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
Sep 28, 2015
Workers at Fiat Chrysler have been voting in large numbers to reject the newly proposed UAW-FCA tentative agreement. The workers are expressing anger over a contract that is a slap in their face, negotiated by a highly profitable company and a union leadership bent on ensuring that the company gets even more profits at the workers’ expense.
This contract would permanently lower the rate of pay for generations to come. In a few years, no one would be left working at Tier 1 wages and benefits. Those “traditional” workers would all be gone, while the top wages will be what today’s second tier makes, with its top wage now set at $25.35 an hour—and that not until someone puts in seven years.
At the same time, a third tier was quietly snuck in—this one to max out at only $22 an hour for Mopar parts workers, and $20.35 for axle plant workers—to be extended later to other component plants.
In a high-stakes chess game, this contract also moved almost all remaining car production to Mexico, and increased truck production in the U.S., and moved almost all major vehicle production in the U.S. from one location to another. All these moves will be used to speed up production and chew up jobs.
The new contract also includes an open- ended proposal for a new health care cooperative that guarantees reductions in current health care coverage and transfers cost to workers by establishing a new pattern of deductibles and co-pays.
Workers have every reason to reject this contract.
But voting NO is not enough. Workers at Chrysler, Ford and GM will have to deal with the question of leadership in the UAW.
The International Union leadership has often said that the contract they negotiated is the best they could get—and it’s true, it is the best THEY can get.
They are the assistant guardians of the capitalist economy—an economy that has piled up masses of profit, by driving down the workers’ standard of living. They immediately assume, in their own words, that increased health care costs, including a new tax on health care, will be passed on to the workers. Why? Why don’t they assume the opposite—that the workers should make the bosses pay, costing them their profits!
When confronted by tier-two workers about the broken promises of the 2011 “Highlight” language that cheat these workers out of almost $10.00 an hour, the UAW vice-president of the union’s Chrysler division explained it away, saying he “can’t find it anywhere in the 2011 contract.” In other words, just a typing mistake! No, their 2011 “Highlight” promise was nothing but a lie!
When Ford workers seemed poised to reject the 2011 contract, top union officials threatened to “put them out on strike until Christmas”—a top-down led strike—a strike to be used against the workers and not as a weapon against the employers.
If auto workers want something better, if they want an end to tiers, if they want everyone at the same, higher wage level, and no tricks and trade-offs on essential health care benefits, they will have a fight on their hands. And it is apparent that those leaders of the auto workers union at the very top level can’t lead it—and don’t want to.
So who will?
The question at hand today is how to be ready for a fight against the auto companies, and how the workers will organize that fight. Will it take a strike? No doubt the companies won’t yield without a fight. But there is an opportunity to win “restore and more” when workers from all three companies come together.
In the course of organizing that fight, the workers will develop a fighting leadership—one that will address other workers, calling on them to join the fight. And why not? We all have the same problem, watching our standard of living be pushed down, so a few fabulously wealthy people can exploit the whole economy in their favor. What starts in auto could spread throughout the workforce.
Sep 28, 2015
The Westlands Water District, which serves agribusiness in the driest part of California’s Central Valley, just got a sweetheart deal from the Obama administration. Westlands’s big growers gave a vague promise to deal with vast amounts of toxic pollution that their farms produce. In return, the federal government guarantees delivery to the growers of almost twice as much water as the annual usage of the city of Los Angeles. And it bars federal or state officials from ever diverting this water for other uses.
The Obama administration also forgave a 350 million dollar debt that the growers still owe as their share of the federal infrastructure that brings them the water, while transferring ownership of that federally funded infrastructure to the owner-controlled district, without compensation.
The Westlands Water District, located west of Fresno, covers a region that is comparable in size to the state of Rhode Island. It contains some of the powerhouses of California agribusiness, and even in this year of withering drought, the almond and pistachio trees and the fields of melons, tomatoes and onions go on and on. These fields produce more crops than do some entire states.
These farm empires trace their roots back to the landholdings of the Union Pacific Railroad octopus, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and the family of Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. The only difference is that today, the owners use private jets to commute from their mansions in Beverly Hills or Orange County. But the migrant laborers who do the work still live in such terrible squalor that the region is considered the poorest in the United States.
Since these fields are located in uninhabitable desert, agribusiness’s profits depend on secure access to massive amounts of water. In the first decades of the 20th century, the growers drilled very deep wells and pumped so much water out of the ground, the fields sank like a partially baked cake. So the powerful, politically connected agribusinesses got Congress to extend the huge federal irrigation system that serves California to their side of the Central Valley. Heavily subsidized federal water started spilling into their canals in 1968.
But widespread irrigation created another problem. Since the soil is full of minerals from an ancient seabed and it is perched atop a layer of clay, the irrigation leached the minerals and the clay barrier trapped the water. Unless it is drained, the land is poisoned. In the late 1970s, the federal government began building a master drain that would eventually empty into the Sacramento Delta. But long before it was finished, biologists discovered the drainage water was poisoning fish and waterfowl, and so the federal government closed the drain.
The government never came up with a solution about what to do with all that badly poisoned water from the fields. Many scientists say that the fields should never have been irrigated in the first place, and a few growers are already taking some of their fields out of production, instead building huge solar cell arrays on their property, for example.
The Obama administration’s settlement, guaranteeing massive amounts of federal water at prices that are less than 10 percent of the market rate, is nothing but a massive profit subsidy for the big farm owners. They can either use the water that the federal government provides them, or sell what they don’t need at a very, very high profit.
Government officials and the news media use the severe drought and their dire predictions of a future of even worse droughts as an excuse to hike water utility rates sky high on working people. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, they give away massive amounts of water–and wealth–to agribusiness and its capitalist allies.
Sep 28, 2015
The U.S. central bank, the Fed, has again decided not to raise the interest rate it charges the banks. After the financial crisis of 2008, the Fed lowered the rate. This rate has been at almost zero, between 0 and 0.25 percent, ever since. For more than two years the Fed has talked about the need to raise the rate, but it has backed off each time.
Under the pretext of trying to help the economy recover, the central bank has loaned the banks hundreds of billions of dollars, practically free. The whole economy has been infused with this money. The result has not been an economic recovery, but an enormous growth of profits and a speculative frenzy at least as crazy as the one before the crash, but with more and more enormous sums of money.
To raise the interest rate–to make its debtors pay actual interest on the astronomical sums that the Fed has loaned them: this could provoke the crash of some speculative bubbles. The banks in debt to the Fed could fail because they couldn’t keep borrowing in order to pay their debts. And it could provoke a crisis of confidence like the one of 2008, which froze the whole system.
The fear that the system could fall into a coma if the infusion of money slows down made the Fed pull back from a rate increase once again. No matter how slowly it would raise rates, the Fed could set off a new crash in the stock market, the massive withdrawal of capital loaned to the already very indebted state, and a financial panic that could be very difficult to stop.
But the Fed also fears that by not raising the rates, it is signaling that the economy isn’t going as well as the governments want us to believe. It seems like that’s what some people took from the Fed’s latest inaction, since the European stock markets fell after the Fed decided not to raise the rate. Nevertheless, the head of the Fed weighed her words and mentioned–one more time–the possibility of raising interest rates, this time at the end of the year!
The owners of capital know well that their system has put the whole economy on the edge of a giant abyss, and that any little thing could set off a catastrophe. They know well that all their remedies have just aggravated the problem. Their only policy is to try and push off the crisis until after they’re dead! They are useless, dangerous parasites. It will be a great day when we finally force them to quit the scene.
Sep 28, 2015
For the past 13 years, Baltimore City has been under a federal consent decree to bring its sewer lines up to standards set by the EPA for public health. Its 75 to 100 year old sewage pipes are allowing untreated sewage to contaminate the Jones Falls and other local streams, which empty into the Inner Harbor. The contaminated water then runs into the Chesapeake Bay.
Although Baltimore is on track to have spent a billion dollars, the work will not be completed at the end of the year as it was supposed to be. In fact, although officials mention how many overflowing pipes they have plugged up, the sewage still runs through the city and into the harbor.
The main treatment plant for sewage is unable to cope with the volume of sewage coming into its pipes–even now, after 13 years of work.
Over the past five and a half years, almost 3,000 incidents spilled at least 93 million gallons of raw sewage into Baltimore City’s waterways.
The city is surrounded by Baltimore County, where overflows also end up running through the same waterways. The county reports only about 600 spills in the same period of time, but their reports show almost 300 million gallons of raw sewage going into the streams and rivers.
Maybe the real figures are even worse.
Baltimore is hardly unique, as the EPA has consent decrees ongoing with 150 cities and counties to stop chronic sewage overflows.
And the problems did not begin with the Clean Water Act 40 years ago. Baltimore City has always collected money from its residents to maintain the water and sewer systems. So what happened to all that money?
For the past 40 years, under every different mayor, there was plenty of money to give to developers to put up fancy buildings at the Inner Harbor. Our water and sewer fees went right there to the Inner Harbor, giving the rich their tax breaks and grants.
Then Baltimore officials have the nerve to claim the city is too broke to maintain its aging pipes!
Sep 28, 2015
The proportion of children in Flint, Michigan with dangerously high levels of lead in their blood has doubled since September of 2013. And it’s even worse in Flint’s highest-risk zip codes where the percentage went from 2.5% to 6.3% in two years.
The rise in lead poisoning is no accident. Flint stopped purchasing water from the Detroit Water Department in April 2014 and is now drawing its water from the Flint River instead.
Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor, said Flint’s water is more than four times as corrosive to iron pipes as Detroit’s water, which means the iron pipes in Flint would fail at least four times faster and cause lead to leach from any remaining lead pipes. High lead levels can lead to brain damage and many other health issues.
The Flint schools advise children to bring bottled water to school and avoid drinking from water fountains. Yes, the kids should drink bottled water, as should everyone else in Flint–until they fix the problem–but let the city provide it until they do whatever is necessary to make sure the people of Flint have a clean and safe water supply!
Sep 28, 2015
Sergio Marchionne for Chrysler and top UAW officials negotiated a new contract, which reduces the cost of labor and increases profit for the companies. They tried to sell the contract by pretending it answered the workers’ demands, which it didn’t. And they soon discovered that workers were displeased and expressed that displeasure by voting NO. Half way through the vote, the contract is being turned down by a comfortable margin, but there are still plants that haven’t voted. As many workers have seen in the past, the leadership of this union has very many ways to steal a vote. Nothing is yet sure.
The following articles about the Chrysler contract are reprinted from the SPARK newsletters at Chrysler’s Warren Truck plant and the Ford Rouge plant:
When Two Tier was introduced, all the companies promised to transfer Tier 2 workers into Tier 1 when their numbers exceeded 25 percent of the workforce.
The 2009 bankruptcy deal at Chrysler suspended that, but it promised that on Sept. 15, 2015, the 25% cap would be applied and everyone over 25% would be immediately made Tier 1. TO DATE ABOUT FORTY FIVE PERCENT OF CHRYSLER’S WORKFORCE ARE TIER 2 WORKERS.
That promise is now forgotten. Now, according to this contract, NO Tier 2 workers will EVER get to Tier 1.
Tier 1 workers get tiny raises and two lump sums. For 10 years, Tier 1 gave up all raises and cost of living. To get back to where they were, they need a base rate of over $36. Right now.
Highly taxed lump sums and bonuses don’t begin to make it up.
So after 10 years of not getting a raise, workers are supposed to be happy with two 3% raises?! Three percent raises used to be the standard every year. If our three per cents had remained in place, the hourly rate for Tier 1 production workers, without overtime, would have been
2012: $29.36
2013: $30.24
2014: $31.14
2015: $32.08.
So in the last four years, first tier production workers have made $18,325.57 less in wages without a 3% yearly wage increase.
In the same time, skilled trades workers have made $20,897.58 less in wages without a 3% wage increase.
The Contract Highlights do NOT explain changes to workers’ health insurance.
As one worker put it, “If it’s a secret, YOU KNOW IT’S A PROBLEM!”
Moving all the products around to different plants will mean big layoffs, as jobs are eliminated in the new engineering. Long-term layoffs.
Nothing at all was put in this contract to help the ones who will be eliminated.
This contract is Sergio’s contract, written by his little helpers downtown.
The truth is that “our time” will never come, until we, the general workforce, make it come. We ourselves have to figure out how to make a plan and stick together, strong enough to squeeze Sergio and his little helpers, squeeze them harder than they are squeezing us.
That’s a tall order and very difficult. But this contract proves there is no other way out.
Sep 28, 2015
UAW President Dennis Williams has negotiated a contract allowing subcontracted employees to work at third-tier wages, even within Big Three auto plants.
This may seem strange when Williams claimed to be negotiating a contract with the stated goal of “bridging the gap” between the two tiers of wages and benefits that employees are currently working under. It may seem to fly in the face of Williams’ claim to be for “equal pay for equal work.” And it may be hard for Williams to maintain his supposed support for a $15 minimum wage, when a third tier wage in auto would be below that.
It’s not so hard to understand, though, if you keep in mind it could accomplish one goal–getting more dues from more Big Three UAW members!
Sep 28, 2015
The bare bones health insurance coverage for Tier 2 workers at Fiat-Chrysler may become the new health insurance coverage for all.
According to a side letter in the tentative UAW-FCA agreement, the company will change coverage to avoid the 2018 federal “Cadillac” tax. Current insurance coverage for Tier 1 workers would likely be subject to the tax.
The Detroit Free Press (9/23/15) explains: “It is unlikely the tax or resulting deductibles would apply to Tier 2 workers hired after 2007. They already pay $300 deductibles for individual coverage and families pay a $600 deductible. In addition, Tier 2 individual plans carry a 10 percent co-insurance contribution up to $700 a year, with family plans incurring co-insurance of up to $1,400 a year.”
Just like lower tier wages were used as a wedge to bring down wages in the auto industry, the health insurance coverage for new hires is the model for new health insurance coverage for all.
Sep 28, 2015
About 13,000 people fall into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County, according to a new report by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles. Some of these people may later find a job or a relative who can take them off the streets. But around 40 percent of them are chronically homeless.
Once people find themselves on the streets, recovering from such dire conditions is difficult. Roughly half the number of people who fall into homelessness do not receive health and behavioral health services, case management, disability benefits and subsidized housing. Many people are thrown onto the streets because of soaring rents, low wages and high unemployment. The Great Recession, which started in 2007, further deepened the homelessness.
“We have single mothers with limited job skills, who couldn’t pay their rent, who were evicted. Most of the people we work with are born into poverty,” according to Rabbi Marvin Gross, who leads Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles.
The city of Los Angeles should have had sufficient funds to provide relief to the homeless people. Instead, the city slashed its affordable housing fund from 108 million dollars in 2008 to 26 million dollars in 2014. But city officials are busy finding ways to increase tax cuts to the businesses.
Los Angeles has one of the highest homelessness rates in the U.S. At the same time, Los Angeles is among the richest U.S. cities. In this city, the rich drive very expensive cars on the same streets the homeless wander around. Rich neighborhoods like Beverly Hills are located next to these poverty stricken streets. Lush houses in such neighborhoods have many rooms, most of them unoccupied. These are the two starkly different human faces of the same city: one is that of the filthy rich and the other that of the extremely poor, both results of the same system.
Sep 28, 2015
The latest official homeless count found 44,000 people living on Los Angeles County streets in a three-day period in January, a 12 percent increase in two years, according to the Los Angeles Times. The survey also found a 37 percent rise in chronically homeless people.
Instead of addressing this social problem, the city officials passed ordinances to criminalize homelessness. One ordinance is to ban the homeless from camping in parks or leaving their possessions in them. Another is to prevent the homeless from putting up tents or tarpaulins on sidewalks, in alleys or in any other public place. A third one, if approved, is to ban the homeless from living in motor vehicles. One has a provision that bans “personal property” such as “luggage, backpacks, clothing, documents and medication and household items.”
The Los Angeles police cite the homeless for violating such ordinances. The police can jail a homeless person for repeated violations.
The main reason for such extremely cruel and irrational measures against people who are just trying to survive is to push the homeless out of sight so that property owners and businesses can thrive. These ordinances are products of barbaric people who cannot think of anything except getting rich.
Sep 28, 2015
Overnight, Turing Pharmaceuticals increased the price of a drug by over 5,000 percent. This drug, Daraprim, is used to treat a parasite caused disease that affects people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients. This price gouging is only the latest of sky-rocketing drug prices.
Martin Shkreli, owner of this very small company based on Wall Street style speculation, justified this increase, saying, “We need to turn a profit on this drug.”
This drug was developed more than 60 years ago. Before Turing bought rights to this drug, its price had been $13.50 per pill. But this speculator increased its price to $750.00 per pill, raising the total treatment cost to $63,000. For long-term treatments, like those required for AIDS patients, the annual treatment cost can go as high as $634,000.
The pill costs about one dollar to produce. Thus, at $13.50 per pill, this drug had already been providing huge profits to its previous owner.
But for the capitalists, the sky is the only limit. Our health is no different than a piece of meat on a chopping block being sold to the highest bidder.
Sep 28, 2015
The U.S. is first in the world when it comes to wealth and power. It has the most billionaires, the most wealth accumulated by its ruling class by far. And it has by far the most powerful military.
But if we look at life for most people, the U.S. falls far behind. According to the newly released Social Progress Index, twenty-nine countries have a longer life expectancy. Thirty-six countries have a lower death rate from infectious disease. Thirty-seven countries have lower childhood mortality rates. Fifty-four countries have a smaller share of women die in childbirth. And eighty-one countries have lower suicide rates.
For those of us who aren’t billionaires, this country sitting at the top of the world’s wealth looks more like a third world country. THEIR wealth and power comes at OUR expense.
Sep 28, 2015
Auto giant Volkswagen is accused of having deliberately bypassed U. S. pollution tests for diesel engines it claimed were almost non-polluting. Only this allowed them to stay below the allowable levels of pollution.
Since 2009, Volkswagen has been carrying out this fraud by equipping the cars with software programmed to activate an internal mechanism to limit the amount of pollution in a car’s emissions while it was being tested. The software would then de-activate that mechanism when the test was over. This system allowed the cars to emit about 40 times the amount of pollutants authorized by law, and still pass the tests.
Volkswagen management, which has constantly bragged about the merits of its “Clean Diesel” in its ads, can only express its “profound regrets.” It has stopped the sale of diesel vehicles in the US–and will recall almost 500,000 vehicles, and maybe pay a big fine for this obvious fraud.
Volkswagen was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and now admits that this system was installed in 11 million vehicles worldwide. But auto industry experts think that Volkswagen probably isn’t the only company to carry out this type of fraud, because it’s very easy to do.
And even when they don’t break the law, the auto companies use many strategies that allow them to produce vehicles much more polluting than they claim. This is because the government’s tests are carried out in laboratories and show cars consuming much less fuel and emitting much less pollution than they do in the course of normal use. Many independent studies have shown a big gap between these lab results and real life. When it comes to air pollution, real cars can produce between five and twenty times as much air pollution as the lab tests indicate.
In auto, as in every other industry, the main concern is not the health and safety of the consumers, nor the preservation of the atmosphere. It is profit. Auto companies accumulate their billions, not only by exploiting their workers, but also by duping consumers. All with the help of the government.
Sep 28, 2015
Last New Year’s, George Roberts, a supervisor with the Independent Review Authority that investigates police misconduct, was brutalized by the Chicago police when he was stopped for a minor traffic violation near his home on the South Side. This according to a lawsuit he just filed against the Chicago Police Department.
According to the suit, officers with guns drawn pushed Roberts to the ground. One of them shouted, “Don’t make me ... shoot you!” When the cops found out that Roberts worked for the Independent Police Review Authority, things got even worse. They turned off their dashboard camera. Then, Roberts said, they handcuffed him and threw him to the ground again, so violently that he soiled himself. When he pleaded with the police to loosen the handcuffs, one of them said something to the effect of, “What are you going to tell me next, you can’t breathe?”
At first the police tried to charge Roberts with a DUI. It was New Year’s, and he admitted to drinking two rum and cokes. While this case was making its way through the courts, he was fired from his job. But he was acquitted of that charge and finally reinstated.
Apparently, Chicago police are ready to brutalize anyone on the South Side–especially someone who has the nerve to investigate police brutality!
Sep 28, 2015
The Pope is being lauded as a champion of the poor for speaking out against poverty and inequality, the destruction of the environment and the plight of migrants fleeing war-torn areas of the world.
Many American Indian activists and supporters have a different view due to the Pope’s recent choice for sainthood, the 18th century Spanish missionary Junipero Serra. As “Father Presidente,” Serra oversaw the founding of at least 10 Spanish missions in the area from San Jose to Los Angeles, California between 1769 and 1784. Approximately 150,000 Indians died in the period that followed. In the area of one mission that extended from Monterey to San Francisco, the population of Ohlone Indians dropped from 30,000 to 100 in a 26-year period starting with Serra’s rule.
The Catholic Church developed a myth that the Indians came to their missions voluntarily and that Serra had great concern for their rights and well-being. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The Indians were used as slave labor. Spanish soldiers were sent out to capture them. When they did, they often separated families to prevent the Indians from passing their culture on from one generation to the next.
The Indians were housed in locked “dormitories” in crowded, deplorable conditions, with no baths and small pots for toilets. With no other women in California, soldiers commonly raped Indian women. The Spanish used every kind of harsh measure to keep the Indians under control.
Pope Francis apparently wants to honor the myth of Serra, and doesn’t care about the reality. But the victims of the Church don’t have that luxury.
Sep 28, 2015
The media has been publicizing Pope Francis’s visit to the U.S. with big headlines and a lot of prime-time coverage, emphasizing his words about poverty, immigration and the destruction of the environment.
Yes, poverty, migration and pollution are big problems humanity is facing today–and they are caused directly by the capitalist system’s drive for profit, causing human misery.
So when thousands of people, including many working-class people directly affected by these problems, came to greet Pope Francis, did he tell them to take on the capitalist system? No, he didn’t do that. Instead, he called on the politicians in the U.S. Congress to solve these problems.
That’s the same Congress that has helped pour trillions of dollars into the coffers of big banks and corporations, while refusing to help the working-class families that have lost their homes and livelihoods in the “Great Recession”–which was caused by the big banks and corporations in the first place! The same Congress that has always supported, and amply funded, every war, every act of aggression perpetrated by the U.S. government in the rest of the world! The same Congress that refuses to bring criminal charges against big corporations for violating all kinds of environmental and safety regulations, killing and poisoning millions of people in the name of profit!
In addressing the U.S. Congress, that big, staunch defender of the capitalist system, the Pope clearly demonstrated his own full support of the capitalist system.
But nothing else could be expected from the head of the Catholic hierarchy, an organization that has, for many centuries, defended a social system that divides the population into rich and poor, by preaching to the poor to wait for justice–until after death!
No, Pope Francis is no different than all those politicians who tell the poor they are with them, only to help stabilize and maintain the capitalist world order that condemns millions of people to poverty.
The workers of the world, regardless of their national, ethnic, racial or religious background, are part of the same social class, the working class. And the working class will solve the big problems it’s facing only if it’s able to overcome these divisions; if it’s able to act together to overthrow capitalism–and replace it with a system that the working class will run in its own interests.
Sep 28, 2015
The new Broad Museum on Grand Avenue was built on a full block of prime, city-owned property. The museum is a vanity project of Eli Broad, who is said to be worth a cool 11 billion dollars. By setting up his own private museum to exhibit his private art collection, Broad increases the value of his collection and personal fortune even more.
L.A. officials provided Broad with the valuable property practically for free. Officials also spent 40 million dollars in public funds on the parking garage for Broad’s museum. How dare city officials turn around and tell us there is no money for our public parks and recreation!
Several hundred teachers picketed the opening of the Broad Museum this weekend.
Broad has taken the lead in privatizing the public schools, stealing money from the kids and the teachers. Broad is just a greedy capitalist, trying to trash the schools for his own private profit.