.
Oct 29, 2012
Indiana State Treasurer and U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock made headlines recently when he commented that pregnancies stemming from rape are “something that God intended to happen.” It was his way to argue that rape victims should not be allowed the right to abortion.
It’s the same as saying “God intends inequality and violence against women and that they should suffer.” Maybe Mourdock’s “god” does–but those ideas and the people who promote them belong in the dustbin of history.
Oct 29, 2012
Businesses in Detroit like General Motors, Blue Cross, Quicken Loans are all gushing with enthusiasm about leaving all the lights in their buildings lit up for the World Series games.
Headlines read “Bathe Downtown Detroit in Light” and “We’ll have the Building Lit from Top to Bottom.” And here’s a great quote: Companies have “no concern about the additional cost for the juice.”
They plunge whole neighborhoods into darkness for months and then turn lights on for a garish use of power! Corporate leaders and their political cronies should be run out of Dodge!
Oct 29, 2012
When the Soviet Union collapsed in December of 1991, capitalists around the world quickly proclaimed, “Communism is dead.” Political analysts told us it was an experiment that had failed. We have a much different opinion.
True, communism was not successfully achieved in the Soviet Union, but it is also true that the people who led the Russian Revolution–Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik Party of tens of thousands of workers–never believed that communism could be built in a single isolated country, especially not in a very poor and war-devastated country like Russia. The people who made the Russian Revolution saw it as only the first step in a world-wide workers’ revolution. It was the international revolution that would give all of humanity access to resources and technology, and thus lay the groundwork for communism.
The Russian Revolution did set off a massive wave of workers’ revolutions in many other countries. In some countries, workers even took power. But nowhere else were the workers able to hold onto power. Nowhere else did the workers have a party like the Bolshevik Party that understood so clearly and had prepared so completely for the tasks of the workers’ revolution.
Nonetheless, this wave of revolution prevented the Russian monarchy and the Russian capitalists from coming back to power, despite a civil war in which the Russian reactionaries were aided by armies from the main imperialist countries. The U.S., England and France all sent money, weapons and even their own troops to attack the new workers’ state. But the workers’ revolutions that spread out over much of the world prevented the imperialist powers from forcing the new Soviet Union back into the capitalist camp.
The workers’ state survived. But it survived alone, surrounded by hostile regimes around the whole world. Moreover, the Soviet working class was so exhausted and decimated by civil war, it had almost ceased to exist as a class. It could no longer run its own state. A bureaucracy began to grow and assume the running of the workers’ state. This bureaucracy put forward a dictator, standing not only above the workers’ state, but also above the bureaucracy itself.
For almost 75 years, this bureaucracy and its dictatorship ran the state the workers had built, much like dictatorships run the states of the underdeveloped world. Capitalism was not re-established, but neither did the workers control their own state. And the bureaucracy held back the spread of the workers’ revolution to other countries.
Lenin and Trotsky had said many times that if the revolution didn’t spread outside Russia, the workers’ state would eventually die. Seventy-four years later, the bureaucracy, which first strangled the revolution, began to take it back to capitalism.
In the 20 years since, the bureaucrats, who already had their hands on state industries, moved to privatize them, turning them into profit-makers. The workers lost materially as their wages went down, social benefits were eliminated, and jobs destroyed. Social inequality exploded, and the working class was disorganized as whole working-class towns disappeared.
This first attempt at building communism may not have succeeded, but this does not mean that communism failed. If earlier generations of capitalists had viewed history in this same fashion, capitalism itself would never have been achieved. It took much longer than 75 years for the bourgeoisie to finally overthrow feudalism, the social system which preceded capitalism, and to begin to lay the groundwork for capitalism. The first bourgeois revolution took place in England in the mid-1600s. It wasn’t until 1789, more than 100 years later, that the bourgeois revolution spread to Europe. Even then, the French Revolution wasn’t completed until the revolutions of 1848, when the bourgeoisie finally consolidated its power in France and began to spread throughout the rest of Europe.
In the U.S., merchants led a revolution in 1776 against Britain allowing an American bourgeoisie to develop here. But U.S. capitalism wasn’t consolidated for another 100 years. It took the Civil War and Reconstruction to finish that job.
Not until the early 1900s was capitalism extended to the rest of the world. It took another half century for the underdeveloped countries to escape colonial status by means of national revolutions, much like the U.S. revolution of 1776.
In other words, we’re talking about a period of more than 300 years during which the bourgeoisie had to fight to establish capitalism.
The Soviet Union existed only 75 years in one isolated, underdeveloped country. And the Russian working class took only the first steps on the road toward building a communist society. They threw out the capitalist class, which allowed them to set up a planned economy. But that is like putting in the foundation for a 10-story building, a necessary first step but far from the completed building.
The planned economy of the Soviet Union was run very inefficiently and wastefully by the Soviet bureaucracy. Moreover, to meet the threat of the U.S., the Soviet bureaucracy devoted much of Soviet production to military purposes. They spent almost as much on their military as the U.S. did, though the Soviet economy was much smaller. Yet despite these severe distortions, the planned economy of the Soviet Union did what no other economy in the underdeveloped world has ever done: it began to catch up to the economies of the developed capitalist countries.
U.S. capitalists compared the standard of living and wealth of the Soviet Union to that of the United States. Because the U.S. is ahead, this supposedly proves the superiority of capitalism. But in 1921, the U.S. was already the top economic power in the world, while Russia, after the devastation of World War I and the civil war, was poor, at the level of a country like India.
In 40 to 50 years, the Soviet Union developed from a very poor country to become the second largest economy in the world, passing by all the developed capitalist countries except the U.S.
Furthermore, to compare only the Soviet economy to that of the U.S. is a false argument anyway. First of all, much of the wealth in the few developed countries like the U.S. has been accumulated from the rest of the world.
If we want to compare the planned economy of the Soviet Union to free market capitalism, we have to compare it to the whole capitalist world, most of which is organized in economies like those of India, Guatemala or Taiwan. Let’s compare the Soviet Union to the slums of Calcutta or the countryside of Somalia, where thousands of people starve to death every day. And let’s judge the economic system of the U.S. by looking not only at how people live in Grosse Pointe Farms or Beverly Hills, but by looking at the middle of Detroit or Appalachia.
In the mid-90s, the Yeltsins and the Gorbachevs and this vast bureaucracy worked to dismantle the planned economy. The result? The economy and the standard of living for the workers of the ex-Soviet Union went backward ... rapidly backward.
What the Soviet workers tried to do in the very first years after the revolution gives us a picture of what the future can be.
The working class revolution of 1917 destroyed capitalist property relations. Despite the devastation and poverty in the USSR, this allowed the working class to start a new organization of society.
The Soviet workers showed what kind of future society they wanted by the first decrees they passed immediately after the revolution. Men were told that women would take an equal place in society. This wasn’t just nice words on paper. There were real deeds. In 1917 the new Soviet Union gave women the unrestricted right to an abortion, a right that U.S. women did not gain until 1973, a right that has been more and more restricted. It was never free. Today it is under attack constantly in the supposedly most civilized country in the world.
Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of filing a piece of paper, so that the government didn’t interfere in people’s lives, so that women were freed from the legal restrictions of marriage. From the beginning, workers attempted to set up day care for children, communal laundries and kitchens, gains that freed women from the prison of the home. Until very recently, the Soviet Union had a system of child care facilities in all its workplaces, while this country is still only in the talking stage.
The workers’ revolution gave all the nationalities within the old Russian empire the absolute right to determine their own future. This right, like other democratic rights, was later destroyed by the bureaucracy. But in 1917, the workers’ revolution gave each nationality the free choice whether to stay within the Soviet Union or to go their own way. Finland chose to separate. The rest of them decided to become part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
What capitalist government has ever freely given this same right? The U.S. government not only refuses this right at home. It goes thousands of miles, to Korea, to Viet Nam, to Iraq, to Afghanistan to impose on other people a government and a social organization those people don’t want.
There were other accomplishments of the Russian Revolution. Engulfed in the bloody slaughter of World War I, people around the world were desperate for peace. The Soviet government pulled out of the war, while all the capitalist governments continued it.
In Russia before the revolution, millions of peasants worked the land, still almost as serfs, tied to the tiny handful of landowners. The Soviet government told the peasants to take the lands for themselves; it offered them material support.
The Russian Revolution shook the entire world. Despite the problems that held it back, this revolution still radically changed the lives and social relations in a land that occupied one-sixth of the land area of the entire world.
No wonder that those few parasites who live off our labor and run the world–those who profit from war, racism, sexism and class divisions–no wonder these leeches want to declare communism dead.
But communism is not dead: it remains to be built. The goals that could not be achieved in a single impoverished country like Russia in 1917 could be realized if the working class of this country were to take the road toward socialist revolution. A revolution here would destroy the heart of imperialism. It could free the peoples of the rest of the world to follow the same path. It could allow the working people of the entire world to become truly free to decide their own future for the first time in human history.
What the Soviet workers started in 1917, we could finish.
We cannot even imagine what a truly communist society will look like, when all human creativity and ingenuity are unleashed. But we certainly know what wouldn’t exist: Class divisions, and therefore poverty, would disappear along with the system built on the exploitation of one class by another in the search for profit. War, racism and sexism would disappear along with the system that requires inequality.
In such a society, everyone would want to work to help build society–why not?–and everyone would be able to. There would be no such thing as surplus labor. But by using all the resources, both human labor and material, and all the technology created by human ingenuity, the amount of work needed from each person would certainly be much less than what any of us do today.
The whole concept of work would be totally different. Instead of working like a robot on a job over which we have no control, we would be free to set up work in the most interesting, efficient and time-saving way. Instead of keeping our time-saving ideas to ourselves because it could cause some jobs to be eliminated, we would instead be finding ways to make everyone’s job easier.
The Russian Revolution opened up libraries and schools to all working people. But a revolution today would mean much more than just opening the doors. Freed of spending most of our lives in dreary mind-numbing work, every person could have most of the day to pursue many other interests. A person could be an artist and a musician and an athlete and a researcher in biology or geology or whatever.
All of this would produce human beings very different from the often greedy, mean-spirited and limited people that capitalism produces.
The Russian workers made the revolution that opened the door to this future. We shall have the great good fortune to be the ones who can walk through it ... if we have half as much courage as they had.
Oct 29, 2012
The wave of wildcat strikes that began with the Lonmin platinum miners in Marikana last August has now lasted two months. Strikes extended to the platinum sector despite the massacre of 34 strikers on August 16th. And far from slowing down, the movement seemed to constantly revive, despite the increasingly repressive policy of the South African government and the bosses, and despite attempts by union leaders to get striking workers to end their strikes.
Mid-September marked a second stage in the movement, with the strikes extending to other mining sectors, while the Marikana workers gained an important wage increase from Lonmin management. After the win at Lonmin, the movement of miners accelerated, extending to the chrome, gold, coal, iron ore and diamond sectors.
On October 7th, the press reported the strike spreading to new mines every day. Twenty-four mining companies were paralyzed, with 100,000 workers on strike. This doesn’t include the 40% of mine workers employed by contractors to the big companies.
What’s more, these wildcat strikes have begun to spread to other industries. On September 27th, the workers at the Toyota assembly plant in Durban began a wildcat strike for wage increases and won after four days on strike. In the province of Limpopo, at the other end of South Africa, city workers held a wildcat strike for better wages.
Even more important was a national strike of tens of thousands of truck drivers, which began on September 24th. It extended to a strike of workers at Transnet, the government railroad and port monopoly.
The authorities did not remain passive. The Minister of Justice announced on September 19, there would be exceptional measures against the unrest. South African President Jacob Zuma authorized the deployment of the army in the entire country to “reinforce the police.” Everywhere the order went out to refuse permits for demonstrations or rallies on public roads.
In regions affected by the strike movement, strikers were prohibited from demonstrating and even meeting in enclosed areas. But the strikes continued, with raging battles against the police and the army. In the Rustenburg region and the Carltonville gold fields, strikers defended themselves by erecting barricades and burning the vehicles of the repressive forces. The police killed at least four strikers in the course of these confrontations, although it’s impossible to know the real number of victims.
The big companies also went on the offensive. On October 5th, Anglo Platinum, the biggest platinum company, announced the immediate firing of 12,000 strikers. The next day, another company of the platinum sector, an affiliate of Anglo-American, fired 2,500 additional strikers. A gold-mining company, GoldFields, evicted 5,000 strikers from company hostels where they lived. But workers continued their movement and the companies soon had to back down.
During this time, the miners’ union leadership tried to take control over events. It opened negotiations with the Chamber of Mines, to amend the union contracts for gold and coal, and it obtained a union contract for the platinum mines.
No doubt the coalition of the government, the union leaders and the mining companies hopes these great maneuvers will be enough to restore order. We will see. After all, last January, the miners of Impala Platinum had also been fired following a wildcat strike, and they suffered police attacks. But they continued to fight, forcing the rehiring of most of those fired and they won an important wage increase.
With all these strikes, the workers and the poor everywhere are angrily expressing their deep discontent. Beneath this anger, there is the social time-bomb left over from the apartheid era. This era created a large, highly-concentrated working class, with a militant tradition that is recent enough to be appropriated by its younger generations. At the same time, the dismantling of apartheid, orchestrated as it was by the Western and South African capitalist classes, left a society which is one of the world’s most unequal. The result of this combination is a social time-bomb waiting to explode.
Oct 29, 2012
Jerry Tucker, a lifelong union militant, passed away on October 19 in his hometown of St. Louis. The cause was pancreatic cancer.
Jerry made his mark inside the UAW as a voice representing those who tried to maintain militancy and find a way to organize among the ranks.
By 1980, most of the UAW leadership was pushing an openly corporate-friendly “partnership,” under the name of “jointness.” Leaders told the workers that wages and benefits had to be given up, to “save” jobs.
In 1985, Tucker, then assistant director of UAW Region 5, broke with the apparatus to oppose that “jointness” policy.
In 1986, Tucker ran for Regional Director on this basis. The vote went against Tucker but was so clearly crooked that courts eventually overturned it. The election was re-run and he won.
In 1992, knowing the odds stacked against him, Jerry ran for president of the UAW, again as a way to oppose the “jointness.” Many in the leadership may have felt the same as he did. But few were ready to put their jobs on the line. Jerry did. He lost, but he continued to raise these issues with new generations of activists. He never lost confidence in the ability of workers to move mountains, once they are organized and focused on a common goal.
It took 18 years before another challenge to the monolithic UAW bureaucracy was made. In 2010, Gary Walkowicz of Local 600 ran against Bob King for the UAW presidency. He said that the UAW needed a “180-degree turn” away from the policies of concessions and partnership.
Tucker addressed an open letter to the Convention delegates, saying they “should celebrate the occasion. Even with the election outcome in little doubt, they should brush-up on all their largely unexpressed fears and turn this Convention into a no-holds-barred grievance meeting on the UAW’s downward spiral and misdirected allegiance to employers who care only about the bottom line and not the lives and welfare of workers, and make the Cobo Hall proceedings a dynamic, positive exercise in true democratic deliberation and debate.”
After sacrificing his career in the UAW, Jerry Tucker kept up a life of activity, striving to educate new militants and to renew currents of resistance within the union ranks.
“Carry on,” Jerry Tucker would say. “Carry on.”
Oct 29, 2012
Ford Motor Company has announced it will be closing three plants in Europe: one in Belgium and two in Britain. All together, 5,700 Ford workers will lose their jobs. Ford says it has an “overcapacity” in Europe, and it has no other choice but to close plants.
Ford CEO Alan Mulally said, “The same ‘One Ford’ plan that transformed our business in North America, and is guiding us toward the better future, is being used to address the crisis in Europe.”
Better future? Better future for who?! For the Ford family, Ford giant stockholders and the banks, certainly. But for Ford workers–absolutely not!
This is what the “One Ford Plan” has done in the U.S.: Ford used the crisis to freeze the wages of its existing workers, and to cut in half the wages of a second tier of new workers. It got rid of all responsibility for the health care costs for retirees, and lowered the money it’s putting toward pensions. It increased the amount of money workers pay toward their health care.
And in the plants themselves, the company has used the crisis to finish what it started over a decade ago, when it spun its parts production out to “independent” companies paying their workers much lower wages. Claiming too much “overcapacity” in the middle of a severe downturn, Ford closed a number of its assembly plants.
But then, when production increased after 2009, Ford didn’t increase its capacity–just the output of the workers still remaining. It has imposed faster and faster line speeds, or added more jobs onto each worker as the line speed remained steady. Ford has imposed a vicious speed-up on its workers.
On top of that, Ford imposed what it called “alternate work schedules”: instead of regular 8-hour days, five days a week, workers have found themselves working 10 to 12 hours a day, and returning again the next day to do it all over again. All at straight-time pay, no overtime. With times and schedules shifting around constantly.
Ford’s “new plan” has destroyed workers’ job conditions, their bodies, and their standard of living.
This is what they now want to impose in Europe. Their plan for a “better future” is to destroy the lives of workers to increase their bottom line–no matter where those workers are.
Oct 29, 2012
Bad enough that 2012 is the most expensive presidential campaign ever run in the U.S. Bad enough that the Obama campaign will burn 1.06 billion dollars with Romney spending 952.2 million.
Even worse? Romney still has a cash pile of 34 million to spend before November 6th on ADS mostly. And if he spends that much, Obama will be racing to match him dollar for dollar.
No matter where you are, no matter what you do, THEY WILL FIND YOU! The TV and radio will blow up from the extra energy; the mailbox will be crammed with paper!
If only we had a dollar for every politician’s lie....
Oct 29, 2012
Workers are due to get what Ford calls a $250 (before taxes) yearly competitive award in December.
But in early December, Ford shareholders are receiving a 5-cents-per-share dividend on their Class B and common stock. Let’s see now, the 70.85 million Class B shares for the Ford family at 5 cents a pop comes to more than 3.5 million dollars every three months.
And for Mulally, he will just have to make do with his 1.1 million dollar dividend from his 22.3 million shares every quarter.
Oct 29, 2012
General Holiefield, a UAW VP, was recently featured on the society page for his wedding, described as an “over-the-top romantic adventure on the Mediterranean.”
Held in Italy, home to Chrysler’s corporate owner, Fiat, nuptials included “the two lovebirds riding a gondola in a Venice Canal,” and the “marriage was blessed on Sept. 30 by the Monsignor at St. Mark’s Basilica.” (Detroit News, 10/19/12). In addition, “The happy couple honeymooned in Athens, Naples, Rome, Livorno, Istanbul, Toulon and Barcelona.”
The policy of union officials surrendering totally to management on whatever the company asks for may pay off for UAW vice presidents but it has been a disaster for workers.
No wonder workers say the union is in bed with the company. A divorce from THAT policy would be a real news event!