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
Apr 17, 2023
A medication abortion pill, Mifepristone, used in over half of all abortions in the U.S., was just banned nationally by one appointed federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, in Texas on April 7. One judge! His court-ruling outlawed one pill of a two-pill combination used for abortion.
The judge ordered it taken off the shelves for medical reasons that have no merit. In doing so, he effectively told the 64 million women of child-bearing age in the U.S that his religious views are more important than a woman deciding what is best for herself and her family.
His decision was immediately appealed, and was referred to the U.S. Supreme Court by the U.S. Department of Justice. As of this writing, Supreme Court Justice Alito has temporarily halted all lower court rulings that have put restrictions on this medication for one week.
Good news? Hardly! It is exactly like giving the fox free access to the henhouse! Or, jumping out of the frying pan into the fire! Alito is the author of the majority opinion that ended federal protections for abortion under Roe v. Wade! So, who wants this case referred to him and his cohorts on the Supreme Court?
In opinion polls, the vast majority of the men and women in the United States are not for bans on abortion. But when abortion rights were upheld across the country, in Kansas, California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont, a new attack designed at stopping abortion through banning the abortion pill was contrived, hatched by the far-right and their billionaire backers. The group that filed this lawsuit cherry-picked its location.
And while the far-right plotted, so-called progressives and moderates, the current ruling administration, the Biden Administration, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party—sat on their hands and acted like there was nothing they could do.
Nothing to do? The FDA IS an administrative arm of the government. They set the rules according to the laws that Congress writes. But the Biden administration did not instruct the FDA to ignore this rogue judge’s decision. Instead, his administration appealed to the most reactionary court in the land, this Supreme Court.
It is as if they are saying “who cares” to those most affected by this decision to ban Mifepristone, that is, working and poor women! Already, Medicaid coverage for abortion is being denied under the Hyde Amendment, which Biden and his administration signed on to. Maybe for them, it’s not a big deal that steps are being taken to eliminate, or at the very least, put restrictions on this pill, the least expensive form of abortion. Maybe they can shrug and say, “That’s how the system works.”
But women without access to abortion are forced to stay home—to raise more children in an already unaffordable economy.
The powerful, the wealthy, already show that they have no solutions to the problems that are pushing women out of the workforce. They shrug their shoulders at the dilemma of women having been pushed out of the workforce under Covid. They know that many of childbearing age have not been able to return to work, but there is no special effort to address it.
When women stay at home, it enables government to cut social services even more drastically. They can keep a skeleton crew at the social services office, at the hospital, at the nursing home, at the school. Working women, confined to the home, pick up the slack. It’s all part and parcel of the same rotten system.
The power to stop this attack is in the hands of the working class. This is not a “woman only” issue. This attack strikes at the very heart of our class.
If we have to be caregivers, social workers, nurses, cooks, servers and all the rest, let us get paid for it! Let’s fight to cut back the working hours so we can spend good time at home. Let’s get moms back out of the house and back into the workplace making a living wage that keeps up with inflation! Husbands, brothers, fathers and sons will fight alongside of us, no doubt.
Women broke out of the home and into the working world centuries ago. If Kacsmaryk, Alito, Biden or any of the other powerful men making decisions want to go home and wipe a baby’s bottom while working on-line, they can take our places, anytime! Meanwhile, the working class can organize its power to force these bosses back, and finally, to take down this broken-down, ancient relic of a system that especially oppresses women and replace it with one that makes the health and welfare of those who labor the first priority.
Apr 17, 2023
Though Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both collapsed recently, the start of 2023 certainly has not been bad for the largest U.S. banks. JPMorgan Chase reported profits of 12.6 billion dollars in the first quarter, a 52% increase compared with last year. Wells Fargo made profits of 5 billion dollars for the quarter, up 30% from a year ago, and Citigroup made 4.6 billion, up 7%.
If you’re thinking this might mean the banks will pay higher interest on savings accounts, don’t hold your breath. When SVB and Signature went bankrupt, commentators put the blame on rising interest rates caused by the Federal Reserve raising its prime lending rate. For the biggest banks, however, it simply gave them an excuse to charge borrowers much higher interest rates than it pays out to depositors.
The director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, Lael Brainard, assures us this means, "The banking system is very sound—it’s stable." Maybe for the largest banks. But as depositors move their money from the smaller banks to the bigger ones, who knows what that will mean for the smaller banks, and any of the rest of us able to bank some money?
Apr 17, 2023
In late March, the House passed a bill, “Affordable Insulin Now Act of 2023,” to limit the cost of insulin to $35 a month for diabetes patients in the U.S. This bill is currently in the Senate for approval to become a law.
Early in March, Eli Lilly got a lot of positive publicity when it announced that the company would reduce the price of their most prescribed insulin, Humulin, from $274.70 to $66.40 per vial. However, that still leaves the cost of insulin extremely high. Because diabetes patients typically use two to four vials each month, Eli Lilly would charge $122.80 to $245.60 monthly.
Those with insurance, either private insurance, or Medicaid and Medicare, may have to only pay $35 per month in out-of-pocket costs. But the difference will still have to be covered by the insurance companies—which, in the end, means passing the costs onto patients. Those without insurance will have to pay the entire cost of hundreds of dollars per month.
Nearly 40 million Americans suffer from diabetes. Around 7 million of these diabetes patients require daily injections of insulin. Almost half of all diabetes patients have reported rationing their insulin supply because of its costs. Some patients have died because of trying to stretch their insulin supplies by cutting their doses.
Yale University researchers, for this reason, concluded that even $35 per month out-of-pocket charges will be cost-prohibitive for many Americans: "It’s going to leave many still struggling and still at these catastrophic levels of spending because the cap doesn’t take into account the resources people have available."
Insulin was discovered by three University of Toronto scientists, Frederick G. Banting, Charles H. Best, and J.J.R. Macleod, in 1921. Later these three scientists sold their patent rights to the University of Toronto for $1.00 each, hoping the low price would keep the essential diabetes treatment available to everyone who needed it. According to a Rand Corporation study, the production cost of insulin today is as little as $6 a vial.
So, insulin has been around for over 100 years and is relatively cheap to produce.
But, the insulin price is still stunningly high today because three pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, dominate 90% of the insulin market and decide on its prices. To extract lucrative profits from high insulin prices, a few individuals, who own or control these companies, rob many and reduce others to misery, even death.
We live in a capitalist society that puts such profits over human lives. People have begun protests against the vast price increases by these pharmaceutical giants out of necessity. Ultimately, only eliminating profits from the healthcare system can stop such practices.
Apr 17, 2023
The Biden administration’s EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has proposed stronger vehicle tailpipe pollution rules that would have to be met by the year 2032. To reach that new standard, it would mean that at least 67% of the new passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs and pickup trucks) that are sold in 2032 would have to be electric.
Biden and the EPA are proposing these rules in the name of protecting the environment—cutting down on the greenhouse gases that lead to the climate change that is warming the planet. There is no doubt that emissions of gas-powered vehicles are at least one of the causes of climate change. And there is no doubt that humanity is headed for an environmental disaster unless the buildup of greenhouse gases is slowed down and reversed.
Electric-powered vehicles are being proposed as one of the solutions. Today less than 6% of new vehicles sold are electric. And there are many problems that stand in the way of electric vehicles being sold more widely. The lack of infrastructure, for one. Today there are about 130,000 public electric charging stations in this country. It is estimated that at least 15 times that many public charging stations would be needed by 2030, in addition to private home and garage charging. And even with more charging stations, the electric grid today is not capable of providing the increased electricity that would be needed.
It is not even clear how much increased electric vehicles would protect the environment. How would the increased electricity be generated? Today the majority of electricity is produced by burning coal and natural gas which also produces greenhouse gases. The mining of the metals and minerals, like lithium, that are needed for electric vehicle batteries can also be very destructive to the environment.
Not as much is said about these problems. But the Biden administration today is proposing new rules that would force most people to buy high-priced electric vehicles, or not have a vehicle at all.
How the hell are ordinary working people supposed to afford to buy an electric vehicle when the average price today is $61,448? Many people can’t even afford to buy a new gas-powered vehicle today with an average price of $49,507.
Are the new rules proposed by the EPA really a protection of the environment? Well, they certainly are a protection of the profits of the auto companies. The auto companies today have made at least a certain amount of investment toward producing some electric vehicles and they want to make a high profit off these investments. Forcing people to buy electric vehicles at high prices would protect auto company profits, even if it means fewer people can afford to buy any new vehicle at all.
The decisions made by capitalists in their drive for profit have led the world to the brink of environmental disaster. The government that works for these profit-seeking capitalists is never going to provide the answers to solve the environmental crisis we are facing.
Apr 17, 2023
Walmart announced it is closing four stores in Chicago—half the Walmarts in the city. All four are in working class, Black or Latino neighborhoods.
In 2020, after the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Walmart claimed its Chicago stores were part of its corporate “racial justice initiative.” City leaders applauded them and offered “incentives” for Walmart to stay in these underserved neighborhoods.
If we didn’t already realize it, the corporations and politicians’ promises of “racial justice” or “helping underserved communities” aren’t even worth the paper they are printed on. In this capitalist system, stores only stay open if they can make a big enough profit.
And the company claims these stores have been losing increasing amounts of money in the last few years. Walmart noted that shoppers are feeling pinched by inflation and are cutting spending. True enough—every worker already knows that wages aren’t keeping up with prices. And by the way, that includes the 1.6 million Walmart workers in the U.S.!
The quality of goods at Walmart might not be great. But the quality at the few dollar stores and corner stores they leave behind is even worse.
Apr 17, 2023
Maryland’s automated highway toll contractor, Kapsch TrafficCom USA, Inc., overcharged more than 90,000 drivers a total of over one million dollars in less than a year, legislative auditors reported recently. These drivers were billed twice for the same trip or billed at semi-truck rates when driving a car.
Maryland is paying Kapsch 72 million dollars over a decade for the for-profit company to operate 131 electronic toll machines, which bring in around 700 million dollars a year.
When the automated toll program was announced, officials boasted it had a "robust real-time monitoring system that alerts to anomalies so that issues can be quickly identified."
Not so much, it seems! We can’t trust our E-ZPass statement without verifying it ourselves. What’s for sure is the system is a cash cow for Kapsch.
Apr 17, 2023
As part of its bankruptcy plan, the City of Detroit must resume making payments into its two pension funds for general retirees and for police and firefighters.
Despite the fact that the city achieved a 157 million dollar surplus in last year’s budget, the city is asking the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to allow it to spread out its pension payment obligations over 30 years, instead of the currently required 20 years.
Meanwhile, Detroit city retirees are speaking out about the hardships they are experiencing as a result of the cuts imposed upon them in the name of the city’s bankruptcy. Many are having a hard time getting by on their pensions. General retirees not only took a 4.5% cut to their pension benefits, they also had their cost-of-living adjustment taken from them, which amounts to an even bigger cut.
Assuming a COLA of 2.5% per year, in the years since the bankruptcy plan went into effect, the loss of COLA would mean city retirees would have lost about 25% in pension increases, on top of the 4.5% cut they took. Police and firefighter retirees managed to hold onto a 1% COLA, but they don’t receive Social Security, so their retirement income is solely based on their pensions.
Some retirees like David Sole and Yvonne Jones are asking Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and the City Council to help out the general retirees’ pension fund by throwing in some of the federal pandemic relief money it has on hand. As always, the city administration finds an excuse to say it can’t do it because its hands are legally tied by the terms of the bankruptcy plan.
While city retirees are left trying to get by on what’s left of their pensions, the bankruptcy plan did make sure the banks that pushed all kinds of rip-off financial schemes on the city for decades got paid. Even if they had to accept reductions in the amounts they were paid, we can be sure none of their stockholders or top executives had trouble just getting by.
Meanwhile, the City of Detroit continues to hand out billions in subsidies and tax breaks to billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family. Of course, they manage to explain that away using “legalese,” like saying the money for supposed developments funded by the billionaires comes out of a different fund than the general city budget. But that’s only because the politicians deliberately chose to put property taxes from downtown Detroit into a separate fund.
Certainly, the City of Detroit bankruptcy was not solely a result of bad policies on the part of local politicians. They’re also a result of rotten policies pushed by politicians at the state and federal level as well.
What’s happened to City of Detroit retirees simply shows that even having a pension is no guarantee of financial security in old age, not so long as the economic system remains in the hands of the wealthy, their corporations and banks, and the politicians who serve them.
Apr 17, 2023
About 39% of Michigan nurses surveyed for a new University of Michigan study said they intend to leave their jobs in the next year. The number one issue for 84% of the nurses surveyed is chronic understaffing. And this was the reality even before the first coronavirus cases. Nurses are leaving their workplaces and are exhausted because their working conditions have been unacceptable for over a decade, according to this study.
At a recent Michigan Legislative hearing at a Detroit high school, teacher turnover was the critical issue raised by students and others in attendance. In particular, in low-income communities, students who most need stable school environments have had to deal with a revolving door for teachers. One student who spoke said of his teacher: “She left because she wasn’t being paid enough …. " And after she left, another teacher in the building covered his classroom.
And at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the lack of staff and not being able to hire enough people is causing increasing workload problems for the remaining employees. DHHS does not appear to have a workable plan to deal with the hundreds of thousands of cases that have to be worked on.
Overworked nurses. Overworked and underpaid teachers. Not enough workers in the Department of Health and Human Services. If you see a pattern here, it’s because there is one. All of these jobs are human service field jobs: working with kids, helping people who are in need, whether health needs or economic needs. All of these jobs are vital, essential jobs. But they are not treated as such in a society that values profit over human service.
This system is therefore incapable of solving these problems. When it comes to health care, and hospitals, this is a country that is increasingly dependent on a privately run medical system which can, and does, deny quality health care and working conditions for health care workers.
In the case of teachers and schools, a high school junior in attendance captured the essence of the problem, saying, “... I’m asking that we get more funding for our schools and employees." But this is not a new demand. Legislatures and government have handed more and more of the surplus value produced by workers that should be going to public services like health care and education, and government programs like DHHS, over to the capitalist class. This class is intent on increasing its overall profit and it is increasingly absorbing an ever-greater part of public monies to do so.
For human services to be a priority, a fight—of nurses, of teachers and other school employees, along with parents and students, of public sector workers—will be necessary. And to make that fight succeed, workers in sectors of the economy that have the weight to unite into a powerful force will have to join them.
Apr 17, 2023
Florida’s legislature passed a law outlawing abortion after 6 weeks, last Thursday. Governor Ron DeSantis later signed it into law.
Six weeks is a particularly disgusting time limit for the start of an abortion ban, since many women don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks. By the time they do know, they could be well beyond the time for a legal abortion.
In passing this new law, Florida politicians hope to impose an even harsher limit than they already put in place with an earlier law that requires women to seek abortions within 15 weeks of conception. The new law will only take effect if the earlier 15-week limit is upheld in a legal challenge currently underway in the state supreme court, which has a conservative majority.
Written as a “compromise,” the new law has exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the pregnant woman. In fact, women pregnant through rape or incest would be allowed the previous limit of 15 weeks to receive an abortion—IF they provide documentation such as a restraining order or a police report!
This kind of provision will force women caught beyond the six-week limit to lie to the police to receive an abortion in rape cases. OR it could place abused girls and women in real physical danger. Because to report their incest/rape/abuse to the police does not mean they will be given physical protection from their abuser! Nor will the abused girl or woman be given financial assistance to move to a safe place.
The kinds of hoops the law would force women through, to receive what SHOULD be basic health care, are monstrous.
And why? Just so a bunch of Republican politicians, including presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, as he eyes a run for president, can pose in front of the cameras and make statements about "Supporting life and family in the state of Florida."
Apr 17, 2023
What follows is a translation of the editorial that appeared on the front of all Lutte Ouvrière’s workplace newsletters, during the week of April 12, 2023. The Constitutional Council subsequently confirmed Macron’s retirement decree.
With the adoption of the law, Macron and Borne thought that the trick was done and that they would only need a few days to turn the page. They have paid for their efforts because, from demonstration to demonstration, the mobilization holds firm.
We have now entered a war of attrition, with the government betting that the combatants will tire out. But there are millions of us who think that working two more years will tire us much more than a few additional demonstration days. As for the anger, it does not wear out, it is building up.
Everything the government does to impose the 64 years sounds like a provocation: the lies about the 1,200 euros, the hasty adoption of the law of 49.3, and now Darmanin’s attempts to intimidate the demonstrators with police batons and arrests.
Every day, there are new reasons to be angry. Just go to the gas pump or do your food shopping. At the bakery, in supermarkets, at the market ... all prices are going up. Tomorrow, the water bill will go up to pay for the greed of Veolia, Suez and others who have not maintained the system, and for all those who plunder and drain this common and essential resource.
It is impossible to forget, too, that big business ensures its margins and dividends by refusing the minimum of the minimum, that is the indexation of wages to prices. And since there is no question of the politicians and the government imposing anything on the capitalists, they are content to whine about excess profits!
This is what they are doing again today, with yet another report proving that the capitalists who manage the highways have cashed in much more than expected when the state signed the contracts. The report denounces an “excess profitability” of 20 billion, stolen from our pockets, at each toll. The government will do nothing to change this.
France scores a double, when it comes to the world’s great fortunes. It tops the list for both genders: Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars is the world’s richest man, and Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt and her 80 billion is the world’s richest woman. But apart from that, the state coffers are empty and, really, the government has no idea where to find the money to finance schools, hospitals or pensions....
For pensions, the government repeats from morning to night that it defends the pay-as-you-go system. But how is the money distributed? It’s a distribution between active and retired workers, that is to say, the distribution of the crumbs that the big bourgeoisie wants to leave them, once its profits have been taken out.
That’s not distribution, it’s swindling! The only real distribution would be to take from the profits and the great fortunes to ensure wages, working conditions and dignified pensions. And this must be imposed by our collective struggles.
We can expect no miracles from the Constitutional Council. This institution can, in theory, strike down all or part of this law. But its members, from Fabius to Juppé, have a resume as long as an arm in terms of attacks on workers. Six of its nine members have even been appointed by Macron or his supporters, and if they are called “wise,” it is because they have never done anything unpleasant in the eyes of the bourgeoisie that dominates the whole society.
Perhaps the Constitutional Council will accede to the request to organize a shared initiative referendum, the RIP. This will cost it nothing and will not bother the government: the procedure is so long and complicated that it has little chance of succeeding. And, above all, the RIP is not suspensive—the law can come into force without delay.
There is no substitute for the collective pressure imposed by the mobilization of millions of people. Nothing can replace the fact that we debate in the companies, that we gather and organize to defend our interests as workers.
The employers and the government were able to make their law with the conviction that the workers, divided and resigned, would not manage to react massively. One of the achievements of the movement is to have shown that we have the strength to fight back and to make ourselves respected. It is to have regained the pride of those who fight, even if the fight is difficult.
Each additional day of mobilization grows and strengthens our camp. Each strike and each demonstration is a step forward for millions of workers. So let’s be there again, as many as possible to continue the struggle!
Apr 17, 2023
This article is translated from the April 14 issue #2853 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In Germany, March 27 was an exceptional day of strike action. The strikes were mostly related to union negotiations by municipal public service workers. But they went well beyond that.
Workers who were involved included people in garbage collection, public transportation, airports, nurseries, city hospitals, and city offices. So-called warning strikes that conform to the laws regulating collective bargaining happen from time to time among these kinds of workers. But this year, with inflation pushing down wages, many more workers joined in.
From the start of negotiations, the lowest paid categories such as workers in trash collection and regional buses and trains turned on the pressure. But municipalities are deep in debt and are less willing than ever to give anything away. The union known as Ver.di demanded a 10.5% overall pay raise with all workers getting at least $538 more a month. This was a way to emphasize that the lowest paid workers need the raise the most.
It was similar with Deutsche Bahn railway line. There too, janitors and security guards sometimes earn a base salary that is lower than the minimum wage. But the company didn’t want to give in. There are two unions at Deutsche Bahn. The smaller union GDL for conductors has called strikes several times before. But EVG, a bigger union covering the rest of the workers—dispatchers, mechanics, electricians, receptionists, security guards, janitors, salespeople and certain conductors—hasn’t struck for years. EVG even accepted to get practically no increase in the last two years, "out of a sense of responsibility toward a company in difficulty."
After calling several multi-day strikes in 2021, GDL had obtained bonuses of $1,216 or higher. Many railway workers left EVG, and some joined GDL. So EVG was under pressure. Railway workers said: “If you don’t strike now, we will leave this union." For many, finally going on strike seemed as important as winning. EVG demanded a 12% raise with no one getting less than $719. For the first time ever, EVG demanded that flat amount, not just a percent. Percent raises favor higher paid workers. Here too, this was in response to the fact that workers at the bottom of the ladder had mobilized.
So both unions, Ver.di and EVG, agreed to go on strike on March 27 at all transportation companies: regional buses and trains, Deutsche Bahn and airports. The simple fact that locals of two unions were speaking with each other and calling for a joint strike made this a special day, the likes of which we had never seen in Germany. In the past, on occasion two locals at Ver.di whose employees were already on strike might have organized a joint demonstration. But generally the union leaderships have argued in a corporatist way, to make separate demands; they said to avoid the danger that a sector of the economy is “drowned” in the event of a joint strike, and so on. But this time, they cooperated across multiple sectors.
The success was impressive. On March 27 the country really came to a partial halt. In many cities, not a single public bus, metro or streetcar ran. Only buses at private companies. At the airports, with air security and ground staff on strike, no planes took off—not at Frankfurt, not at Munich. At Deutsche Bahn, not a single train on the main lines ran, and almost no regional trains.
Even before the strike began, the media and the political world unleashed torrents against this strike, indignant that “the unions” dare to “paralyze the country” and “strike the economy in the heart.” This met with no success. Strikers rejoiced before the strike, and then felt proud when trains and urban transportation seemed to disappear.
Workers in general, far from finding the demand for $538 for everyone to be too much, began to echo this demand too, saying that considering inflation this is the amount everyone needs. Because strikers anchored this demand for $538 in the public debate—because they dared to demand this much—many employees felt March 27 to be virtually their own strike.
In fact, the media’s refrain attacking this strike “that everyone was doing at the same time,” lecturing workers that it would have been SO much more practical and wise to go about it one after the other—just like their headlines about “mega-strike” and “general strike"—has planted this perspective in many minds. Some workers started saying: "Exactly! That’s what we need: a general strike! We should all strike at the same time!"
This is a new situation in Germany. The idea has not existed for decades. Contract negotiations and the right to strike had been boxed in and locked up. So, an idea has resurfaced that did not exist in people’s minds—or it only existed in books or in other countries. With the success of March 27, the mindset of a number of workers might be changing.
Apr 17, 2023
(Updates on some recent strikes across the country.)
Teamsters Local 89 struck Sysco food services in Louisville, Kentucky and Indianapolis, Indiana for 13 days. On April 8 they accepted a new contract with 34% wage increases spread over 5 years, co-pays of 20% instead of 50% for health insurance premiums, hiring nine new drivers and promised minimum staffing of 96 drivers per shift. Workers were tired of 16 hour shifts! Picket lines were honored in Los Angeles by Sysco members of Teamsters Locals 495, 630, and 848; in San Francisco by Sysco members of Teamsters Local 853; and in Seattle by Sysco members of Teamsters Local 117.
Tyson workers in Van Buren, Arkansas, struck on April 10 against being cheated in severance pay, workers comp claims, and nonpayment of vacation time. Tyson is closing their plant May 12, and the 969 workers are not getting what Tyson management told the newspapers they would get. Workers were heroes and essential for coming to work during Covid on crowded poultry processing lines. Now Tyson shows its other face.
Rutgers University teachers of AFT-NJ went on strike April 10. The 9000 teachers have worked without a contract since last summer. It was the largest public sector strike in New Jersey in 30 years. After five days the strike was “suspended” to consider a “tentative framework” for negotiations, with “significant” pay raises.
On April 12, 88 Teamster workers struck Republic Services waste management in Memphis and Millington, Tennessee. Contract negotiations had been stalled for weeks. On March 31, a worker was killed at a Republic landfill. The workers of Local 667 boiled over.
On April 10, over 350 workers of UNITE HERE Local 11 struck Flying Food Group at LAX International Airport. The workers prep in-flight meals. They have worked without a contract since June 2022. A worker with 12 years’ time is still stuck at $18.04. The strike is also about management refusing to correct supervisors who continually hit on women workers and harass them. A union rep said, “It’s companies like this that push workers to the edge.”
On April 10, 340 workers of United Chemical Workers Local 591C struck AdvanSix chemical manufacturer in Hopewell, Virginia. The plant makes ammonium sulfate for fertilizer and nylon for carpeting. The contract expired April 6 and workers walked when the company offered only to give half the workers any raise at all.
Apr 17, 2023
In the first week of April, dramatic news broke that hundreds of top-secret U.S. documents had been leaked and posted online. The documents were said to detail wide-ranging American military and security secrets throughout the world, but especially about the Ukraine War.
For about a week, there was endless speculation by U.S. officials and the news media over whether the leaks were part of a diabolical Russian disinformation campaign. But that speculation ended when U.S. federal agents arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts National Guard. According to news reports, Teixeira, who worked in military intelligence, had been posting the leaked documents to an online gaming chatroom in order to try to educate and discuss world events with a small group of young people.
If this is the case, those young people might have discovered from those documents just how much both the U.S. government and the news media continually lie—especially about war. For the documents show that the Ukrainian War is not the glorious and heroic war in defense of Ukraine that the Pentagon and news media try to make it out to be. On the contrary, the documents “leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war,” as the New York Times reported on April 9. In other words, the U.S. documents illustrate how much the Ukraine War is really a U.S. war against Russia. And in fact, as the documents show, there are already special forces from the U.S. and other NATO countries operating in Ukraine.
Far from protecting Ukraine, the documents give a picture of just how much death and destruction the U.S. government and military has brought to that country. Ukrainian battlefield casualties have been so high, the Ukrainian government has resorted to kidnapping young and not-so-young men in order to try to find replacement cannon fodder. And the documents show that rather than being well-trained and well-equipped, the Ukrainian army is in disarray, and that soldiers are being sent into battle lacking training, arms, and ammunition.
Yet, despite the terrible casualties on both sides, the U.S. documents detail Pentagon plans to continue that war at least into the next year. For the continued war very much serves U.S. interests. The U.S. is using the Ukrainian people and their country in order to permanently weaken the U.S.’s century-long rival, the Russian government. Thus, it is the U.S. that is fomenting the biggest war in Europe since World War II.
So, the U.S. government labels these documents top secret, not because what they say is particularly secret—even the Russians know all this already—but because what these documents reveal is a true condemnation of what the U.S. is doing—coming from the U.S. government’s own institutions.
Apr 17, 2023
This article is translated from the April 7 issue #2853 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The U.S., the European Union, Germany, and then France officially recognized the Holodomor, the deadly mass famine that struck Soviet Ukraine in 1932—1933. French legislators running the gamut from right-wing to left-wing parties requested that the president and his executive branch sign on.
Paris doesn’t want its American, German and British rivals to be the only ones standing with the Ukrainian government. They too memorialize what they describe as genocide perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine and its people. France along with the other imperialist powers is anxious to prove which side it is on, given the context of the current war where Ukraine, supported by NATO, confronts Russia.
But the fact of speaking of a mass murder by starvation, which is what the Ukrainian word “holodomor” means, serves primarily to prepare for today’s war’s aftermath. One day or another, the imperialist governments and their corporations will be competing in the market for major reconstruction contracts and supply orders to rebuild a Ukraine devastated by war. This market is already estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars.
For the big French corporations setting their sights on these contracts for construction, transport, energy, food, armaments and so on, it’s well worth it to approve of how the government in Kiev rewrites history in an ultra-nationalist way.
Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and the bureaucracy that usurped power in the USSR decided in the late 1920s to collectivize farmland by force. The entire peasantry rose up against the policy. In Ukraine as elsewhere in the USSR, the bureaucratic and police violence of collectivization did not follow any consultation with the peasants. There was no material or political preparation which would have made the future collective farms called kolkhozes a real progress for farmers to join by choice and to improve the economy of the whole country.
Instead, the regime wanted to force the peasants to enter the collective farms and to bring their cattle. But the peasants slaughtered their cattle rather than be dispossessed of them. This was a human, social, political and economic catastrophe.
Stalinism responded with a remedy that made things even worse. To break the widespread opposition by the peasants, Stalin ordered the army to deport millions of them that he called rich farmers, or kulaks. The conditions of these deportations made them a death march. Then, to ward off famine threatening cities because of his policy, Stalin ordered troops to confiscate everything they could find in the villages, even what the peasants needed to survive.
This criminal policy broke the back of agriculture and caused the death of millions of Soviet people. Grain-growing areas suffered the highest number of deaths from starvation: 3.4 million in Ukraine, 1.5 million in Russia along the Volga River and in the North Caucasus, and 1.4 million in Kazakhstan. Given its small population, Kazakhstan paid the heaviest price for the famine Stalinism caused in 1932—1933. But other places were also bled dry by forced collectivization and deportations, as told in the 2015 novel Zuleikha, set in Tatarstan, Russia.
Apart from its forced collectivization policy, the Stalinist regime had another reason to crush Ukraine under its boot. In the Ukrainian Soviet republic, the Bolshevik policy toward nationalities had the greatest effect. A national feeling there flourished in the aftermath of October 1917. Ukrainian language and culture developed like never before, as they were finally recognized, as were those of other once-oppressed local minorities. So the dictatorship of the bureaucracy found itself having to subdue a population which had acquired a taste for autonomy—particularly as Ukraine was the second-largest Soviet republic in terms of population and industry.
So in early 1933 Stalin sent one of his henchmen, Postychev, to put the situation in order. He sped up forced collectivization and choked off the Bolshevik policy of Ukrainization by dismissing its promoters. Many Communist leaders and writers protested by committing suicide. One was Mykola Skrypnyk, who had led the first Soviet government in Ukraine in March 1918.
The bringing to heel of nationalities by Stalinism did not stop there. During the Second World War, the dictator ordered what was almost a policy of genocide, the murderous mass deportation of entire populations. Poles, Balts, Koreans, Volga Germans, Karachays, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars … Ukrainians only escaped this fate because of their numbers, as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said in 1956 when denouncing some of Stalin’s crimes. This was expert counsel, formulated with the cynical humor of the Stalinist bureaucrat who Stalin sent to lead the Party in Ukraine in 1938!
By calling the Holodomor genocide, Ukraine’s current leaders above all conceal the extent and depth of the crimes of Stalinism, which were not at all limited to Ukraine. Ukraine’s current regime is deeply reactionary. They celebrate authentic far-right perpetrators of genocide, Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk, who have become “heroes” for pro-Western Ukraine. Their troops massacred many Jews, Poles and Russians in Ukraine between 1941 and 1945.
And speaking of genocide, the Western sponsors of Zelensky’s regime know all about it. From the extermination of Native Americans by European colonizers, to the pillage of the peoples of Africa to supply slaves to French, English and other plantation owners. And huge massacres perpetrated by the imperialist powers all over the globe.
It’s logical for these great powers to echo the nationalist myths of the regime they protect in Ukraine. Their talk obscures the fact that the greatest freedom Ukraine ever knew—national and social—was established after October 1917 under the red flag of the Bolshevik Revolution and the struggle for socialism on an international scale.
Apr 17, 2023
At the United Auto Workers (UAW) Bargaining Convention held March 27–29 in Detroit, leaders and delegates spoke of taking on a fight against companies whose contracts were about to expire: U.S. auto companies, parts companies, Blue Cross, and several universities.
A new president, Shawn Fain, was sworn in only a day before the opening of the convention. Despite all the difficulties it presented after a hotly contested election with Ray Curry, Fain was able to direct the meetings of the union.
Chuck Browning, of the defeated caucus, gave a message of militancy and unity. “To our enemies who are not in this room, to the rich and powerful that want to attack labor, to the employers who want to make profits at our expense through the exploitation of workers, to those people I send a message today…Let the world hear we’re united when it comes to taking on our enemies.”
Fain sent a clear message that the fight wasn’t restricted just to auto: “When are we going to rebuild our power as a working class? When are we going to reclaim our dignity as working people? Now we are ready to fight against our only true enemy, multi-million dollar corporations who refuse to give our members their fair share.”
Does this mean the UAW is united, and ready for a fight? Does it mean that the UAW will get ready for strikes when contracts expire in September? Does it mean that information will go out to every workplace? Will there be a strike?
Certainly, Ford, GM and Stellantis (formerly Fiat-Chrysler Corporation), after having imposed concessions year after year, having taken what were known as “good paying” union jobs down to the level where new hires have to work a second job, having replaced permanent jobs with temporary jobs—surely, auto bosses won’t be looking to give up anything. They aren’t ready to increase their labor costs. Not only have they, since the 1970s, reduced pay, they have intensified exploitation. They have pushed auto workers to a killing pace, imposed schedules that are unhealthy and unsafe. They have closed down plants, laid off workers, and increased the intensity of work. They are in the process of doing even more of that, with an accelerated plan to make even more profits off fewer vehicles; eliminating car lines and smaller, less-profitable vehicles and whole lines, in favor of producing luxury cars and trucks that average upwards of $60,000.
Negotiations at a bargaining table are not going to win these jobs, wages and benefits back. But if auto workers decide to try to get back what they have lost, they can begin a fight that will pull many other workers into a much wider fight. Solidarity and organization must be built from the ground up. On every floor, in every plant, in every office, in every workplace, workers need to flex their muscles on day-to-day fights—right now.
Old concessionary policies can be thrown out the window, replaced by fighting policies. But that depends on whether there are enough workers ready to take the fight as far as it will go. Take on all the auto companies at once, instead of setting a target. Look outside of one union to the power of the many millions of workers who are facing the same speed-up, the same cutbacks, the same layoffs—in unions, or without a union. The policy of fighting in separate units at different times is a policy that serves only the bosses.
To go up against auto bosses means to go up against Wall Street. They are the main stockholders of the auto companies. The Wall Street bosses today are all workers’ bosses—they determine what happens at a Michigan insurance company or a university in Carolina. What’s needed is a wide-open fight, one that would require the forces of many more workers than the number organized today in the UAW. But if the UAW were to start fighting, it could touch off a wider fight.
If the UAW workers are ready to organize and take on the companies, they have the weight to begin a real social struggle, one that can unite the working class into a powerful force against capitalism and all its inequalities and exploitation.
Apr 17, 2023
Movie: Harlan County USA, award winning documentary, 1976, director Barbara Kopple, available on YouTube.com or on HBOMax
In the summer of 1973, the coal miners working at the Brookside Mine, located in Harlan County, Kentucky, voted to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). What followed was a 13-month-long strike when the bosses refused to sign a contract. Film director Barbara Kopple lived with the strikers for a year, and recorded events as they unfolded, including violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their militant womenfolk. The film records the workers themselves choosing their strategy, dealing with obstacles. It includes the music of the miners’ culture and fights and highlights the unity that made the strike known across the country.
Book: Teamster Rebellion, by Farrell Dobbs, 1972
This book tells the story of the strikes and organizing drives of the Teamsters for a union contract carried out by working men and women in Minneapolis in 1934. It was a brutal life-and-death fight and it engrossed the entire city.
The fight was led by Trotskyist communists who understood what they were up against. If the police attacked the pickets and let the scabs go in, the next day the organizers had hundreds ready to push back the attack. When the police or the company’s henchmen then attacked, shooting unarmed picketers, injuring 67 and killing two, the workers responded with a funeral procession of 20,000 which marched to the strike headquarters.
When the governor declared martial law enforced by the military, banned the strike, and jailed most of the leaders, the workers still found a way to continue the strike. The book shows the power workers have to run or shut down an entire city.
Apr 17, 2023
Last year, nearly 1,500 wells in California went dry, and a state audit found that almost one million Californians did not have safe drinking water in their homes.
One major reason behind this crisis is the reckless extraction of very large amounts of groundwater by big agricultural companies. These companies have the means to drill very deep wells, tapping underground aquifers for very profitable, and extremely water-guzzling, crops such as almonds, pistachios and walnuts. These nuts are known as “permanent crops” because, unlike seasonal food crops, they require water year-round, and a lot of it, over a 30-year life span.
Researchers at Bloomberg Green have found that, since 2010, six major buyers have increased the farmland they own in California fourfold, to a total of 120,000 acres. They include big insurance companies such as Manulife, Allstate and Prudential; pension funds such as TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America) and the Public Sector Pension Investor Board of Canada; the Mormon Church; as well as the largest private bank in the world, UBS.
These financial speculators are putting huge amounts of money into nut farming, especially in California’s Central Valley. As nut exports to Europe and Asia have been growing fast, California’s almond acreage has soared by 50%, and pistachio by 90%.
But water is scarce, so these speculators have been spending millions of dollars to drill very deep wells, as deep as 1,000 feet or more, to pump very large amounts of water from underground aquifers. But this has dire consequences.
Since these deep wells deprive shallow wells of their water, other farmers and households lose their water, and water gets poisoned.
Yet another, and permanent, consequence of over-pumping is that, with the aquifer emptying out, the land above it sinks, damaging roads, bridges, dams, canals, and other infrastructure. Much of Central California has been sinking at varying rates for close to a century—parts of the San Joaquin Valley have been dropping as much as a foot per year. Subsidence, as this type of sinking is known, has also been affecting the California aqueduct, a 440-mile canal that carries water to Los Angeles.
Of course, water sources will eventually dry out, and entire agricultural areas will stop producing food. In fact that future may not even be so far, considering that California, for example, is in the middle of a very long and severe drought. But as Graham Fogg, an emeritus professor of hydrology at the University of California at Davis put it: "Capitalism is driving this. Investors [speculators] don’t care, because in 10 years they can make all the money they want and leave."
No, concerns about the future don’t slow down the narrow-minded frenzy of speculators for a quick profit. And the capitalist system encourages, and protects, this unfettered profit drive at the expense of the whole human society.
Apr 17, 2023
This winter’s unusually high levels of rain and snowfall have brought Central California’s long-dried Tulare Lake back to life. This re-appearing “phantom lake,” as it is called, has already flooded agricultural fields and towns in an area of 30 square miles (nearly 20,000 acres.) It will certainly inundate much more land in the coming months, as the record level of snow pack on the nearby Sierra Nevada range melts.
Covering 690 square miles, Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. For thousands of years, the rich area around the lake supported a large population of Native Americans.
But beginning in the 1860s, the state and counties built dams, levees and canals on the rivers that fed Tulare Lake, on behalf of land speculators and big agriculture bosses. So much water was being diverted from these rivers into the fields of San Joaquin Valley that, in 1884, the Scientific American magazine warned of the impending “utter absorption” of Tulare Lake. By the early 20th century, the lake was almost dry.
The dry basin of the lake provided fertile and productive land, thanks to the sediments deposited at the bottom of the lake. Some of the richest agricultural dynasties in the country used this land to get even richer. Towns also emerged in the dry lake basin, providing homes to tens of thousands of farm workers working the fields—towns such as Corcoran, which now has a population about 22,500. Corcoran is also home to one of the biggest state prisons in California which, along with the rest of the town, will have to be evacuated as Tulare Lake rises.
In the past also, after particularly wet winters, Tulare Lake’s basin got flooded considerably—as in 1969, 1983 and 1997. During the 1983 flooding, the lake’s area reached 82,000 acres (about 128 square miles), its largest size in the 20th century; and it took two years for it to dry out again. Experts think that the size of the lake can get even bigger than that this time, once the snow on the Sierra Nevada melts.
So now, once again, fields and towns are under water, with more to come. Entire communities of farmworkers, already low-paid and struggling before the flooding, are losing their livelihoods AND homes. Once again, workers are paying the price for many decades of reckless land and water grabbing by big agriculture bosses.