the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 2, 2023
The federal government was once again saddled with the threat of a shutdown if a budget “continuing resolution” were not passed. But at the last minute, a deal was brokered.
In case you forgot, it was only four months ago that the government had its last showdown over an impending shutdown. At that time, Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal that included cuts to public spending for the population in order to slide more money into the bulging bank accounts of the capitalist class.
That deal guaranteed that the government debt would continue to expand well beyond its current 31.4 trillion dollars. The centerpiece of that deal was an agreement to increase “regular” military spending at least one percent faster than the rate of inflation while cutting ordinary civilian spending—cuts to roads, water sources, dams, levees, bridges, parks, woodlands—as well as to schools, Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).
Now, four months later, came a vote to continue this attack on working people that Democrats and Republicans voted on in June. All Democrats in Congress, and most Republicans, were very happy to continue as is. But a hard-right-wing of Republicans in the House wanted to go even farther, with even more cuts to public services. They were the ones voting against a Continuing Resolution that would keep this attack going.
And so, all sides poured forward their own versions of posturing, grandstanding, and showboating until the very last minute. McCarthy suddenly reversed himself and worked with Democrats against the right wing of his own caucus and got a deal done for a new Continuing Resolution. Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, did the same in the Senate.
This new resolution funds the government for just another 45 days, through mid-November. It keeps the funding where it is, with current cuts in place, but adds a bit more for disaster relief. It was a deal that most Republicans—and Democrats—could vote for since they’d already voted for it in June.
But this means that this clown show, with threats of government shutdown, will come rolling back into town in November.
And who would be the ones to feel the immediate pain in a potential government shutdown? Certainly not any of those Congress members! And certainly not any of their corporate friends, who will continue to receive the payments on their contracts, military and otherwise.
No, the people who would feel the biggest and most immediate pain from a shutdown would be ordinary working people who rely on government money and services to survive.
Hundreds of thousands of workers would be sent home, not paid until a shutdown ends. Hundreds of thousands more would be forced to continue working as “essential workers"—without a paycheck, until the shutdown ends.
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children would run out of funding within days, leaving nearly seven million mothers and children without food or medical aid. Ten thousand children would immediately lose access to Head Start programs.
This was apparently a scenario that some politicians were willing to accept if they could spin it their way for the upcoming elections. But other politicians, the more “reasonable,” saw the risk in shutting down the government. Though not as immediate OR life-threatening, definitely, corporations and banks would feel the pain from stopping an apparatus that they depend on to make and defend their profits.
So, Democrats and Republicans funded the government for another 45 days.
What kind of political system is this that can put an immediate halt to wages, services, and support needed by millions of working people—just because a group of politicians say so?! It’s certainly not a system that working people organize or control! It’s certainly not a system working people can depend on to meet our needs.
No, this latest budget shutdown circus is just the latest demonstration that working people have no interest in this system whatsoever. We need a system that will truly work for us. The only way we’ll get such a system is to build it ourselves.
Oct 2, 2023
Repayments of student college loans resumed on October 1st for the first time since March of 2020. The interest started accruing on September 1st. Nearly 44 million people in the U.S. “owe” 1.77 trillion dollars on student loans.
One out of every five households in this country is paying student loans. The average borrower has over $37,000 in loans for attending a public university and over $11,000 for attending a community college. In fact, it’s working-class families who, in their vast majority, are suffering under this weight.
Historically, only the children of the wealthy had the right to receive an education in the U.S. It was social movements—in the 1800s, including from the period of the Reconstruction, after the Civil War, all the way up to the Civil Rights and Black movements of the 1960s—that made it possible for the children of the working class and poor to receive a public education.
Similarly, it was normally only young people from wealthy backgrounds were able to go on into higher education. They were, and still are, for the most part, the ones who enter Ivy League universities. They are the ones who have been able to go to the university on their parents’ incomes and who come out without a penny in debt, the ones who walk into “careers” based on family connections.
Struggles of the working class, particularly in the black population, in the 1940s and ‘50s and into the ‘60s, opened up more access for the working class to get some higher education. And as a response to the Black movement’s demand for “open enrollment” and “education available to all” in the 1960s, the government set up guaranteed loans (not grants) for students with family incomes of less than $15,000 a year. When this program was set up, however, the cost of a college education was still relatively low.
The big increase in student indebtedness began in the early 1980s, in the midst of the worst recession at the time, since the Great Depression. All kinds of public services were cut. The government slashed its support for public colleges and universities, and in turn, these institutions boosted their tuition much faster than the rate of inflation. Financial aid did not keep up. The federal Pell grant for low-income students, for example, once covered the vast majority of college costs. Today it meets only about one quarter.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, for the 1970–71 academic year, the average in-state tuition and fees for one year at a public non-profit university was $394. By the 2020–21 academic year, that amount jumped to $10,560, an increase of 2580%.
One borrower described his experience as follows: "I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in English writing and $42,207 in debt. In the years that followed, I paid about $370 a month while working…paying a total of $57,347—or 136% of the original balance."
Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Today, the government pays collection agencies to go after everything they can get their hands on: they can seize tax refunds, garnishee checks, disability payments, and Social Security checks.
From the beginning, the federal government did not guarantee an education for everyone, much less a free one. But the government, through the Department of Education, did contract with loan servicing agencies that make money off of servicing federal loans. The government turned higher education into just another avenue for profit. It guarantees that the loan servicing agencies are paid. It guarantees that banks are paid, no matter what, that hedge funds can buy up student loan debt.
During his 2020 campaign for president, Biden promised a student debt relief program. But no matter what plan does go through, any plan is a band-aid on a system that continues to put tens of millions of people in debt—often for the rest of their lives.
No matter how the political parties play it, student debt isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue. It’s a class issue. This system will spend ten times more on the military budget than it spends on the education budget. College should be free, and these budgets should be reversed.
The real fix is obvious. The class that produces everything has every right to be freed up enough to pursue education. It’s the working class that has the power to get rid of this class system and replace it with one where the wealth it produces is used for what human beings need.
Oct 2, 2023
On September 20, the Biden administration announced it would allow 472,000 people from Venezuela to legally work in the U.S.
These migrants do need the right to work—but that is all they are getting, no other legal rights that citizens have. And even that right to work is good for just 18 months.
When he welcomed Biden’s decision to grant work permits, the governor of Illinois made clear who this policy is really aimed at helping: "In Illinois, we’re facing worker shortages in critical industries like hospitality, food processing, health care, and transportation, and these additional workers will help relieve these shortages and the burden they place on employers."
In fact, the interests of employers drive every aspect of U.S. policy, and it is these policies that have created this “crisis” in the first place.
There are already estimated to be more than eleven million undocumented people living in the U.S., many of whom have been here for decades. Most of them work already despite lacking work permits. While employers have no interest in deporting these workers, they also have little interest in granting them more rights since their lack of rights and inability to qualify for any benefits keeps them under their employers’ thumb more than other workers. The policy of every administration in recent memory, including Trump, just happens to line up with these employers’ interests—no new rights and no mass deportation of immigrant workers.
Migration itself is also largely driven by U.S. policies that serve U.S. corporations.
For more than 100 years, U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been aimed at ensuring that U.S. and European oil companies get the lion’s share of profit from that country’s vast oil wealth. In 1999, Venezuela began to take a slightly independent stance, using a tiny bit of the oil wealth for a few social programs. In response, the U.S. has backed at least two attempted coups and imposed increasingly severe sanctions that have destroyed the Venezuelan economy. For many workers in Venezuela, wages are no longer enough to pay for food. This is why so many are willing to take the risk to try to come to the United States.
This is not just a Venezuelan problem. U.S. corporations extract wealth produced by workers in every country of the region, whether they are growing bananas in Honduras, sewing clothing in Guatemala, or making auto parts in Mexico. U.S. policies toward each of these countries are aimed, first of all, at defending the interests of these corporations. The result is that they keep whole populations impoverished, breed violence, and have driven large numbers of people to leave their countries.
The U.S. corporations are determined to reap profits from the population of the entire world to the extent possible. They don’t care if they exploit these workers in Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico—or in the U.S., if the workers manage to get here.
These corporations and the politicians who serve them have an interest in dividing us. They benefit when we fight over who gets to live in what country, who gets what rights, even who gets access to the few beds available in homeless shelters.
But workers have a different interest. We are the same class, the working class, wherever we live, however we got there. We have an interest in every member of our class being able to live a decent life with the same rights as everyone else. To get that, we will have to fight the giant corporations that exploit everyone they can on every side of every border. And our fights will be all the stronger, the more we are united as a class.
Oct 2, 2023
TV Show: Reservation Dogs, 2021—2023, streaming on Hulu
The TV show Reservation Dogs just ended with the conclusion of its third season. It is the first and only show in which all directors, writers, and series regular actors are Indigenous. It is based on the actual town of Holdenville, Oklahoma. The show appeared to be a comedy about four Native American teenagers, but it was quickly revealed as an intergenerational narrative of life, loss, and healing in rural America on the reservation. The episodes dealt with suicide, aging, drug use, friendship, societal abuse, racism, and more. It showed the healing power of generations and of community when they come together and together seek to find the way forward.
Book: Indignant Heart, Testimony of a Black American Worker, by Charles Denby, 1978
This is an incredibly powerful book of a Black militant fighter in both the South where he grew up and later in the auto plants in Detroit. The first part of the book was published under a pseudonym in 1952, at the height of the repression of the McCarthy period. The second part was written later and describes his participation and/or observations of the social movements of his time. He was born in 1907, the son of sharecroppers in Alabama. He describes life in the oppressive South and how he and his community stood up to it.
He along with others moved north to the booming town of Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. He describes in detail the brutal work in the plants, and his wife also describes her experiences. He was a natural organizer, outwitting over and over the company foremen or supervisors and the efforts of the Reutherite UAW to stop the organizing.
Wherever he went, he brought workers together, and together, they found a way to push back the company. He understood that an attack on one was an attack on all, and he demonstrated how fighting the division of racism benefitted all. He describes his experiences as a communist around the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party, the promise and the disappointments. He was a fighter wherever he went, and made the world a better place.
Oct 2, 2023
Here are some strikes that are currently going on in the U.S. These strikes may remain isolated and separated today. But others could join them. New strikes arise almost every week.
Local 2500 workers of the UAW’s Office and Professional Department are on strike against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Workers demand pay to keep up with the cost of living and an end to the hated tier system of wages and outsourcing. Tiers force new workers to work 22 years to gain top pay! The 1100 workers in Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing handle customer service calls and claims adjustments. "Don’t get sick tonight, Blue Cross is on strike."
ZF Chassis Systems in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, makes front axles for the nearby Mercedes-Benz assembly plant. The 190 workers of UAW Local 2083 went on strike on September 30. The workers voted NO to the first contract offer, NO to the second, and NO to the third. This big international company continually ignored the workers’ needs for reasonable healthcare, livable wages, and an end to the hated tier pay system. Now it’s NO contract, NO axles!
Local 644 of the UAW in Royersford, Penn., continues on strike to bring all of the 103 workers up above poverty-level wages. The workers make steering and throttle control cables sold to boat and RV manufacturers. This international company has offered less than half of what the workers need, insists on keeping the two-tier wage and benefit system, and also demands that the workers pay a bigger share of their health insurance.
On September 27, Local 498C of the Chemical Workers Union Council, a branch of the UFCW, went on strike against CSL Behring of Bradley, Illinois. The company’s final contract offer was overwhelmingly rejected by a 648—5 vote, and strike authorization passed 652—1. The workers want a stop to the outsourcing of their work, which has been going on for two years. CSL Behring is a global pharmaceutical company. It reported an after-tax profit of $2.61 billion last year.
Since early July, the hotel employees of the Los Angeles area have engaged in “rolling strikes” of a few days to a week against hotel companies who refuse to grant pay raises for workers to cope with the insane cost of living in the Los Angeles area. The week of September 25, five hotels in the Santa Monica area were struck by UniteHERE’s Local 11 housekeepers, bartenders, and other staff. Workers’ message to conventions and travelers: "Don’t risk coming to a strike-ready hotel!"
The union coalition representing more than 75,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente has announced a three-day strike beginning on October 4 if no agreement is reached by October 1. The workers at hundreds of Kaiser facilities in six states and Washington, D.C. demand pay raises and better staffing, as well as improved benefits and protections against outsourcing.
Kaiser workers say the understaffing is so severe that many patients cannot get much-needed medical appointments in a timely fashion. Being short of workers also means overwork and burnout among the existing workers, causing many to quit. As for pay, Kaiser is offering pay raises between 12% and 14% over four years, which is far below the increase in cost of living.
Kaiser has made 3.3 billion dollars of profit in the first six months of 2023 alone. It has no excuse not to meet the needs of its patients and workers.
Oct 2, 2023
Aaron Rodgers, a star quarterback for the New York Jets, got a guaranteed 75 million dollars for playing in 2023 and 2024. He was a great quarterback for the Green Bay Packers previously. Rodgers, however, is 39 years old, which is old for a football player. After only four plays, he had a serious injury to his Achilles tendon.
Lots of workers might be willing to trade an Achilles tendon surgery for 75 million dollars. But the reality is that not all football players are Aaron Rodgers. Most will only play for a season or two and not make that much money. Also, a torn Achilles tendon will take a year to heal. Football players risk destroying their bodies and their brains. Many get CTE—that is serious damage to their brains.
Football players are like gladiators, often getting seriously injured during their playing careers. These players sacrifice their bodies for money. The players are exploited by the team owners’ search for profit, as are all U.S. working people.
Oct 2, 2023
Unemployed workers in California who qualify for unemployment benefits receive $40 to $450 per week for six months. Considering the extremely high cost of living in California, including rents and utility costs that are much higher than the national average, these benefits are a pittance.
This is because California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) trust fund, from which the unemployment benefits are paid, is extremely underfunded. California limits the tax that employers pay to fund these benefits to the first $7,000 in wages of a worker per calendar year. Some companies pay the tax on even less than $7,000. As a result, the companies pay toward EDD funds much less than $36 per worker each month.
And this miserly company contribution to the unemployment fund has not changed since 1982. For more than forty years, the unemployment insurance wage base remained unchanged at the limit of $7,000 while companies raked out billions and billions of dollars from their workers’ labor, enriching their owners at unimaginable levels.
But because this meager unemployment benefit is still higher than the companies’ miserly contribution to the unemployment fund, the California unemployment trust fund is expected to generate a budget deficit of a few billion dollars each year, which may encourage EDD to further reduce unemployment benefits.
So, simply put, the State of California keeps a benefit that’s very vital for unemployed workers very low. But this scheme works for the businesses; they pay a very minimal tax.
Oct 2, 2023
It was total chaos in New York City on Friday, September 29, when remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia brought heavy rain to the city.
City streets turned into rivers. On highways, stranded drivers had to be rescued from cars inundated with water rising up to the cars’ windows. Water cascaded down the stairs of subway stations, where the train system came to a halt. Flood waters entered buses, causing panic among passengers. A terminal of the LaGuardia Airport was shut down for hours because of flooding.
These were some of the scenes that viewers across the country watched on TV. All the authorities had to say to people was, “Stay at home—it’s a life-threatening situation out there.” But what choice did the tens of thousands of workers have who found themselves in this life-threatening situation when they left work to go home? And what choice did the thousands of residents who live in basement apartments have other than running away and letting their homes be completely flooded?
And this wasn’t even the first time. In fact, over 50 people died in New York in similar flooding just two years ago, when remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the city in September 2021. And many of those victims were people trapped in windowless basement units.
After the flooding two years ago, officials, from the city’s mayor all the way to President Biden, pledged that New York City would be better prepared next time. Some of these officials even named particular problems—clogging of the sewer system, for example.
Yet, it certainly doesn’t look like anything was done to fix those problems. And it’s certainly not enough to blame it on climate change. Yes, when two “once-in-a-millennium” floods hit New York City in two years, it is probably a sign of climate change. But is it really an excuse that the city was so unprepared?
Climate change or not, very little has been done across the country for decades to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure. Politicians who run the government at all levels have let the infrastructure deteriorate by cutting the funding from maintenance and upgrades so they can shovel more taxpayer money to big companies and boost their profits.
It’s the working class and poor that pay the heaviest price for the cutbacks and neglect. How many people have lost their windowless basement dwellings—the only ones they can afford—to flooding? How many have died? “No deaths,” authorities were quick to report on the day of the flooding. But is it true? Or will they “find out” days later that there were deaths also?
Oct 2, 2023
The following are excerpts from a presentation given by Gary Walkowicz at the SPARK meeting on September 24. A video of the entire presentation is linked on the SPARK website: 2023-09-24
On September 15, the UAW leadership called a strike against the Big Three auto companies—Ford, GM, and Stellantis. They shut down one assembly plant at each company. A week later, the union leaders did not strike any more assembly or parts plants; they only called out the parts distribution centers at GM and Stellantis, which did not have an impact on any vehicle production.
UAW autoworkers today have every reason to make a fight against our corporate bosses. We have a lot to fight for … because we have lost a lot. Up through the early 1970s, autoworkers had gained an adequate standard of living. It was better than what their parents had and opened the door for a better future for their children. Autoworkers gained these things by waging many, many strikes against the auto companies, starting with the sit-down strikes. In the time period after World War II, the American capitalists had become the dominant military and economic power in the world. So when autoworkers did strike for better wages and benefits, the auto corporations gave up a little. Autoworkers also pulled other workers up with them. The higher pay in auto meant that people wanted to get jobs at the Big Three. The jobs were hard, but autoworkers at least had a somewhat tolerable standard of living. Not anymore.
After decades of concessions, the standard of living for autoworkers has been drastically reduced. Higher seniority workers have fallen way behind. From 2007 up to today, autoworkers’ hourly wages, when adjusted for inflation, have gone down by 30%. Second-tier workers, those hired after 2007, start out at half pay, with fewer benefits and no pension. Today, many of the new hires in auto have to work a second job just to survive. It’s shocking how far auto wages have fallen. And autoworkers have lost even more when it comes to jobs and working conditions.
When the current contract negotiations started, the new leadership in the UAW said they wanted to gain back what had been lost. They put their monetary demands on the table—a 46% wage increase over the life of the contract and the restoration of cost-of-living adjustments. The UAW leaders demanded an end to tiers and temporary workers—bringing every worker up to full pay. They demanded pensions and retiree health care for all the workers who don’t have them, over 60% of the workforce. And they demanded higher pensions for the workers who do have them.
Certainly, autoworkers deserve every damn penny of those demands. In fact, we need much more than that because those demands don’t even make up for all the concessions that were taken from us.
We can see that some of the money they took from us has gone into the pockets of CEOs like Mary Barra and Jim Farley. They are now paid over 20 million dollars a year. They got a 40% raise. But most of the money stolen from us is not so obvious; it has gone to the people behind the scenes, to the people that we don’t see—the Wall Street capitalists who own the auto companies. They are making billions and billions off our labor.
The media, who are also owned by big corporations and Wall Street, have been crying and lying about the union leaders’ demands.
A more realistic estimate by Deutsche Bank said that all of the UAW’s contract demands would cost about 5 billion dollars a year. Hell, Ford alone paid out that much money to their stockholders in dividends this year. GM gave their stockholders more than 14 billion dollars in stock buybacks. They have plenty of money, more than plenty. The Big Three made 250 billion dollars of profit in the last decade. If the workers get more of that money and the stockholders get less, so what? We deserve it. It should be our money. Workers’ labor and blood and sweat produced every penny of those profits, and we produced every penny of those stock buybacks and dividends.
It is possible that the auto companies will offer some raises in the face of this strike. But raises alone, even raises that might seem big, are not going to give autoworkers the lives they deserve. Because raises alone would not even touch the biggest thing that has been taken from autoworkers—the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been taken away. Raises don’t help you if you don’t have a job or if your kids won’t be able to get a job or be able to have what you had.
What has really made the auto bosses rich and made workers’ lives poorer is that the companies have been cutting jobs and getting much more work out of many fewer workers.
In 1979, there were 450,000 UAW workers at GM alone. Adding Ford and Chrysler, there were almost a million workers at the Big Three. Today, there are only 145,000 UAW workers at the three companies combined. Where did all the jobs go? A lot of the jobs were taken away through speed-up. Many hundreds of thousands more jobs were taken away by outsourcing. UAW members at Ford, GM, and Chrysler used to make many of the parts for the cars and trucks. Then, the Big Three set up subsidiaries to outsource the work, spinning off the parts plants to Delphi, Visteon, and Acustar. Then they broke up the subsidiaries and they moved the work to other companies, to other auto part suppliers. Every time the work moved, the workers got paid less and less money. That was the bosses’ goal. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of workers in the auto industry working at these supplier plants; some of them are unionized, and many are not. But they all work for poverty wages. In Michigan alone, there are about one thousand auto supplier plants that are not part of the Big Three. Many of them are producing parts that were once made by Ford, GM, and Chrysler workers. These low-paid workers are the 3rd tier, the 4th tier, and the 5th tier of auto workers.
And today, auto companies are openly planning to eliminate more jobs as they transition to building electric vehicles. Right now, those jobs in battery plants pay a lot less than full-pay auto jobs. Even after the UAW leaders negotiated a raise at the GM joint-venture battery plant in Ohio, those workers are still making $12 an hour less than full pay at GM. What we are seeing now is the beginning of the next round of outsourcing jobs and creating lower pay tiers.
On top of the transition to electric vehicles, there is another threat to autoworkers’ jobs. The Big Three auto companies have made it clear that they want to sell only high-priced vehicles in the future—trucks, SUVs, and luxury vehicles. Ford, for example, is planning to stop building almost all their car lines. Ford CEO Jim Farley admitted that the company is planning for a future where fewer people will be able to afford to buy a vehicle. In the future that the auto bosses are planning, not only will autoworkers not be able to afford to buy what they build, and there will also be fewer vehicles produced, which would mean fewer jobs. This is how the auto companies are planning to increase their profits even more, at our expense. This is the future they are planning for us.
Another way the auto companies have increased their profits is by imposing horrible working conditions in the plants. Working in an auto plant was never easy, but in the last few decades, things have gotten much worse. Every year, year after year, the company eliminates jobs and adds the work to the remaining workers. That’s the speed-up we talked about. Today every worker is doing the work of 2 or 3 or 4 workers. On top of working harder and harder, autoworkers have had their break time reduced. The result of the speed-up and less break time means that every day, autoworkers go home exhausted. It means autoworkers end up with broken bodies—they have carpal tunnel and other repetitive motion injuries; they have shoulders that need rotator cuff surgery and damaged knees.
The auto bosses also have increased their profits by implementing insane work schedules in the auto plants—having people work 10 hours, 10.7 hours, and 12 hours a day. The companies have people working mandatory overtime, working 6 and 7 days a week for months at a time. Then there are the people who are forced to work split shifts, working day shift and night shift in the same week. Working exhausting jobs and exhausting schedules will take years off your life. That’s what they want us to sacrifice so that more money will go to Wall Street.
We need wages that provide a decent standard of living. We need decent working conditions that don’t cripple and exhaust us. And we need to have a job and keep a job! And we need jobs that will be there for our children, jobs for the next generation. Right now, we have none of those things. And even if the auto companies met the UAW leaders’ money demands, that would not improve working conditions in the plants or get back the jobs that have been lost.
The loss of jobs, the horrible working conditions, the reduced pay—these are all the result of autoworkers and their union not resisting the war that the bosses waged on us. From 1976 to 2019, the UAW did not wage a single major companywide strike against the auto companies.
In 2019, the old UAW leadership called a strike against GM—this was the first show of resistance in 43 years. But it was only at one company. Today, the new leadership of the UAW has called another strike—at all three companies, but so far, it has engaged only about 25,000 workers out of the 145,000 UAW autoworkers. At this point, fewer auto workers are on strike than in 2019. So far, the autoworkers called out on strike have been used by the UAW leaders as a negotiating tool and a scare tactic to get the auto companies to give up some money.
Autoworkers certainly have more power than they have used so far. Autoworkers can fight for more than some small raises. Autoworkers can fight for more jobs, better working conditions, and a comfortable standard of living.
But that would require a different fight than the one proposed by either the old UAW leaders or the new UAW leaders.
People will say that the UAW workers at the Big Three can’t do it by themselves. That’s right, we can’t do it by ourselves. But UAW workers don’t have to stand alone. First of all, we have to use all of our forces—145,000 Ford, GM, and Stellantis workers together to make a fight, not just a few of us.
Then we have to pull in all those hundreds of thousands of workers from the auto industry who work in all those parts plants, workers who are even more underpaid and more exploited. There are also all the autoworkers at the non-union transplant auto companies who have their own reasons to fight for more.
And for every job in auto, there are six more jobs connected to it, workers in steel, rubber, plastics, and transportation. This is a big part of the working class.
The whole working class has the power to make a fight in every factory and every workplace. They can fight everywhere—inside the factory, outside the workplace, and in the streets.
People will say this kind of fight can’t happen. Well, in 1936 and 1937 and again in 1945, strikes by autoworkers spread throughout the working class. Other workers came out, not just to support autoworkers, but to join them by making their own fight. That’s why those strikes accomplished so much.
This time, we do not have to stop.
Oct 2, 2023
American military contractors have been the biggest winners in the Ukraine War, especially Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrup Grumman. The U.S. Pentagon has been feeding this war, shipping everything from state-of-the-art tanks and missile systems to helicopters, helmets, and ammunition to Ukraine at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
So, while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians are killed and wounded, the big U.S. military contractors have been raking in record sales, leading to big increases in these companies’ stock prices. Since the war began in February 2022, Lockheed’s stock zoomed up by more than 40%, and it is at record levels.
And these companies have not just been profiting from the war in Ukraine. The Ukraine War has ignited a great big arms race. Governments around the world have gone on a spending spree. U.S. weapons exports increased by 40% in just the last year.
Of course, the U.S. is, by far, the biggest military spender in the world, accounting for 39% of global military spending, three times as much as China, and ten times as much as Russia. Today, the U.S. military budget is approaching a trillion dollars, the most U.S. military spending since World War II, when adjusting for inflation.
The U.S. working population is footing the bill for all that spending, as U.S. spending on food stamps, childcare, and health care for the working poor have all been slashed. These cuts have contributed to a big increase in poverty and hunger in this country over the last year.
This is one way that the drive for ever-greater profits by a few big companies is pushing the world into a bloody dead end.
Oct 2, 2023
This article is translated from the September 29 issue, #2878 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Relations between the governments of Warsaw and Kyiv, which had suddenly cooled down over Ukrainian agricultural exports, have been even more strained with the announcement by Poland that they will no longer deliver arms to Ukraine.
Kyiv had just filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia because they refused to lift their embargo on Ukrainian agricultural products. As for the Polish and Ukrainian rulers, who yesterday said they spoke on behalf of “brotherly peoples” fighting the same Russian enemy, they were seen the next day insulting each other in public.
In front of the UN in New York, Zelensky denounced “countries [such as Poland] who pretend solidarity [with Ukraine while] indirectly supporting Russia.” Angry Polish President Duda then compared his Ukrainian “ally” to “a drowned man who clings to everything [risking] to drown his rescuer.” And to add that he was going to devote all his efforts to building up the Polish army, no longer helping that of Kyiv.
The upcoming legislative elections in Poland are likely to prompt its ultra-conservative leaders to pose as nationalists defending their peasants and an army they increasingly want. But electoral demagoguery does not explain everything. The Polish state defends its interests, those of the wealthy it represents, not those of the Ukrainian state or those of an alleged camp of democracy that would bring together the Ukrainian state and the NATO member states under the leadership of the great imperialist powers. Propaganda cannot make people forget that among the allies of the anti-Russian camp, the interests of each may differ or even be opposed. We see it between the United States and the countries of Western Europe; thus, Germany’s economy suffers more than others from sanctions against Russia due to its greater dependence on Russian gas. This is also true for less powerful countries, such as Poland.
While belonging to the European Union, Poland has chosen to link its fate to American imperialism, first on the military and commercial levels. When Duda and his Prime Minister say they are giving priority to the Polish army, they describe a reality that did not start yesterday, even if this war gave it more weight. On the one hand, they justify military orders of which the United States is the sole provider. The volume is enormous: in recent months, 486 HIMARS rocket launchers, 96 Apache helicopters, 32 F-35 stealth fighters, and also 366 Abrams tanks … to compare with the 30 promised to Kyiv by Washington, or even with the 200 French Leclerc tanks!
Warsaw says it wants to have the largest conventional army on the continent. It devotes 4% of its gross domestic product to it, proportionally twice as much as France, to build up to a force of 300,000 men just for its army within a few years in a country of 40 million, while France has 200,000 for its entire military.
Much less wealthy than Germany or France, Poland is at the forefront of the arms race in which the world is engaged. In Poland’s case, the United States is the main beneficiary. This is tied to the fact that it has publicly raised its voice against the Ukrainian protégé of the West while also refusing the green light given to Ukrainian agricultural products by the European Union.
Imperialism, particularly American imperialism, supports Kyiv against Moscow, but the levers controlling this support are out of reach for Kyiv. Zelensky can demand more and more weapons in front of the cameras, but it is not he who decides—Kyiv remains a pawn of the policy of imperialism. The Polish President and Prime Minister have abruptly reminded us of what American officials regularly suggest in a more diplomatic way.
Oct 2, 2023
This article is translated from the September 29 issue, #2878 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In a few days, the Azerbaijani armed forces have just crushed those of Nagorno-Karabakh, a small Armenian enclave that seceded from Azerbaijan three decades ago during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Nagorno-Karabakh residents immediately fled to take refuge in Armenia.
Azerbaijan seized upon a pretext—the death of soldiers in the explosion of a mine—to launch a lightning “anti-terrorist operation.” The 2020 war, won by Baku, had already greatly reduced the area of this enclave and broke the territorial continuity of Nagorno-Karabakh with neighboring Armenia. Now, the independence that Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed in 1991 is over. But the war is not over because Baku has already announced that it intends to establish a corridor between Azerbaijan and the Azeri zone of Nakhchivan, landlocked between Turkey, Iran and Armenia. However, with the state of the borders resulting from the decomposition of the USSR, such a corridor can only open through and at the expense of Armenia. And, necessarily, it can only oppose it militarily.
This little piece of Europe, by its geographical location—the two Caucasian mountain ranges forming a bridge between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea—has always been a place of mixing of various populations between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It follows that the Caucasus is a mosaic of peoples who settled there at various times and mixed, or at least lived alongside one another.
With regard to Nagorno-Karabakh, the formation of the Soviet Union in the wake of the October 1917 revolution brought together Armenian populations in a territory distinct from Armenia, administratively attached to Azerbaijan, which surrounded it, but with significant autonomy. Above all, there were no state barriers to the movement of residents their freedom to come and go between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh or between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan.
This situation applied to around 100 other peoples living in the USSR who had their own territory or who lived within administrative entities alongside another majority ethnic group without big problems. In any case, so long as Soviet Russia and then the USSR sought to give maximum rights to all national components of the population. With the installation of Stalinism at the turn of the 1930s, the bureaucracy that usurped the power from the working class formally maintained the inherited framework of the revolution, even if, on many occasions, Stalin and his regime stifled the aspirations of nationalities by deporting some from the Caucasus and elsewhere.
The implosion of the Soviet Union, desired by the heads of the bureaucracy, made the situation very quickly evolve in a tragic way. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, local heads of the bureaucracy sought to carve fiefs in “their” republic by presenting themselves as intractable defenders of the majority ethnic group, supporting them against the “center,” that is to say Moscow and against minorities living on their territory.
This is what happened from 1989—1990 in Azerbaijan, where the clan of the leader of the local Communist Party, Aliev, wanted to bring the Azeri population together by fomenting anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku and Soumgaït. Knowing what awaited them, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed their independence in December 1991, when the USSR ceased to exist. A war broke out, which left tens of thousands of people dead. In 1994 it led to a cease-fire, not even to a formally concluded peace, then the situation remained as it was, punctuated by regular clashes.
Armenian forces then gained territory to link Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Russia, which was in what it considered its area of natural influence and which more or less supported Yerevan, the Armenian capital, had troops there who guaranteed a certain status quo. But since 2014, Moscow has focused on Ukraine, which had chosen the western camp. And, with the current open war, Russia no longer has the strength or the will to assert itself in the Caucasus. Especially since, behind Azerbaijan, supporting it militarily and politically, there is Turkey, a member of NATO but also a partner to a certain extent with Moscow in the Ukrainian conflict.
Russian soldiers therefore remained armed against Baku’s troops. No one knows how this conflict will evolve. But one thing is certain: when it seemed frozen, it became a hot spot on the map again, once more. And the peoples of the region, whether Armenian, Azeri, or otherwise, can only bear the brunt of a fire that is likely to spread.
Oct 2, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of September 24, 2023.
Even before autoworkers went out on strike, the big media dug up “financial experts” to claim the auto companies can’t afford the wage and benefit increases the UAW was asking for.
Can’t afford it? Of course, they can. Over ten years’ time, Ford, GM, and Stellantis-Chrysler almost doubled their profit, making almost 250 billion dollars. They showered stockholders with 66 billion dollars in dividends and stock buybacks. They increased by 40% the money they lavished on their chief executive officers. They built new factories in a competition to take over the world.
And that’s just a snippet of the wealth the auto companies accumulated from the workers’ labor over all these years. So don’t let anyone talk this nonsense to you that “they can’t afford it.”
They just don’t want to. And in this capitalist society, their ownership of the means of production gives them the right to decide.
Well, the auto companies are unhappy today. The union’s decision to call a strike interferes with the companies’ freedom to decide.
After 1976, the UAW refrained from calling a national strike at the three U.S. auto companies for 43 years. Companies were given a free hand to do what they wanted. And they did it. They cut out the yearly wage increase. They removed protection from inflation. They eliminated most protection from layoffs. They removed the 12 extra personal days off gained in 1976. They eliminated pensions and the medical care that went with it for new hires. They replaced guaranteed medical care for existing retirees with an inadequately funded VEBA. They spun off parts plants. They pushed a brutal speed-up in order to reduce jobs. They set up killing work schedules. They closed plants. They made temp work the way in for many new hires.
For 43 years, the UAW just watched—no national strike was called at Ford, GM, or Chrysler.
So, in 2019, when the “old” leadership of the UAW called a nationwide strike at GM, it really was a shot across the companies’ bow. And there were some gains: bigger bonuses and a partial reduction in tiers and temp work. But limited to just one company, it took 40 days to get even that.
Now, in 2023, the “new” leadership of the UAW has called another national strike, this time at all three companies. But this strike, too, has limits. Only part of the workers have been called to strike.
Maybe the strike will finally get to all the plants at all three companies. But so far, it seems more like a bluff to threaten the companies rather than an action that allows the workers to mass their forces and use the power their numbers give them.
In the second week, the UAW extended the strike to 38 parts depots—a lot of facilities but few workers. And the 38 facilities don’t feed into production. They distribute parts to dealers, auto shops, and fleet owners. Someone with an old vehicle in need of repairs will feel the pain. Auto shops will. The companies won’t. They’ll just build up inventory at plants producing big money-makers.
Maybe the threat of a strike rolling out to all the plants will bring a little bit more than the 2019 strike. If so, look behind the money up-front. Can it provide workers’ children with a decent existence? What about the destruction of working conditions, elimination of jobs, division of workers into different categories, different companies?
UAW leaders called for the 2019 strike but limited it from the beginning. New leaders appear to be doing the same thing again in 2023, just in a different way. In both strikes, the workers were divided into those who fight and those who don’t.
Of course, things can change. The 2023 strike may be only at the beginning. The companies themselves might call the union’s bluff.
But above all, no one can say what the workers might take upon themselves to do. There are many auto workers today, disappointed at not being called on to join the fight. There are workers who know that this is more like a shouting match than a real fight. Some of those workers may be the ones leading others to break through the divisions imposed by the companies and by union leaders!
This strike may still gain a real life.
Oct 2, 2023
State caseworkers who help low-income working families and the disabled apply for Medicaid health insurance and other important services have had enough management threats. They are on the informational picket line in Michigan, telling their story.
On Wednesday, September 27, a spirited lunchtime “informational picket” was joined by roughly 70 people. At the Connor Health and Human Services Office in Detroit, workers are demanding more help and expressing outrage that essentially the whole office is facing discipline.
"There’s no way I can answer the phones, conduct an interview, process an [application] and address the people the way they really need to be addressed," said a longtime caseworker.
In Michigan, nearly 30% of the state’s population—three million people—came to be enrolled in Medicaid health insurance during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE).
Now that the pandemic is declared over, federal officials came up with a ridiculous plan: require millions of people to re-apply for their health coverage during a tiny window of time.
Talk about dumb ideas! As any ordinary worker could have predicted, state workers cannot keep up with the paperwork, phone calls, and in-person visits that keep pouring in.
Picketing UAW members informed the public that instead of hiring more people, management expects the remaining workers to spend only six minutes on the phone with each client, attempting to push quantity over quality.
A top management structure that believes six minutes is enough time to help people in crisis must set a stopwatch and tap their foot when helping their own family members!
Oct 2, 2023
On September 29, the UAW leaders expanded their partial strike against the Big Three auto companies, calling out one more assembly plant each at Ford and GM. Stellantis was spared, at least for now. That meant that about 25,000 out of 145,000 UAW members were now on strike at the Big Three.
Ford CEO Jim Farley responded by blasting UAW president Shawn Fain, saying that the union was holding up a contract settlement and was holding the company “hostage” over the issue of battery plants. What bull! The Big Three have made 250 billion dollars in profits over the last ten years, and they could easily afford to meet every one of the UAW’s initial demands—which are economic—and still address job security issues.
It is not clear what the UAW leaders are asking for regarding the battery plants. But it is clear that the auto companies are using the excuse of the transition to electric vehicles to do what they have been doing all along, cutting jobs and lowering wages.
The Big Three auto companies openly admit that they are planning to reduce jobs in powertrain plants, where workers build gas-powered engines and transmissions. They’ve been doing it. This is not new! So now, the auto companies are building new plants where batteries will be made for electric vehicles. And all the talk is about the fact that the auto companies want to pay the battery plant workers much less than they pay full-time auto workers. And, so far, that’s the reality. But it’s not because they are battery plants. It’s because the capitalists will drive down wages, using whatever pretext they think will convince people.
UAW leaders may be making an issue with the battery plants. The battery plants being built by the Big Three do not fall under the national contract agreements with the UAW. Even if there is some agreement with the UAW leaders, so what? If workers are laid off in an engine plant in Michigan, for example, what good is it if they are allowed to transfer to a job in a battery plant down South? These battery plants are not being built in the same city or even the same state where the old plants are.
Auto workers need jobs where they live; they need jobs that provide a decent standard of living; they need jobs and wages that will be there for their children and the next generation. Over the past couple of decades, auto companies cut wages and hundreds of thousands of jobs by outsourcing most of their production to supposedly “independent” auto parts companies, paying lower wages. Auto companies have eliminated thousands of jobs by speed-up—getting more work out of fewer people. Did these jobs just disappear in the air?
During these decades of job loss and wage concessions, there was little resistance by auto workers and their unions. In 2019, there was finally a strike at GM—the first companywide strike at the Big Three in 43 years. Today, some UAW auto workers are again engaged in a strike called by the union leaders. Both fights were limited—just in different ways. But that still can change.
A fight can start over what happens at the battery plants. But the fight can also be over keeping jobs at the engine and transmission plants. When the companies say they don’t need as many gas-powered engines and transmissions, everyone can still be kept working on all the jobs eliminated in the past. The fight for jobs can be in the assembly plants by putting the jobs back to the way they used to be—where one person does the work of one person, not three or four people.
If all the 145,000 UAW workers at the Big Three were in the fight together, they could engage all the other auto workers, who have their own reasons to fight. All the hundreds of thousands of workers in the auto supplies plants. The many thousands of auto workers who work at Tesla, Volkswagen, Nissan, Hyundai, and all the other auto companies. All these auto workers are underpaid and overworked, too.
Any fight by auto workers for their jobs and their future goes up against the same Wall Street capitalists who own all of these auto companies and auto suppliers. What is needed is a class fight, a fight by all the auto workers and all workers, a fight to shake the whole system that exploits them all today.
Oct 2, 2023
UAW workers on the picket lines have things to say!
“This strike is the only way I can get a pay raise any time soon.”—a temporary worker in Toledo making $15.71 with on-again/off-again scheduling.
“Fifteen years ago, we made them a loan, just like the government did. They repaid the government right away. But not us. Now it’s our time.”—Stellantis striker.
“We can’t even afford to buy the cars we produce while the CEOs take everything they can get away with.”
“Our jobs are set by somebody looking at a spreadsheet on the computer, somebody who has never once even tried to do this work.”
“Let’s see the CEOs come and bend over these jobs 10 hours a day, six days a week, and see how they like it. They couldn’t do it.”
“There’s very little return on these type of jobs at $16.76.”
“We just want to not have to struggle so much.”—a striker at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant.