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 10, 2005
Delphi, the giant auto parts supplier, which was part of the GM empire, says it wants to cut wages and benefits by two-thirds! Two-thirds! This comes on the heels of what the steel companies and airlines have already screwed out of their workers and retirees.We are getting hammered from every side. On the job, one worker is doing the work of three, and the other two are booted out the door. No job is safe.
The bosses are outright bloodthirsty.
So is the government. The politicians are constantly gutting vital programs: education, health care, unemployment insurance, workers compensation. Other programs, such as public health or public transportation, are in the process of disappearing. Even the National Hurricane Center had its budget slashed.
The government cut spending on the infrastructure–and then cut it again, letting the roads, bridges, water supply, sewage systems all go to ruin. Everything that allows society to operate and that protects us from disasters–like the levees around New Orleans–is neglected. All so that more money could be given to the wealthy.
It was government negligence and indifference that caused the incredible toll from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and not the storms themselves. Thousands of people were killed, millions are now refugees, because the lives of the workers and the poor are expendable to the corporations and their political lackeys.
In their eyes, we are something to be used up and tossed away. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is turning young people into cannon fodder. And why? Only so the rulers of this country can put their hands on more oil, more money, more power.
A tiny minority is getting ever richer and more powerful, while our world disintegrates.
Don’t tell us we have to pin all our hopes on getting Bush out of office. That means waiting. And we don’t have the time. Waiting got us into this disaster in the first place.
As disgusting as Bush is, he is only a puppet. Pulling the strings are his corporate masters. Just like the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana, the Republican president does what the puppet master wants.
We need to respond to the attacks, we need to take on the corporate bosses and their political henchmen. It may be true that there are few people fighting today. So we start where we are, with the forces we have, against the enemy we can take on.
What we do can influence others. The mother of one soldier killed in Iraq decided to confront Bush. Others joined in, and that echoed all over the country. How much more couldn’t we do when workers join their forces together.
Working people are fed up about the war, job cuts, unceasing demands by the bosses and politicians to give up more and more. Fed up as we all are, living in a society crumbling around our feet, we can turn back the tide of attacks. And no one else can do it for us.
Oct 10, 2005
Only the top one% of all taxpayers had increases in income that were greater than the rate of inflation in 2003. Everyone else saw their incomes lose ground to inflation.
These were the conclusions of a new study on wealth in the United States, organized by Edward Wolf, an economist at NYU. Among other things, Wolf also showed that the richest one-tenth of 1% of the population, just 129,000 taxpayers, had more income in 2003 than the entire poorest third of the U.S. population, over 43 million taxpayers.
People often say they feel they are getting poorer. It’s not just a feeling.
Oct 10, 2005
As the Navigant scandal broke into the open, Zev Yaroslavsky exclaimed: "For them to be contemptuous of the taxpaying public in this way, it turns my stomach." What a lot of hot air!
Yaroslavsky is one of the L.A. County supervisors who helped spearhead the closing of King/Drew’s trauma center and demanded the closure of the entire hospital, which serves a poor, working-class community! He and others like him shamelessly took taxpayer money out of public services and handed it out to the likes of Navigant.
They’re not shocked at corruption–they’re only upset their cronies got caught!
Oct 10, 2005
Boasting that communities will now "have more power to hold companies accountable and make informed decisions about how toxic chemicals are managed," the EPA proposed new rules on emissions of toxic chemicals.
Hearing that, one reasonably might think the EPA was strengthening its rules–but no, not at all.
Under its new rules, industrial companies will not have to report leaks of toxic chemicals unless more than 5,000 pounds has leaked out, up from 500 pounds under current law. And the EPA wants to allow all industrial companies to go two years between reports, instead of one year under the old rules.
The 1986 law which required companies to make these reports certainly had a lot of loopholes–but the EPA is proposing to expand the loopholes to fill the whole space!
Oct 10, 2005
The news media now admits that its reports describing wanton violence and lawlessness in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were wrong. There was no widespread looting, as every single news channel and newspaper reported. No mobs broke into the WalMart and took all the guns and ammunition. No opposing gangs rampaged in the streets. People did not shoot at helicopters trying to rescue them. Wrong too were all the reports of homicides and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana Superdome. There were not 30 or 40 decomposing bodies inside a freezer in the Convention Center, including a girl whose throat was slashed. All told, the police say that there were four murders for that week–which is typical in a city that anticipated 200 murders for this year.
"I think 99% of it is bullshit," commented Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney of the Louisiana National Guard, who served inside the Superdome.
"I certainly saw fights," said Major Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who also worked in the Superdome that week, "but I saw worse fights at a Cubs game in Chicago. The people never turned into these animals." On the contrary, Major Bush said, "What I saw in the Superdome was a tremendous number of people helping people.... They have been cheated out of being thought of as these tough people who looked out for each other."One of the few officials with the Department of Social Services in the Superdome told of how rough teenagers helped save those who were collapsing from heat and exhaustion every few minutes. "Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said, "But they worked their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the New Orleans Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
These officials also reported about how people worked to keep each other safe in the kind of common sense ways that ordinary people do when they come together.
Faced with the most horrifying conditions, the people trapped inside the Superdome and Convention Center behaved in an exemplary fashion. Top city officials, despite the regular reports from their own officials about what really was going on, spread vicious rumors against them.
Eddie Compass, then the city police chief, promulgated rumors in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking on armed bands of thugs at every turn.
Later on, he was forced to admit that this never happened.
As for Mayor Ray Nagin, he also continuously embellished on the stories of the wanton violence and lawlessness. As late as September 6 in an interview by Oprah Winfrey he still described the scene inside the Superdome as "animalistic." "In that frickin’ Superdome for five days I was watching dead bodies, I was watching hooligans killing people, raping people," Nagin lied.
These lies were told to justify calling for tens of thousands of National Guard and regular military troops to bolster the police. The military was used to protect the mansions of the wealthy, as well as the business district and the French Quarter, which were all on high ground and had not been flooded.
City officials want the military to stop people from leaving the enormous shelters with their unspeakable conditions and moving into the grand mansions, hotels and office buildings. Officials wanted to stop them from getting into the big stores and restaurants that were stocked high with food and clothing, which could have been used to feed and clothe those who lost almost everything.
In other words, instead of opening those places up and bringing people into them, making their resources available to them, the city officials did the opposite, thus costing countless lives.
These lies and slanders against the working class and poor of New Orleans were told to uphold what is most sacred in this capitalist society–the private property of the wealthy.
Oct 10, 2005
The City of Detroit is turning 800 young children out of the public schools–and not for lack of money. The city could have had more than three million dollars in Head Start money from the federal government to pay for the kids’ education.
The city says it simply can’t find the space for the students. Can’t find space? Between 2000 and 2004, the city closed or consolidated 21 schools. Since last June, it closed 30 more. Of course, while the city has been closing schools, it has had 42 charter schools open up in the city.
In other words, while enrollment declined in the public schools, many of those students, and money for their education, have left for the charter schools. Not because charter schools give a better education. Every study made shows they are worse. But charter schools certainly do give money to the businesses and churches that run them.
The Detroit School Board ought to be ashamed–closing schools while shuffling students to charter schools–and then pretending they don’t have enough students to keep schools open at the same time they’re turning 800 students away!
Oct 10, 2005
The House of Representatives gave a nice gift to the oil companies. It passed a bill called the "Gasoline for America’s Security Act."
The bill still has to pass the Senate. If it does, it would delay current deadlines for smog cleanup until 2015 or later. It also provides subsidies to the mega-wealthy oil corporations if they construct new refineries or refurbish old ones–paid for out of our tax money, of course! And it gives the President the authority to designate federal land to be used as refinery sites. It’s all nothing but an enormous handout.
The politicians pretend they’re acting because of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to ensure gasoline supplies during a crisis. In reality, they took advantage of Katrina to raise prices–then took advantage of higher prices to reach still further into our pockets.
The Democrats blame the passage of the bill on sneakiness by the Republicans. The bill passed by a vote of 212 to 210. The Republicans strong-armed two of their members to change their votes at the last minute. All the Democrats could figure to do was shout "Shame!" If they had really wanted to stop the bill, they could have found a way, like making sure that their six members who abstained had voted.
We can blame both parties for this bill!
Oct 10, 2005
Navigant Consulting, the company that was hired to "turn around" the King/Drew hospital near Watts, has been caught with its hands in the cookie jar.
An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that Navigant had double-billed for plane tickets and charged the county for first-class travel, luxury car rentals on weekends and trips unrelated to King/Drew. Navigant’s top manager at King/Drew, Kae Robertson, for example, charged the county for a $2,425 round-trip flight between Rochester, New York, and Washington, D.C., with no stop at Los Angeles. She also billed the county for a $1,088 Hawaii trip, which was for another client. A $1,588 ticket to Florida was billed twice. And the county was charged $548 for a flight Robertson never took.
Instead of taking the train or driving, one nursing consultant flew the 150-mile distance between San Diego and Los Angeles every week, spending nearly $700 each time in airline and cab fares. Navigant consultants routinely upgraded their flights to first class and their rental cars to luxury. A Navigant executive defended these charges, saying: "Such expenses are routinely accepted in the private sector."It’s true. And that’s exactly why it’s a big lie when we are told that services at King/Drew hospital would be provided "more efficiently" and even "less expensively" if they were turned over to private enterprise–which would run a hefty profit on top of such extra expenses!
Oct 10, 2005
In September, the Baltimore City Council voted to pass the mayor’s proposal to build a 305-million-dollar Hilton hotel downtown. The hotel is to be financed entirely by city bonds.
Bonds may sound like a way for taxpayers not to pay. But that’s not true. The actual investors in bonds may be wealthy, but the bonds have to be repaid–and so does the interest. And that’s all paid from the city’s budget. Last year, Baltimore City’s budget paid 68 million dollars for repayment of interest on bonds and loans issued in the past. That means money not going to meet the population’s needs.
Every Baltimore resident pays a big cost, because the sewers have overflowed, health care for the uninsured has been cut back, children go to 75-year old schools with broken windows, doors and heating systems, rec centers have closed, and parks and recreation workers have been laid off.
If hotel and other development deals were so profitable, the politicians would surely brag about them, especially at election time. Instead, as one council member opposed to this hotel deal put it, "If it [financing hotels] is too risky for a private investor, why in the world are we going to do it?"So why are the politicians turning our money over to the 100-billion dollar a year hotel industry, which showed a 15% profit last year?
Oct 10, 2005
After Katrina, Bush’s job approval ratings took a huge hit–a well-deserved hit! Bush and his handlers frantically tried to make up ground. They arranged a major speech, which was all a rehash of the old terrorist scares and how well Bush is doing against terrorism.
Since he didn’t see the U.S. cavalry riding over the hill to his rescue, Bush tried to have terrorists fill in for a while.
Oct 10, 2005
On September 15, a general strike against price increases paralyzed Jamaica. There have been sharp increases in the price of many everyday goods and services such as electricity, transportation, food, animal feed and other things.
The Jamaican Labor Party, which today is in opposition to the party in power, called for the demonstrations. But their size went beyond the wishes of the opposition politicians. They called for peaceful protests, without any roadblocks, but their instructions weren’t followed. According to the Minister of National Security, roads were blocked and police were attacked. This reveals the population’s exasperation with the enormous difficulties they face just trying to survive.
Oct 10, 2005
A new report by Human Rights Watch contains testimony from three soldiers who participated in torturing detainees at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the soldiers is identified as Capt. Ian Fishback of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; the other two, both sergeants from the same division, asked not to be identified. Capt. Fishback, who also reported the torture incidents to the offices of two U.S. senators, said that he decided to go public after trying in vain to get his superiors to do something about it for 17 months.
The three soldiers described in detail daily, systematic torture incidents involving severe beatings, exposure to extreme hot and cold as well as to corrosive chemicals, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation. Most of these reported abuses took place in Camp Mercury near Falluja, between September 2003 and April 2004. That is, all this was going on during the height of the media attention to Abu Ghraib. "We still did it, but we were careful," said one of the sergeants.
The three soldiers testified that they learned the torture techniques they used from watching CIA agents interrogating detainees in Afghanistan. And, like the torturers of Abu Ghraib, these three Camp Mercury torturers said that they abused detainees in order to "soften them up" before interrogation, as ordered by military intelligence officers. The soldiers felt so confident about having a free hand to torture detainees that they did it even "for amusement," as one soldier put it. Once, an army cook showed up in the detention area, ordered a detainee to bend over and broke his leg with a metal baseball bat. One of the soldiers said that they "kept it to broken arms or legs," because they were ordered to be careful not to kill detainees.
The Bush administration and military claimed that Abu-Ghraib was an isolated case, that there was no systematic policy to torture detainees, that the horrendous abuses captured in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos were the result of a "lack of training." These testimonies from an elite army unit put the lie to this crap.
But then, it’s not the first time these lies are being exposed. Anybody who reads the newspaper or watches the news on TV must be aware of the systematic nature of torture at U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since torture at Abu Ghraib was revealed one and a half years ago, the Army alone has opened more than 400 inquiries on reported cases of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, the Washington Post released memos signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, clearly giving his approval for torture and even suggesting that some of the techniques used were too mild!
And yet, so far, nobody ranked higher than prison guards has been put on trial for torture. All those military intelligence and CIA agents who, in testimony after testimony, are said to have ordered and carried out torture, are left off the hook. All the military officers in charge of the torture prisons are left off the hook. All those higher-ranked officers up the chain of command, whose knowledge, approval and cover-up of torture is well-documented in memos and testimonies, are left off the hook. And Rumsfeld and Bush and that whole gang of crooks, whose instructions to military officers to use torture is well-documented, are left off the hook.
But then, who would seriously expect war criminals to prosecute themselves and voluntarily go to jail? The population of this country and of all those countries abused by them are the only ones who can call them to account.
Oct 10, 2005
Not even two weeks after the last Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers supposedly left the Gaza Strip "liberated," the Israeli army again went on a violent offensive against the Palestinian population.
A deadly explosion in Gaza during a military parade organized by Hamas left 19 Palestinians dead. The Palestinian Authority said the cause of the explosion was an accident, but many remained suspicious that the "accident" was an Israeli action. In any case, homemade rockets were fired in reprisal from a border village in Palestine into the Israeli town of Sderot. Six people there were wounded. The Israeli army responded strongly. The government of Ariel Sharon used this incident to justify deploying heavy artillery batteries along the Gaza Strip, organizing air raids and launching missiles that led to the death of four leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Twenty civilians were also wounded. The Israeli military destroyed buildings, including a school, and terrorized the population in the overcrowded neighborhoods and surrounding countryside.
"We don’t intend to launch just occasional operations, but rather to maintain an ongoing operation whose objective is to hit the terrorists by every means," insisted Sharon during these attacks. To make his point, he organized the arrest of many hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank, the majority of whom were suspected of being political militants. In particular, the Israelis arrested many Hamas candidates for the upcoming municipal elections that are scheduled in the occupied territories.
No matter what pretext the Israeli government invokes, the conditions in which one and a half million Palestinians live, stacked into the Gaza Strip, keeps this territory a powder keg ready to explode. In the absence of a perspective for a viable Palestinian state, many young Palestinians are influenced by Islamic groups which present themselves as radicals. Hamas and other groups fill a power vacuum left by the weak and despised Palestinian Authority.
The Israeli government continues its policy of expanding the settler colonies in the West Bank. It also unashamedly continues the construction of the "apartheid" wall that encircles areas inhabited by Palestinians. This wall further reduces the physical existence of a Palestinian state to a succession of autonomous "reserves."
The recent increase in Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians may be linked to a struggle going on within Sharon’s own Likud party. Sharon played the tough guy at the very moment when his party’s central committee was trying to decide on a date for presenting next year’s candidates. Sharon barely saved his position, with just under 52% of the 3000 members of the party’s leading body supporting him. His rival, Netanyahu, who opposed the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza, made his appeal to the right-wing extremists and ultra-religious groups.
Sharon is no man of peace, even if he did oversee the withdrawal of a few Israeli settlers from Gaza. He proves it by his competition with Netanyahu to see who will take the tougher stance against the Palestinians.
The chief victims of the hypocritical "peace process" are the Palestinians. But if the Israeli majority wants a peaceful settlement of the conflicts, it cannot count on either Sharon or Netanyahu. Nor can it count on the leaders of the Israeli Labor Party who have never presented a policy fundamentally different than that of the right-wing parties, and who give support to Sharon today.
Oct 10, 2005
The following article is excerpted from an editorial in the October 7th edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), newspaper of the revolutionary workers organization of that name in France. It discusses the meaning of the large demonstrations that took place in cities around France on October 4th. So many workers took part that public transport, city services, post offices and even some private companies were partially or completely shut down. Effectively, these angry workers from workplaces and cities all over the country staged a one-day strike to protest the worsening situation.
The day of action on October 4th was a success. Large numbers participated, both in Paris and in many other cities. There were workers from the railroads, public transit, city governments, the postal service and many other public services, as well as many workers from the private sector, and not only in companies threatened by layoffs. This turn-out is an encouragement for all workers....
We can no longer count all the blows that the bosses and the government have rained down on the workers. The big companies, even those making billions in profit, lay off workers, freeze wages and hire mostly temporary replacements. The government facilitates their task by suppressing the few provisions in the law still protecting workers. And the government adopts budgets that give enormous gifts to the big companies and wealthy individuals, while cutting back on unemployment compensation, social insurance and pensions, that is, on whatever benefits the working class.
This has been going on for years. Governments change, the parties in power trade places, but the blows against the workers continue.
So workers must react. The workers of SNCM (the Marseille-Corsica Ferry Service) have reacted to the plan to sell off their company for a tenth of its value to a speculative fund, which will cost hundreds of jobs. With the support of the port workers of Marseille and Corsica, they showed that they have no intention of keeping quiet while their throats are cut. They forced the government to back down somewhat: those sailors imprisoned for taking over a ship were released and the French state will keep possession of one quarter of the company. The workers of SNCM continue to fight and are right to do so. The plan to privatize the company is still there–as is the threat of layoffs hanging over several hundred workers.
Our only way forward is to defend ourselves. It’s vital, for if we stop, the bosses and government will continue their offensive. They don’t have confidence in their own economy. They won’t invest if the market isn’t promising. They want more profit with less spending on investment or research; so they exploit workers more. Their current profits, which are really extravagant despite the listless economy, are realized from our labor. The big, middle and even little bourgeoisie make so much money that they don’t know what to do with it, while the working class is pushed into misery. If things are left up to them, they will continue in the same way.
There is only one way to oppose the bosses’ desire to profit and increase their stockholders’ dividends at any cost: threaten their profits....
As many workers participated in the demonstrations and strikes of October 4th as did in the one last March 10th. Despite the attacks suffered by workers since then, their determination hasn’t weakened. The union leaders, however, waited almost seven months to follow up on March 10th.A follow-up to October 4th is needed, and quickly! Those workers who still hesitate can see by the October 4th demonstration the force the working class can muster and they can join others showing such determination. We have to strike while the iron is hot. We must continue the mobilization until the working class in its entirety is ready to mobilize and engage the struggle up to the point that it gains its vital objectives: a general increase in wages, ending the casualization of labor, the prohibition of mass layoffs and the withdrawal of all the reactionary measures taken by the government.
Oct 10, 2005
On September 23, the FBI killed Filiberto Ojeda, age 72, in a shootout in a small farm town in western Puerto Rico. Ojeda, who had been living in Puerto Rico for fifteen years while being sought by the FBI, was the founder of a Puerto Rican nationalist group, the Macheteros (Machete men).
According to the New York Times, "Though Mr. Ojeda Rios was a controversial figure on the island, his death in a shootout with FBI agents last week in Hormigueros, PR, has outraged Puerto Ricans of all political stripes, not just the small fraction who support independence, but also those who embrace the island’s status as an American commonwealth and even those who want it to be a state."At his wake in the capital San Juan, there was a line several blocks long, and at his funeral in his hometown hundreds crowded the cemetery. People blocked major highways in San Juan. Even the government of Puerto Rico said his house would be turned into a museum and the street leading up to it would be named for him.
Ojeda was a nationalist. His organization at one point turned to terrorism, substituting the armed actions of a small group for the fights of the population. If people came out in response to his killing, it was not because they supported his organization or his ideas. It’s because of what the killing showed about the heavy hand the U.S. still wields over Puerto Rico.
Part of the reason for popular indignation was the day on which he was killed, September 23rd. It is an important Puerto Rican holiday, the date of an unsuccessful rebellion against Spanish rule. The anger was also over the way he was killed. After a stakeout, the FBI came to his door and a shoot-out erupted. The FBI airlifted an agent who had been shot to a hospital, leaving Ojeda, who had also been shot, behind. The FBI prevented anyone from entering the house for 20 hours. The autopsy said Ojeda slowly bled to death but would have lived if he had received proper medical assistance.
The incident was a reminder that Puerto Rico does not control its own destiny.
Oct 10, 2005
Hurricane Katrina may have exposed some of the raw truth about this class society. But it’s not a new story. In 1927, an off-the-charts flood engulfed the entire Mississippi River watershed system–running from Pittsburgh in the east and Nebraska in the west, down into New Orleans. Twenty-seven thousand square miles were flooded. Nearly a million people became refugees. The dead could not be reliably counted.
John M. Barry, in his book Rising Tide, tells the story of this flood in a way that reveals some of the class lines in 1927: Rising Tide shows the absolute control wielded by plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta and bankers in New Orleans, control which allowed them to protect their financial interests at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of the general population.
In the 1920s, agriculture in the South was dominated by plantation owners like LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi. His wealth depended on the labor of hundreds of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers. It was their labor that raised and reinforced the levees that protected Percy’s holdings. And it was their labor that Percy sought to hang onto by imprisoning them on the levees as flood waters destroyed the surrounding countryside.
Levees for miles along the Mississippi and its tributaries were turned into one big armed concentration camp. Food and water were delivered to this imprisoned population by the same tugs and barges that the Guards’ guns kept them from escaping on.
It might as well have been slavery and it helped reinforce the Great Migration from the plantations after the flood waters went down. Sharecropper families, having lost everything, began slipping away, going north. The withdrawal of their labor put an end to the Delta plantation era.
Below Greenville, in New Orleans, there were also "men of consequence," the city’s bankers who sought to maintain their credit ratings and the investments of Eastern financiers by dynamiting a section of levee and allowing the Mississippi’s floodwaters to drain out onto two poor counties just south of New Orleans.
In fact, the failure of the levees further upstream was already reducing the threat against New Orleans. But the bankers, worried about New Orleans’ economic reputation, destroyed the levees anyway.
The bankers, "honorable men" all, signed an indemnity agreement with the small towns to be flooded and their people, pledging to cover all losses. But their promises turned out to be worthless, just as their honor turned out to be non-existent. The residents of the flooded counties–many of them the poorest whites–were ruined, many driven from the area permanently.
Then there was that other "honorable man," Herbert Hoover, who used the plight of the refugees all up and down the Mississippi to gain prominence for himself, and then the presidency.
Barry’s book shows all this and much more–how the Army Corps of Engineers made disastrous decisions, adding not only to the flood of 1927, but to subsequent ones; how the racism of the time permeated the actions of the ruling class. And finally, how social class decides who lives and who dies during a disaster. Not much has changed since 1927.
Oct 10, 2005
DaimlerChrysler Corporation (DCX) held a press conference celebrating the first of its two new engine plants in Dundee, Michigan. But DCX was really celebrating its total defeat of traditional union safeguards for workers.
Connections with Chrysler’s present workforce were broken. The UAW agreed there would be no transfers of other DCX workers into the new plant.
Traditional job descriptions and protections have been discarded for a "flexible" workforce. The Dundee plant manager said, "anyone can do anything, any time, anywhere." To emphasize the point, workers are required to wear uniforms. The manager did not say what would happen to workers who become unable to "do anything, anytime, anywhere."The 8-hour day is history. Ten-hour days, four days a week will be standard. Limited to 40 hours a week, this isn’t necessarily so bad. But when overtime is required? Workers can expect that the standard will become 10-hour, 5- and 6-day weeks, as enforced at DCX’s Warren (MI) truck plant just a few years ago.
The two new plants, known as GEMA (Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance, because they also will make engines for Mitsubishi and Hyundai) will eventually employ 550 workers. But only 250 will be unionized as Chrysler workers! One hundred fifty will be salaried and 150 will be suppliers’ employees working inside the plants–a fragmented, weakened, three-tier workforce.
A United Auto Workers’ Vice-President said, approvingly, "GEMA is just the beginning of what the UAW is going to do.... This footprint will be carried on."This brutal footprint on the necks of workers, that is.
Oct 10, 2005
Delphi Corporation, world’s largest supplier of automotive parts, declared bankruptcy for its U.S. unit on October 8. As stated by a Reuters reporter, "The auto parts maker is not cash-strapped but is filing to take advantage of current, more lenient bankruptcy rules. ...It is also filing to pressure its unions to come up with wage concessions."Indeed, the entire Delphi saga is little more than an elaborate maneuver by General Motors to violate its promises to workers, to escape from GM’s pension and benefit obligations, reduce 34,000 U.S. hourly workers to near-poverty conditions, and threaten every U.S. auto worker with the same treatment. Of course, immense rewards will go to executives who successfully captain and steer the maneuver, and the largest stockholders will reap the ultimate benefits.
If it were only a matter of manufacturing efficiency, GM would not have spun off Delphi in l999. Delphi’s many parts plants contributed at least 12 billion dollars’ worth of goods to GM. It’s far easier to manage such large, complicated production systems if all the various parts are under one management with one set of standards and one communication system. It’s more efficient.
But GM was willing to accept inefficiencies–that is, to pay extra–in order to dump some of its debt, in particular, its debt to the workers. So they "spun off" Delphi, pretending under a legal fiction that it was "independent." It was a strange kind of independence, to be as completely integrated as ever in GM’s manufacturing process–but claiming independence (and poverty) in relation to union contracts.
In fact the independence was so completely fictitious that only wheeler-dealer accounting could make Delphi appear to be a viable company on its own. An SEC investigation and a class-action lawsuit are under way, regarding that accounting during 1999-2001.
To complete the maneuver, Delphi this year hired vulture capitalist Robert "Steve" Miller, and Jack Butler of the legal firm Skadden, Arps.
Miller previously guided Federal-Mogul Corporation into bankruptcy to protect its shareholders from liability in asbestos lawsuits. And as CEO of Bethlehem Steel, Miller put it into bankruptcy, decimating retirees’ pensions, destroying their health care, cutting active workers’ jobs, wages and benefits. He then sold the leftovers, which, as part of the new Mittal Steel, were instantly profitable.
Jack Butler was lead counsel for Kmart when Kmart dumped its own debts, leaving its workers and its common stockholders high and dry. Kmart then came out of bankruptcy and (miracle of miracles!) found it had enough cash and credit to immediately buy up the much larger Sears Roebuck empire!
Speaking of cash and credit, Delphi has a consortium of the very biggest banks committed to supporting it during the bankruptcy–banks like JP Morgan, Chase and Citigroup, Inc. These are not exactly institutions which buy into losing propositions!
While GM and Delphi make sure that newspaper accounts are full of frightening statistics, the Kmart and Bethlehem Steel examples showed how much these sorts of statistics are worth. Certainly the banks aren’t frightened! Nor is GM, which is making no detectable effort to find alternative suppliers.
Now that the steel industry, the airline industry, and Kmart have proof-tested the bankruptcy game, all companies understand how it can be done. And so far, what has any executive seen, that might hold them back? Only in the case of Northwest Air has any group of workers tried to actively stand up in their own defense–and that group was too small to prevail.
Neither courts nor union negotiations behind the scenes have made any difference to corporations determined to get out from under what they owe the workers. The only option left untried in the workers’ defense is the option which first won pensions, benefits, and higher wages: collective action on a massive, massive scale.
Oct 10, 2005
Speaking about the possibility of an avian flu outbreak, the president said at last week’s press conference, "We’re watching it. We’re careful. We’re in communication with the world. I’m not predicting an outbreak. I’m just suggesting to you that we better be thinking about it. And we are. And we’re more than thinking about it, we’re trying to put plans in place."Apparently the "thinking" is going quite slowly. Since the avian bird flu strain was identified in 1997, the Clinton administration had three years and the Bush administration had more than four years to come up with a way to deal with flu epidemics. Seasonal flu, without any strain of the avian type, already kills an estimated 35,000 people each winter in the U.S.
If the government were really getting ready to combat an outbreak of avian flu or any flu epidemic, it would have proposed to act in three areas: strengthening the public health system, funding medical research into the flu, and preparing to destroy sick animals.
To deal with an epidemic, what’s required is a centralized public health system. To all intents and purposes, the United States has no public health system. Public hospital after public hospital has been closed. Those still open are woefully understaffed and underfunded. They cannot cope with the flood of 40 million uninsured patients.
There is no way to really count cases of flu, or any other disease, contagious or not. Much reporting to the Centers for Disease Control is voluntary. A recent report by the non-profit Trust for America’s Health found that fewer than 20 states can even track diseases by computer.
The current secretary of Health and Human Services, in fact, says that in a flu outbreak, decisions will have to be made locally. We saw how effective local control was in the face of public disaster with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita!
Nowhere in the country has serious research been well-funded to explain how avian flu can jump from chickens to humans. And the large pharmaceutical companies, a 500 billion dollar a year industry, refuse to research the disease or to manufacture flu vaccines. They say there’s not enough profit in it.
In Britain, in order to contain mad cow disease public officials had to destroy entire herds. But the political supporters of big business who call themselves Congress have never ordered their buddies in agri-business to destroy diseased flocks or herds. Yet the public needs a law requiring the immediate destruction of diseased animals–and other animals in contact with diseased ones.
The U.S. government, able to spend billions on wars overseas and corporate tax breaks at home, has not prepared seriously for a bad outbreak of flu, avian or otherwise, despite Bush’s smirking for TV cameras while talking about it.
The director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University put it clearly: "This country is phenomenally not prepared."