the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 30, 2015
The U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan continue. Any official reassurances and promises by U.S. officials about these wars ending are outright lies.
In Iraq, U.S. warplanes have been bombing the city of Tikrit. Despite U.S. official claims that there are no U.S. combat troops on the ground, you can bet there are plenty of U.S. “advisors,” along with mercenaries and CIA agents, even as they try to use Iranian troops, militias and selected Iraqi army units to do their dirty work. This battle for Tikrit is only the opening act in a new of phase of an ongoing war for control of the country. Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq and a center of the oil industry, could very well be the next much, much bigger target.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is also raging. That’s what Obama admitted when he announced that he was keeping 10,000 U.S. troops there for the entire year. Officials say those troops are necessary for combat during the “spring fighting season.” No, the fighting is not only for the spring. And don’t buy the line that there are “only” 10,000 U.S. troops–not when you count the CIA, State Department officials and U.S. contractors.
When the U.S. military invaded and toppled the regimes of those two countries more than a decade ago, it lit the match to a region that was already a powder keg. Historically the peoples had been divided up and used against each other by the different imperialist powers. Today, it’s U.S. imperialism that seeks to tighten its grip over the whole region.
The U.S. installed dictatorships in both countries, that were so hated and corrupt, only sowed disorder. To prop up their puppets, the U.S. tried to drown insurgencies and resistance in blood and fire. When that didn’t work, the U.S. government tried dividing peoples against each other, setting those countries ablaze in civil wars. The U.S. supported and armed militias and warlords, who justified their dictatorship over peoples by religious fundamentalism and superstition that came straight out of the Dark Ages. The CIA and Special Forces tried to buy influence by doling out enormous shrink-wrapped bricks of cash like candy.
Those militias, such as ISIS, that today oppose the U.S. in Iraq, had originally been tied to the U.S. Many of these fighters came out of the same Sunni forces that the U.S. had previously armed and used in order to try to consolidate the hold of the U.S. puppet government. After they were no longer useful to the U.S., the Iraqi government tried to imprison and execute them. When they turned against that government, as well as the U.S., they used the same brutal, oppressive methods as before, when they served their former U.S. sponsors.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have now spread. From Afghanistan, the war spread to Pakistan and it exacerbated the ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India, enormous countries with nuclear weapons. From Iraq, the war spread to Syria and down to Yemen.
These wars threaten to engulf large parts of the globe, creating increasingly barbaric conditions.
These wars are not accidents or mistakes. They come out of the drive of U.S. imperialism to impose its domination over the Middle East. They are the inevitable consequence of the move by giant U.S. oil companies to suck the region dry of its vast wealth. The U.S. state apparatus–governments, state department bureaucracy, armed forces–are little more than the servants of the oil companies and the banks that stand behind them.
Mar 30, 2015
Last week a PG County cop was indicted on charges that included first-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Officer Jenchesky Santiago was on patrol in a Bowie, Maryland neighborhood last May when he told two men they were parked illegally outside a home. They were not. The driver explained he was dropping off his cousin. Santiago ordered the man who had been walking toward his house to return to the car. When the man didn’t return, Santiago blocked him from entering his home, pulled his gun and held it against the man’s head.
Then Santiago proclaimed to the men: “We’re PGPD. We shoot people.”
Many people in PG County felt like the cop was speaking the truth! One person even suggested changing the police department motto, from “Protect and Serve” to “We Shoot People.”
PG County’s police chief Mark Magaw said in a statement, “These actions are not indicative of the high standards we expect from our officers.”
But this is not an isolated incident and PG County cops have a decades-old reputation for being aggressive and dangerous.
In July of 1999, the U.S. Justice Department complained about excessive use of force by the PGPD canine unit.
In 2005, at least three PG cops seriously beat a University of Maryland student during what they called a “riot” after Maryland beat rival team Duke.
In February of 2012, corporal Donald Taylor beat Ryan Dorn so hard with the butt of his gun that the weapon fired. He was also indicted for assault and misconduct in office, but later found “not guilty” and acquitted of all charges.
Also in 2012, Corporal Ricky Adey was indicted for assaulting a teenage boy during an arrest. Adey was also acquitted.
It seems like it’s business as usual for the Prince Georges county Police Department.
Time for that business to be shut down!
Mar 30, 2015
On April 7, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will face a runoff election against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Both are Democrats.
Many people in Chicago were excited that Garcia forced Emanuel into a runoff. Emanuel has earned the nickname “Mayor 1%” by closing schools and mental health clinics, privatizing services, increasing fees and tickets that fall on ordinary people, and handing over enormous tax breaks and subsidies to corporations.
Garcia seemed different. He spoke against the schools closings and privatizations and accused Emanuel of helping downtown at the expense of the neighborhoods. The fact that Garcia forced Emanuel into a runoff shows that people are fed up with the politics as usual that works against them.
But according to the not very reliable polls, it seems Garcia is falling behind. Maybe this is because Emanuel has spent ungodly amounts of money. Maybe it’s because he has the backing of the Democratic Party’s machine. But maybe it’s also because, in trying to appeal to middle class voters, Garcia has gone out of his way to seem “respectable” and “responsible.”
One example is Garcia’s answer when asked if he was too beholden to the Chicago Teachers Union. He said the city doesn’t have enough money for “the union to come out completely happy with any dealings.” And, because he knows the leaders of the union, he could sit down with them and get them to see the city’s position.
We don’t know why Garcia has dropped in the polls, or who is going to win. But we do know that for someone to run and really try to make a change, they would have to start by telling the truth: there is plenty of money in Chicago for decent schools, parks, roads, services, and to cover the budget deficit. We have to take it back from the corporations that have stolen it. And someone who wanted to be mayor in order to do these things would start by saying he would use every aspect of the office he could to help the population organize to put their hands on that wealth.
Mar 30, 2015
Both candidates in the Chicago mayoral election talk about “distrust” between the police and the city’s black population. Big surprise! Black people have NO reason to trust the Chicago Police Department.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Chicago police stopped and frisked people without arresting them more than 250,000 times over four months last summer. This is more than four times the rate in New York, when stop and frisk was at its peak!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, about 3/4ths of those stopped were black, even though black people make up only about 1/3 of Chicago’s population. Black people were even more likely to be stopped in white neighborhoods. And most of the time, the police not only had no reason, they couldn’t even make up an excuse about criminal activity to justify the harassment.
In other words, the basic policy of the Chicago Police Department is to hassle young black men by the hundreds of thousands. And, even though white people use and sell drugs at a higher rate, the cops send many more black people to jail for drug crimes. And it’s why, finally, the cops kills so many young black men on the street–it’s a direct consequence of their policy of targeting them for harassment and arrest.
Yes, there is “distrust” and “suspicion” of the police among black people in Chicago. For good reason!
Mar 30, 2015
A police dashcam video came out showing police in Inkster, a Detroit suburb, beating Floyd Dent during a traffic stop. The cops claim Dent refused their orders to show his hands, but the video shows a cop walking up to Dent’s car after he opened the door, shoving a gun in Dent’s face, yanking him out of the vehicle, immediately throwing him to the ground and attempting a choke hold on him, then punching him in the head 16 times while holding him on the ground. Dent wound up with fractures to his face, bleeding in the brain, and 4 broken ribs.
The cops claim they found crack cocaine in Dent’s car and charged him with possession of crack along with resisting and obstructing police. After seeing the video, a judge dropped the resisting and obstruction charges, but let the drug possession charges stand.
Dent is a 57 year-old black worker with no previous arrests. He has worked at the nearby Ford Rouge plant for 37 years. He refused a plea bargain and is speaking out against the drug possession charge saying, “I saw them plant the drugs in my car. An innocent man does not plead guilty.” Another video has surfaced which appears to show the cops planting the drugs in Dent’s car.
The cop seen punching Dent in the video is William Melendez, a former Detroit cop with a history of similar abuses. He has been sued at least 12 times in federal court. One of those suits involved the killing of an unarmed man in Southwest Detroit as he lay on the ground following a traffic stop. Witnesses in another suit involving Melendez testified he and other cops planted guns and drugs on them, and beat and sexually assaulted them.
What happened to Dent is a microcosm of what has been happening around the country for decades, where the cops grab someone and put a felony on him. It’s part of the so-called War on Drugs. First called for by Ronald Reagan, many of the changes in the laws encouraging the campaign came under the Clinton administration.
As part of the drug war, the federal government offered grant money to local police departments. That required cops to makes arrests, often for very small time drug possession. Many cops were not so anxious to arrest people over such petty crimes, so the federal government “incentivized” them by requiring the police departments to show that they were being effective in carrying out the drug war. That meant showing increases in drug arrests. The grants were, in effect, a bounty for making more arrests.
The War on Drug grants, which continued under Bush, have only continued to increase under Obama. Vice President Joe Biden was a strong proponent of the drug war in the Senate during the Clinton administration; and Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, also strongly supported it.
Add to these grants laws giving the police the power to confiscate money and property of anyone on suspicion of involvement in drug-related crimes and the incentives for cops to concoct reasons for drug arrests increase even more.
It’s easy to see that a worker like Floyd Dent with no previous criminal history was targeted. Imagine how many young men, on the streets with no job and little possibility of getting one have been similarly targeted, with no ability to offer much of a legal defense. Petty drug arrests only worsen the likelihood of their finding jobs.
The War on Drugs is a weapon intended to imprison a section of the black population that was the most militant part of the working class, and still potentially is. It is only exacerbated by the fact that most cops are white, as in the case of the Inkster police department, which is 95 per cent white in a city with a population that is 73 per cent black.
So long as the cops are allowed to carry out such terror against the black population, the ruling class which employs them will be able to keep the entire working class under its thumb.
Mar 30, 2015
A movie that is, not surprisingly, hard to obtain in the U.S. was nevertheless watched by large theater audiences in France and Switzerland. The documentary, “Cleveland V. Wall Street” tells the story of how, back in 2008, the City of Cleveland unsuccessfully tried to put 21 Wall Street banks on trial for the foreclosure crisis.
This film exposes how mortgage brokers went door-to-door in East Cleveland, targeting and misleading working class, poor, and minority home owners into taking on outrageous second mortgages. One broker, a former drug dealer, testifies about his role in peddling sub-prime mortgages.
This excellent Swiss/French documentary can be ordered on the internet, but viewing requires a multi-region DVD player or watching on a computer. It is a DVD worth seeing.
Mar 30, 2015
What happened to Cleveland happened to Detroit. Greedy banks ravaged homes, neighborhoods, and people’s lives in Cleveland. Here in Detroit a lawsuit similar to the one in Cleveland has been filed against the Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley.
In the early 2000s, banks around the country increased how often they made subprime mortgage loans. Subprime mortgages made up only 5% of all home loans in 2001. By 2004 to 2006, they jumped to about 20% of all mortgages around the country. Here in Detroit, though, they were closer to 75%.
Subprime mortgages carry a much higher interest rate than standard mortgages; by as much as 2 or 3% a year. What’s worse, about 80% were adjustable-rate mortgages, meaning the banks attracted people to take out these loans with low down payment requirements and low starting interest rates to hide the fact that interest would skyrocket after 2 or 3 years.
The loans were dumped on people and were a disaster waiting to happen, to the people and to whole areas of the city. The lenders went out of their way to hide the reality of what would happen, so people got roped into deals they couldn’t pay for down the road.
The lenders knew some of the borrowers were never going to be able to afford these high interest loans and—to cover up what they were doing—the lenders either encouraged them to lie on their loan applications about their earning potential or did the lying for them.
On top of it, they steered people who could have qualified for lower interest mortgages because they had good credit, especially black working class borrowers, to accept subprime loans with enormous interest rates, thereby guaranteeing that even people with good credit would fail.
Why were the lenders ready to make so many risky loans? Because Wall Street banks wanted to buy them to bundle them and sell the bundles as what are called “mortgage-backed securities.” Not only did Wall Street know the lenders were making bad loans, they encouraged them to do it. Many of the lenders wouldn’t have been able to make the loans they did, were it not for the capital the Wall Street companies were making available to them.
Lawyers in the current lawsuit against Morgan Stanley have presented emails showing officials at Morgan Stanley knew New Century Financial, the mortgage lender they bought mortgages from, was making overly risky loans. They referred to the loans as “scary” with a bunch of exclamation points, and “crap” or “like a trash novel.” Emails also show that New Century officials knew they were making bad loans, but continued to do it because they knew the banks would buy them.
Wall Street wanted these loans, and Wall Street got what it wanted. We’ve been living through a long-term capitalist economic crisis, and because of the crisis, the banks and investment companies themselves have run up huge amounts of debt.
These financial institutions needed a way to show they had more money coming in than going out, so no one would question how much total debt they had accumulated. Buying subprime loans, packaging them into securities and then selling them was a way to do that. It was a way to make a quick buck. That’s why almost all of them carried out these slimy schemes. It’s how capitalism works in today’s world.
With so many more people being able to get mortgages, prices on the housing market kept going up. Mortgage lenders used the rise in home values to convince borrowers that even if their interest rates went up, they could always re-finance later or as a last resort, sell their homes at a higher price, with a profit to pay off part of their loans. It created a housing bubble. When people started defaulting on loans the housing bubble burst, and so did the bubble on the mortgage-backed securities market. And that provoked the Great Recession we are still living through today.
The drop in home values, together with job cuts due to the Great Recession, meant many people could not afford to make the huge payments on these rotten loans. From 2005 to 2009 the banks foreclosed on 67,000 homes in the city of Detroit. Since 2009, Wayne County has foreclosed on over 70,000 homes, not over mortgages, but due to nonpayment of taxes; and another 60,000 are currently at risk of tax foreclosure. While there may be some overlap in some of these figures, it means well over 150,000 homes have been foreclosed on. That’s really an enormous number!
Detroit lost 240,000 residents between the Census of 2000 and that of 2010. The media and the politicians are always talking about how that many people left the city. If every home has on average even 2 people in it, foreclosures have stripped more people from their homes in Detroit than the number who have left the city!
In 2010, Dave Bing, when he was mayor, put forward a plan to shrink the city. Bing was forced to step back briefly from his initial plan when people reacted to part of his plan that called for residents of sparser areas of the city to be “relocated” to denser parts of the city. People rightfully likened the plan to the relocation of the Cherokee Indians along the Trail of Tears.
Nevertheless, a new version of the plan was issued in 2013, just before the city went bankrupt. The planners started from the premise that the city will continue to shrink. And of course it will, if people continue to be driven out.
And this plan—which has been and continues to be implemented—is a way to drive people out of their homes. Some areas will continue to get services, while others will not. The plan for some areas is to simply let them go back to nature. This will be helped by the cut off of city services, leaving abandoned homes to rot and be stripped, and allowing roads to crumble. If a few owners in an otherwise vacant area don’t want to move, the city will simply wait them out until their land can be packaged with others and sold later.
Bing proposed to clear large parts of working class Detroit. Bing was speaking for the ruling class that wants to clear out the city and put it towards its own ends, whether for industrial use, real estate development for wealthy people or real estate speculation like Dan Gilbert is carrying out.
Having driven many working class people out, city officials under mayors Archer, Kilpatrick and Bing, the financial manager, and the new Mayor Duggan, have been handing the city over to the same wealthy class that created the mortgage crisis.
The city gave land to Chrysler and the Renaissance Center to General Motors. It paid 215 million dollars to build Ford Field for the Ford family, 189 million dollars to build Comerica Park and now will pay another 280 million dollars to build a new hockey arena for Mike Ilitch, Little Caesars Pizza and Red Wings owner. It gave Compuware land to build its headquarters downtown and land taken by urban renewal programs to the Detroit Medical Center, which was recently sold to a private equity firm. Now under Duggan, the city is re-doing street lighting and building a light rail system for the more affluent areas of the city.
While areas like the downtown and Midtown are being refurbished, other areas have no street lights, no trash pick-up, and no EMS, fire or police response. City and state officials have worked with the Emergency Manager of the Detroit Public Schools to close many of the neighborhood schools. When people can’t live close to the schools they’re sending their children to, they move.
Whether imposed by city planners, or through theft by ordinary capitalist measures, the result is to take Detroit, a mostly black city, and hand it over to the wealthy. And this isn’t just happening in Detroit. It’s happening in every major city in the country where the working class used to live in the center. The difference is that what took them 70 years to do in a city like New York, they’ve tried to do in a couple of decades here in Detroit.
For working people, and especially the black population, the capitalists’ plan has meant the loss of homes they or their parents worked their whole lives to buy. It means family members moving in with one another and living in more crowded conditions. For those who haven’t lost their homes, the result has been the devastation of their neighborhoods. The many abandoned homes become targets for thieves and drug dealers, making the neighborhoods less safe to live in.
Politicians like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, along with his Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, and now Mayor Mike Duggan pay lip service to improving the neighborhoods and helping people to keep their homes. In reality, many more people will lose their homes than will be helped by the schemes these rats have to offer.
Pushing back the bosses and demanding decent housing, schools, and city services will take a real fight by the working class. The working class has pushed the ruling class back before, but it took social movements like those of the 1930s and the 1960s to do so. No one knows what will set off the social movement of our time. But what is certain: Until the working population mobilizes, until we fight, we will have no decent future.
Mar 30, 2015
Baltimore City has sent out notices to about 25,000 customers warning that their water will be shut off if they don’t pay their bills within 10 days. These unpaid bills total about $40 million.
The warning letters went out just two days after the city Board of Estimates voted to pay an extra $13 million for the installation of smart meters on top of the $107 million that had already been authorized for this project.
Is the city trying to force more people out of their homes so they can give the land to developers? Or trying to cover its cost over-runs for the smart meters? Or both?
Mar 30, 2015
The Detroit Water Department announced plans to distribute 800 shutoff notices per day to residential customers across the city now that the weather is warming up. They took a break for the winter from their slimy deeds of shutting off access to water, a vital necessity, to low income residents having trouble paying their bills.
From mid-2013 to mid-2014 they shut off the water to over 40,000 homes, saying the department needed the money. Some of these residential customers owe as little as 150 dollars on their bills, yet just the top 40 delinquent corporate customers owed 8.5 million dollars just last August, and nothing has been done about going after them. Some of the bigger “deadbeats” include the likes of the Chrysler Group, Ford Field, Joe Louis Arena and the State of Michigan.
This is just one more attack aimed to drive poor people out of the city in order to hand it over to the wealthy and the corporations, and we need to fight to stop it.
Mar 30, 2015
April 15 is the deadline to file income tax, so it’s good to know who’s getting the breaks. Those with the lowest income get a tax break worth a tank of gas. The richest one-tenth of one percent can buy a fleet of Cadillacs with their deductions.
A tax break for saving for the kid’s college seems like a good idea. But those with incomes over $150,000 got 80 percent of the benefit. Maybe the reason their share is so high is that most of us can’t afford to save!
Some of the biggest tax breaks only benefit the rich. While a top tier auto worker, mechanic or airline worker pays 25 percent of the first hour of overtime in income tax, rich people getting income from capital gains–money from gains in stock, bonds and real estate–pay only 20 percent. The same is true for their interest payments on bonds. This money is actually called “unearned income.” And it’s true!
All these tax breaks add up to big bucks: 620 billion dollars in 2014. This is more than the government spends for 15 government agencies, including the Departments of Housing, Transportation, Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. What’s happened is that money has been transferred from services that benefit working people to tax subsidies for the rich. The money is there–it’s just going to the wrong hands. We know where to look to take it back.
Mar 30, 2015
Thousands of farm workers in the Mexican state of Baja California walked out of the fields on Tuesday, March 17, at the peak of the winter harvest season.
This strike pits against each other two diametrically opposed social forces. On the one side, there are some of the biggest and richest companies in the world. The large farms in Baja, about 200 miles south of San Diego, specialize entirely in produce for the U.S. market–for big companies that we all know: Walmart, Safeway, Kroger, Albertsons, and others. Mexico’s produce exports to the U.S. are a business worth more than 7.5 billion dollars a year.
On the other side are fruit pickers, the vast majority of whom are indigenous people from the southern states of Mexico. Many of them are illiterate and don’t even speak much Spanish. Trying to escape extreme poverty, they have migrated hundreds of miles north, only to be caught up in extremely bad working and living conditions.
The companies pay the fruit pickers as low as 7 dollars a day for more than 10 hours of back-breaking work in the sun–if they pay them at all. The bosses often withhold the pickers’ wages in order to keep them on the farm until the harvest is completed. Many of the dorms where workers sleep have no beds, no electricity, no running water, no functioning toilets. The farms are in effect prison camps, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. Child labor is rampant. Farm bosses harass and assault women workers, without fear of criminal charges. Any worker who complains, let alone tries to organize, risks being fired and blacklisted.
In fact, the companies that run the farms break dozens of labor and criminal laws every day. The authorities not only don’t prosecute company officials, they in fact work for the companies themselves. For example, when police catch a worker that has managed to escape a farm, they take him or her back to the farm–under the pretext that he or she owes money, because the workers are constantly indebted to the stores on the farm that overcharge for all necessities.
This is what the farm workers rebelled against. Thousands of workers walked out. Entire families, children, the elderly, women with babies in strollers lined up along the highway across the farming area, holding signs and shouting at passing drivers, occasionally also blocking the road. They marched into the towns, shutting down schools and stores, occupying government buildings.
The authorities, ever at the service of the bosses, sent in more than 1,000 cops and soldiers in riot gear and armored vehicles. They fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the strikers, roughed them up and put hundreds of them in jail.
And the companies that own the fields are digging in. Sitting on the billions of dollars they have accumulated by not paying their workers, backed by the Mexican federal and state armies, the capitalists are prepared to let an entire strawberry harvest rot rather than concede to the workers’ demands–no matter how modest those demands may be.
The striking farm workers of Baja have shown so far that it’s possible to organize under the most oppressive conditions and stand up to the biggest companies, despite all the bosses’ efforts to intimidate them. Their fight continues. It’s a fight against the greed of big American corporations.
Mar 30, 2015
About 168,000 high-paid Wall Streeters got 28.5 billion dollars in bonuses last year. Bonuses, that is, equal to twice as much as one million people made all year long, working 40 hours a week for the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Just think: those bonuses would be enough to triple the minimum wage of a million people.
That would be a much better use of the money!
Mar 30, 2015
When the UAW Bargaining Convention 2015 opened in Detroit, Michigan on March 24th, the issue of two-tier wages was a major concern for delegates. The fact that the union administration felt the need to address it was proof that pressure against the current wage structure has been building in the union. In speeches and resolutions, the administration took care to appear resolute in their determination to “bridge the gap” in wages.
The tiering of wages is a strategy of the automakers to bring down the wage levels paid for production of autos. The GM annual report in 2010 said, “Our current U.S. and Canadian hourly labor agreements provide the flexibility to utilize a lower tiered wage and benefit structure for new hires, part-time employees and temporary employees.”
The UAW leadership also supports tiering policies: They argue that wages must be lowered to levels paid by the Asian and European transplants here in the U.S. in order to allow the Big Three to compete.
Parts plant workers are perhaps the hardest hit by tiering. Once part of the auto worker family, parts work was spun off to other mostly American plants at lower wages. This created third and fourth tiers. Today, American Axle for example starts workers out at $10 per hour.
Still, today, the UAW administrators claim that it is their negotiation of tiers that resulted in “more jobs”, i.e., the recent hiring into the plants of some 40,000 Tier 2 workers.
In fact, it is not true that the UAW leaders have created more jobs by accepting lower tiers of pay. If companies have been hiring in the current period, it is due to the increased production of vehicles and increased sales that followed the recession of 2008 and the replacement of some retired workers.
In any event, today, auto workers are producing as many vehicles as they did 30 years ago with around half as many workers. That’s not more jobs.
The administration of the union no doubt feels the pressure from its membership for wage increases due to the record profits of the auto companies. Their strategy is clearly to patch their way through rough waters by convincing the bosses to throw some of their super profits toward small wage increases, even for the 1st tier of workers.
But behind the scenes, these same union leaders and the corporate bosses speak happily about the upcoming end of two tier in perhaps two rounds of contracts.
They know that in a period of about 8 years, or two contracts, the current Tier 1 workers, who average 49 to 51 years of age, will be retired out, eliminating the problem of Tier 1 & 2 disparity. They know that then the lower Tier 2 will be the norm.
This may be a great solution for the auto bosses and for their junior partners in the union. But it is not good at all for the working class.
Many delegates to the convention are wise to the administration’s strategies, which are, in fact, corporate strategies. In the words of Gary Walkowicz, bargaining committeeman at the Dearborn Truck Plant at Ford Rouge, and long term fighter against two-tier, “It’s not about ‘bridging the gap.’ It’s not about moving a few people into first tier pay. It’s not about giving people first tier pay, but no pension. It’s about getting rid of two-tier now.”
He pointed out in interviews that the company he works for, Ford Motor Company, could convert its 14,685 Tier 2 workers to a full $28-an-hour Tier 1 wage for about 335 million dollars a year; that is, a fraction of the $6.9 billion the company earned in North American profits just last year.
Delegates, including Walkowicz, wore T-Shirts that read “ No More Tiers” and spoke up for a fighting policy on the convention floor.
It is certainly possible that during contract negotiations the auto bosses will grant some small concession in wage increases to auto workers, even to Tier 1 workers.
But if there is any concession from auto companies, auto workers can be sure that it will be a bone thrown out to keep workers from organizing and fighting until the company can eliminate Tier 1 in some few years time.
If the Union Administration had any intention of halting the downward spiral of wages, health and retirement benefits and working conditions, they would have used this convention to begin organizing for a real fight, which appears to be the last thing on their minds.
Clearly, to roll back the attacks, to start the working class on the road to recovery, will take a real fight led by different leaders; workers who are loyal to their class and their class interests.
Mar 30, 2015
....If we are going to gain back what we have lost, then, first of all, we must put an end to 2-tier.
It’s not about “bridging the gap.” It’s not about moving a few people into first tier pay. It’s not about giving people first tier pay, but no pension. It’s about getting rid of 2-tier now. Two-tier has weakened our union. There was a reason why those before us in the UAW insisted on “equal pay for equal work.” We must demand: Bring everyone up to first tier now!
We see what 2-tier means for legacy workers. Since we accepted 2-tier, legacy workers have not had a raise. We have lost COLA, bonuses, holidays, overtime after 8 hours. Retiree health care is no longer guaranteed. It is dependent on an under-funded VEBA. Retirees are paying more and more out of pocket. As long as we are divided between first tier and second tier, the corporations will use that division to hold everyone down. The best way for legacy workers to gain back what we have lost is to end 2-tier. We can fight together for what we need....