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
Jun 25, 2001
On June 19, in the small Iraqi village of Tel Afr, 23 young people were killed and 11 more were wounded while playing soccer. The Iraqi government accused U.S. and British warplanes of dropping bombs and firing on the soccer field.
The response of U.S. and British officials was to blame the Iraqi deaths on an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile that they said was fired at a U.S. warplane, returned to earth and exploded. In fact, said one Pentagon official, the U.S. had not bombed that particular district of Iraq on either Tuesday or Wednesday.
Of course, there is little reason to believe anything the Pentagon says. But take their words at face value because even in those cynical words the Pentagon accuses itself. To claim that the U.S. did not bomb that one particular spot on those particular two days is to admit that it is bombing the country regularly. So, even if an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile did kill the Iraqi children, as U.S. officials claim, what reasonable person could blame the Iraqis for trying to defend their country against the ongoing attacks?
These attacks have been truly barbaric. Iraq was once among the more developed and relatively prosperous countries in the Middle East. But 11 years ago, the U.S. began a massive bombing of Iraq. Within a few short months, it had killed 100,000 people and destroyed the country’s infrastructure, that is, the country’s ability to produce electricity, purify water, treat sewage, as well as produce and transport its main export, oil.
Since then, while continuing the bombing, the U.S. has also imposed punitive trade sanctions and war reparations. As a result, according to the United Nations, over one-third of the population suffers from severe malnutrition. Such diseases as typhoid, cholera, malaria, even polio, which had been wiped out long ago, have come back in waves of epidemics for which Iraqi hospitals have no medicine, nor even the simplest palliatives.
Death stalks the land. Even conservative estimates put the death toll at more than one million Iraqis, more than half of whom were children under five. And Iraqi children continue to die at a rate of over 4,000 per month.
The U.S. officials blame all this on Saddam Hussein, a dictator and mass murder. But what they don’t say is that the U.S. supported and armed Hussein... when he carried out a war for them against Iran. More to the point, they don’t bother to explain why the U.S. has made the Iraqi population pay the price for the actions of this dictator the U.S. helped arm and keep in power.
They attack Iraq today for the same reason they once authorized Saddam Hussein to invade Iran–to be the sole power calling the shots in the Middle East.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait without U.S. authorization, he threatened the stability of the Middle East, and thereby U.S. profits and investments. The biggest U.S. companies, including the oil companies and banks, exploit the resources and labor of countries throughout the Middle East, and for that matter, just about everywhere in the world.
The U.S. war against Iraq is nothing but a demonstration of how much the U.S. state apparatus is ready to destroy, how many people they will murder, in order to defend the right of U.S. corporations to exploit and impoverish the entire planet for their own profit.
The same U.S. corporations that are benefiting from this war, are also taking the offensive against the working class and poor in this country. They are downsizing and laying us off, cutting our pay and benefits, breaking our strikes and unions.
The interest of the workers in this country lies 100% on the side of the people of Iraq.
Jun 25, 2001
The big drug companies have been pushing lately to extend their patents on particular drugs.
Bristol-Myers got a new patent last year that will prevent a competitor from manufacturing a cheaper generic version of its anti-anxiety drug BuSpar for three years. In just this one deal, Bristol-Myers gained over one billion dollars total!
By using a second patent on how to administer its cancer treatment drug Taxol, Bristol-Myers again prevented the production of a cheaper generic version of the drug–enabling it to take in another extra one billion dollars.
Pfizer filed for and got a second patent on its epilepsy control drug Neurontins. Preventing production of a generic version boosts Pfizer’s income an additional billion and a half dollars every year.
All told, the drug companies made an estimated 79 billion dollars extra last year due to patent protections.
When confronted by evidence of their patent-protected price-gouging, the big drug companies claim that they need to be able to sell the drugs that they invented at hugely inflated prices so they will have the money needed to conduct the research and development of new and better drugs.
Nonsense! According to their own figures, the drug companies spend almost twice as much money on advertising and promoting their drugs as they do on developing them. As far as actual research goes, they pay only about 40% of the total spent on drug research. And a big portion of their research is directed to ways of extending their patents on existing drugs. The rest, 28 billion dollars, comes from the federal government, universities, private foundations and charities. And the results of all this research are turned over free, or nearly free, to the drug companies.
No, drug prices are high because the pharmaceutical companies play on our need for their medicine to make enormous profits–so high that the average rate of profit in the drug industry is about double that in most other industries.
They are holding our health hostage to their ddrive to accumulate wealth.
Jun 25, 2001
Over 30,000 children must return for summer school in Baltimore this summer. That’s almost one of every three students in the public school system.
These students are going to summer school supposedly to learn what they failed to learn during the nine months of the school year.
A noble aim–but there’s a problem. This is Baltimore, where the combination of high heat, high humidity and high pollution gives the area one of the worst "bad air" indexes in the entire country. Almost none of the 180 schools staying open this summer has air conditioning.
The school system does have some air-conditioned rooms, of course–right in the Board of Education’s offices. Undoubtedly, the students would learn better if they took advantage of the good air there.
Jun 25, 2001
Alcoa Aluminum’s main smelter in Washington state has been shut down, as have the smelting operations of four other aluminum companies on the Northwest Coast.
They weren’t shut down because of a lack of buyers for aluminum–nor for a lack of workers. The big aluminum producers shut down simply because they could make more money by reselling electricity than they could by producing and selling aluminum.
Alcoa, for example, had longterm contracts to buy electric power from the federal government’s Bonneville Power Administration at a rate of $22 a megawatthour. But deregulation of the electric power industry opened the road to enormous price increases. By last winter, electric power was selling on the open market at rates running between $250 and $500 a megawatthour. Shutting down aluminum production to resell electricity let Alcoa pocket the difference.
The result was an enormous increase in Alcoa’s profits. Its profits in the first quarter of this year 120 million dollars - were over ten times as high as what they had been in the same period a year ago, before they started selling electric power.
Alcoa was not the only company to make big bucks when the government stopped regulating prices in the natural gas and the electric power industries.
Enron, a Texas marketing company, has made even bigger profits from the California electricity "crisis." For all practical purposes, Enron does not produce either natural gas or electric power. It simply buys and sells them. But by withholding natural gas and electric power which it had bought from the marketplace, it helped drive up the prices for these necessities - to the point that the going price for electric power was more than ten times as high this year as it had been last year.
None of this adds to production. None of it produces more wealth, that is, goods and services which the workers can buy with their wages. None of this improves the standard of living of the working people of this country.
It simply increases the balance sheets of big corporations, letting them grease the hands of politicians while they pay their executives bigger bonuses. It lets them go out and buy up other companies or throw their windfall into the stock market, driving up prices there.
These companies are not in business to produce goods and services. They are in business to produce profit. If they can do so by producing goods and services, they will do it, increasing the exploitation of their workers to turn a bigger profit. But if they can increase their profit by stopping production, they will do that also, laying off workers, pushing the economy into a new recession.
This is capitalism stripped down to its essentials: existing to make a profit. Everything else is secondary. These giant companies could care less what they do to the population or even to their own economy.
There is no reason the working class should pay for this. No company which is making a profit should be allowed to lay off workers - or to cut back on jobs, which is simply a way to layoff the next generation of workers before they are hired.
The big corporations create the problems that working people face. Let their profits be taken and used to overcome the problems.
Jun 25, 2001
The World Health Organization recently announced that tuberculosis could be brought under control in five years if the funds to combat it were increased by 400 million dollars each year.
This additional funding would allow poorer countries to pay for needed medicines and monitoring of patients. About a million people a year die from TB even though it can be cured.
Does 400 million sound like a lot of dollars? The U.S. federal government’s budget is currently five billion dollars per DAY (yes, per DAY). This means about 200 million dollars are spent every single hour of every single day.
So two HOURS of the U.S. federal budget could save millions of lives.
But, of course, it won’t be spent–the wealthy and their corporations can’t bear to give it up.
Jun 25, 2001
At the beginning of April, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis at a school in Leicester, an old industrial city in the center of Great Britain. TB is a disease which was supposed to have been eradicated decades ago.
The outbreak was ignored until a confidential government report was leaked to the press. According to the report, 31 children were diagnosed in April with the disease; 60 others were infected by tuberculosis bacteria and 170 children showed symptoms of having been exposed. According to the report, there is no doubt that the children caught the disease right in the school.
The increase of tuberculosis in Great Britain has been spectacular and getting much worse. In the dozen years between 1987 and 1999, the number of reported cases increased by 21%. But in the year 2000 alone, the increase was almost 11%.
Government commentators have the nerve to argue that a large part of the increase in Great Britain occurred among immigrants from poor countries, in order to deny their responsibility in the worsening situation. But they avoid mentioning the fact that 44% of the cases are people of British heritage. Nor do they explain why the principal concentrations of the disease are found in the poor neighborhoods of the three biggest working class areas in the country–London, Birmingham and Glasgow.
The politicians who have been in power, including the Labor Party of Tony Blair, have an overwhelming responsibility for this situation. Their general policy, which favors the profits of the bourgeoisie, pushes a larger part of the working class into poverty, either through unemployment or low-paid jobs. Moreover, they have reduced social expenditures, including for public health, in order to free up an increasing part of state resources for the profit of the bourgeoisie. This has led to a worsening of sanitary conditions in housing and the cities, as well as decreases in preventative treatment and health care.
In the case of tuberculosis, for example, the government abandoned preventative vaccination of school children between 10 and 15 years old in 1999. The official reason given was the lack of sufficient vaccine. Now they say they will restore the vaccination program–but not until the end of 2002!
After diagnosing the first case of tuberculosis at this school in Leicester in August 2000, health officials waited until March 2001, or seven months later, before testing all the teachers and children at the school, with the disastrous result that we now see. They don’t bother justifying their inaction. But there are reasons: budget reductions which have devastated public health services, as well as the "turn toward the market" of public health, which absorbs an increasing share of resources, both human and financial. The British government leaves it up to the pharmaceutical companies to decide how much vaccine will be produced. And since vaccine is no longer under patent protection, the pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in producing it.
Blair carried out his recent electoral campaign claiming that "the market is the way of the future." For the poor, it can be the way to the cemetery.
Jun 25, 2001
A wave of almost daily demonstrations, which started about two months ago in the Kabylia region of Algeria, has spread to other parts of the country. Starting on June 10, demonstrations broke out in many cities and towns across the country. As in Kabylia before, angry demonstrators, mostly young people, ransacked government buildings and clashed with the police.
On June 14, hundreds of thousands of Algerians took to the streets in Algiers, the capital city of Algeria, to join hundreds of thousands of ethnic Berbers, turning the event into the biggest demonstration since independence in 1962. The Berbers had come to Algiers from Kabylia to protest poverty, unemployment and police brutality. When the police prevented the protesters from marching to the presidential palace, clashes broke out between stone-hurling demonstrators and the police. The police used tear gas, pressurized water and bullets. Four people died and nearly a thousand were wounded.
In the wake of the Algiers rally, the government announced a ban on demonstrations. But this apparently made little difference–on June 18, the day after the ban was imposed, new protests and street battles ensued, resulting in seven deaths.
The protests had begun in the northeastern region of Kabylia in the middle of April, after a teenager was killed by the police while in custody. The police’s response to those protests was to fire live ammunition at demonstrators causing new deaths, which in turn led to new protests. The protesters, almost all of whom were in their teens or twenties, countered the tear gas and bullets of the police with stones. In the two main cities of the Kabylia region, Tizi-Ouzou and Bejaia, 80 protesters died and hundreds more were wounded in these street battles. Hospital workers reported that many of the victims had been shot in the back. In the face of this brutal response by the authorities, other layers of the population in Kabylia were drawn into the protest movement–women, government workers, journalists, doctors, lawyers all held their own demonstrations against government repression.
The Kabylia region, where the majority of the people are ethnic Berbers, has a long-standing tradition of opposition to the Algiers regime. One reason for the Berbers’ resentment against the regime is that, for decades, the Arab-dominated government has tried to suppress their language and culture. But the motives of the young people in this latest uprising reach clearly far beyond cultural recognition. From the very beginning, the slogans of the movement have been for jobs, housing, a decent education–in short, improvement of the conditions for the workers and poor. As the huge Algiers demonstration and the spreading of the demonstrations to other cities show, these demands and the struggle of the Kabylia youth have found an echo in other parts of the country.
That’s certainly not surprising. According to government figures, which normally tend to under-represent such statistics, unemployment is over 30%, and about 25% of the population lives below the official poverty line. Unemployment among young people is much higher, easily reaching figures as high as 70 to 80%. Just recently, the government announced a five-year "stabilization" plan which is aimed at making sure that Algeria can make the payments on its 30-billion-dollar debt (which amounts to two-thirds of the country’s GDP) to foreign banks. The planned measures, which include cuts in social services and privatization and closure of state-run enterprises, will only increase unemployment and poverty and further push down the living standard of those workers who still hold jobs.
If Algeria is in such a bad shape economically, it’s not because the country doesn’t have resources: Algeria has large oil reserves, and supplies 40% of the natural gas used in Europe. But this kind of economic collapse is the fate of formerly colonized, underdeveloped countries in today’s capitalist world, no matter how much their resources contribute to the globe’s economy. Four decades ago, Algeria won its war of independence against its colonizer, France, but political independence didn’t automatically translate into economic independence, let alone an improvement of the life of the workers and poor. Algeria quickly became a country whose resources continued to be exploited by corporations based in the former colonial powers, while its ruling regime suppressed the demands of the workers and poor through military repression.
This has led to a deep mistrust and resentment in the population against the regime and its backbone, the military. When the latest revolt broke out in Kabylia, the people in towns and villages not only attacked government buildings and businesses owned by generals, but also demanded that the police and the army leave the region. But the young people in Kabylia have also distanced themselves from the existing opposition parties–the religious parties, some of whom have been engaged in a decade-old, bloody civil war against the military and the two secular parties which have traditionally championed Berber cultural rights. Instead, the protesters formed town and village committees to coordinate their demonstrations. The massive Algiers rally, for example, was organized by these committees.
It remains to be seen how this mass movement will further develop. The solution to the problems of the workers and poor, in Algeria or elsewhere, can only come from their own independent organization aimed at defending their own interests.
Jun 25, 2001
The following is a translation of an article written by the comrades of UATCI (Union of African Communist Internationalist Workers), an African Trotskyist group active in the Ivory Coast.
One hundred forty people recently died of thirst in the desert in southern Libya. According to Nigerian authorities, the victims were people taking their chances in order to search for work elsewhere.
Leaving Niamey in Nigeria, about 165 people of different West African nationalities took the truck of a ferryman to go secretly to Libya or even on to emigrate to Europe. Along the way, the truck broke down. Without aid, 140 were soon dead; only 25 survived.
Unhappily this is not an isolated case. Recently, 86 Somalians suffered a similar fate. Leaving Somalia secretly to go to Saudi Arabia or Yemen, the boat they were on broke down in open seas. The crew made them jump into the ocean where they drowned. Those who refused were thrown overboard.
Look at what the capitalist system has in store for us! Dominating the world, it has turned the countries of the Third World into a vast workshop for exploiting and exporting raw materials. In order to have their grip on the riches of these countries, the big powers have set up regimes entirely in their pay. The big powers, like the local rulers, completely scorn the needs of the populations. The economy of the African countries doesn’t respond at all to the poor classes. The more ruinous the domination, the more the misery deepens.
In such a situation, part of the population searches increasingly to leave their countries in order to find work where there is some. There is, in fact, a permanent migration of the population of the poor countries toward those which are less poor, toward Europe or North America.
In order to flee the misery, the workers fall into the hands of smugglers, risking their lives. Those responsible for this situation pretend to be scandalized or even saddened when accidents leading to death happen like these most recent ones. But this doesn’t lessen their responsibility.
Jun 25, 2001
The following article is a translation of an article written by the comrades of Combat Ouvrier, a West Indian Trotskyist group active in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
The anniversary of the death of Bob Marley was celebrated in many corners of the globe. In Jamaica and the Caribbean, there were numerous commemorative events. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, artistic events, TV programs and commentaries marked the occasion.
It has been 20 years since the Jamaican reggae singer passed away. Bob Marley was a singer, musician, and songwriter of great talent. He also represented the youth of the poor ghettos. He himself came from the ghettos of Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. In a good number of his songs, he expressed not only the misery, but also the revolt which the young people of these ghettos knew–and still know. It’s not an accident that he was particularly popular in the poor neighborhoods where a good number of the youth recognized themselves in his music, and in part in his rastafarianism.
This religion consists of a belief in "Jah," that is, god who is reincarnated in the person of Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopia. It was of little importance to the rastas that Haile Selassie was a dictator, a very bloody one, in one of the poorest countries in the world. For them, Haile Selassie was a black messiah. His divine mission was to unify all black people in the world, starting first with unifying them in Africa. This rastafarian belief was accompanied by various daily rituals. Rastafarians are vegetarians, they praise the use of drugs, especially ganga, "the liberating herb" (marijuana), they put their hair in dreadlocks. Many live in rural communes. They protest against the society and its established order, which they call "Babylon."
Nevertheless, this protest remains passive. They do nothing which really calls it in question.
In Jamaica, the People’s National Party, the PNP, to this day understands the political gains it can make by addressing the rasta milieu and the youth in the ghettos. Electorally, the PNP benefitted enormously. When Bob Marley brought together the leader of the PNP and the leader of the JLP, the Jamaican Labor Party, which was the other major party, on the same stage in Kingston in April, 1978, it was, he said, to boost reconciliation, peace and reunification in Jamaica.
But this episode, which became famous and "historic" in Jamaica, showed very well the limits of the protests of Bob Marley and of the rastafarian milieu. Manley and Seaga, the leaders of the PNP and the JLP, were the representatives of the Jamaican bourgeoisie. Obviously, the bourgeoisie plays on the differences between those two parties, as it does in a number of countries. But both parties are directly or indirectly responsible for the misery, the ghettos and the violence which reigns there.
Bob Marley and the rastas, by their music, their marginal life-style, their non-conformism give illusions to the youth of the ghettos. Willingly or not, they mask reality in a profound social conservatism.
In the poor countries, the bourgeoisie gives the poor youth no chance to "make it." Some of the young look for a way out by a sort of flight into dreams, music, drugs. From time to time, one of them, like Bob Marley, is able to get out of the misery.
Yet thousands of young and less young in the ghettos make up a potentially revolutionary force. But they are not able to emancipate themselves and all the poor except by the revolutionary path, that calls in question capitalist society, whether post-colonial or imperialist. It is the capitalists who always, in searching to make more profits, create more poverty. And it is this poverty which makes millions of people live in immense ghettos. In the poor countries of the Caribbean or Africa, the poverty spreads out as far as the eye can see. From this is often born the music of the poor, like reggae. But it is again the capitalists–producers, managers of record houses and other millionaires–who enrich themselves the most from this music.
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery," sang Bob Marley. Yes, but one should add, from capitalist slavery, from wage slavery.
Because the real liberation will result from the destruction of these criminal parasites, the capitalists. The day when the working class creates a revolutionary party will be the day when it will lead all the youth in these ghettos to bring down the capitalist "Babylon" and create a new world. A world without exploitation of class and of race, without rich and poor.
Jun 25, 2001
On June 21, striking workers at the Up-To-Date Laundry in Baltimore voted to accept a three-year contract. The company agreed to recognize their union–UNITE! (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees)–for the first time. The workers also won some wage increases, as well as health and pension benefits and paid vacations for the first time.
Up-To-Date is the largest industrial laundry in Baltimore, employing over 250 people at its main plant. The company provides laundry services to several major hospitals and hotels in the area.
Most of the Up-To-Date workers are recent Hispanic immigrants or black and most of them are women. Racial discrimination and sexual abuse were rampant in the plant. Wages at Up-To-Date were miserable–only $6 an hour for many of the workers. On-the-job conditions were disgusting–very high heat and humidity, laundry contaminated with germs, blood, even hypodermic needles and pieces of body tissue. The company didn’t even provide gloves for workers handling this dangerous dirty laundry–except whenever there was a quick government inspection of the plant. The workers had few employee benefits.
In 1999, during an organizing campaign at Up-To-Date, enough workers signed union cards for the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) to order a union representation election. But, as is so often the case these days, the Up-To-Date bosses then used threats, intimidation and firings to try to stop the workers from voting for union representation. After months of this one-sided fight, the majority of the workers voted against the union in June 1999. The union then filed over 100 charges of unfair labor practices with the NLRB.
The NLRB eventually upheld many of these charges and ordered another election–it wasn’t until 21 months after the first election that the order came through. As part of an agreement with the NLRB, the company gave back pay to over three dozen fired workers, reinstating them in their jobs. It also agreed to allow UNITE! organizers into the plant.
None of this meant that the company was ready to accept the workers’ union. Shortly after a new union organizing campaign was started, ten more pro-union workers were fired by the Up-To-Date bosses. It appeared that the campaign to get a union was going to founder in the same trap as the first one had.
Instead, the workers walked out, beginning a strike on April 23. For ten weeks they maintained around-the-clock picket lines at the plant. They also got support from other workers and students who came to downtown lunchtime rallies. The strike was put in front of the working class of Baltimore.
The poor, largely female and minority workforce–workers who are all too frequently despised–showed that it is possible to take on the bosses directly and win.
The union continues to lose ground as they ask the workers who want a union to wait on NLRB elections or on a "friendly" boss who will agree to recognize the union just because the workers ask.
The Up-To-Date workers used their own strength against bosses who had always treated them with contempt... and they forced the bosses to begin to take their interests into account.
Jun 25, 2001
Bread and Roses is a new film depicting the lives of janitors in Los Angeles who clean a high rise office building and their attempts to build a union.
The film is fiction, but it is based loosely on the Justice for Janitors organizing campaign which built local unions of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The story of Bread and Roses takes place in 1999 as a group of Mexican immigrants is smuggled over the border and brought to downtown Los Angeles. Obviously, their precarious situation makes them more vulnerable to terrible exploitation in the U.S. Many undocumented workers in this country are forced to accept working hand to mouth in day labor or peddling just to survive. When the main character in the film, Maya, lands a job as a janitor in a large office building, it is a step up, even though the job pays the minimum wage, even though her boss is a tyrant who takes out the equivalent of a month’s pay from her first checks for the "privilege" of working for him.
The film, by Ken Loach, a well-known British director, whose best films have chronicled the stories of workers in Britain, captures the problems these workers face. Coming on the scene is Sam Shapiro, a former college student who became a union organizer. When he tries to organize this group of workers, most workers at first resist the idea because the company seems too powerful, while they feel weak. Some workers see the job as a stepping stone to a better job down the road. But when several workers are fired, most workers change their minds.
Where the film falls short is that it doesn’t really depict how the workers organize their own power to take on the company. Instead, the movie shows that much of the fight is carried out by Sam, the union organizer, whose strategy seems to depend on being able to embarrass the building managers and owners, such as when he barges into a fancy restaurant or when he and other workers crash a party in the building held by one of the building’s owners. In these scenes the workers appear to be assistants to the union organizer.
These scenes do not even hint at what the janitors really had to do just to force the cleaning companies to accept their union. For example, in 1991, a large Justice for Janitors demonstration outside the Century City complex was attacked savagely. L.A. police beat and arrested hundreds of demonstrators. But this attack called forth widespread protests by janitors and their supporters. It was this expansion of the fight that led several of the largest cleaning companies to officially recognize the union and negotiate the first contract.
That said, Bread and Roses is worth seeing because it tackles some of the problems and conditions that an important section of the working class faces, even if it doesn’t really show what workers have done when they decide to fight against those conditions.
Jun 25, 2001
"Attention: Active UAW Members and Retirees. If you own/drive a Ford Explorer, you and a guest may travel to Washington, D.C. to attend a rally to protest Firestone’s accusations that the Ford Explorer is an unsafe vehicle!!"
With these words, the UAW extended Ford’s invitation to Ford workers to defend their boss.
Ford, of course, made it worth the workers’ time. They would be paid hotel expenses for two nights in Washington, travel expenses, meals and gasoline charges–as well as their wages for three work days they could miss. All in all, Ford was offering an all-expense paid time off from work and a little jaunt to Washington–and all the workers had to do was show up driving Explorers and holding signs proclaiming their confidence in Ford’s concern for safety.
It’s certainly true that Firestone has attempted to shift the blame for the safety defects in certain of its AT tires onto Ford’s shoulders–just as Ford is attempting to throw the blame for the safety defects in the Ford Explorer into Firestone’s lap.
But the fact remains that both companies put out products which were unsafe–and which they knew were unsafe–for years. Both companies had been told by their own engineers that there were serious safety defects in these products.
In 1989, when Ford engineers warned top management of the propensity of the Explorer to roll over, top management ignored the warning–and continued to ignore the warning for the next 11 years. The main step they took was to order under-inflation of the tires–which simply exacerbated the propensity of the Firestone tires to shred when running hot.
Both companies have paid out big bucks in settlements to the families of people who have died–in settlements which are sealed, thereby preventing evidence from being presented in open court. But those millions of dollars already paid speak volumes about what each company knows about its own responsibility in this affair.
And yet, the UAW would ask its members to defend Ford’s concern for safety. This is the same Ford, in case anyone has forgotten, whose "concern for safety" resulted in six deaths and a dozen serious injuries in the explosion of its old Powerhouse at the Rouge Plant, in Dearborn, Michigan, in February of 1999. The top UAW officials who today are ready to organize a "UAW Explorer Safety Confidence Rally" are the same ones who not only refrained from indicting Ford for the Powerhouse deaths then, but even rushed to express their confidence in Ford’s concern for worker safety.
The mounting deaths associated with safety defects in the Explorer illustrate very clearly where Ford’s concerns are and have always been: the Explorer was Ford’s cash cow. To stop production of it in order to eliminate a serious safety defect would have meant cutting into some of those enormous profits that Ford has been rolling up.
Ford would not do it. And the UAW leadership cannot bring itself to condemn Ford for making a decision which could only mean that people would die so Ford could make more profit. In fact, several UAW officials explained that if Ford’s profits were cut back, so would be the workers "profit-sharing" checks. It is the perfect example of what it means when the union ties the workers’ hopes to their companies’ situation.
The workers’ prospects do not depend on the company’s prospects–they depend on whether the workers and their organizations are ready to put the workers’ needs first. Period. If profits are reduced–let executive salaries, bonuses and stock option plans be cut down. Let stockholders be denied dividends. Let the company stop taking billions of dollars with which it today plays on the stockmarket and buys and sells other companies. But let the workers have the income they need.
This rally is certainly not the worse pimping that UAW officials have done for Ford, but it is a very clear expression of what their partnership with Ford means and how much they have abased the union to keep it going.
Jun 25, 2001
In April of 1941, workers struck Ford, shutting down the huge Rouge complex in Dearborn Michigan. It was the first time the Rouge had ever been shut down by a strike. And this strike was what convinced Henry Ford I he had no choice but to accept the union the workers had built.
Standing behind this strike lay more than a decade of work carried out by Communist Party militants at Ford and other auto companies. The CP had issued shop papers at Ford through the latter part of the 1920s and into the 1930s. In so doing, it had built up a network in the plant, while it recruited a good number of militants. Their network of sympathizers in the plants became the union’s network. The CP, by this time, also had a reputation for fighting against racism, and this gave it a certain influence among the black workers whom Ford tried—unsuccessfully—to use against the union.
By 1940, the top UAW leaders were already turning their backs on the sit-down strikes that had won the union at GM and Chrysler. Instead, they called on the workers to look to the Roosevelt Administration in Washington and the Democratic governor in Michigan.
Results were slow in coming, however, and Ford was regularly firing union activists. By the beginning of 1941, the atmosphere in the Ford plants was heated.
On March 13, 3,000 workers in one division at the Rouge sat down on the job to protest the firings. On March 18, 6,000 workers in the axle building sat down until 12 fired unionists were rehired there. On March 19, another building struck and the company once again gave in. On March 21, Ford agreed to return more than 1,000 fired unionists.
But when management refused to talk with a rolling mill delegation about the firing of unionists in that building, the rolling mill workers stopped work on April 2, quickly spreading their strike to other departments and buildings. The UAW leaders had tried to head off the strike. But within nine hours, the whole Rouge was shut down.
At least 10,000 of the Rouge’s 85,000 workers ringed the plant in huge picket lines. The workers formed huge barricades with parked cars, shutting down all the roads leading to the plant. When cars were removed, workers began to form moving picket lines of cars four and five abreast all around the Rouge. Workers all over the area joined in, despite attempts by the top UAW leadership to keep the struggle restricted to Ford workers.
Within eight days, Ford agreed to accept the union and to reinstate most of the fired workers—providing the strikers would agree to go through an election supervised by the new NLRB.
In fact, it was obvious the workers would vote overwhelmingly for their union. But hinging recognition on this vote symbolized what was to follow: top UAW officials would now push workers to depend on government procedures and on negotiations between the bosses and union officials.
On April 12, a mass meeting of nearly 20,000 workers ratified—but only by a small majority—the proposal to end their strike under these conditions. The most conscious workers understood they could have forced Ford to recognize them directly instead of waiting for the government’s stamp of approval.
They went through the election and of course they won it.
From the moment of the victory, history was rewritten to obliterate the fact that it had been the workers’ own organized strength and determination to act that had built their union. Nonetheless, it was not the vote, but the determination of the most militant workers to organize a fight of their fellow workers which had forced Ford to accept the union.