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 26, 2015
Auto companies and other employers are using Obama’s “Cadillac Tax” to attack workers’ health care benefits. It is an attack that will ripple through the entire working class.
The “Cadillac Tax” included in Obama’s Affordable Care Act is a 40 percent corporate tax that would be imposed on health insurance plans with a value over $12,500 for an individual and $27,500 for a family. These are the so-called “Cadillac” health care plans, plans with actual coverages with minimal deductibles and copays. Companies don’t want to pay the tax, so they want to cut the workers’ health insurance coverage and make them pay more.
The UAW International is helping them do it. The new Chrysler agreement gives the UAW leadership authority to help the company “find ways to lower health care costs” during the 4-year life of the contract.
What’s happening in auto is a harbinger of things to come for workers all across the country. Many employers are using the “Cadillac Tax,” which incidentally does not go into effect until 2018, as an excuse to cut health insurance benefits to their employees now. Ninety percent of large employers are taking steps to prevent their plans from triggering the tax in 2018, according to the American Health Policy Institute.
Supporters of these kinds of reductions use the term “Cadillac Tax” to imply that workers whose health insurance meets the threshold are somehow highly “privileged.” But these threshold levels lump in all kinds of costs associated with workers’ health care, including the costs of premiums paid by both the employers and all their employees, as well as contributions to health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts by both. So, even not-so-good plans will trigger the “Cadillac Tax.”
The “Cadillac” tax places the blame for rising health care costs on individuals, as if people make a habit of using health care frivolously. As if costs rise because people use their health care! Those who defend the tax conveniently leave out of the picture the exorbitant profits raked in by health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, massive hospital conglomerates, and even the banks and construction companies that profit from hospital expansion. The ACA and the Cadillac Tax do nothing to lower these costs. They just shift more and more of the costs to the workers themselves.
Corporations and the ruling class in this country have always opposed any attempt at true national health care. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare” as it often is called, was designed by the health insurance companies themselves, and supported, in the end, by both of the bosses’ parties, the Republicans and Democrats. This is true no matter how much hay the Republicans have made with it for political purposes.
The inclusion of the “Cadillac” tax and the low penalties employers face for not providing health insurance to their employees means the politicians and the insurance companies designed the law to push workers out of employer-provided health care and into the individual health care “marketplace.” Their method for reducing health care costs is to make workers pay such high deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance that many people will simply have to choose between going without needed medical care or paying for it themselves out-of-pocket.
The bosses’ growing campaign to cut worker health care benefits amounts to one massive pay cut. Increasing premiums, co-pays, co-insurance and deductibles could mean costs of tens of thousands of dollars or more dumped on the backs of workers. Medical costs already account for the majority of personal bankruptcies. Imagine how many more we can expect with this drive to cut workers’ health benefits.
Health care should be a right, not reserved for the few who can afford to pay out of their own pockets. Whatever employer-based health care benefits workers have, they were the results of fights made by the working class in the past. We need to fight to take the profits out of health care, and until that happens, make the bosses pay!
Oct 26, 2015
Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, pled guilty to fraud on October 13th. She had arranged a kick-back of more than two million dollars, in exchange for steering a contract for training school principals to her former boss, Gary Solomon and his SUPES Academy.
This was not the first time Byrd-Bennett has used her position as an “educator” to funnel money to her friends. Between heading schools in Cleveland and Detroit, she worked for textbook publisher Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt. Then, as soon as she was hired to run Detroit schools, she gave the publisher a 40 million-dollar contract! She also gave multi-million dollar contracts to the same Gary Solomon she helped out in Chicago. And she even gave her son-in-law a $71,000 contract for producing a “report” that never came out. In fact, when Byrd-Bennett was tapped for the job in Chicago, the Detroit newspaper commented that she was getting out just in time to stay ahead of an investigation. One member of the Detroit school board claimed that “the community was coming after her on that $40 million contract.”
So why did the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, hire this obviously corrupt person to head the Chicago Public Schools? For one thing, Emanuel is also tied to Gary Solomon–Solomon steered Byrd-Bennett’s predecessor Emanuel’s way, and he was the one who suggested Emanuel hire her.
And for what it’s worth, Emanuel became a very rich man by brokering a few investment banking deals for his well-placed friends and contacts–including the Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner. The one real difference is that Emanuel winning contracts through his friends was “legal.” No wonder he didn’t see anything wrong with Solomon or Byrd-Bennett.
Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett have both made it clear they want to use the schools to funnel money to the rich at the expense of working-class students. That’s the real corruption, whether it’s illegal or not.
Oct 26, 2015
Two “experts” working for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office found the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice last November “reasonable.”
Rice was playing with a toy pellet gun in a park outside a Cleveland Recreation Center when a police car pulled up to him, and a cop got out of the car and shot and killed him immediately. Anyone can see the video on the internet. And no one who has seen it could possibly conclude that this shooting was “reasonable.”
These experts don’t tell us anything new about the murder of Tamir Rice. But they do show–very clearly–that there are always “experts” for sale!
Oct 26, 2015
The movie “99 Homes,” about homeowners being foreclosed on and evicted, will make you mad. Dennis Nash (played by Andrew Garfield) is a single dad who loses his construction job in Orlando, Florida in 2010, falls behind on his mortgage, and loses his home. Rick Carver (played by Michael Shannon) is the real-estate broker behind the eviction, who then offers him work cleaning up after other evictions.
Dennis is determined to get his house back, so he does job after job for Rick–cleaning raw sewage out of a foreclosed house, threatening his son’s best friend’s father, and doing an eviction alongside the sheriffs. The film shows some illegal practices of brokers, like stealing air conditioners and then charging to install “new” ones. But what does illegal mean when foreclosure court judges rush through Dennis’s own hearing in a minute or so? And the county clerk’s office conspires with Rick and Dennis to file a forged document!
To filmmaker Ramin Bahrani’s credit, the movie focuses on the human stories behind the housing crisis. Dennis first refuses the handgun Rick advises him to carry, but soon enough he is eager to have it. The family Dennis has just evicted shows up in the same rundown hotel he and his mother (played by Laura Dern) and his son are living in, which is filled with other families just like them.
This movie might not show a solution for capitalism’s housing problem, but it tells the truth about the true human cost of the banks’ crimes.
Oct 26, 2015
Tenants in four low-rent apartment buildings in Anacostia, in southeast Washington, D.C., testified that the owner is letting the buildings go to ruin. The tenants say the owner wants them to leave so he can tear down the cheap apartments and build higher rent ones. The rent is currently controlled because of a city law concerning older buildings. But if all the tenants leave, the developer is free to reconstruct the buildings and charge higher rent.
The tenants describe raw sewage in a basement; abandoned, broken washers and dryers in a laundry room; and doors that don’t lock. More than half of the tenants have left since the developer began buying the buildings in 2009.
The tenants say the city is putting a lot of money into this neighborhood. For example, the mayor recently announced plans to build a 55 million-dollar practice facility there for D.C.‘s women’s basketball team, the Mystics. And there are plans for major government offices on the nearby grounds of the former Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital. The developer expects to make more money renting to people with professional salaries who might then be attracted to the neighborhood.
This developer is known for making big campaign contributions and has a seat on the city Planning Commission. Clearly, this “Planning” doesn’t take into account people’s needs–but only money and connections!
Oct 26, 2015
Port of Los Angeles officials have admitted that they have been violating a legal settlement that the Port signed more than a decade ago, to reduce pollution.
Port officials have been allowing one particular company, China Shipping North America, to violate requirements such as turning their ships’ engines off and plugging in to electricity when docked. The diesel-run engines of so-called “supertankers” are so huge, just one of them can generate more pollution than thousands of cars. China Shipping was also allowed to violate rules about using less-polluting fuel in trucks and yard tractors. And we can bet that it wasn’t just this one company that was given a pass.
What port and company officials have been doing is truly criminal. The residents of the area suffer from diseases such as asthma, heart disease and cancer at such high rates that doctors have long dubbed the area around the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach the “Diesel Death Zone.” And China Shipping alone accounts for 20 per cent of the container volume at the port, one of the busiest in the world.
The consequences are deadly for the millions of working-class people who are forced to live in the area because they can’t afford to move elsewhere. And especially for their children, who are more vulnerable to the chronic diseases caused by pollution, and suffer from them all their lives.
This blatant, deliberate negligence by the port officials is a direct result of their readiness to help big companies to increase profit.
If port officials or the companies are to be held accountable for their criminal actions, it certainly won’t happen through lawsuits and “legal channels” overseen by the authorities. That’s one thing this whole pollution scandal shows.
Oct 26, 2015
When U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called a summit of mayors, police chiefs, and prosecutors to discuss the rise in violent crime in cities across the country, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence. They have pulled back from the ability to interdict ... they don’t want to be a news story themselves....”
Most of the mayors in attendance applauded. The St. Louis mayor blames violent crime on the “Ferguson effect”, that cops don’t want to be the next Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown. We hear the same line in Baltimore and New York. According to this logic, revealing what cops ACTUALLY DO by taking videos amounts to a “war on cops!”
This argument flies in the face of logic. First of all, NOT ONE COP has yet been convicted of murder or manslaughter, despite all the cases that have been caught on video. Very few have even lost a day’s pay, even when there is video evidence that they killed someone!
On top of that, the police have all kinds of ways of massaging the violent crime statistics. It’s true there is lots of crime in U.S. cities this year–and there was last year, too. Why should we believe people who have a political reason to make it seem like crime has gone up?
No, hypocrites like Rahm Emanuel and police departments across the country don’t care about crime in poor neighborhoods. They just want to use crime as an excuse to ramp up their control and repression of exactly those people most likely to be the victims of crimes–both the crimes of the street and the crimes of the cops.
Oct 26, 2015
Barack Obama announced on October 15 that he would leave thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan through 2016, breaking one of his 2008 electoral promises.
The U.S. military has not brought security, nor the end of corruption or the heroin traffic, and even less the democracy promised in 2001 during the imperialist invasion of the country. And it hasn’t made the Taliban go away.
The Afghan population has paid for this war with close to 100,000 deaths since 2001, and many more wounded. Millions of Afghans have fled their country. The inhabitants of the frontier zones in Pakistan have also been massively affected.
Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in this war and occupation over 14 years, despite the 140,000 western troops in Afghanistan at the height of the war (under Obama in 2011), despite the tens of thousands of mercenaries from private security companies, the U.S. has not been able to impose its unpopular Afghan allies on the country. Because the Taliban remains active in many Afghan districts and sometimes even takes over cities, like Kunduz a few weeks ago, the U.S. is keeping its troops in the country.
To leave Afghanistan while the Taliban is on the offensive would smell like a defeat for U.S. imperialism and its military. But to leave an army of occupation for an indefinite period, without any perspective of victory, is also problematic for the U.S. This is the impasse that U.S. imperialism finds itself in.
How will Obama’s successor in the White House deal with the Afghan problem? No one knows. But one thing is clear: the Afghan population will not be easily controlled, no more than the other peoples imperialism seeks to dominate.
Oct 26, 2015
This article is from the October 23rd, 2015 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In Dresden, the capital of the east German state of Saxony, a demonstration organized by the anti-immigrant movement PEGIDA was able to attract more than fifteen thousand participants on October 19th. In opposition to the far right and to these anti-immigration protestors, about the same number of demonstrators came to show their support for the refugees.
It is estimated that in 2015, between 800,000 and just over one million refugees will have arrived in Germany and filed for asylum there. The introduction of checkpoint inspections at the borders in mid-September has not lowered the number of new arrivals. In fact, the rate has actually increased to 10,000 per day. Several special trains are bringing more refugees from Austria to Germany all the time.
All across the country, in the big cities as well as the smallest towns, just about anything that could serve as a shelter is seized upon once normal housing is no longer available. This includes gymnasiums, old barracks, prefabricated structures, and dilapidated buildings whose demolition has been stopped at the last minute in order to house the new arrivals after a slight renovation.… Temporary arrangements like tent cities have appeared all over, in the middle of the cities or on soccer fields. To give a sense of how widespread this is, in a city like Essen, there are seven tent cities, each one housing between 300 and 700 people. In Hardheim, a tiny town of 4,600 inhabitants, there are currently one thousand asylum seekers housed in an old army barracks. Between 600 and 800 migrants arrive every day in the capital, Berlin.
Some companies have certainly profited from this situation. Those who rent canvas structures and portable toilets and showers to the towns have never done such brisk business, nor have the hotels or the private companies guarding the emergency housing. Even though Chancellor Angela Merkel has explained that the German government will not compromise on the right to seek asylum, the federal government does not really assume responsibility for this task itself. This means that it is left up to the states, and above all to the local governments which are often in debt, to pay for a large part of the cost of housing, food, and education for migrants.
The right-wing parties CSU and AfD, who call themselves Euro-skeptics, have taken a radically reactionary course and are using the situation to shore up their own support on the backs of the migrants. In Dresden, it is not only PEGIDA but also the Neo-Nazis of the NPD, who had previously been running out of steam, that have regained their strength over the past few weeks by sharpening hostility to the migrants. The level of tension has increased, with demonstrators close to the far right becoming radicalized and threatening or attacking migrants and humanitarian or anti-racist militants.
On the other hand, there has been an increasing number of volunteers throughout the country who have taken up the initiative to provide help to the refugees, giving their time, money, and skills. This level of support remains high, such that without it, there would be total chaos in many of the temporary shelters. In Berlin, some militants find food, prepare it, and distribute it to the refugees on a daily basis so the refugees can have a second meal. Others help as best they can with medical aid for the many people who have physical or mental trauma or who have become ill after months of travel in deplorable conditions. Some teach courses or help with administrative procedures, while others distribute clothes or toys. Workers, nurses, doctors, and teachers are there every day, before or after work, while high school and college students bring help, ideas, and initiatives, without all of which the situation would be incomparably more difficult.
Among these people, many are conscious of the need to oppose the xenophobic demagogy, and they have demonstrated in many cities, in higher numbers than the far right.
Oct 26, 2015
This article is from the October 23rd, 2015 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The October 10th bombing in front of the Ankara Central railway station caused 99 deaths, according to the official figures, although a medical organization said 128 died. There are an additional 400 wounded, some very seriously. The two suicide bombers who blew themselves up there, in the middle of a dense crowd of demonstrators, carried out a vicious massacre.
The organizers of the October 10th demonstration were trade unions, NGOs, left-wing groups, and the HDP, a pro-Kurdish party, which the Turkish president Erdogan had vowed to destroy after its good results in the June 7th elections prevented his own party, the AKP, from winning an absolute majority. This was not a pacifist demonstration, as the western media has described it, but a demonstration against the war that Erdogan’s government has been waging against the Kurdish autonomists of the PKK for the past three months. Organizers had chartered buses to transport people from all across Turkey to this demonstration in the capital.
The government was forced to admit that once again it must attribute the bombings to members of the Islamic State. But ultimately, this boils down to an indictment against itself.
The Turkish government has contributed significantly to the organization of ISIS. It provided ISIS with weapons, training camps in Turkey, and routes to cross the Syrian border in order to combat the government of Bashar al-Assad, whom Erdogan and his Saudi allies had wanted to overthrow in order to install an allied regime. And while today Turkey has officially joined the anti-ISIS coalition, it continues to play a double game.
Many on the left believe that the Turkish military and police, even if they were not directly responsible, were probably aware of the preparation for these attacks. Accordingly, if the police had wanted to prevent them, they had the means to do so.
Erdogan has cynically used these atrocities for his own political purpose. He used them as a pretext to carry out a new war against the “terrorists,” not targeting those who are probably responsible in ISIS, but instead the PKK, putting an end to a truce that had lasted for two years. And since then, all of the actions of Erdogan’s government have fed into a real climate of civil war in the country, targeting not the Islamic State, but all those who might have sympathy for the Kurdish cause.
The real reason is that Erdogan and his supporters are afraid and are willing to risk everything in order to stay in power. After years of stability, the economic crisis has finally reached Turkey and has stirred up social discontent, as the labor strikes last spring have shown. In response, Erdogan has chosen to use a strategy of tension, designating the Kurds as the enemy to destroy and searching to fan Turkish nationalism before the new elections scheduled for November 1st.
As soon as news of the bombings became known, many demonstrations broke out across the country, often to the chant of “Erdogan—assassin!” Erdogan himself waited several days before going to the site of the bombing in order to lay flowers and fake some emotion. He decided in the end that not doing so would mean conceding that he was perfectly fine with this tragedy and that this might hurt him in the elections. It is by no means certain that these few flowers will be enough to fool anyone.
Oct 26, 2015
It has been two years since the collapse of the Rana Plaza building near Dhaka in Bangladesh, which killed 1,138 garment workers and injured more than 2,000. Now, several organizations recently released a report on the “unacceptable delay” of the multinational retail clothing company H&M in implementing basic safety measures for the workers at its textile suppliers in Bangladesh.
Along with 200 other clothing brands, H&M had committed itself to guaranteeing the safety of workers at its textile suppliers in Bangladesh in 2013, following the Rana Plaza catastrophe. But nothing has changed. In these factories that employ four million people, 80% of whom are women, the owners “cut corners on safety issues, on ventilation, and on sanitation. They will not pay overtime or offer assistance in case of injuries. They will not build fire exits or stock fire extinguishers. Many of them treat their workers like slaves,” according to Human Rights Watch. The report details daily injuries, harassment, and threats made against anyone who complains. It even cites cases of worker militants being assassinated.
H&M blames its local suppliers. How convenient! But it is the one putting pressure to reduce costs and increase profits by as much as possible.
These brands are very profitable, but the companies have taken more than two years to pay the 30 million dollars to compensate the families of the victims of Rana Plaza. It is a crime on top of a crime.
Oct 26, 2015
Seven hundred unionized and 100 non-union warehouse workers in Landover and Upper Marlboro, Maryland were told they will be laid off starting in December. Safeway supermarket warehouse contractor C&S plans to move operations to lower-pay and non-union sites in Pennsylvania and northeastern Maryland.
C&S first threatened to move in the 1990s. At that time, the union agreed to more than seven million dollars annually in cost savings for the company, including a five-year wage freeze, a lower starting wage, Sunday hours, and on-call workers. But Safeway and C&S have now decided they want more.
C&S has become the country’s biggest warehouse operator as supermarket chains have outsourced that work. And C&S’s practice is to cut pay, consolidate jobs and lay off workers, and end union contracts. C&S has cut 6,700 union warehouse jobs in the last 20 years, including closing the Giant warehouse in 2012. Giant is another supermarket chain in Maryland.
Safeway is owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management–and Cerberus’ most important product is profit.
Oct 26, 2015
The famous physicist Stephen Hawking recently answered a question about robots causing unemployment. He replied, “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”
In other words, modern technology doesn’t take jobs. Unemployment is caused by the capitalists’ use of that technology, to maximize their profits by squeezing more out of each worker.
He’s absolutely right!
Oct 26, 2015
A few workers from a crowd of 2,000 stormed a meeting of their Air France bosses on October 5, leaving two executives with their shirts practically torn off. It’s hardly surprising, since these bosses were proposing to lay off 1,700 ground crew, 900 cabin staff, and 300 pilots over the next two years.
Some French politicians called the workers “gangsters” and worse, but as the workers put it: “It’s not our shirts we’re defending, it’s the skin off our backs.” They are referring not only to the proposed layoffs but to 20,000 more job cuts that already took place at Air France over the last 15 years.
The police showed up at the crack of dawn a week later to arrest five of the Air France workers, treating them like they were dangerous criminals. They were threatened with charges that carry sentences of three years in prison and a possible fine of more than $50,000.
The Air France bosses wanted to divide the workers, pitting mechanics against cleaners, stewards against pilots. Instead, the pilots refused the bosses’ plan to force them to fly 100 more hours per year. The Air France bosses had hoped to blame their layoff plans on the pilots.
Workers scorned the chief executive who called the plans “voluntary departures, not layoffs.” And workers understand very well that the Air France bosses are backed up by government officials, from left to right. Even if the prime minister called the Air France workers names, public opinion was with them. One militant working at the naval yards in Saint-Nazaire refused to shake President Hollande’s hand, to show “solidarity with the Air France workers.”
The politicians condemn the workers for a couple of torn shirts, but they say nothing about the real violence: the bosses’ plans. The real criminals are the bosses who propose ever more work from ever fewer workers, on wages that don’t allow anyone a decent living.
Despite the attacks on workers in the media, despite legal threats, despite warnings of continuing layoffs, the work force is angry. What’s needed is for this anger to become the basis for a general mobilization. Since the bosses want to test their ability to push the workers backward, what matters is how the workers respond.
Oct 26, 2015
The Social Security Administration (SSA) says seniors will receive no Cost-of-Living Adjustment to their monthly checks next year. It’s because the SSA uses the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers to determine how much inflation retirees face.
Say what?! Yes, and active workers are supposedly saving money due to lower gasoline prices–so that means retirees get no Social Security increase. Never mind that retirees, who don’t drive nearly as much as active workers, are facing skyrocketing Medicare costs. Social Security checks have risen 43 percent since 2000, while Medicare Part B premiums have gone up by 131 percent in that time.
Sounds like the government has found a sure-fire way to reduce the ability for the elderly to pay for medical care just when they need it the most. That’s one way to cut the Social Security and Medicare rolls in one fell swoop!
Oct 26, 2015
The Chicago Tribune found that the State of Illinois used its EDGE subsidy program to give companies 269 million dollars in the last four years. The Trib found two-thirds of companies that got money either did not add the workers they promised to add, or they didn’t keep the workers they promised to keep. And 79 companies that got money for adding jobs actually cut 23,369 jobs.
In other words, the program was just another excuse by the state to give money to big business.
Now the politicians say drastic cuts have to be made to the state budget. NO! The money is there! Take it back from big business!
Oct 26, 2015
After mounting pressure from parents and community leaders in Flint, Michigan, the lead poisoning of children by Flint’s water system hit national news.
Backed into a corner, Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder announced on October 8 that the city of Flint would return to Detroit’s water system. The required funding was unanimously passed by the Michigan legislature and the switch away from Flint River water was made in less than 48 hours!
At his press conference on October 8, the governor laid out his stance that identifying blame for the lead poisoning of children is not something he intends to look into.
Of course the governor said this! Because an effort to place blame would expose that the governor’s office played THE major role in this debacle. Governor Snyder appointed Flint’s Emergency Financial Manager, Darnell Earley. Children were exposed to lead poisoning because emergency financial managers answer to no one. They just cut costs!
It was cynical and misleading of Governor Snyder to announce on October 22nd that he appointed an “independent task force” to examine the controversy over Flint’s water system. In the words of one member, this new task force is limited to making recommendations about “whether there are practices that need to take place in water systems across the state.” Not exactly a deep investigation into wrongdoing!
But while the Emergency Financial Manager Law continues, similar debacles WILL happen again.
Multiple news reports thus far found that the decision to switch the city over to Flint River water was made by one person—Darnell Earley. Earley, by the way, was appointed by Governor Snyder as the new Detroit Public Schools’ Emergency Manager in January of 2015. So parents, look out!
But a recent news report points blame in a new direction. One Flint official said that the decision to switch to Flint River water came directly from the governor’s office! When questioned by reporter Curt Guyette about this, the governor’s spokesperson said on October 8: “You’re saying that the governor’s office was directly involved? I can’t address that at all....”
Going forward, an accurate nickname for Rick Snyder would be “Governor Cover-Up!”
Oct 26, 2015
The UAW and FCA (Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles) announced that Chrysler workers have ratified a new agreement. In a carefully orchestrated public media campaign, the UAW International repackaged the first rejected contract into a second agreement that was no “richer” than the first. To quote one analyst, “they packaged it in a way that was much more appealing even though it likely doesn’t cost Chrysler more money than the first agreement.”
Clearly, both the UAW International and FCA designed the first and second agreements to address the anger and frustration of Chrysler workers about unequal pay and benefits, generally known as Two Tier–without actually doing anything about it.
Having broken a promise to promote a section of Tier Two workers to Tier One pay at the end of the 2015 contract, bargainers had THAT issue to “repackage.”
In the first, rejected, contract, the UAW International and FCA argued for keeping Two Tier with some improvements. In the second contract, they APPEARED to eliminate Tier Two. They “promised” to bring workers just short of top wages–in eight years. But everything must be renegotiated in four years, when this contract ends!
It appears that this “promise,” which also moves about 20 percent of Tier Two workers to current Tier One wages within two years, was enough to get the contract passed.
This, combined with concerns about how workers would ever be able to get anything better, put a damper on the fight. The International UAW hammered the workers down, spouting sermons about all of the bad things that a strike would bring. This made even the most militant workers reluctant to risk a strike.
Chrysler is giving a little with one hand, while taking away more with the other. Increases in pay for current workers in the second contract will be paid for by lowered wages and benefits for future workers, and by plans to transfer more health care costs to current workers. The rules for employment of temporary workers were radically changed–clearly as a way for Chrysler to establish a new, even lower tier by hiring many more temporary workers at lower wages.
Instead of eliminating Two Tier, the contracts expand and increase the number of tiers–a divisive boomerang that will come back to hit current workers. Why keep Tier 2 workers when the company can hire long-term temps instead?
While promising a “pathway to full pay,” the contract leaves future employment for Chrysler workers up in the air. Chrysler bosses made very real plans to move products between facilities and locations, with future layoffs and relocations for those currently employed.
How will the Chrysler workers weather these storms over the next two years, four years? How will they face continuing inhuman alternative shifts and work rules that are inhuman–all of which remained in the current contract?
Perhaps the determination of a section of the Chrysler workers to reject the contract will begin to prepare them for the fights to come ... once the smoke and mirrors of the current contract disappear into thin air.
Oct 26, 2015
The governor of Texas recently denied Medicaid funding for patients seeking services at Planned Parenthood. Three days later, state investigators showed up at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Brownsville and ordered the centers to turn over patients’ records, including doctors’ orders, nursing notes, and lab tests, as well as the home addresses and telephone numbers of their workers.
The Texas government is using videos of Planned Parenthood workers “selling” fetal tissue to people pretending to be representatives of a biomedical company. Anti-abortion activists claim that these show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale.
This is all a smokescreen. No one profits from working for Planned Parenthood–just the opposite. These under-funded centers stay afloat because of nurses, doctors, and staff members willing to stand up to the threat of violence in order to defend women’s health. In the past decades, anti-abortion activists have murdered doctors, bombed clinics, and repeatedly intimidated women seeking health care–most of whom go to Planned Parenthood clinics for all kinds of health services, mostly not for abortions.
And of course fetal tissue–like other kinds of human tissue–is crucial for medical research. Those who object to its use want to send us back to the Middle Ages, when research even on corpses was banned, and leeches and bleeding were the height of medical technology.
The Texas ban on Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood is aimed at all women’s health, not abortions. The Hyde Amendment has barred federal money, including Medicaid, from paying for abortions since 1976! For decades, this has meant that poor women have a much harder time getting an abortion. But cutting off all Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood means that many women now won’t even be able to get the basic Ob/Gyn care or contraceptives that these clinics provide.
Texas’ attempt to get the records of Planned Parenthood patients and workers just adds to the intimidation. What will they do with these records? Given what anti-abortion criminals have done in the past, demanding these records is an outright threat that anyone who has had anything to do with Planned Parenthood could face violence from the state or from vigilantes.
The politicians who run Texas want to send women back to medieval times, when the leading cause of death was childbirth, and when there was no safe form of contraception, let alone abortion. These barbarians must be stopped.