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
May 8, 2017
Officials from both the Republican and Democratic parties hailed the government report that the unemployment rate had dropped to 4.4 per cent in April. “Great news,” said Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta. “The momentum in the job market is really impressive,” said Jason Furman, who had been Obama’s chief economist.
Even the New York Times ran an article called, “We’re Getting Awfully Close to Full Employment.”
Full employment? Not at all–and the government’s own statistics show it. A much smaller part of the population has a job today compared to past decades. Today, after eight years of supposed economic recovery, the employed part of the population is as low as it was during the depths of the 1992 and 2001 recessions. And that’s for workers between 25 to 55 years old, or prime working age. If the older part of the workforce is included, it is even worse.
And what about all those “spiffy” new jobs that employers are supposed to be creating? Most of them pay such low wages and benefits, workers are either forced to work lots of overtime, or hold several jobs just to make ends meet.
And many of the jobs companies are offering aren’t even “jobs.” Instead of hiring more workers, companies are contracting out the work to individual workers, pretending that workers are really “entrepreneurs,” or one-person companies. For a company like Uber or Lyft, the advantage is that the contract employee has to bear almost all the costs that used to be covered by the company. So, after the contract employee deducts all these costs, they are lucky to be making the minimum wage. And most of the job growth in this recovery has been in contract, part-time, temporary or very low-paid full-time labor!
So, a growing number of workers don’t make enough money, or can’t get enough hours. They don’t have enough to live on. And they can’t get out from under the shadow of partial or full joblessness.
These horrible conditions are what Republican and Democratic officials, not to speak of the New York Times, call “full employment”!
Certainly, full employment is not only possible but necessary, in order to meet the basic needs of the working population. Millions of new jobs could be created just in order to build all the affordable housing, schools, and health care facilities, not to speak of decent parks and recreational facilities that we lack today. Millions more jobs could be created in order to repair the crumbling basic infrastructure, including roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, etc. And millions more new jobs could be created by properly staffing all the workplaces that are severely short staffed: construction sites, factories, post offices, administrative offices and stores.
Not only could unemployment be wiped out, but workers could work shorter hours.
Why isn’t this being done? Not because of a lack of wealth. This society is extremely rich and getting richer. Every year, the working class produces ever more wealth, and the working class becomes more productive.
No, the main obstacle is the capitalist class. The capitalists make up a tiny part of the society, much less than 1% of the population. But the capitalists–and the capitalists alone–have the power over the economy and the society. And they use that power to increase their own profits and wealth. In this time of crisis and decline, the capitalists steal an ever larger share of the wealth created by the working class. It is the capitalist drive for profit that is creating this growing reservoir of joblessness and near-joblessness.
Workers don’t have to stand for this. It is the working class that produces everything and makes society run. That includes even the luxury products enjoyed by the super-rich. That means the working class has the power to impose its interests on the society, including, first of all, the right for everyone to have a job that allows workers to have a decent life–which means working fewer hours.
But to get that, the workers will have to organize together to fight as a class.
May 8, 2017
Starting in the late 1990s, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) knocked down much of the high-rise public housing in the city. They claimed they had to knock these buildings down because they were in terrible disrepair, which was true–because the city had spent decades letting the buildings rot. The CHA promised to replace the units they destroyed with other options–but those options have yet to materialize, nearly twenty years later.
So what are they doing today? The CHA has done everything it can to funnel money to rich developers. For example, developer Related Management bought the public housing complex of Parkway Gardens in Woodlawn for 40 million dollars in 2011. When fully rented, this housing complex brings the company 10.5 million dollars a year off of nearly 700 low-rise units.
There is a ten-year waiting list to get into public housing like Parkway in Chicago, so this company is all but guaranteed to keep Parkway fully rented. And the rents Related Management charges the city are higher than elsewhere in the neighborhood. Plus, this same company received more than 30 million dollars in federal tax credits for taking over a public housing complex. So CHA allows Related Management to draw tens of millions of dollars in guaranteed profits, funded by working-class taxpayers.
The ten-year waiting list for public housing shows that housing is a real problem in Chicago. The cause is obvious: rents are too high, and wages are too low! But instead of dealing with this problem, the city government devotes its resources to propping up the profits of the big corporations.
May 8, 2017
Yet another 24/7 closure was announced in Washington, D.C.; this time the westbound Pennsylvania Avenue bridge will be closed for seven months. The over-100-year-old bridge was deemed structurally deficient by the U.S. Transportation Department after pieces of the bridge fell onto Rock Creek Parkway back in 2015.
This wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many other closures happening all at the same time. Beach Drive, which carries thousands of commuters, is completely shut down for three years. This one shut-down alone has doubled the traffic on already overcrowded roads nearby. Another road is completely shut down so D.C. Water can rehab sewer infrastructure. The Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Potomac River, has permanent lane closures due to structural deficiencies. And this is just the short list of examples.
One might think the fall-back plan is to use public transportation–ride Metro. In fact, Metro has forced thousands off the system because it is so unreliable and unsafe. And now Metro is closing all of its Orange Line stations in Maryland and D.C. east of Stadium-Armory for one month. Much of the system has been single-tracking for months. It’s not so much riders jumping ship as it is Metro pushing people off.
Decades of not maintaining bridges, roads, and Metro rail have caught up all at once, resulting in gridlock. The city is crippled, and more closures could paralyze it. Of course all these repairs are desperately needed. But if maintenance had been done all along, we would not be seeing all these 24/7 months long closures–all at once.
It took decades of neglect to get here. It took decades of political decisions to neglect infrastructure in order to give tax breaks to developers. These decisions have left us with a city literally going to pieces. Soon only the President will be able to get around the city–in his helicopter.
May 8, 2017
Like the rest of the U.S., Michigan has roads and bridges that are falling apart. State politicians promised relief with a 2015 tax increase they deceptively called “a roads plan.” Their “plan” DID increase gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees on ordinary people, beginning in 2017. But more money for roads? No!
The Michigan House and Senate passed new budgets keeping the same level of funding for roads as last year! The same level of funding means more crumbling!
But if you follow the money, legislators just created new “Brownfield Tax Cuts” that will hand up to 40 million a year to wealthy real estate developers.
It’s the same trick politicians played with the Michigan Lottery. New money came in when the lottery was created, but school funding never increased, like voters were led to believe.
Politicians cynically use workers’ desire for better roads and schools as a bait and switch–taking more money from our pockets but never providing the better roads and schools we need!
May 8, 2017
After hitting a few speed bumps along the way, it looks like billionaire Dan Gilbert is on his way to getting more money in tax breaks from the State of Michigan. The state House passed a bill to allow big real estate developers like Gilbert to get reimbursed for developing “brownfield” sites.
Gilbert threatened the state to not go forward with plans to redevelop the old Hudson’s department store site in downtown Detroit if he wasn’t given these tax gifts.
This might seem like a reasonable idea. The federal government originally provided funding for the cleanup of brownfield sites abandoned by private companies that met strict definitions from the Environmental Protection Agency as being polluted.
But the Hudson’s site isn’t polluted. So, the Michigan House bill, which is expected to pass the state Senate and be signed by Governor Rick Snyder, broadens the definition to include “foreclosed, dangerous and blighted property.”
Now, with some creative descriptions, the Hudson’s site can be called a brownfield site and Gilbert can get his tax gift!
These kinds of tax breaks take away money to pay for roads, water and sewerage, and street lighting, and amount to a gift to real estate tycoons like Gilbert to help them snatch up more prime real estate in cities like Detroit–all the while, pushing out poor and working class people and leaving the tax bill for people who can least afford it.
May 8, 2017
Oaktree Capital bought more than 600 properties in Baltimore City and Baltimore County from the U.S. Housing Department’s DASP, Distressed Asset Sales Program. Oaktree got the properties at a big reduction in price from DASP, with the agreement their investment would bring “stabilization” to neighborhoods.
What has Oaktree accomplished? Forty percent of these Oaktree properties went to foreclosure, and 20% more are threatened with foreclosure. Mortgage adjustments, when given by Oaktree, meant that half of those homeowners saw $10,000 added to the principal they had to pay back. The “distressed” properties were in majority black neighborhoods, some of the same areas where the sub-prime mortgage scandal had already meant people lost their homes over the last 10 years.
The union organization “Unite Here” described Oaktree’s practices at a Baltimore City Council housing hearing on March 30. When their members visited 320 Oaktree properties around Baltimore, they found almost half were vacant.
And what is Oaktree Capital Management? It is a one hundred BILLION dollar private investment fund. They buy up thousands of properties all over the country and put lots of people out of their homes, finding a way to profit off people’s need for affordable housing. No–they don’t stabilize neighborhoods. They do the opposite.
May 8, 2017
“To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking Congress to approve legislation that produces a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure of the United States,” Trump said, and added that the money would be raised “through both public and private capital.”
The Transportation Secretary later explained that the needed infrastructure improvements may be funded by imposing tolls on the roads and bridges.
As usual, the working class will fund such projects through tolls, and the rich will reap the benefit. This public-private capital talk is another scam imposed by the thief on the worker.
May 8, 2017
The president of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, was put in power by France during their military intervention in the country. The French Army is still there, supposedly to fight terrorism but really to keep the country in the French imperialist orbit. The corruption of the previous president, Amadou Toumani Touré, overthrown in 2012, opened the way for the invasion of Jihadist groups in the north of the country. The current regime has shown itself to be rotten as well, as this article translated from the revolutionary workers’ newspaper, Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs shows.
For the fourth time since he took power in 2013, the president of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, changed the prime minister. Abdoulaye Idrissa Maïga, Defense Minister in the last government, replaced Modibo Keïta at the head of the government. One of the most remarkable features of the new government is enormous numbers of ministers, 36 portfolios to satisfy these guys’ huge appetites. The Malian president has already earned his nickname: “Mister My Family First!” You almost have to believe he has enlarged his family in order to suck more wealth out of the government!
For a number of months, the regime has faced a series of strikes by public workers. The low-level government officials stopped working in January 2017. When the government refused their demands, their strike of “seven working days” became an “unlimited strike.” From there the movement spread to other sectors of public workers: the labor inspectors, the workers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, those of the different territories, the public hospitals, and finally of the teachers.
All of these, despite the diversity of their status and their type of work, demanded an improvement in their conditions of work: payment of bonuses, change in the salary scale, hiring of contract workers as regular employees, replacement of their dilapidated work materials, etc.
The new Prime Minister, bringing the habits from his old job as Defense Minister, thought that he could instill fear in the strikers by playing the strong man, but he didn’t intimidate many people. The workers in the public hospitals kept their strike going for 38 days, the longest strike in the health care sector for thirty years. After they decided to end their strike, one of the leaders of the union announced: “We have gained eight demands out of nine, and a partial agreement on the ninth. We demanded an increase in the bonus for special work, and we have gotten a 100% increase. Concerning the hiring of contract workers, the principle has been agreed to.”
The strike of the teachers is still going on because up to now they haven’t been satisfied. The students are worried about missing a year: they’ve begun to demonstrate and demanded that the government and the teachers negotiate.
For the moment, the government seems to have chosen to turn a deaf ear and to play the tough guy. It has declared a state of emergency for the whole country for nine days. Officially, this is to confront the “terrorist menace,” but no one is fooled into thinking that this will intimidate the Jihadist fanatics. In reality, the state of emergency in a big city like Bamako is always aimed at intimidating the population. In the name of a pretended public security, the government will ban any demonstration, crowd, or occupation of any public space. They are probably getting ready to order the teachers back to work under penalty of law.
In the past, the public workers, the teachers, and the students organized struggles under the bloody dictatorship of Moussa Traoré. If President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta wants to play the strong man with them, he might get a surprise just like the old dictator.
May 8, 2017
These articles continue our series on the Russian Revolution, taken from the words of participants.
Two months after the February Revolution, demonstrations in Petrograd against the continuation of the war forced out the government ministers Goutchkov and Miliukov. Then, from April 14 to 22 (April 27-May 4 by our calendar), the debates in the 7th Conference of the Bolshevik Party showed that the revolution continued to spread out wider and extend deeper. The workers imposed the eight-hour work day, organized their own supplies, and built their militias: a form of workers’ control was put in place.
The slogan “all power to the soviets” was already a living reality. A delegate from the Moscow region described the situation: “At Orekhovo-Zonevo, the power is in the hands of the workers. Carrying weapons without the soviet’s authorization is prohibited. The peasants are with the workers ... we have in our village a peat-bog owned by capitalists. We went to see them and we said that if they don’t give us fuel to work, we will close the factory. Comrade Lenin says all the time that the soviet of workers deputies must take power. Well! In our town, it’s already done.”
In the Donetz basin, the workers were in control of the Ukrainian city of Lougansk, as their delegate described: “The miners are everywhere: in the commissariats of the militia, in the soviet of workers and soldiers deputies. They also act as judges. They are absolute masters of the pits.”
Lenin drew the conclusions of this meeting:
“To create a network of soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies—that is our task today. The whole of Russia is already being covered with a network of organs of local self-government. A commune may exist also in the form of organs of self government. The abolition of the police and the standing army, and the arming of the whole people—all this can be accomplished through the organs of local self-government....
“The real work is to bring about the abolition of the standing army, the bureaucracy, and the police, and to arm the whole people....
“This war is a world war. It is waged by definite classes, and was brought on by banking capital. It can be stopped by transferring power to another class. So long as the power remains in the hands of the ruling classes, peace can alter nothing.
“The proletariat must be shown how the revolution can be carried forward by concrete measures. To carry the revolution forward means to achieve self-government by independent action. The growth of democracy does not stand in the way of self-government, it helps us to realize our aims. The war can be terminated only by the transfer of power to another class—and Russia has come closest of all to that—but never by a truce among the capitalists of all countries on the basis of an exchange of subjugated nationalities. A commune is quite suitable to the peasantry. A commune means complete self-government, the absence of any supervision from above. Nine-tenths of the peasantry should be for it.
“The bourgeoisie may reconcile itself to the nationalization of the land, should the peasants take over the land. As a proletarian party, we must declare that the land alone will not feed people. To cultivate it one will therefore have to set up the commune. We must be for centralization, but there are times when things can best be done locally; we should allow a maximum of initiative in the local areas. The Cadets are already acting like officials. They tell the peasants: ‘Wait for the Constituent Assembly.’ Our party alone provides slogans that really carry the revolution forward. The soviets of workers’ deputies are fully capable of establishing communes in the local areas. The question is whether the proletariat will be well enough organized for the task, but this is a thing we cannot estimate in advance, we must learn by doing.”
May 8, 2017
A little more than two months after the revolution, on May 5, 1917 (May 18 by our calendar), a new provisional government was put in place: Nine liberal ministers, plus five socialists, drawn from different organizations, joined Kerensky, who had been the only “socialist” member of the provisional government. The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet gave their support to this coalition. The Bolsheviks, who were still a minority in the soviet, refused to join this capitalist government. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky relates the feelings of the workers and soldiers about all this:
“The masses, in so far as they were not yet for the Bolsheviks, stood solid for the entrance of socialists into the government. If it is a good thing to have Kerensky as a minister, then so much the better six Kerenskys. The masses did not know that this was called coalition with the bourgeoisie, and that the bourgeoisie wanted to use these socialists as a cover for their activities against the people. A coalition looked different from the barracks and from the Mariinsky Palace. The masses wanted to use the socialists to crowd out the bourgeoisie from the government. Thus two forces tending in opposite directions united for a moment in one....
“The army was in favor of coalition. One of its delegates later–at the June congress of the soviets–expressed not at all badly the attitude of the front toward the question of power: ‘We thought that the groan which arose from the army when it learned that the socialists would not enter the ministry to work with people whom they did not trust, while the whole army was compelled to go on dying with people whom it did not trust, must have been heard in Petrograd.’
“The war was the deciding factor in this question, as in others. The socialists had at first intended to sit out the war, as also the sovereignty, and wait. But the war would not wait. The Allies would not wait. The front did not want to wait any longer.”
The leaders of French and English imperialism played a decisive role in the formation of this government. Their main goal was to keep Russia in the war against Germany.
Kerensky’s tour of the army confirmed this: “On the 11th of May, Kerensky went to the front to open his agitation in favor of an offensive. ‘A wave of enthusiasm is growing and spreading in the army,’ reported the new War Minister to the Provisional Government, choking with the enthusiasm of his own speeches. On May 14, Kerensky issued a command to the army: ‘You will go where your leaders conduct you,’ and in order to adorn this well-known and not very attractive prospect for the soldier, he added: ‘You will carry on the points of your bayonets–peace.’”
May 8, 2017
On May 1st on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C., someone hung bananas from nooses with racist messages on them. This was the same day that the first black woman, Taylor Dumpson, was sworn in as student government president. Bananas hung from nooses is a racist message in itself, but the perpetrator also wrote “AKA FREE”–in reference to the historically black sorority of which the new SGA president is a member. Other bananas had “HARAMBE BAIT”–in reference to the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into its exhibit.
This despicable, cowardly act was executed in the dark of night while the perpetrator covered his face so as not to be identified by the security cameras. A few days later a white supremacist threatened Dumpson online.
American University is an elite school. Students and faculty seemed surprised and shocked that this happened, as if the money it takes to go to the school would somehow make it immune from racism in the society. But this was not the first time. In September, a rotten banana was reportedly thrown at a black student, and another rotting banana was left on the doorstep of their dorm.
This vile, racist act is not so surprising given the current reactionary atmosphere in this country. In fact, it is part of a larger string of recent racist incidents. A noose was found hanging in the kitchen of a fraternity at Maryland University. At Boston’s Fenway Park a Red Sox fan threw a bag of peanuts at Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones and yelled racist epithets at him. The racists never went away, but the explosive movements of past decades forced them back under their rocks. Now, they feel emboldened to come crawling back into the daylight.
Trump, with all his disgusting vitriol, has given all the racists in this country a great big permission slip–signed by the President of the United States himself. This is what Trump has “accomplished” in his first 100 days.
Trump and all the racist scum taking their lead from him need to get the message: this ignorant crap will not stand.
May 8, 2017
Trump’s latest health care bill passed the U.S. House. Trump celebrated by busing House Republicans to the White House rose garden for a victory lap.
Despite all of Trump’s blustering about what a great bill this was, the passage had nothing to do with improving medical care. It would make medical care in the U.S. more restrictive and 20 times more complicated. Even a Republican paper like the Chicago Tribune called Obamacare’s provisions on pre-existing conditions “simple” compared with the latest Trump plan.
With this bill, Trump and the Republicans are pandering to their right-wing base. It eliminates tax increases included in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on higher-income people and health insurers. It cuts funding for the Medicaid expansion included in the ACA. It removes penalties on individuals and employers for not having or not providing health insurance.
It would defund Planned Parenthood by prohibiting states from direct spending of money from the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the new name for “Trumpcare”, on “prohibited entities” that are “primarily engaged in family planning, reproductive health, and related medical care” or “provide for abortions”. This would likely mean the closure of many clinics in rural areas that are the only available providers of medical care for women.
Trump’s plan still has to pass the Senate, where even the Republicans are not anxious to take the blame for it in its current form.
Trump knows that, but he just played an enormous game to give himself something to crow about. He needed some kind of victory after virtually every one of the many promises he made during his election campaign about the “great” things he was going to get done in his first 100 days in office fell completely flat.
Demonstrating the mentality of the dictator of a 23rd rate country in the 17th century, Trump maneuvered to finally give himself something to show a few days after his first 100 days were up. As far as the health of the population is concerned, Trump declares, “Let them use band-aids!”
May 8, 2017
Small towns and rural America are being destroyed by lack of jobs and drug addiction. Brian Alexander’s new book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town breaks down what has happened to one Ohio town.
A hundred-plus year history of manufacturing glass utensils—baking dishes, beer mugs, wine carafes—has gone on in Lancaster, Ohio, just south of Columbus. The town’s glass company is still called Anchor Hocking by locals. Officially, it is now called Oneida, having merged with the silverware company.
In the 1940s, Forbes praised Lancaster, Ohio as an “all-American town.” Executives of Anchor lived in town. Rich and poor residents knew each other. It was a situation of home town paternalistic capitalism.
For decades now, the glass company has been bought and sold by a series of vulture capitalists, each making millions by loading the company down with more and more debt.
The author traces Anchor Hocking’s decline to the 1970s. In 1975, Mitt Romney and other “consultants” arrived in town to identify “efficiencies” to make the company more profitable. In 1982, corporate raider Carl Icahn bought up Anchor stock and forced the company to pay three million dollars to prevent a leveraged buyout.
After that, the company was “stripped and flipped” more than once. Corporate offices got moved out of town. Different concessions got forced on workers, with huge job losses.
In 2004, Anchor Hocking was sold to Cerberus Capital. Cerberus loaded more debt onto the company. (It should also be noted that Stephen Feinberg, the head of Cerberus, is a key financial advisor to Donald Trump today.)
The book ties the stealing of wealth to the growing drug epidemic in the community. It shows how drug sales and drug addiction flow from the sinking wages, plummeting standard of living and the declining schools.
In 2016, an Anchor worker averages only $14.55 an hour with no retirement plan. The median income in town is only $37,494, compared to $51,849 for the entire U.S.
The school district was gutted when it lost money through tax breaks given to the corporate raiders—to “save jobs.” The schools lost more than $3 million in funding over the course of two years, leading to layoffs.
The drug epidemic has raged to the point that by 2014, three-fifths of women who came to the local hospital for pre-natal care screened positive for cocaine, opiates, meth, or Xanax. In a humane way, the author explores the lives of both dealers and users of drugs in the town.
By showing a clear example of how capitalism has destroyed one town, the destruction of human lives all across small-town America is exposed.
The author puts the blame squarely on corporate greed, on Wall Street, where it belongs. He says Lancaster, Ohio’s destruction “came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of returns.”
May 8, 2017
Care First Blue Cross Blue Shield has asked regulators to approve average rate increases of 52% for individual health plans it sells through the state insurance exchange in Maryland and a 29% increase in Washington, D.C. Three other companies offering plans through the exchanges have also proposed very large increases.
While Maryland and D.C. insurance commissioners will almost certainly approve rate increases smaller than what these companies have requested, they are still expected to be large.
Instead of reducing the cost of health care by forcing the health care industry to accept lower profits, both ObamaCare and now TrumpCare simply change who pays for it, with more and more of the costs falling on the insured population either directly or through the taxes we pay. Meanwhile, specialty doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers rake in bigger and bigger profits.
May 8, 2017
It has been 25 years since the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. On April 29, 1992, people’s anger boiled over after the acquittal of four L.A. cops, whose brutal beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, in March 1991 was seen by millions of people on TV.
Half an hour after the “not guilty” verdict hit the airwaves, more than 300 protesters were in front of the L.A. County Courthouse. Into the evening, hundreds more people took to the streets, first in South-Central L.A. and then in other parts of the city, stopping traffic on streets and freeways. Another large protest began at the L.A. police headquarters and lasted well into the late hours of the night.
Angry residents confronted cops in the streets, and police retreated from South Central. Within the next two days, authorities sent in 10,000 California National Guard troops to beef up the police force, followed by 3,500 federal troops two days later. It would be six days before the rebellion died down.
As usual in such situations, the media emphasized images of violence–motorists being pulled out of vehicles and beaten; smoke rising from buildings set on fire; etc. Commentators called the rebellion “senseless,” telling people, patronizingly, they were “destroying their own neighborhood”–as if it weren’t the capitalists and their government that destroyed these working-class neighborhoods all the time, by not providing good-paying jobs, decent schools, a functioning infrastructure and services!
But authorities’ own actions after the rebellion showed that people’s outburst of anger was not senseless after all. Talk of six billion dollars of investment for jobs and businesses did not, of course, materialize–but the very fact that L.A. authorities talked about the need for such a large infusion of resources shows that the rebellion was absolutely justified.
Today, 25 years later, the conditions that led to the 1992 rebellion are not only still there, but they have worsened. South-Central, now called South L.A., has higher official poverty and unemployment rates than it did in 1992. And incidents of police brutality, including especially the police shootings of black men, are as rampant as ever.
Then as today, there is widespread anger and frustration in the working class. This was demonstrated by the relatively large outburst in Baltimore in 2015 in the wake of the police killing of Freddie Gray. But for this anger to lead to real and lasting results for those who revolt, working people need not only to rebel, but to fight consciously, aiming to challenge the very system of profit that creates this poverty and brutality.
May 8, 2017
On April 17, 2015, Osiel López Pérez slipped while cleaning the liver-giblet chiller at the Case Farms plant in Canton, Ohio. The machine kicked on and “literally ripped off his left leg,” leaving it hanging by a flap of skin and a ligament.
Pérez was a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. This allowed the company to legally fire him with nothing–no workers’ comp and the barest emergency medical care. The law let them discard him like a damaged piece of meat because he didn’t have papers.
Another Case Farms worker, Evodia González Dimas, lost the use of her left arm from carpal tunnel syndrome. She had worked at the Case Farms plant in Morganton, North Carolina, removing fat and bones from chicken legs. When the company “discovered” that she was undocumented in 2006, they rehired her under another name and helped her get another set of fake papers. When she complained a few months later of pain in her hand, the company claimed she was a new employee, still under probation, not eligible for workers’ comp–and they fired her.
When González sued, the government found that the company “knew exactly what was going on with respect to her employment status” and “took advantage of the situation.” But despite eventually “winning” in court after many years, she got nothing–because the law is set up to serve the corporations and keep the immigrant workers desperate.
May 8, 2017
In 1995, two hundred workers at a Case Farms plant in Morganton, North Carolina, struck for four days and voted to unionize. In response, Case Farms requested immigration documents from more than a hundred of them, threatened to get them deported, and eventually defeated the union. In 2008, workers again tried to organize a union and went on strike at a Case Farms plant in Winesburg, Ohio. The company suddenly discovered that seven members of the union organizing committee “might not be legally authorized to work in the United States” and fired them all, again breaking the strike.
Companies aren’t legally allowed to fire striking workers so brazenly–but because these workers were undocumented, Case Farms got away with it.
Case Farms knows exactly what it’s doing. In 1989, it began sending vans to recruit workers directly from churches that offered sanctuary to people fleeing the U.S.-backed death squads in Guatemala. The human-resources manager who organized this told a historian: “Guatemalans can’t go back home. They’re here as political refugees. If they go back home, they get shot.” This made them perfect workers for an extremely dangerous, low paying boss.
Once the Guatemalan workers started to organize, Case Farms turned to Burmese refugees. Then it recruited ethnic Nepalis expelled from the country of Bhutan. The more desperate the workers, the better for this company.
Case Farms might be an extreme example, but the bosses of this country all have an interest in keeping immigrant workers as desperate as possible, in denying them as many legal rights as possible. This lets the bosses exploit these workers to the extreme and use them as a battering ram against other workers.
The working class’ interest is the opposite: to demand that all workers in this country, no matter where they’re from or how they got here, have full legal rights, the same as everyone else.