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
Mar 19, 2018
On Wednesday March 14, hundreds of thousands of students from over 2,800 middle schools, high schools and colleges across the country participated in demonstrations stemming from the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead.
Some of the demonstrations were carefully controlled by school administrations, and lasted just 17 minutes. Some lasted much longer. Some were quiet moments of silence; some were angry rallies demanding action, with chants of “Enough is Enough!” and “We call BS!” When some school officials forbade students from leaving their schools, many went ahead with their protests anyway, accepting whatever discipline their school decided to hand down. They insisted on being heard.
Activities included assemblies, marches, speeches, theatrical performances, discussions and debates. Different groups of students did different things, but all those who did, found ways to break out of the routine of a regular school day and insist that something needs to change.
And they captured the interest of a lot of working class people who also know that much needs to change.
Enough is enough.
More demonstrations are planned for March 24, and for April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings.
Where will all this activity go? Who knows?
Of course, school officials and other authorities know where they want it to go. They tried to contain, corral and control the students’ anger and activity. Some tell the students that they should “stay engaged,” but offer only very narrowly prescribed activities for this engagement: Vote. Contact your elected officials. Wait. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The media, too, did its part to characterize the protests as very narrowly focused on gun control. And certainly the shooting in Parkland was the flashpoint; but that doesn’t at all mean that gun control was the only thing on these students’ minds.
The Republicans are in a bit of a bind confronting the protests; they rely on the NRA for votes. But for the Democrats, it’s win-win. They are very happy to appear supportive of these protests–even rushing out of Congress to greet the protesting students in Washington, D.C. After all, this simply amounts to another variation on the same old message of “let us know what you want, vote for us, and wait for us to make the changes for you.”
Maybe young people will accept this narrow limitation and pull back. But maybe not. They’ve already “called BS” on the Republican notion that nothing can be done; how long before they call BS on the Democratic notion that young people should just wait for the system to work for them?
Just because the authorities want these thousands of angry young people to stay in their lanes, doesn’t mean that they have to stay there. Just because the protest starts with gun violence doesn’t mean it will stay on that issue only. There are many, many problems confronting young people, and they all stem from a society based on extracting profit at the expense of human need and dignity. These young people could very well say “Enough is enough” to much more than gun violence.
The students who acted have already gained a valuable experience. They’re making connections and seeing that they have common interests across the country. All these many thousands of students who organized actions across the country can feel, rightly, that they accomplished something. They organized collectively, and they have forced an issue onto the national stage that the adults in power have absolutely run away from, up until now.
That is an experience these students will carry with them. Some of these students, of course, may slip back into the comfortable future niches already prepared for them. But most will end up joining the world of work. Like all those before them, they will be subjected to exploitation that creates rotten conditions of work and life. Maybe having learned to say “enough is enough,” they will say it again. This time from within the heart of the class that has the power to challenge the foundation of this rotten society, a society that cannot protect young people from violence.
Mar 19, 2018
In early March, Donald Trump visited the state of California in order to inspect the prototypes for his wall with Mexico. It was all a disgusting spectacle to try to appeal to his base by spewing his usual anti-immigrant rant. The trip hid the fact that after a year in office, Trump had failed to get the Republican-controlled Congress to provide any funding.
Trump may have visited California. But California already has a wall that had been built under previous administrations of Democrats and Republicans alike. Any new wall is slated for Texas, where most of the property along the border is privately owned. And in Texas, the wall is so unpopular, even most Republican Party politicians oppose it. Any new wall would not only cut through countless neighborhoods and backyards, it would also divide ranches and farms, not to speak of amputating parts of Big Bend National Park and a couple of golf courses. So, the Republicans in Congress have been stalling.
The Democratic Party politicians also used Trump’s trip to play to their base, pretending to lead the “resistance” to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
Last year, the Democrats passed three laws that they claim make California a supposed “sanctuary” state. In reality, most police agencies had been pushing for these restrictions, anyway, because acting as an extension of ICE has been, for the local police, counter-productive. When immigrant communities fear deportation, they steer away from the police and other authorities completely, not reporting crimes or appearing in court as witnesses, for example.
But no one should be fooled by Democratic Party posturing.
Only a few years before, many of these same politicians, who today don the mantle of protector of immigrants, had carried out many of the same policies as those pushed by Trump. Take Governor Jerry Brown. In 2010, when Brown was state attorney general, he said: “I don’t support sanctuary cities... Just opening up the cities and saying our borders don’t mean anything, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, I’m not going there.”
The same is true of Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party’s frontrunner to succeed Brown in the upcoming elections. When Newsom was mayor of San Francisco, he vetoed sanctuary policies enacted by the city council aiming to protect immigrants. Even after the city council overrode his veto, Newsom still refused to enforce those policies, claiming that they “violated federal law.”
No, strip away the rhetoric and posturing, which are aimed at their electoral bases, the actual policies of the Democrats and Republicans and even Trump himself are not very different. They give the capitalists what they want.
One important California grower explained what they want to reporter Mark Arax: “As rich as the farmer might be, his workers could bring him to his knees, if they realized their power. The farmer didn’t like feeling vulnerable. So, he supported anti-immigrant measures because he wanted the workers to always feel a little ‘iffy.’”
And both the Republicans and Democrats oblige.
Mar 19, 2018
Walt Disney workers demonstrated outside the company’s shareholders meeting in Houston in early March. Inside the shareholders and CEO Robert Iger had reason to be very pleased.
Disneyland charged $120 dollars a ticket last year, for anyone over 10. Its attendance reached 27 million people last year, with the company profiting handsomely from this bonanza. Disney’s worldwide profit reached nine billion dollars in 2017, a handsome increase from four billion dollars in 2000.
CEO Iger should also have been very happy, with his pay at 162.5 million dollars in 2017. Quite a sum of income for only one person!
But, Disney’s motto, “the happiest place on earth,” was not on the minds of the 30,000 workers of Disney’s theme parks. Disney chopped their pay by 15 percent in real dollars between 2000 and 2017.
Their pay is so meager that more than one out of ten workers at Disney Anaheim were homeless at some point in the last two years; two-thirds of the workers said they didn’t have enough food to eat three meals a day; three-quarters said they could not afford basic expenses every month.
Glynndana Shevlin, a food and beverage concierge at the park and a Disney worker for 29 years, said: “Every month, I face choices between rent, food or bills. I have been evicted twice. I’m often hungry because I’m skipping meals. At work, I’m a clean, happy person, but when I leave and get in my car, I become a sad, unhappy person who doesn’t always know where I’m going to sleep.”
Apparently the company motto, “the happiest place on earth,” is only for the capitalists who own Disney.
Mar 19, 2018
If you haven’t run across Potholes–and lots of them–then you haven’t been driving much lately!
Lack of funding–year after year–has gotten Michigan to where we are at today. Quite a few of our roads are in horrible shape!
It’s not as if the state doesn’t have money. The state keeps cutting taxes for big businesses–putting millions more into their pockets–while we suffer. THAT is state policy in a nutshell.
Mar 19, 2018
A report looking into a fatal bus crash puts responsibility squarely on the management of the Baltimore City Public schools. In November of 2016, the driver of the school bus and the driver of an MTA bus and four passengers were killed.
The report makes it clear this crash was no “accident”–it was the result of extreme negligence. The school bus driver had been involved in 12 crashes in the past five years, and he had serious medical problems. But the bus company hired him anyway. The bus company, a sub-contractor for city schools, itself had so many violations that the state of Maryland had suspended it from doing charter bus work.
Why did BCPS give this unsafe contract the work of transporting children? Didn’t they know? Well they should have. Schools management had an office to oversee contracting. But management never gave the office the funding it needed. So it had vacancies and high turnover, and it had outdated technology to record data. Management was not willing to fund a serious operation to transport school children.
Schools management objected to the report, claiming it had changed procedures after the crash. The report said something else: “Even after the tragic events in November 2016, no apparent changes were made to organizational structure or operating practices.”
And so another accident that could kill six more people is waiting to happen.
Mar 19, 2018
This article continues our series on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
Several months after the workers’ councils (soviets) took power, the new revolutionary state came under attack from all sides.
In October 1917, the soviets overthrew the bourgeois government in order to establish the first workers’ state. They did so under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin. At that moment, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs), a petty-bourgeois revolutionary party, split in two. The Left SRs separated from their more right-wing comrades, supported the Bolsheviks, and participated in the new government.
The Bolsheviks—and Lenin first of all—always knew that the establishment of a workers’ state required the use of the Terror (this name comes from the period of repression against the nobility during the French Revolution) to prevent the capitalists and czarists (royalist partisans of the czar) from retaking power.
However, at first the Bolsheviks’ use of repression was very moderate, particularly that carried out by the Cheka, the political police of the soviets. But the counter-revolutionary attacks intensified.
In January, the czarist general Kaledin raised an army that attacked the southern part of soviet Russia “in the name of the Constituent Assembly.”
Among the “ukases” (decrees) that he published in the region that he controlled were #2428 and #2431, which read: “It is illegal to arrest workers. The orders are to hang them or to shoot them,” and “The orders are to hang all workers who have been arrested in the street. Their bodies must be exposed in public for three days.”
In February 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a treaty with the German armies that were attacking them from the west that required Russia to cede Ukraine to Germany. They did this in order to end the war, as they had promised the masses. In Ukraine, the German troops helped the czarists to create a new White Army (against the Red Army and the workers’ state) that carried out wholesale massacres of Jewish civilians (150,000 in one year). In Finland, a third White Army, led by the general Wrangel, massacred the workers who had taken power in Helsinki (with 20,000 workers and their families massacred at the end of April 1918).
The threat also came from within. In March, the Left SRs who wanted to continue the “revolutionary” war against Germany turned against the Bolsheviks. Their leader, Maria Spiridonova, burst in to the Congress of Soviets and, brandishing a revolver, announced that she was calling her party to armed insurrection against the Bolsheviks. Yakov Blumkin, the right-hand man of Felix Dzherzhinsky (the Bolshevik head of the Cheka) applied this slogan by assassinating the German ambassador to Russia and then, with the help of SR officers in the Cheka, taking Dzherzhinsky himself prisoner. Dzherzhinsky was eventually freed, and Yakov Blumkin was allowed to leave Russia for his native Ukraine, where he took part in the local Bolshevik Party. As for Maria Spiridonova, she was sentenced to one year of imprisonment, then immediately amnestied “in view of her past services rendered to the revolution.”
But the counter-revolutionary armies and the French, British, U.S., and Japanese expeditionary corps were strangling the revolution from the outside and massacring workers and peasants. Another Left SR militant, Fanny Kaplan, shot Lenin three times on August 30th, leaving him between life and death for several days. The survival of the workers’ state was clearly at risk.
It was only on September 5th, 1918, nearly a year after the soviets took power, that the soviet government decreed the “Red Terror”: the order to widely arrest people suspected of plotting against the workers’ state or aiding the White Armies, and—in those cases where their guilt was clear—to execute them without delay. This order also consisted of taking bourgeois families as hostages in order to demoralize those who supported the reestablishment of capitalism.
According to the historians who are most hostile to the revolution, the red terror resulted in 140,000 deaths in three years … which is many times fewer than the number of workers, peasants, and Jewish citizens massacred by the counter-revolutionaries in the first months of the white terror. Far from showing that the Bolsheviks were bloody dictators, this period instead demonstrates all of the restraint that they strove to act on for as long as possible.
But it also shows that whatever the temperance and good will of the revolutionaries, the laws of revolution are stronger than them, and that an oppressed class that takes power cannot do it without exercising terror over the privileged classes that they overthrow.
Mar 19, 2018
Women in Spain carried out an unprecedented mobilization on March 8 against wage inequality, discrimination, and sexual violence.
The unions and media said six million people in 120 cities demonstrated to show their anger against how women are treated, especially in the working class. Responding to the call of feminist organizations, trade unions, and political parties, some workers went on strike for the day, some for only two hours, and most for the afternoon.
Right-wing political parties openly opposed the movement. The Citizens Party said the strike demands went against the proper functioning of the capitalist system. Rajoy, an open reactionary, head of the government and of the People’s Party, dared to put on a purple ribbon to show solidarity with women–symbolically. The Socialist Party president of Andalusia also hailed the mobilization. Of course everyone remembers each time his party was in power, it supported anti-worker laws which made inequality between men and women worse!
Why did this day bring an unprecedented mobilization on International Women’s Day? Because the inequalities that women suffer greatly mark Spanish society. Hopefully this mobilization will encourage other big working class actions. For all workers, women and men alike, this demonstration is a hopeful sign.
Mar 19, 2018
This article the translation of an editorial from workplace newsletters of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The so-called Spinetta report recommends transforming SNCF, France’s state-run national railroad, into a limited liability company; closing down “secondary lines;” opening up to competitors; doing away with current working conditions of railroad employees; and slashing five thousand jobs. In other words, this report is laying the groundwork for the accelerated privatization of SNCF and the destruction of railroad employee rights.
This is an outright declaration of war, to which the CGT, France’s major union confederation, replied by calling for a day of protest on March 22.
Railroad employees have every reason to fight back, and so do all French workers. The government is proudly boasting about the economic recovery and the return of prosperity. No worker should accept seeing his working and living conditions getting worse. No worker should accept being treated like a chip in a poker game.
This is the government’s latest attack not only on railway workers but on all workers. Macron is intent on bringing railway workers—and the whole working class—into line. His aim is clear: Let’s not forget that he announced 120,000 job cuts in the public sector just a few weeks ago.
Apart from being an attack against all working people, privatizing SNCF and opening up railway transport to competition would be a huge setback for society.
Those who take the train on a regular basis are well aware of the consequences that the lack of investment already has on the railway system.
Many trains are slowed down or cancelled, others arrive late due to various technical problems. Millions of travelers experience these inconveniences ... or worse.
Those who explain that privatization will make things better for the public are telling flat-out lies.
A number of financiers are interested in the state’s decision to open up SNCF to competition. They are accustomed to seeing the state cater to them. They expect to lay their hands on SNCF’s infrastructures, materials and employees at a low cost. Their only problem will be to choose the most profitable parts!
SNCF has for years been acting like any private sector enterprise. Railway workers are submitted to the same productivity-oriented pressure as the rest of the working class. Travelers are confronted with exorbitant prices during peak periods and with the closing down of trains and lines that are deemed unprofitable.
Today’s government wants to take this situation one step further by opening up new opportunities to private capital.
In the name of profit, the government is pushing more and more people to the edges of society. This approach leads slowly but surely to a system in which the age of the patient—or the content of his wallet—decides whether he will get an artificial hip joint or not, a system where social security will not cover expensive treatments and where access to a university education is restricted.
Whether in hospitals, retirement homes or on the railroads, making profits is the priority. And yet accepting the parasitic nature of capital is contrary to the interests of workers and consumers.
In the battle they’ve decided to fight against the government, we stand on the side of the railway workers against Macron and the bourgeoisie.
Mar 19, 2018
As of March 19, it has been 15 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. It’s an important anniversary, albeit an extremely tragic one. The U.S. involvement in the war, which continues to this day, has resulted in tremendous costs which can be measured in many ways.
The greatest cost of the U.S. war in Iraq has been paid by the Iraqi people. One conservative estimate, counting only officially documented deaths, puts the death toll of Iraqi civilians at over 200,000. Another recent estimate, based on surveys of Iraqi households, puts the total at more like 2.4 million people who died sooner than they otherwise would have. The recent bombardment of Mosul aimed at ending ISIS control of the area is estimated alone to have killed 40,000 people.
At least another seven million Iraqis have been forced at different times to flee their homes, many into refugee camps, due to fear of ethnic violence and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure.
The war has also spread to other countries such as Syria and together with the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen.
The war has also taken its toll on American troops, with close to 4,500 killed according to official U.S. military figures, and another 32,000 wounded. That’s not to mention all those who came home wounded mentally or those showing longer-term physical damage. One early medical study from 2004 found 10.5% of soldiers returning from Iraq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. As long ago as 2009, the Pentagon estimated 360,000 U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered traumatic brain injuries. Many who served in Iraq have developed cancers and other illnesses.
Whatever lies the U.S. told to justify its invasion and continuing involvement in Iraq, its calculation that the Iraqi people wanted it there proved wrong. But U.S. imperialism never really bases its calculations on whether the population wants it there, but on profit. In the case of Iraq, those profits are based on oil, and while its profits may be somewhat inhibited by the situation in Iraq, the war nevertheless has allowed the U.S. oil industry to come out ahead. It’s also prevented other countries, particularly those in Europe, from getting their hands on Iraqi oil.
Despite the changes in administrations in the White House, from Bush to Obama to Trump, the U.S. war in Iraq continues to this day. Despite Obama’s promise to end U.S. combat operations, there remain over 4,000 U.S. troops and almost 7,800 mercenaries in Iraq, with another 20,000 “civilians” employed at the U.S. embassy there.
The war in Iraq gets little attention in the headlines these days. But after 15 years, its devastation should not be ignored.
Mar 19, 2018
With his typical grandstanding, Trump announced big tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. (Almost immediately, he negated the effect of the tariffs by excluding from them the countries that sell the most steel and aluminum to U.S. industries, like Canada. And that is typical of Trump also.)
But what counts is not Trump’s order itself, but how he justified it. Trumps says it will bring the “dying steel industry back to life,” resurrect rusting factories, and provide millions of jobs.
As the young people say, “call BS.” Tariffs won’t bring jobs back.
The steel industry is not “dying” from imports. Part of its production has been replaced by other industries, including plastics and preformed concrete, as technology develops.
But, most important, the steel industry continues to produce at a very high level in this country–but the same developing technology allows steel to be produced by many times fewer workers. U.S. steel producers require only 1.5 person-hours of work to make a ton of steel today, compared to more than 10 hours in the 1980s.
It’s not imports that steal jobs–it’s the vast increase in what labor can produce; it’s the changes introduced into the production of goods and services by technology.
Technology is not an enemy. These vast changes in steel–which happen to a greater or lesser degree in every industry–could allow all of us to work many fewer hours, and yet have enough income to buy all the products that our labor produces. Why not? All of us are making more things with our labor time. So, divided up among all of us, that means we could all have more.
With what technology has wrought, all of us could be working 10 or even 20 fewer hours a week. We could all have more paid vacation time. We could all have more paid holidays. We could all retire earlier. And the most noxious forms of shift time could be eliminated.
That’s what technology could do–if it weren’t controlled, as it is today, by capitalism. To make sure that the benefits of new technology come to those who work–that has to be the goal that workers fight for. In other words, we have to take control of that technology away from the capitalists who use it today to pile up senseless levels of profit. We have to impose our needs, before their profits.
Mar 19, 2018
For over a year, 2000 auto parts workers in Saline, Michigan had worked almost non-stop. Working 12 hours a day and 7 days a week was mandatory. Workers would get attendance “points” for missing work. After too many points, workers were fired.
Faurecia, the French automotive supplier, owns the Saline plant. They supply Ford Motor Company with interior parts.
In January of 2018, the company launched a new A-B-C work schedule. Workers would now have to work “only” four days a week, 12 hours a day.
But after the change to a 4-day work week, a computer glitch caused a huge mess. The attendance tracking system was still programmed for a 7-day work week! Many workers were wrongfully getting attendance “points” for working their 4-day schedule!
Because so many were hit by this computer error, the UAW negotiated with the company to roll back all attendance points to zero. The company wanted this deal kept secret, but a photo of the agreement leaked out. Workers spread the information.
Knowing that their points would soon be rolled back to zero, workers started massively calling in sick and not coming to work!
One day, 600 workers did not show up. Another day, 400 workers did not show up. The bosses begged, but workers would NOT come in. They knew their points would be rolled back to zero. Finally, they had a chance to rest!
Without these workers, the company could not get out production of instrument panels to supply some Ford plants. At first, the company had executives and office workers go to Saline to work production. That did not work!
Next, workers at supply chain factories were invited to work at Saline for extra pay. They got time-and-a-half pay and double pay on Sunday. The company provided pay for their travel or arranged bus transportation and even Uber rides.
Saline workers saw an opportunity open up to enjoy a much needed rest and they went for it. Being allowed to feel human for a few days was more important to them than missing a few days’ pay.
In the future, Saline workers might find they can solve all kinds of workplace problems by continuing to act together!
Mar 19, 2018
Over 20,000 West Virginia public school teachers and 13,000 school employees will get 5 percent raises, starting in July of 2018. How did this happen?
A strike that started in a few southern coal mining counties caught fire. It was joined by other workers and became a state-wide strike. Every public school in West Virginia was closed for 9 days.
In this state where public employees have no collective bargaining rights, over 30,000 people “bargained” by not going to work. They gathered by the thousands each day at the state capitol and decided together when they would go back to work.
Rank and file teachers made sure their strike was well organized. When union officials announced a tentative “deal” with the governor, teachers organized themselves to not go back to work. They had no trust in the politicians and wanted everything in writing.
Many teachers had not wanted to strike, but when it became clear that state officials were tone deaf to their concerns, teachers faced reality. They realized–almost in unison–that they needed to go “All-In or Nothing.”
In one of the poorest states in the U.S., teachers needed to lessen the impact of their strike on children. They reached out in their communities. They planned for alternative child care. They planned for free food to be delivered to kids’ homes to make up for missed school lunches. Being organized ahead of time helped this strike to have widespread support, including from community groups and churches.
Each day of the strike, bus drivers, cooks and teachers massed at the state capitol in the thousands. They made a lot of noise. Feeling the power of being together strengthened their resolve.
The strike started over a “raise” that would have left them further behind when healthcare costs were factored in. In the end, they did not win better healthcare. Healthcare costs are “frozen” for a year.
Certainly the West Virginia teachers and state employees deserve more. But they came out ahead for the experience they gained of how to fight. And they understood that their fight needs to spread.
On the day they won 5 percent raises, thousands of strikers left the capitol shouting: “West Virginia first, Oklahoma next!” West Virginia workers hope to hand off the strike torch to teachers in Oklahoma, where teachers were discussing whether to strike.
Mar 19, 2018
On March 16, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired. He was just the latest in a string of people pushed out of the Trump administration over a blistering ten-day period: Trump fired Rex Tillerson, his Secretary of State, along with Steve Goldstein, the Undersecretary of State. Trump fired John McEntee, his personal assistant. Just one week earlier, the Director of Trump’s National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, stepped down.
And on top of this rapid turnover, Trump announced three new major policy changes in the same period. He would meet with the leader of North Korea, he would impose major tariffs on steel and aluminum, and he would support some gun control legislation. Trump may have quickly undermined all three of these announcements. He may pretend that “there is no Chaos, only great Energy!” in his administration. But every time he made a new announcement–he was able to occupy the news.
And that was exactly the point–to obscure the fact that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was probing Trump’s financial empire.
That became obvious on March 6, when it came out that an advisor to the United Arab Emirates with ties to the Trump administration was cooperating with the investigation.
Just a few days later, on March 15, Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization, which oversees Trump’s businesses. This subpoena expands the investigation to focus very directly on Trump’s money and how he got it. Like many others, this business “empire” has been based on fraud, theft, loans from gangsters, and ripping off contractors.
Throughout his business career, when Trump was caught in fraudulent activities, he moved aggressively to tie up and divert investigations and lawsuits. Like a rat caught in a corner, Trump is lashing out once again.
Mar 19, 2018
A lot of companies announced that they were giving a big chunk of the money they got from the Trump tax cuts back to their workers. But no surprise—the reality is somewhat different. According to a study by Just Capital, only 6% of the money the companies are getting is going to workers. And more than half of that is in the form of bonuses, meaning it will be a one time bump, rather than a permanent raise. We’ll give one guess where the other 94% of the money is going....
Walmart is still bragging about its cheap bonuses—$1000 if you have 20 years seniority. All this is paid for out of a tax cut. It’s money that should be going to workers’ roads, schools, and services. And they have the nerve to brag about giving workers back a few cents?