United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 07, 2021 3:34 pm

Why Amazon Is Terrified of Its U.S. Workers Unionizing
Posted on December 4, 2021 by Yves Smith

Amazon continues to abuse its warehouse workers, both in its day-to-day treatment of them and in its thuggish, law-breaking campaign to prevent unionization in the US.

By Sonali Kolhatkar, the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations and a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has just ruled that a historic union vote held earlier this year among Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was not valid. The highly publicized vote, which took place over several weeks in February and March 2021, resulted in a resounding defeat for the union, with more than 70 percent of those voting choosing against union membership.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU, accused Amazon of engaging in “efforts to gaslight its own employees,” and filed a petition in April to nullify the vote. After investigating the union’s assertion, the NLRB decided that Amazon interfered so blatantly in its workers’ ability to vote that a second election is now in order.

The ruling detailed how, in spite of the NLRB denying Amazon’s request to install a mail collection box right outside the warehouse entrance, the company did so anyway, giving workers the impression that it was involved in the vote counting. Additionally, the company distributed “vote no” paraphernalia to workers in the presence of managers, forcing them to declare their support of or opposition to the union. And, Amazon held what the NLRB called “captive audience meetings” with small groups of workers, “six days a week, 18 hours a day,” in order to blast the approximately 6,000 employees who were eligible to vote with anti-union messaging over the course of the voting period.

An NLRB regional director, Lisa Henderson, who made the decision for a second vote, denounced Amazon’s “flagrant disregard” for ensuring a free and fair election and said the company “essentially hijacked the process and gave a strong impression that it controlled the process.”

It’s no wonder that the election turnout was low and that ultimately only about 12 percent of eligible voters cast ballots choosing to unionize.

Anticipating the NLRB decision to allow a second vote, the company has already begun paving the way for interference once more. According to a Reuters report in early November, “Amazon has ramped up its campaign at the warehouse, forcing thousands of employees to attend meetings, posting signs critical of labor groups in bathrooms, and flying in staff from the West Coast.”

This aggressive and repeated pushback by one of the world’s largest employers against a unionizing effort at a single warehouse in the United States is an indication of Amazon’s absolute determination to deny workers a say in their labor conditions. Kelly Nantel, a company spokesperson, said that workers don’t need a union because they benefit from a “direct relationship” with their employer—a laughable notion considering the unbalanced power dynamic between the behemoth retailer and any one of its nearly 1 million U.S. employees.

So invested is the company in maintaining a union-free workplace that the NLRB in a separate decision determined that Amazon illegally fired two employees last year who were agitating against its unfair labor practices.

There is an obvious reason why Amazon has opted to respond so aggressively to unionization efforts in the United States. Its European workers are unionized and are actively demanding better wages and working conditions. For example, in Germany, unionized Amazon workers walked off their jobs for higher pay in November during the peak holiday shopping season. Last year, Italian workers went on strike for 11 days to win an extra five-minute break to ensure good hygiene in light of the pandemic. And, in the spring of 2020, French unions demanded that Amazon suspend all activity at its warehouses in the interest of worker safety during the early months of the pandemic. A French court ruled favorably, saying that the company had to suspend deliveries of all nonessential items.

Further, union leaders and unionized workers from various European nations began collaborating with one another last year in what Business Insider called an effort to “swap notes… on how to pressure the retail giant to improve their working conditions.”

This sort of European union activity and cross-border worker solidarity is exactly the type of scenario that Amazon does not want to see replicated in the United States.

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to the Bessemer vote in April saying that he would ensure his company became “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the RWDSU took it as an admission that Amazon has indeed been mistreating its workers.

Indeed, there have been numerous studies detailing mistreatment. One investigation by the New York Times earlier this year at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, warehouse found that the company churned through workers with an extremely high employee turnover rate. The paper also found that although managers keep careful track of nearly every conceivable aspect of how quickly employees work, their efficiency and productivity, there were apparently few records, if any, of worker health including COVID-19 infections.

At the same time that the Bessemer warehouse workers were being bombarded with anti-union propaganda, the company was practically minting money with record profits from a greater dependence on online shopping during the pandemic. Profits jumped 220 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period a year earlier.

The NLRB ruling for a do-over vote at the Bessemer warehouse comes at a time when American workers are increasingly intolerant of poor labor conditions and low wages. A wave of strikes this fall and mass resignationshave also impacted Amazon’s ability to hire more workers. Now, in addition to the RWDSU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has vowed to engage in organizing efforts aimed at Amazon and passed a historic resolution this summer in response to how “Amazon poses an existential threat to the rights and standards our members have fought for and won.”

Still, Amazon’s aggressive efforts at maintaining union-free operations in the United States have continued to bear fruit. In addition to rolling out more anti-union efforts ahead of the second vote at its Bessemer warehouse, Amazon appears to have prevailed against another unionization effort—at the Staten Island warehouse that the New York Times investigated. Just two weeks ahead of an NLRB hearing on whether there was sufficient interest to form a union there, workers mysteriously withdrew their petition.

A Reuters study of 20 years of wage data for the retail industry found a clear and growing advantage for unionized workers compared to non-union workers, with the weekly wage gap between the two groups increasing from $20 in 2013 to $50 in 2019. The outlet explained that “unionized workers tend to work more hours per week and on a predictable schedule, while non-union workers often have a ‘variable schedule’ that depends on how busy management thinks the store might be.” In other words, the rights of non-union workers are subservient to the company’s well-being.

Perhaps this is what Nantel meant by the benefits of having a “direct relationship” with workers. Except, she claimed such a relationship was in the interest of workers, when in truth it is in the interest of employers like Amazon to have no collective power to wrestle against.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/12 ... izing.html

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CONCRETE TEAMSTERS BEGIN INDUSTRY-WIDE WORK STOPPAGE
2021.12.04
174 Concrete Strike
Press Contact: Jamie Fleming Phone: (425) 281-0166 Email: jfleming@teamsters174.org

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More than 300 members of Teamsters Local 174 now on strike

As of this morning, unionized concrete has stopped flowing throughout King County as members of Teamsters Local 174 walked off the job in an Unfair Labor Practice strike. Prior to today, well over 100 Teamsters were already on strike at Gary Merlino Construction and Stoneway Concrete. That number now swells to over 300, as workers from Cadman, CalPortland, Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel, and Lehigh Cement stopped pouring concrete throughout the Puget Sound area.

The Unfair Labor Practice strike is the result of Employers’ failure to bargain in good faith for a new contract. After months of offers that dramatically undercut other construction trade union contracts, lead negotiator Charlie Oliver submitted another “Last, Best, and Final” offer to the Union that added mere pennies to the previous offer. This offer was not made in good faith, and was resoundingly rejected by the Teamster membership. Instead, the group decided to walk off the job until the Employers decide to negotiate in “good faith”.

Now that the Teamsters are on strike, the clock is ticking on all construction going on in King County. Without concrete, the impact of this strike will be strongly felt throughout the region.

“Our members have had enough of Charlie Oliver’s insults,” said Teamsters Local 174 Secretary-Treasurer Rick Hicks. “He seems to believe these workers exist solely for him to exploit and abuse, and that they can be replaced at a moment’s notice. Well, now is his chance to prove it, or he can come back to the bargaining table with a legitimate offer rather than more insults.”

“My message to the owners and managers of all these concrete companies is this: Charlie Oliver is not telling you the truth,” Hicks continued. “He has completely bungled these negotiations, to the point where concrete has now stopped flowing and all of us are losing money. Come back to the bargaining table and let’s get a deal so we can all get back to work and enjoy the holiday season.”

Founded in 1909, Teamsters Local 174 represents 8,600 working men and women in Seattle and the surrounding areas. “Like” us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TeamstersLocal174.

https://teamster.org/2021/12/concrete-t ... -stoppage/

Seriously hard, dirty work deserves all the compensation it can get. As a former Teamster(Local 311) I salute these guys and gals. Not the best time for a strike in that industry though: when the ground freezes works slows down greatly as most product is for in-ground infrastructure. And concrete will not 'set up' properly below 32F.(They closed our plant in Baltimore for about two months in winter.)

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We Don’t Need a 24/7 Economy
by MODERATOR
December 6, 2021

Consider what it means for an American president to call for dock workers to go on a 24/7 schedule to ensure that Christmas presents arrive at homes on time. A Gilded Age? Not for those workers heading for the night shift, that’s for sure.

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[Ravi Shah / CC BY 2.
By Rebecca Gordon | TomDispatch

In mid-October, President Biden announced that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, joining the nearby Port of Long Beach, which had been doing so since September. The move followed weeks of White House negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as well as shippers like UPS and FedEx, and major retailers like Walmart and Target.

The purpose of expanding port hours, according to the New York Times, was “to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.” Reading this, you might be forgiven for imagining that an array of crucial items like medicines or their ingredients or face masks and other personal protective equipment had been languishing in shipping containers anchored off the West Coast. You might also be forgiven for imagining that workers, too lazy for the moment at hand, had chosen a good night’s sleep over the vital business of unloading such goods from boats lined up in their dozens offshore onto trucks, and getting them into the hands of the Americans desperately in need of them. Reading further, however, you’d learn that those “critical goods” are actually things like “exercise bikes, laptops, toys, [and] patio furniture.”

Fair enough. After all, as my city, San Francisco, enters what’s likely to be yet another almost rainless winter on a planet in ever more trouble, I can imagine my desire for patio furniture rising to a critical level. So, I’m relieved to know that dock workers will now be laboring through the night at the command of the president of the United States to guarantee that my needs are met. To be sure, shortages of at least somewhat more important items are indeed rising, including disposable diapers and the aluminum necessary for packaging some pharmaceuticals. Still, a major focus in the media has been on the specter of “slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.”

Providing “critical” yard furnishings is not the only reason the administration needs to unkink the supply chain. It’s also considered an anti-inflation measure (if an ineffective one). At the end of October, the Consumer Price Index had jumped 6.2% over the same period in 2020, the highest inflation rate in three decades. Such a rise is often described as the result of too much money chasing too few goods. One explanation for the current rise in prices is that, during the worst months of the pandemic, many Americans actually saved money, which they’re now eager to spend. When the things people want to buy are in short supply — perhaps even stuck on container ships off Long Beach and Los Angeles — the price of those that are available naturally rises.

Republicans have christened the current jump in the consumer price index as “Bidenflation,” although the administration actually bears little responsibility for the situation. But Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats know one thing: if it looks like they’re doing nothing to bring prices down, there will be hell to pay at the polls in 2022 and so it’s the night shift for dock workers and others in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and possibly other American ports.

However, running West Coast ports 24/7 won’t solve the supply-chain problem, not when there aren’t enough truckers to carry that critical patio furniture to Home Depot. The shortage of such drivers arises because there’s more demand than ever before, and because many truckers have simply quit the industry. As the New York Times reports, “Long hours and uncomfortable working conditions are leading to a shortage of truck drivers, which has compounded shipping delays in the United States.”

Rethinking (Shift) Work

Truckers aren’t the only workers who have been rethinking their occupations since the coronavirus pandemic pressed the global pause button. The number of employees quitting their jobs hit 4.4 million this September, about 3% of the U.S. workforce. Resignations were highest in industries like hospitality and medicine, where employees are most at risk of Covid-19 exposure.

For the first time in many decades, workers are in the driver’s seat. They can command higher wages and demand better working conditions. And that’s exactly what they’re doing at workplaces ranging from agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere to breakfast-cereal makers Kellogg and Nabisco. I’ve even been witnessing it in my personal labor niche, part-time university faculty members (of which I’m one). So allow me to pause here for a shout-out to the 6,500 part-time professors in the University of California system: Thank you! Your threat of a two-day strike won a new contract with a 30% pay raise over the next five years!

This brings me to Biden’s October announcement about those ports going 24/7. In addition to demanding higher pay, better conditions, and an end to two-tier compensation systems (in which laborers hired later don’t get the pay and benefits available to those already on the job), workers are now in a position to reexamine and, in many cases, reject the shift-work system itself. And they have good reason to do so.

So, what is shift work? It’s a system that allows a business to run continuously, ceaselessly turning out and/or transporting widgets year after year. Workers typically labor in eight-hour shifts: 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 a.m., or the like. In times of labor shortages, they can even be forced to work double shifts, 16 hours in total. Businesses love shift work because it reduces time (and money) lost to powering machinery up and down. And if time is money, then more time worked means more profit for corporations. In many industries, shift work is good for business. But for workers, it’s often another story.

The Graveyard Shift

Each shift in a 24-hour schedule has its own name. The day shift is the obvious one. The swing shift takes you from the day shift to the all-night, or graveyard, shift. According to folk etymology, that shift got its name because, once upon a time, cemetery workers were supposed to stay up all night listening for bells rung by unfortunates who awakened to discover they’d been buried alive. While it’s true that some coffins in England were once fitted with such bells, the term was more likely a reference to the eerie quiet of the world outside the workplace during the hours when most people are asleep.

I can personally attest to the strangeness of life on the graveyard shift. I once worked in an ice cream cone factory. Day and night, noisy, smoky machines resembling small Ferris wheels carried metal molds around and around, while jets of flame cooked the cones inside them. After a rotation, each mold would tip, releasing four cones onto a conveyor belt, rows of which would then approach my station relentlessly. I’d scoop up a stack of 25, twirl them around in a quick check for holes, and place them in a tall box.

Almost simultaneously, I’d make cardboard dividers, scoop up three more of those stacks and seal them, well-divided, in that box, which I then inserted in an even larger cardboard carton and rushed to a giant mechanical stapler. There, I pressed it against a switch, and — boom-ba-da-boom — six large staples would seal it shut, leaving me just enough time to put that carton atop a pallet of them before racing back to my machine, as new columns of just-baked cones piled up, threatening to overwhelm my worktable.

The only time you stopped scooping and boxing was when a relief worker arrived, so you could have a brief break or gobble down your lunch. You rarely talked to your fellow-workers, because there was only one “relief” packer, so only one person at a time could be on break. Health regulations made it illegal to drink water on the line and management was too cheap to buy screens for the windows, which remained shut, even when it was more than 100 degrees outside.

They didn’t like me very much at the Maryland Pacific Cone Company, maybe because I wanted to know why the high school boys who swept the floors made more than the women who, since the end of World War II, had been climbing three rickety flights of stairs to stand by those machines. In any case, management there started messing with my shifts, assigning me to all three in the same week. As you might imagine, I wasn’t sleeping a whole lot and would occasionally resort to those “little white pills” immortalized in the truckers’ song “Six Days on the Road.”

But I’ll never forget one graveyard shift when an angel named Rosie saved my job and my sanity. It was probably three in the morning. I’d been standing under fluorescent lights, scooping, twirling, and boxing for hours when the universe suddenly stood still. I realized at that moment that I’d never done anything else since the beginning of time but put ice cream cones in boxes and would never stop doing so until the end of time.

If time lost its meaning then, dimensions still turned out to matter a lot, because the cones I was working on that night were bigger than I was used to. Soon I was falling behind, while a huge mound of 40-ounce Eat-It-Alls covered my table and began to spill onto the floor. I stared at them, frozen, until I suddenly became aware that someone was standing at my elbow, gently pushing me out of the way.

Rosie, who had been in that plant since the end of World War II, said quietly, “Let me do this. You take my line.” In less than a minute, she had it all under control, while I spent the rest of the night at her machine, with cones of a size I could handle.

I have never been so glad to see the dawn.

The Deadly Reality of the Graveyard Shift

So, when the president of the United States negotiated to get dock workers in Los Angeles to work all night, I felt a twinge of horror. There’s another all-too-literal reason to call it the “graveyard” shift. It turns out that working when you should be in bed is dangerous. Not only do more accidents occur when the human body expects to be asleep, but the long-term effects of night work can be devastating. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports, the many adverse effects of night work include:

“type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, metabolic disorders, and sleep disorders. Night shift workers might also have an increased risk for reproductive issues, such as irregular menstrual cycles, miscarriage, and preterm birth. Digestive problems and some psychological issues, such as stress and depression, are more common among night shift workers. The fatigue associated with nightshift can lead to injuries, vehicle crashes, and industrial disasters.”

Some studies have shown that such shift work can also lead to decreased bone-mineral density and so to osteoporosis. There is, in fact, a catchall term for all these problems: shift-work disorder.

In addition, studies directly link the graveyard shift to an increased incidence of several kinds of cancer, including breast and prostate cancer. Why would disrupted sleep rhythms cause cancer? Because such disruptions affect the release of the hormone melatonin. Most of the body’s cells contain little “molecular clocks” that respond to daily alternations of light and darkness. When the light dims at night, the pineal gland releases melatonin, which promotes sleep. In fact, many people take it in pill form as a “natural” sleep aid. Under normal circumstances, such a melatonin release continues until the body encounters light again in the morning.

When this daily (circadian) rhythm is disrupted, however, so is the regular production of melatonin, which turns out to have another important biological function. According to NIOSH, it “can also stop tumor growth and protect against the spread of cancer cells.” Unfortunately, if your job requires you to stay up all night, it won’t do this as effectively.

There’s a section on the NIOSH website that asks, “What can night shift workers do to stay healthy?” The answers are not particularly satisfying. They include regular checkups and seeing your doctor if you have any of a variety of symptoms, including “severe fatigue or sleepiness when you need to be awake, trouble with sleep, stomach or intestinal disturbances, irritability or bad mood, poor performance (frequent mistakes, injuries, vehicle crashes, near misses, etc.), unexplained weight gain or loss.”

Unfortunately, even if you have access to healthcare, your doctor can’t write you a prescription to cure shift-work disorder. The cure is to stop working when your body should be asleep.

An End to Shift Work?

Your doctor can’t solve your shift work issue because, ultimately, it’s not an individual problem. It’s an economic and an ethical one.

There will always be some work that must be performed while most people are sleeping, including healthcare, security, and emergency services, among others. But most shift work gets done not because life depends upon it, but because we’ve been taught to expect our patio furniture on demand. As long as advertising and the grow-or-die logic of capitalism keep stoking the desire for objects we don’t really need, may not even really want, and will sooner or later toss on a garbage pile in this or some other country, truckers and warehouse workers will keep damaging their health.

Perhaps the pandemic, with its kinky supply chain, has given us an opportunity to rethink which goods are so “critical” that we’re willing to let other people risk their lives to provide them for us. Unfortunately, such a global rethink hasn’t yet touched Joe Biden and his administration as they confront an ongoing pandemic, supply-chain problems, a rise in inflation, and — oh yes! — an existential climate crisis that gets worse with every plastic widget produced, packed, and shipped.

It’s time for Biden — and the rest of us — to take a breath and think this through. There are good reasons that so many people are walking away from underpaid, life-threatening work. Many of them are reconsidering the nature of work itself and its place in their lives, no matter what the president or anyone else might wish.

And that’s a paradigm shift we all could learn to live with.

https://scheerpost.com/2021/12/06/we-do ... 7-economy/

Indeed we could. I've known plenty of guys who said they couldn't make it without OT, which only reflects how poorly they were being paid. And this, without even addressing the environmental issue of rampant productionism and the social fallout of unhinged consumerism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 13, 2021 2:56 pm

Inside the Secretive World of Union Busting
Capital & Main’s new series explores the impact of the union avoidance industry, which has only gotten more powerful in recent years.

Published on December 9, 2021By Marcus Baram

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Collage by Marco Amador. Photos by Alex Sava, Juan Monino, Tacojim, Patrick Heagney and Metamorworks via Getty Images.

The company owner was so worried about his employees joining a union that he mounted machine guns to keep labor organizers off his coal mine, launched an anti-union magazine and even secretly funded a Black newspaper to convince African-American workers that unions were dangerous. Those union-busting tactics worked, allowing mine magnate Charles Debardeleben to stop his workers in the industrial Birmingham-Bessemer area of northern Alabama from joining a union during the 1920s and 1930s.

Almost a century later, the tactics have gotten less physically intimidating but remain just as effective. Earlier this year in Bessemer, Amazon was easily able to fend off a well-publicized union organizing effort through a relentless anti-union campaign that included a website, text messages to employees, fliers posted in bathrooms and classic techniques like captive audience meetings, in which workers can be forced to sit for hours and listen to anti-union consulting firms paid at least $20,000 a day. Some of the tactics may have been illegal — the National Labor Relations Board recently authorized a new election after the union argued that the company’s decision to install a mailbox onsite created the false impression that Amazon was running the election, which pressured workers to vote against the union.



While union membership has risen slightly since 2018 thanks to some major organizing wins, and public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965, labor has a lot of ground to make up. Union membership plummeted from 20.1% of American wage and salary workers in 1983 to just 10.8% in 2020. One of the biggest reasons for that decline is the use of well-funded, aggressive campaigns by employers to fight off unions, conducted largely through expensive union avoidance consultants and lawyers. In 2019, it was estimated that companies spend at least $340 million per year on such consultants and often engage in illegal tactics, for which the penalties are minimal.

“They seem to be more aggressive than they used to be,” says Joe Hernandez, an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers in Orange County, California. “There was a union election in South Dakota, where pro-union workers who had a couple of tardies that were previously overlooked ended up getting fired. Other times they just close down the store or factory. They’re doing it all — using surveillance technology, social media messaging, whatever they can to beat the union.” (Disclosure: UFCW is a financial supporter of this website.)

In conversations with dozens of union officials, union avoidance consultants, former regulatory officials and workers, we’ve gained insights into union-busting activities by companies ranging from behemoths like Starbucks, Amazon, CVS, Dollar General and Safeway to health care organizations like Kaiser Permanente and HCA-affiliated hospitals to gig economy startups like HelloFresh and Imperfect Foods.

In a series of four stories, Capital & Main will explore the role and impact of union busting: how your favorite companies still aren’t required to disclose how much they spend on such consultants, how new workplace surveillance technologies have been exploited by some businesses to help them defeat organizing efforts, how labor studies academics have been pressured and intimidated by pro-business think tanks and lawmakers to stop their research into workplace issues — plus an interview with a longtime union organizer about his unlikely alliance with one of the most notorious union busters.

https://capitalandmain.com/inside-the-s ... on-busting

Inside the Secretive World of Union Busting: How Employers Use Technology to Defeat Unions
An estimated 60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools, some of which can be used to chill organizing.

Published on December 9, 2021By Jo Constantz

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Last January, at the height of the pandemic, an elderly housekeeper at a former hotel in Long Beach, California, that was being used to quarantine people with COVID-19 tested positive for the virus and died. That prompted the union that represents hotel workers in Southern California to file a complaint with the state and the National Labor Relations Board alleging that the hotel failed to follow pandemic safety protocols. Hotel workers met regularly to discuss their health, the safety situation and to strategize about how to address their complaints with the company, Holliday’s Helping Hands, which had been contracted by Los Angeles County to run the facility.

During a Zoom call set up by union representatives and employees who had organized a worker organizing committee, “We noticed that managers of the company had busted into the meeting — they had crashed our Zoom call,” recalls Lorena Lopez, a director of organizing with UNITE HERE Local 11. “Workers started to get very nervous and shut down their cameras so they wouldn’t be recognized. I was running the meeting and asked everyone to ID themselves. But the company people refused.” During the meeting, a worker on the cleaning crew had volunteered to be the spokesperson for the group. According to Lopez, this worker was confronted by management the next day and pressured to quit.

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“They were spying on us — and it was easy to do via Zoom,” she says. Under a settlement agreement with the NLRB, the company agreed to post flyers informing employers of their right to unionize and pledged not to ask them about organizing efforts and not to surveil their Zoom meetings. A lawyer for the company did not return requests for comment.

Workplace surveillance, already widespread in the U.S., has become even more prevalent during the pandemic as employers try to enforce public health measures and monitor remote workers. According to research by Gartner, a market research firm, 60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools, twice as many as before the pandemic. Coworker.org, a labor research nonprofit, recently compiled a database of over 550 of these commercially available products, which it dubs “little tech,” and published a study outlining potential harms and noting the industry’s general lack of regulation.


“Employers do have surprising freedom to monitor what their employees do on their own systems.”
~ V. John Ella, a Minneapolis-based employment and business lawyer.

Technology-enabled surveillance — from keycard tagging and email monitoring to social media tracking and worker profiling — often introduced in the name of safety and productivity can have a chilling effect on organizing and allow companies to sidestep labor law. It enables employers to profile workers and gain insights into employees’ private lives and their sentiments — who’s likely going to be the most outspoken? Why is that single Black mother now meeting with those two workers with strong political views? — and allows them to develop algorithms to predict union vulnerabilities.

Amazon and Walmart are two of the best-known examples of employers using surveillance technology during union battles, sometimes skirting the law. Leaked internal documents from Walmart included methods for monitoring employee activity and conversations about union activism, Amazon’s Whole Foods utilized heat maps that were based on predictive analytics to track store locations considered at high risk of union activity, and Google reportedly has a system to alert managers to any internal meetings scheduled with 100 or more employees, “partially to weed out employee organizing,” according to the human resources newsletter HR Brew.

Since at least September, HelloFresh, which has been locked in a bitter struggle with UNITE HERE, which seeks to organize its workers, has been tracking social media posts about union activity using a marketing tool called Falcon. It’s reportedly discussed monitoring the employees behind such posts and even reported such posts as spam to diminish their visibility. The company explained to Vice that “it is our duty to correct misinformation and mischaracterizations of our company.”

Such tactics are often used to turn employees against each other, says Ricardo Hidalgo, an international organizer with the Teamsters, who has helped unionize machinists and sanitation workers. Company managers and the consultants they hire will try to sneak anti-union managers into group texts and WhatsApp groups to track discussions about organizing activity. “I’ll tell worker(s), ‘There’s a snitch among you.’ That’s how bad it gets.” (Disclosure: The Teamsters are a financial supporter of this website.)


Surveillance has been a component of anti-union campaigns since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency began infiltrating unions in the 1870s.

There are few restrictions on how these tools are used. “Employers do have surprising freedom to monitor what their employees do on their own systems,” said V. John Ella, an employment and business lawyer based in Minneapolis.

These practices became even more invasive as the shift to remote work dissolved boundaries between home and work for many.

Surveillance has been a component of anti-union campaigns since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency began infiltrating unions in the 1870s. The passage in 1935 of the National Labor Relations Act, which established the right to form a union, did not address spying directly, though the practice is at odds with the act’s aim to protect concerted activity.

Over the years, case law has accrued to delineate what kinds of surveillance constitute an unfair labor practice. According to research by Charlotte Garden, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law, the NLRB has found a range of practices to breach the law, including “watching employees with binoculars, watching union activity on a daily basis and for hours at a time, posting guards in previously unguarded areas, [and] photographing or videotaping employees and monitoring their phone calls in response to union activity.”

In general, though, if an employer sees union activity out in the open, it isn’t considered an unfair labor practice. The NLRB judges whether the employer’s methods are “out of the ordinary” in a manner that chills collective action. As Garden notes, this allows employers to “set the baseline” — and encourages the adoption of the broadest possible surveillance.

Today’s technology drastically reduces the amount of work you need to do to keep tabs on workers, making comprehensive surveillance financially viable for the first time.

Companies can install commercially available software from firms like ActivTrak, HiveDesk and Teramind to track keystrokes, take periodic screenshots of employees’ desktops and monitor email. “To some extent these surveillance technologies are a little harder to spot, [which] arguably allows them to engage in surveillance that’s more hidden and maybe less known,” says Wilma Liebman, former chair of the NLRB, and can potentially give companies an advantage during tense union elections. “To the extent that they’re able to track employees’ emails, they would be able to [know] what the communications are and the substance of them, giving them insight into pre-union activity, employee discontent.”


Employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5% of all union election campaigns, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.

Some elements of surveillance have become so commonplace that they’re easy to overlook. ID badges, for example, can be used to monitor employees’ movement within a workplace, tracking whom they meet with and when.

While technology has changed, labor law has not.

Comprehensive surveillance is quickly becoming standard practice, even though it is illegal under labor law for companies to spy on unionization efforts and other protected activities, whether that activity is covert or overt (and intended to intimidate workers).

It’s not a theoretical issue. Employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5% of all union election campaigns, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Almost 14% of union elections included a charge of coercive surveillance, though the researchers said this figure is likely an underestimate since many cases go unreported.

One issue that complicates the situation is that labor law was written in the 1940s, and its protections are grounded in “distinctions around being on or off the physical worksite or activities during work hours or during breaks” that are largely obsolete for a modern workforce that involves remote workers checking their cellphones, according to a report by labor market policy analyst Kathryn Zickuhr.

Daniel Hanley, a senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute and the author of a report on Amazon’s surveillance practices, said surveillance tends to have a “creeping” effect: You accept a little bit, which opens the gate to the next bit — until, eventually, it’s hard to know how much is actually necessary.

Amazon warehouses are decked out with security cameras integrated with artificial intelligence to analyze workers’ every move. Item scanners used by employees keep track of the amount of time it takes to complete a task — too much time off task can lead to warnings or termination. Even drivers, most of whom are independent contractors, are monitored closely: Data is collected on things like vehicle location, braking and speed while cameras inside the vans watch for signs of unsafe behavior.

“It used to be that workers could feel pretty comfortable talking with their co-workers, as long as the supervisor wasn’t within earshot. You don’t really have that luxury anymore.”
~ Matthew Bodie, professor at Saint Louis University School of Law

Amazon, in particular, will continue to find “ever more imaginative means to surveil workers,” Hanley said. “There’s really nothing that they’re not going to figure out.”

Given its outsize role in the American economy, Amazon’s practices are likely to be imitated by other corporations. Among the measures that have raised eyebrows at the company are buying software that could help it analyze and visualize data on unions, monitoring employee listservs known for their activism and tracking the use of Facebook groups by contract drivers to plan strikes. The company has insisted that those programs were not intended to clamp down on organizing efforts by workers.

FedEx and UPS delivery trucks have also been outfitted with driver-facing cameras, raising concerns that the audio and video monitoring chills protected union activity. Walmart, famously anti-union, patented technology in 2018 that could record and analyze audio at checkout counters to gauge how cashiers were interacting with customers.

Given the level of surveillance in some workplaces, it can feel like there’s no refuge. “It used to be that workers could feel pretty comfortable talking with their co-workers, as long as the supervisor wasn’t within earshot,” said Matthew Bodie, professor at Saint Louis University School of Law. “You don’t really have that luxury anymore, that kind of private space.”

Such monitoring can create the monotone hum in your mind that you are constantly being watched. It’ll get you to question: “Should I talk to other people? How can I talk to them? How do I know Amazon doesn’t know?”

If an employer came across evidence of organizing while collecting data for other purposes, they would essentially have to ignore some of that information and compartmentalize it in a way that protects the employees from retaliation, per labor law.


Though surveillance is one of the most serious unfair labor practices, it can be extraordinarily difficult to prove that an employer was engaged in such activity.

But under “at will” employment agreements, employers can fire workers for any reason or no reason at all.

It’s often in employers’ interests to do so. A study by Anna Stansbury, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, found that a typical business may have an incentive to illegally fire a worker it suspects of organizing if it would diminish the probability of unionization by just 0.15% to 2%.

Though surveillance is one of the most serious unfair labor practices, it can be extraordinarily difficult to prove that an employer was engaged in such activity. Management can argue that they just check the data in an emergency, though it’s nearly impossible to know exactly how they’re using all of the information they’re collecting.

Organizers say that in this context, maintaining secrecy is crucial. The process can be painstaking as organizers try to keep everything under wraps.

Calvin Skinner, an organizer at the SEIU-UHW, said that during one recent two-year campaign, “We had to be so covert until we filed for the election.”

Most organizers are well versed in using secure, private means of communication like Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and avoiding company devices that can be monitored.

But acting in such secrecy fosters a feeling of wrongdoing. “If it’s too secret, too confidential, then it starts to feel illicit,” said Bodie. “It’s like, oh, we shouldn’t be doing this.”

Sometimes an employer’s use of technology to surveil its workers can backfire, like at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, where the all-encompassing surveillance system has spurred organizing efforts. Spokespersons for Amazon have described its employee monitoring efforts as prudent business measures, according to the Washington Post.

Sometimes, such invasive surveillance can also turn off company managers and even turn them into whistleblowers. Several years ago, Tim Dubnau, deputy director of organizing at the Communication Workers of America, said he was contacted by a high-level manager at Verizon Wireless. “He felt awful about the union-busting.” In a 2020 ruling, an NLRB administrative law judge found that the company’s search of an employee’s personal property “would reasonably be construed to permit unlawful search and surveillance of employees’ organizing…” And in 2018, the company settled with the NLRB after the CWA filed an unfair labor practice charge related to an employee’s claim that they were surveilled for engaging in union activity. A spokesperson for Verizon denies that it engages in surveillance, stating that it “respects and follows the law and employee rights” under labor law. “Our company does not engage in surveillance of employees’ union activities.”

Unit, a startup with the goal of streamlining the unionization process, has leveraged its technical expertise directly. Managers and supervisors are not permitted on the platform. An election petition signature is needed to access the platform, a requirement designed to limit access to supporters.

Unit’s FAQ page advises users not to use the app during working hours or on work-related devices or networks. “It is illegal for your employer to spy on your union, whether on the Unit app or in real life,” the site says. “Sometimes employers disregard the law, so to keep your information private, we recommend only using personal devices and non-work internet to access Unit.”

The platform collects data from all who register, including a verified email address and an IP address. In case anyone from management tries to gain access — a clear violation — they’ll have evidence. “We surveil the surveillers,” said founder James White.

Workplace monitoring, of course, isn’t all bad: Some surveillance practices can help ensure safety, detect and prevent harassment, and provide constructive employee feedback.

The key, according to Hanley, is to incorporate workers into the decision-making process.

“What are their health and safety concerns? Maybe they say, you know what? This technology, we actually could use it,” said Hanley. “But that’s for them to decide.”

Yet it’s hard to imagine a company like Amazon willingly relinquishing control in this area to its workers. It’s a catch-22: Workers won’t get a say until they win a seat at the bargaining table.

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Inside the Secretive World of Union Busting: The Story of an Unlikely Alliance
Thirty years ago, a labor organizer helped convince an anti-union consultant to document his methods.

Published on December 10, 2021By Marcus Baram

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Protest at Gimbels department store in New York City in July, 1948. Photo: European/FPG/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

They were certainly an odd couple, the unlikeliest of allies: the union organizer and the notorious union buster. Bob Muehlenkamp, a stalwart of the modern-day labor movement, has coordinated hundreds of union organizing campaigns and was the organizing director of the Teamsters and SEIU 1199, the hospital workers union. Martin Jay Levitt, a master of corporate skulduggery, did everything he could as a consultant hired by hundreds of companies to intimidate workers into not joining a union. Once, during an organizing effort marked by threats of violence at one of the country’s biggest hospital systems, Muehlenkamp was handcuffed and arrested for trespassing, Levitt relishing another victory as employees voted not to join a union. They were on opposite sides, fighting tooth and nail, for close to 20 years.

Until Levitt had a change of heart, and in the late 1980s reached out to Muehlenkamp about his desire to write a book exposing the dirty tricks of the union-busting industry. Levitt’s Confessions of a Union Buster was published in 1993 and immediately made waves, with Levitt appearing on 60 Minutes and giving lectures around the country to denounce his former colleagues and confess his sins. “Union-busting is a field populated by bullies and built on deceit,” he wrote. “The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.” He described how his former firm, Modern Management Methods, had developed a methodology for breaking down employee support for unions by using psychological tactics and turning managers into anti-union spokespersons.

His new career as a reformer earned him enemies on both sides — panicking his old colleagues in the union avoidance consulting industry and arousing skepticism among former nemeses in the labor movement, one of whom called him a “cheesy hustler.”

Levitt wrote about his insatiable greed, his alcoholism, a rap sheet that included forgeries, check fraud and arson, and multiple illegal activities on behalf of some of America’s biggest companies. Critics called him an opportunist, but some labor veterans, including Muehlenkamp, saw him as an important ally who could help them learn how to combat the union busters.

Levitt was a complicated penitent — just months after the book was published, he went to jail for obtaining credit by false pretenses — and he passed away in 2004 without having won over that many of his former antagonists.

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But his seminal book has served as a guide for union organizers and their allies. Levitt describes how his former industry benefited enormously from a 1950s-era loophole in labor law that allowed companies to hire anti-union consultants without disclosing those arrangements — one of the “enormous, gaping errors in the law that have left room for a sleazy billion-dollar industry to plod through,” Levitt wrote. That loophole was closed in 2016 by the Department of Labor, finally shedding light on an industry paid an estimated $340 million a year by companies. The labor victory was short-lived — just a few years later, the loophole was reopened by the Trump administration, and the Biden administration has yet to take action.

The book is being reprinted, with a new introduction and appendix by Muehlenkamp, who writes that “it documents the dirty underside of how U.S. corporations, who routinely bargain with unions in other countries, attacked and weakened American democracy. The question is, what can we do about it? We know how to have the best chance at beating the union busters. It starts with reading Levitt’s book. Know the enemy and take them as seriously as they take a union.”

Muehlenkamp talked to Capital & Main about his experiences in the movement, knowing Levitt as enemy and ally, and what he sees as the biggest challenges facing unions today.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Capital & Main: What motivated you to write the intro? Were you familiar with Confessions of a Union Buster?

I knew Marty and I encouraged him to write it. He came to me and asked me if I thought it would be worth doing.

Now, it’s been over 25 years, but it’s relevant at this moment and we thought it would be right, both in terms of people wanting to organize and in terms of democracy and what’s happening in the country, to come out with a new edition of the book. It’s almost impossible to have a vibrant democracy without the labor movement. It just doesn’t work.

So take me back to how you first met Levitt.

I first met Marty during the organizing effort at Henry Ford Hospital [in southwest Detroit] back in 1972-73. It was and maybe still is the biggest union election in any private hospital. Henry Ford was 2,800 [workers eligible to be unionized]. They stacked it. Originally it was 1,300. They stacked it with 1,500 more workers — secretaries and others [which makes it harder for the union to win elections], and then they proceeded to unleash, for the first time in my experience, the full campaign. To the extent that even the organizers had surveillance on us. All the time. I’d never experienced that level of intensity before, and I’d been organizing workers for about three years. They delayed until they were ready. They stacked the list. They eliminated all the leaders through intimidation or firing them. They isolated everyone. They had relentless communication, based on psychological methods. They arrested me, just to portray “violent” union organizers, for trespassing.


“It’s almost impossible to have a vibrant democracy without the labor movement. It just doesn’t work.”

What happened?

I was inside the hospital talking to workers. It’s a vast complex, and I’m just talking with some workers. And of course they surveilled me and walked up and put cuffs on me for trespassing, and I was booked.

And did you encounter Levitt during that battle?

Never saw him, never heard of him until afterwards. I think they may have bragged about it [the union organizing effort failed at Henry Ford Hospital]. And then we started running into him everywhere. His fingerprints were everywhere for the next 15 years. And the others started copying their methods. His firm, they created the system, the method. And even the legitimate law firms did it.

That set the template for the modern-day union-busting campaign.

I think so. Obviously, with the technology now, they can do more surveillance. They use social media. They do it all, but it’s the same idea. But don’t kid yourself. The technology is not what does it. It’s the individual terror. Like I say, if there’s 500 people in a unit, there’s not one election, there are 500 elections. They have a file on every single person and they work it. That’s what makes the difference. And in the end, the message is always, “Let’s get back to what it was. Just get rid of this union stuff.” And they do all kinds of things. They would have people’s cars broken into in their parking lot, which had never happened before. But now the union’s there, so they break into people’s cars, right? And then the cops are all over the place, and then they have to change the lighting and they put out the communication that it’s all because of the union.

What pushed Levitt over the edge?

It was a combination of things — he was not a stable person. The nature of what he did to so many people got to him. He was an alcoholic, his family life fell apart. His finances, despite making all that money, collapsed on him. And so mentally, psychologically, physically, he broke down. He had a religious conversion. It all came together and he had a complete collapse.


“Obviously, with the technology now, they can do more surveillance. But don’t kid yourself. The technology is not what does it. It’s the individual terror.”

But what made him think, “I have to go a different way. This part of my life was terrible and I want to change.”

There were people at the time, when he started telling people that he was going to do it, and he was asking for advice, who would say, “Bob, forget it.” That he ran out of one way to make money and he just was trying to make money doing something else. And that was obviously part of it, but I don’t subscribe to that theory. He had some understanding of what he did. He wanted to make money, sure, but he really wanted to come clean on it. And I think he did. I think he really told it the way it was. The book is about him.

But he doesn’t really put the pieces together of the method. He was writing more of a personal story, a confessional, obviously.

And when did he reach out to you?

He reached out to me, sometime in 1989, about writing it. I wasn’t surprised. I just took it as a matter of course. I told him, “OK, great. As long as you tell the truth.” And that encouraged him. Then I invited him to a big union meeting. He was in Northern California at the time. And I was doing training with the hospital workers union. They were preparing for a big strike all over San Francisco, and I was working with them. And we brought in all the shop stewards on a Saturday about what to expect as we built up to the strike, what they would do to try to bust the union. So there were several hundred people there, and I told Marty, “Come over and watch my presentation and see if you think I’ve nailed you.” And he came, he just sat in the back and then he called me afterwards. He said, “Bob, there’s nothing more to say, you got it all.”

Did you become friends, would you say?

Oh no, not at all. When I invited him to come to a Teamsters thing, I didn’t have any concerns about it at all. I thought, “Wow, this will be great.” The Teamster guys are serious guys, and they were more than pissed. It was not what I expected. I thought they would be somewhat thankful that he exposed it all and they’d want to get into a conversation with him.

And did he get them to think of him more kindly?

No. No. No. They still hated his guts.


“The only thing that matters is taking the employer out of the process, which is what the PRO Act is about. As long as the employer is in the process, forget it.”

In general, it seems very rare for a union buster to switch sides. Have you come across other cases of whistle-blowers who all of a sudden want to work with you or feel bad?

I’ve worked on hundreds, thousands of campaigns. And you never come across that.

Except for Levitt. Why is that — because the money is there or because there’s an intense ideological component?

Both of those. They really believe this shit. Whether they believe in how they do it… Do they ideologically believe that unions are horrible? Yes. And then the money is good…I don’t recall any of them ever coming forward and telling people what they did, and how they got trained. They take supervisors off the job for weeks at a time and train them.

You talked a little about the use of technology, but how else has union-busting changed over the last 30 years?

In terms of the fundamentals, I don’t think it has changed, except in adapting technology to this method. It helps them — they just use it. But you can’t get too clever with this. The personal stuff is what matters. The one-on-one terror.

Regulators like the NLRB and DOL are supposed to be watching. Have they gotten more or less concerned about unfair labor practices (ULPs)?

I suspect that because there’s so little organizing going on now, there aren’t that many ULPs pending or processed, or finalized, or whatever — or elections overturned. It’s completely useless. The legal process is completely, completely useless. Good people go in under Democratic administrations, but there’s often a bureaucracy in place, no matter whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, and there’s an endless legal and bureaucratic process that they have now created over all these 80 years or so. But then under Republicans, they reverse the rulings. They bring their own people in, they drag things out. You cannot fix this, the legal issue, by going around the edges. The only thing that matters is taking the employer out of the process, which is what the PRO Act is about. As long as the employer is in the process, forget it.

Are you encouraged by the recent increase in organizing activity? There’s a lot of activity around organizing gig workers, and now there’s an effort to unionize Amazon workers in Staten Island.

Yes, I’m encouraged. It’s more than has been going on for 20 years or so. We’ll see. That’s why this book is so relevant now, because people really do need it. But we also shouldn’t exaggerate, right? The efforts that are going on. It’s better. But as long as the employer is in the process, it won’t matter.

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Inside the Secretive World of Union Busting: Here’s How Much Corporations Pay to Bust Unions
U.S. companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to ensure workers don’t organize.

Published on December 10, 2021By Marcus Baram

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A Dollar General store in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

A handful of workers at the Dollar General In the small Connecticut town of Barkhamsted had grown frustrated last September at being poorly treated by a district manager, amid allegations that sexual harassment was ignored. They became so upset that they sought to form a union to see that their concerns were addressed. But when they did, the massive retailer fought back with a vengeance.

The organizing effort involved just six workers (five after one said he was fired for his efforts to unionize) earning $13 an hour — so about $624 a day in total — but the company spent multiples of that to combat the union drive. Dollar General paid Labor Relations Institute, a firm known for its union avoidance consulting, a fee of $2,700 per day for each consultant it brought in, according to filings with the Department of Labor. LRI used five consultants, who reportedly held one-on-one meetings with workers and conducted group sessions to educate them on the risks of joining a union. In the end, the unionization effort failed and the company breathed a sigh of relief. The retail giant posted $33.7 billion in sales and $2.7 billion in profit in 2020, but remains convinced its future earnings might have been hurt if any of its 157,000 workers joined a union.

The company is just one of many that collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to make sure that its workers don’t organize. To take on the unions, they often hire consultants and law firms that specialize in tactics such as messaging, surveillance and intimidation. Companies spent an estimated $340 million a year on the cottage industry of consultants, some of whom charge $350-plus hourly rates or $3,200-plus daily rates. One consultant noted during a congressional hearing that the number of consultants had increased tenfold during the 1970s.

Such advisers have been around for many decades and their tactics have evolved, with an increasing use of surveillance technologies like social media monitoring and email tracking. But their approach remains essentially the same — relying on fear-mongering and intimidation.

They’ve been incredibly successful. Union membership has plummeted in recent decades, from 20.1% of American wage and salary workers in 1983 to just 10.8% in 2020. While anti-union consultants have played an outsized role, the country has also seen a decline in sectors like manufacturing that were once heavily unionized. In addition, regulators at the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board charged with ensuring fair union elections have seen their budgets slashed and enforcement of rules regulating unlawful employer activities decline over the decades.

The decline started during the Reagan administration, remembers Patrick Byrne, a former official at the DOL. He recalls a supervisor walking into his office, pointing at a photograph on the wall of FDR talking to an unemployed worker waiting on a breadline during the Depression and snapping, “That’s old hat!” Byrne says that during the Trump era, his bosses ignored multiple reports of employers engaging in potentially illegal activity. “Over the years, the use of consultants has skyrocketed,” he says, adding that the agency has lost its sense of mission. “The New Deal paradigm is in cardiac arrest.”

Here are some of the most well-known companies in America and how much they’ve spent on union-busting firms.

These numbers represent just the tip of the iceberg — during the Trump administration, officials at the Department of Labor stopped requiring companies to disclose how much they spend on union avoidance consultants. As a result, the number of LM-21 filings plummeted 38% the year after the rule change — and many of those that were submitted left the dollar amount section blank. The Biden administration has yet to tighten the rules, despite signaling its intent last April to revisit these Trump-era changes. A spokesperson for the agency didn’t return a request for comment.

These partial spending numbers for anti-union consultants from 2017 to 2021 reflect the changing economy and now include many food delivery app companies and cannabis startups trying to cut their labor costs.

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Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class
December 12, 2021
Deprived of land and common rights, the English poor were forced into wage-labor

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Building and clothmaking were among the largest industrial occupations in the 17th century.

Articles in this series:

Commons and classes before capitalism
‘Systematic theft of communal property’
Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men
Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class
by Ian Angus

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
—Bertolt Brecht, “A Worker Reads History”


Much academic debate about the origin of capitalism has actually been about the origin of capitalists. Were they originally aristocrats, or gentry, or merchants, or successful farmers? Far less attention has been paid to Brecht’s penetrating question: who did the actual work?

The answer is simple and of world-historic importance. Capitalism depends on the availability of large numbers of non-capitalists, people who are, as Marx said, “free in the double sense.” Free to work for others because they are not legally tied to a landlord or master, and free to starve if they don’t sell their labor-power, because they own no land or other means of production. “The possessor of labor-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labor has been objectified … [is] compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labor-power which exists only in his living body.”[1]

This article outlines some key experiences of the first great wave of commoners who were separated from the land in England in the 1500s and 1600s.

Some commoners went directly from following a plough to full-time wage-labor, but many, perhaps most, tried to avoid proletarianization. Christopher Hill has shown that “acceptance of wage labor was the last resort open to those who had lost their land, but many regarded it as little better than slavery.”[2] Not only were wages low and working conditions abysmal, but the very idea of being subject to a boss and working under wage-discipline was universally detested. “Wage-laborers were deemed inferior in status to those who held the most minute fragment of land to farm for themselves,” so “men fought desperately to avoid the abyss of wage-labor. … The apotheosis of freedom was the stultifying drudgery of those who had become cogs in someone else’s machine.”[3]

The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”[4] Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.

The Dispossessed

Some people worked for wages in feudal society, but it wasn’t until feudalism disintegrated that the long-term growth of a proletarian class began. It developed, directly and indirectly, from the destruction of the commons.

As we saw in Part One, there was significant economic differentiation in English villages long before the rise of capitalism. By the 1400s, in most communities there was a clear division between those whose farms were large enough to sustain their families and produce a surplus for the market, and the smallholders and cottagers who had to work full- or part-time for their better-off neighbors or the landlord.

Between the two groups was a surprisingly large category known as servants in husbandry — young people who lived with farm families to gain experience, until they could save enough to rent land and marry. They lived and ate with the farmer’s family, often had the right to keep a few sheep or other animals, and usually received a small annual cash payment. “Between one-third and one-half of hired labor in early modern agriculture was supplied by servants in husbandry, and most early modern youths in rural England were servants in husbandry.” At any time until about 1800, some 60 percent of men and women aged 15 to 24 were living-in as farm servants.[5]

In class terms, servants in husbandry were a transitional and temporary category, similar to apprentices or college students today. “Servants did not understand themselves, and were not understood by early modern society, to be part of a laboring class, youthful proletarians.”[6] I stress that because many authors have interpreted a late seventeenth century estimate that more than half the population were servants to mean that most people were wage-laborers. In fact, most servants could best be described as peasants-in-training. A substantial layer of people who had to sell their labor-power existed in the late 1600s, but they were still a minority of the population.

In the 1400s and early 1500s, most enclosures involved the physical eviction of many tenants, often entire villages. After about 1550, it was more usual for landlords to negotiate with their larger tenants to create bigger farms by dividing up the commons and undeveloped land. “It became typical for wealthier tenants to be offered compensation for the loss of common rights, while the landless poor, whose common rights were often much harder to sustain at law, gained little or nothing in return.”[7]

Loss of common rights was catastrophic for smallholders and cottagers. The milk and cheese from two cows could generate as much income as full-time farm labor, and their manure was fuel for the cottage or fertilizer for a garden. None of that was possible without access to pasture. Jane Humphries has shown that, before enclosure, in families where the men worked as day-laborers, the women and children worked on the commons, caring for animals, cutting turf and gathering wood for fuel and building, gathering berries, nuts and other wild foods, and gleaning leftover grain after harvest. “Since women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in women’s economic position within the family and more generally to increased dependence of whole families on wages and wage earners.”[8]

At the same time, England was experiencing a baby boom — between 1520 and 1640, the population more than doubled, from about 2.4 million to over 5 million. That was still about a million fewer people than in the 1300s, before the Black Death, but the system that formerly fed 6 million people no longer existed. Population growth, rising rents, and the trend towards much larger farms were making it impossible for the poor to live on the land. It’s estimated that the proportion of agriculture laborers who had no more than a cottage and garden jumped from 11 percent in 1560 to 40 percent after 1620.[9]

Forced Labor

Turning the dispossessed peasants of Tudor and Stuart England into reliable wage workers required not just economic pressure but state compulsion. “Throughout this period compulsion to labor stood in the background of the labor market. Tudor legislation provided compulsory work for the unemployed as well as making unemployment an offence punishable with characteristic brutality.”[10]

The most comprehensive of those laws was the 1563 Statute of Artificers. Among its provisions:

Unemployed men and women from 12 to 60 years old could be compelled to work on any farm that would hire them.
Wages and hours for all types of work were set by local justices, who were drawn from the employing class. Anyone who offered or accepted higher wages was imprisoned.
No one could leave a job without written permission from the employer; an unemployed worker without the required letter could be imprisoned and whipped.
The pioneering economic historian Thorold Rogers described the 1563 Statute as “the most powerful instrument ever devised for degrading and impoverishing the English worker.”[11] R.H. Tawney compared its provisions to serfdom: “the wage-laborer … can hardly have seen much difference between the restrictions on his movement imposed by the Justices of the Peace and those laid on him by the manorial authorities, except indeed that the latter, being limited to the area of a single village, had been more easy to evade.”[12]

But no matter what the law said, there were often more workers than paying jobs, so many hit the roads in search of work. Such “masterless men” frightened the country’s rulers even more than the unemployed who stayed home. Tudor authorities didn’t recognize any such thing as structural unemployment — able-bodied people without land or masters were obviously lazy idlers who had chosen not to work and were a threat to social peace. Like most governments then and now, they attacked symptoms, not causes, passing law after law to force “vagrants, vagabonds, beggars and rogues” to return to their home parishes and work.

A particularly vicious law, enacted in 1547, ordered that any vagrant who refused to accept any work offered be branded with a red-hot iron and literally enslaved for two years. His master was authorized to feed him on bread and water, put iron rings around his neck and legs, and “cause the said slave to work by beating, chaining or otherwise in such work and labor how vile so ever it be.”[13] Vagabonds’ children could be taken from their parents and apprenticed to anyone who would have them until they were 20 (girls) or 24 (boys).

Other vagrancy laws prescribed whipping through the streets until bloody and death for repeat offenders. In 1576, every county was ordered to build houses of correction and incarcerate anyone who refused to work at whatever wages and conditions were offered.

As Marx wrote in Capital, “Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labor.”[14]

Migration and emigration

Much of England was still unenclosed and sparsely populated, so rather than live as landless laborers, many families travelled in search of available farm land.

“This surplus population moved from the more overcrowded areas to the regions of fen and marsh, heath and forest; moor and mountain, where there were extensive commons still, on which a cottager with a little or no land could make a living from the rights of common, by which he could pasture some animals on the common and take fuel and building materials; where there were still unoccupied waste lands, on which the poor could squat in little cabins and carve out small farms for themselves; and where there were industrial by-employments by which a cottager or small farmer could supplement his income. By this migration and from these resources of common rights, wastelands and industry, the small peasant survived and poor or landless peasants were saved from. decline into wage-laborers or paupers.”[15]

But the largest number of migrants left England entirely, mostly for North America, or the Caribbean. Net emigration in the century before 1640 was close to 600,000, and another 400,000 left by the end of the century — extraordinarily large numbers from a country whose mid-1600s population was barely 5 million. What’s more, those are net figures — many more left, but their numbers were partially offset by immigrants from Scotland, Wales, Ireland and continental Europe.[16]

Most of the emigrants were young men, and about half paid for the dangerous ocean crossing by agreeing to be indentured servants for four or more years. That was a high price, but hundreds of thousands of landless peasants were willing to pay it. (For some it was not a choice: English courts frequently sentenced vagrants and other criminals to overseas indentured servitude.)

Labor in the Metropolis

For many of the dispossessed, establishing new farms in England or overseas was not possible or, perhaps, desirable. The alternative was paid employment, and that was most easily found — they hoped — in London.

“Whereas the population of England less than doubled from 3.0 million to 5.1 million between 1550 and 1700, London quadrupled from 120,000 to 490,000” — making it home to nearly 10% of the national population.[17] London normally had a high mortality rate, and repeated outbreaks of plague killed tens of thousands, so that growth could only have occurred if about 10,000 people moved there every year. Living conditions were terrible, but wages were higher than anywhere else, and hundreds of thousands of landless workers saw it as their best hope.

Most histories of the city emphasize its role as a hub of global trade and empire. As Brian Dietz comments, “historians by and large hesitate to associate London with manufacturing. An industrial image somehow seems inappropriate.”[18]

That’s understandable if “London” means only the walled capital-c City and the immediately surrounding parishes, where rich merchants lived and worked, and where guilds formed in medieval times still controlled most economic activity, but London was more than that. Most migrants lived in the eastern suburbs, which grew an astonishing 1400 percent between 1560 and 1680. In those suburbs, and south of the Thames, there were so many industrial operations that historian A.L. Beier describes the metropolis as an “engine of manufacture.” There were “water and corn mills on the rivers Lea and Thames; wharves and docks for repairing and fitting out ships between Shadwell and Limehouse; as well as lime-burning, brewing, bell-founding, brick and tile manufacture, wood- and metal-working.”[19]

In the metropolis as a whole, industry was more important than commerce. Few records of the size and organization of industries have survived, but it appears from burial records that in the 1600s, about 40 percent of the people in the metropolis worked mainly in manufacturing, particularly clothing, building, metalwork and leather work. Another 36 percent worked primarily in retail.[20]

Despite the growth of industry, few workers in London or elsewhere found long-term or secure jobs. Most wage-workers never experienced steady work or earned predictable incomes.

“Continuity in employment was not to be expected save among a minority of exceptionally skilled and valued employees. Most workers were engaged for the duration of a particular job, or in the case of seamen for a ‘run’ or voyage, while general labor was usually hired on a daily basis. The bulk of the laboring population, both male and female, therefore constituted a large pool of partially employed labor, which was drawn upon selectively as need arose. … For some, periods of fairly regular employment were punctuated by lengthy bouts of idleness. For others, days of work were scattered intermittently across the year. …[21]

London was by far the largest manufacturing center in England, but migrant workers played key roles in industrial growth in smaller cities as well. Among others, Coventry (population 7,000) attracted spinners, weavers, and cloth finishers, and Birmingham (population 5,000) was an important center for cutlery and nail manufacture.[22]

Working at Sea

In previous articles I discussed the Fishing Revolution — “the development and growth of intensive fishing in the North Sea and northwestern Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” Thousands of workers travelled to distant fishing grounds, where they worked for six or more months a year, catching, processing and preserving herring and cod. The Newfoundland fishery alone used more ships and required more workers than the more famous Spanish treasure fleet that carried silver from Central and South America. The offshore bank-ships and onshore fishing-rooms were factories, long before the industrial revolution, and the men who worked in them were among the first proletarians of the capitalist epoch.

In the 1600s, English ships and fishworkers became a dominant force in North Atlantic fishing. “The success of the North Sea and Newfoundland fisheries depended on merchants who had capital to invest in ships and other means of production, fishworkers who had to sell their labor power in order to live, and a production system based on a planned division of labor.” [23]

The growth of long-distance fishing prefigured and contributed to the growth of a larger maritime working class. Mainstream economic histories of 16th and 17th century England usually discuss the merchant companies that organized trade with Russia, Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, India and Africa, but few have much to say about the seamen whose labor made their trading voyages possible.

Fortunately, historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have been remedying that neglect. In Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and The Many-Headed Hydra, they document the growth of a working class on merchant and naval ships — “a setting in which large numbers of workers cooperated on complex and synchronized tasks, under slavish, hierarchical discipline in which human will was subordinated to mechanical equipment, all for a money wage. The work, cooperation and discipline of the ship made it a prototype of the factory.”[24]

The capital that merchants invested in long-distance trade “necessarily set massive amounts of free wage labor in motion.”

“In the mid-sixteenth century, between 3,000 and 5,000 Englishmen plied the waves. But by 1750, after two centuries of intensive development, their number had ballooned to more than 60,000. Merchant shipping mobilized huge masses of men for shipboard labor. These workers entered new relationships both to capital — as one of the first generations of free waged laborers — and to each other — as collective laborers. … These cooperating hands did not own the tools or materials of production, and consequently they sold their skill and muscle in an international market for monetary wages. They were an absolutely indispensable part of the rise and growth of North Atlantic capitalism.”[25]

The Elizabethan Leap

Despite migration and emigration, England’s rural population grew substantially in the 15th and 16th centuries. The growth was accompanied by restructuring — the beginning of a long-term economic transition, away from farming to rural industry.

“The rural population wholly engaged in agriculture fell from 76 per cent in 1520 to 70 per cent in 1600, and 60.5 per cent in·1670. The ‘rural non-agricultural population,’ a category which includes the inhabitants of small towns a well as those of industrial villages, rose from 18.5 per cent in 1520 to 22 per cent in 1600, and 26 per cent by 1670.”[26]

Old rural industries prospered and new ones emerged as a result of what Marxist historian Andreas Malm calls the Elizabethan leap — the spectacular growth in the production of coal for both industrial and domestic use, replacing wood and charcoal. “The years around 1560 marked the onset of a virtual coal fever, all major fields soon undergoing extensive development; over the coming century and a half, national output probably soared more than tenfold.”[27] There were substantial coal mines in south Wales and Scotland, but the largest collieries were financed by groups of merchants and landowners in northeast England. Shipments down the east coast, from Newcastle to the fast-growing London market, rose from 50,000 tons a year in 1580 to 300,000 tons in 1640.

“Large specialist workforces with an elaborate division of labor were employed in sinking, timbering and draining pits, the hewing, dragging, winding and sorting of coal and its transportation to riverside staithes, where it was stored ready for shipment downriver in keelboats to meet the collier fleets at the mouths of the Tyne and Wear. …

“The overall growth of the industry meant that by 1650 coal was Britain’s principal source of fuel, not only for domestic heating, but also for the smithies, forges, lime kilns, salt pans, breweries, soapworks, sugar refineries, dyeing vats, brick kilns and numerous other industrial processes which consumed perhaps a third of total output.”[28]

By 1640, the English coal industry was producing three to four times as much coal as all of the rest of Europe combined, and employed more workers than all other kinds of English mining combined.[29] Some 12,000 to 15,000 workers labored directly in coal mining, and more worked in transportation and distribution — “those who produced the coal were greatly outnumbered by the carters, waggonmen, keelmen, seamen, lightermen, heavers, and coalmen who handled it on its way from pithead to hearth.”[30]

Spinners and Weavers

The growth of coal mining and coal-based industries was impressive, but wool was by far the most important raw material, and clothmaking was the largest non-agricultural occupation.[31] Until the late 1400s most raw wool was produced for export, mainly to cloth makers in Flanders, but by the mid-1500s, almost all of it was spun and woven in England. By 1700 English textile production had increased more than 500 percent, and cloth accounted for at least 80 percent of the country’s exports.

For centuries, cloth had been made by individual artisans for family use and for sale in local markets, but in the 1500s production came under the control of clothiers who delivered large quantities of wool to spinners, then collected the thread and delivered it to weavers. They specified what kinds of thread and cloth should be made, and shipped the product to the London merchants who controlled trade with Europe.

Clothmaking involved multiple tasks, including shearing, sorting and cleaning the raw wool, separating and organizing the fibers by combing or carding, dyeing, spinning, and weaving. Spinning, done almost exclusively by women, was the most time-consuming and employed the most workers.

The importance of women in spinning is illustrated by the fact that in the 1500s, the word spinster came to mean a single woman, and distaff (the staff that held wool or flax during spinning) referred to the female side of a family line.

Working backward from the amount of cloth produced for export and domestic use, historian Craig Muldew estimates that at least 225,000 women worked as spinners in 1590, 342,000 in 1640, and 496,000 in 1700. These estimates assume that all the spinning was done by married women, who would have to do other household work as well. Some would have been done by single women, so the actual number of working spinners was probably somewhat smaller, but nevertheless, “spinning was by far the largest industrial occupation in early modern England.”[32]

Roughly speaking, it took ten spinners working full time to produce enough thread to keep one weaver and an assistant working full time. Weavers were almost all men: some were employed in workshops with a few other weavers, but most worked in their homes. By the early 1600s, it was not unusual for a single capitalist to employ hundreds of cottage workers, and some clothiers employed as many as a thousand, all paid on a piece-work basis. For capitalists, putting-out was an effective means of mobilizing many workers in a complex division of labor while retaining effective control and minimizing capital investment. Cottagers were a wonderfully flexible workforce, easily discarded when the market contracted, which it often did.

Some spinners and weavers were successful peasants who supplemented their income with part-time wage-labor, but a growing number received most of their income in wages, and topped that up with the produce of small plots of land and the commons. As Marxist historian Brian Manning points out, in the seventeenth century increasing numbers had no land — they were “were very poor at the best of times, but during the periodic depressions of trade and mass unemployment they came close to starving.”[33] A class division was developing, between the peasantry and a rural proletariat.

“The critical divide lay in the borderland in which small holders or ‘cottage-famers’ with a little land and common rights, but partly dependent on wages earned in agriculture or industry, shaded into landless cottagers wholly dependent on wages. In the background to the revolution the number of the latter was growing.”[34]

In traditional handicraft production, the artisan purchased wool or flax from a farmer, decided what to make, and sold the finished product in a market or to an itinerant merchant. In the putting out system, a capitalist provided the raw material, dictated the type, quantity and quality of product to be produced, owned the product from beginning to end, and controlled payment. The producers were no longer independent artisans engaged in petty commodity production, they were employees in a system of capitalist manufacture.

A new class

As Marx wrote, a new class of wage-laborers was born in England when “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”[35]

With those words, and in his entire account of “so-called primitive accumulation,” Marx was describing the long arc of capitalist development, not an overnight change. It was sudden for those who lost their land, but the social transformation took centuries. In the early 1700s, two hundred years after Thomas More condemned enclosures and depopulation in Utopia, about a third of English farmland was still unenclosed, and most people still lived and worked on the land. It took another great wave of assaults on commons and commoners, after 1750, to complete the transition to industrial capitalism.

The century before the English revolution was a time of transition, a time when, to paraphrase Gramsci, the old order was dying while the new order was struggling to be born. An important part of that transition, as I have tried to show in this article, was the exclusion of uncounted commoners from the land, and the consequent birth of a new class of wage-laborers. None of the industries described here could have survived a day without them.

Over time, and with many detours and reverses, the dispossessed became proletarians.

Looking back, that transition appears inevitable, but it did not seem so to commoners at the time. They furiously resisted the privatizations that forced them off the land and into wage-labor. Mass opposition to the destruction of the commons was widespread, and some argued eloquently for a commons-based alternative to both feudalism and capitalism.

To be continued …

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, (Penguin, 1976), 272-3.

[2] Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (Verso, 2020), 66.

[3] Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 221, 237.

[4] Marx, Capital v.1, 273.

[5] Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3, 4.

[6] Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, 9.

[7] Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2002), 83.

[8] Jane Humphries, “Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History, (March 1990), 21. Humphries’ research focused on the 1700s, but her remarks apply with equal force to earlier years.

[9] Jeremy Boulton, “The ‘Meaner Sort’: Laboring People and the Poor,” in A Social History of England, 1500-1750, ed. Keith Wrightson (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 310-30.

[10] Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, Revised ed. (International Publishers, 1963), 233.

[11] Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. 5 (Clarendon Press, 1887), 628.

[12] R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (Lector House, 2021 [1912]), 33.

[13] Quoted in C.S.L. Davies, “Slavery and Protector Somerset; The Vagrancy Act of 1547.” Economic History Review 19, no. 3 (1966), 534.

[14] Marx, Capital: v.1, 899.

[15] Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Bookmarks, 1991), 187-8.

[16] No one knows exactly how many people immigrated and emigrated, because no one kept records. These figures are from the most authoritative study: E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Edward Arnold, 1981), 219-228.

[17] Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, “Population Growth and Suburban Expansion,” in London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (Longman, 1986), 38. Other estimates of London’s 1700 population range as high as 575,000.

[18] Brian Dietz, “Overseas Trade and Metropolitan Growth,” in London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (Longman, 1986), 129.

[19] A. L. Beier, “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London,” in London 1500-1700, ed. Beier and Finlay, 163.

[20] Beier, “Engine of Manufacture,” 148.

[21] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 313.

[22] Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640-1660 (Pluto Press, 1996), 62.

[23] Ian Angus, “Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism,” Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Climate & Capitalism, February-April, 2021.

[24] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2013), 150.

[25] Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290.

[26] Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 172.

[27] Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016), 48.

[28] Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 170-71. A staithe was a wharf built specifically for transshipping coal.

[29] J. U. Nef, “The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large-Scale Industry in Great Britain, 1540-1640,” Economic History Review 5, no. 1 (October 1934), 14.

[30] John Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1 (Clarendon Press: 1993), 350.

[31] Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge, 2010 [1962]), xv; B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600-1642 (Cambridge University Press, 1959), 6.

[32] Craig Muldew, “‘Th’ancient Distaff’ and ‘Whirling Spindle’”. Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (2012), 518, 523.

[33] Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640-1660 (Pluto Press, 1996), 62.

[34] Brian Manning, 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution (Bookmarks, 1992), 71-2.

[35] Marx, Capital v1, 876.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/1 ... ing-class/

Previous installments of this series were posted in the 'environment' thread, however, as the emphasis has changed from land use to labor we have migrated accordingly. They can also be found at the link.
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 17, 2021 3:17 pm

Labor Activists Want to Know Why Workers Were Left to Die in Extreme Tornadoes

Grief, anger, and demands for answers after tornadoes kill at least 14 U.S. workers.
JEFF SCHUHRKE DECEMBER 15, 2021

Image
First responders surround an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Edwardsville, Illinois, on December 10, 2021, after it was hit by a tornado.
TIM VIZER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In the aftermath of a rare string of December tornadoes last Friday night that left 80 people dead across six states, labor activists are questioning why employees at two large worksites in the path of destruction were left exposed to danger.

A candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky was totally destroyed after sustaining a direct tornado hit with 110 workers inside. At least eight people died and dozens more were severely injured. At the same time, an Amazon delivery station in Edwardsville, Illinois was also hit by a tornado during a shift change, causing the roof to fly off and part of an exterior wall to collapse, killing six workers ranging in age from 26 to 62.

As search-and-rescue teams sifted through the rubble the next morning, Amazon founder and world’s second-richest person Jeff Bezos was celebrating another successful rocket launch by his private spaceflight company Blue Origin. Meanwhile, Amazon was unable to say for sure how many of its workers were trapped inside the devastated delivery station.

“While a tornado is a rare and extreme event, we know that Amazon’s disregard for workers’ safety is unfortunately a chronic pattern that puts workers at risk every day,” said Tommy Carden, a lead organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a worker center based in Joliet, Illinois.

Indeed, this past year alone, Amazon has faced repeated criticisms for expecting employees to continue coming to work even in the midst of extreme weather events like deadly heatwaves and floods, illustrating how many of the same frontline workers who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic are also vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-fueled disasters.

“No Room for Humanity in Amazon”
According to local authorities, the first tornado warning for Edwardsville, Illinois was issued around 30 minutes before the deadly twister formed. Workers report being told to take shelter in bathrooms. At least one bathroom was hit by the tornado, killing 26-year-old driver Austin McEwen as he took refuge there.

Larry Virden, an Amazon driver and father of four, told his girlfriend in a text message shortly before the tornado that ​“Amazon won’t let me leave.” He also died in the disaster.

“Requiring workers to work through such a major tornado warning event as this was inexcusable,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) — which has been leading a high-profile campaign to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. ​“This is another outrageous example of the company putting profits over the health and safety of their workers.”

“The site got tornado warnings between 8:06 and 8:16, and site leaders directed people on site to immediately take shelter. At 8:27, the tornado struck the building,” an Amazon spokesperson told In These Times. ​“The majority of the team took shelter in the primary designated location. There was a small group who took shelter in a part of the building that was then directly impacted by the tornado, and this is where most of the tragic loss of life occurred.”

The company declined to comment on Virden’s text message about not being allowed to leave.

“Whether during a tornado, hurricane, or heat wave, mgmt [management] treating workers like numbers puts our lives at risk,” tweeted Amazonians United—a movement of Amazon workers across the country who have been organizing for higher pay and improved safety since 2019.

Members of the Amazonians United in Chicago said that at their South Side warehouse, ​“We’ve had a fire, power outage, [and] flood,” yet were told each time to ​“keep working.”

“They set up systems to keep place the running, but there’s no room for human judgement. There’s no room for humanity in Amazon at all,” said an East Coast Amazon warehouse worker who wished to remain anonymous.

The worker, who is a member of Amazonians United, told In These Times the company has ​“no real policy” when it comes to having employees come in during extreme weather events.

“They very, very rarely tell you whether to come in or not, so you just have to judge it for yourself. It’s sort of this subtle way of getting you to come in even if you are not really feeling safe,” the worker explained. ​“They abdicate responsibility for everything and put it all on us, and it’s ridiculous.”

Amazon workers around the country say they have never received emergency training, according to The Intercept.

The lack of training is perhaps related to Amazon’s reliance on contractors and temps, a practice that helps the company evade liability for work-related accidents. Out of 190 workers at the Edwardsville delivery station, only seven were full-time employees of the company.

Amazon workers have also raised concerns about the company’s traditional ban on personal cell phones inside warehouses, as it can restrict them from accessing warnings about severe weather or other emergencies. The ban was temporarily lifted in the pandemic, and the company has said it was not in place at the Edwardsville facility.

Meanwhile, the Amazon Labor Union—an independent union of Amazon workers at a facility on Staten Island, New York — blasted the company after Friday’s tornado.

“The needless deaths were a reminder of Amazon keeping shifts going during other disasters, such as at the Staten Island facility during Hurricane Ida,” the union said. ​“Even as water poured in to the lobby of that warehouse, safety-conscious workers who refused to work that night were terminated.”

The Amazon Labor Union’s leader, Chris Smalls, said in the wake of the tragedy, the company should immediately recognize their union ​“as a matter of public health and a matter of reparations.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has opened an investigation into the disaster at the Evansville delivery station, but Warehouse Workers for Justice is demanding state hearings into Amazon to establish protocols around the construction of new warehouses.

“We’re calling on state legislators to step up to review the processes on how these warehouses go up,” said Marcos Ceniceros, WWJ’s interim executive director. ​“These warehouses are popping up all over the place very quickly. We need to take a second to pause to make sure this is happening responsibly with the workers and communities in mind.”

“Unnecessarily Put into a Dangerous Situation”
The non-union candle factory destroyed in Mayfield, Kentucky belonged to the family-owned Mayfield Consumer Products (MCP), a major employer in the region. The company makes scented candles sold at retailers like Bath & Body Works.

The first tornado alarm in Mayfield sounded nearly three hours before a twister reduced the plant to rubble, killing at least eight. Five factory employees who survived told NBC News that in the critical hours and minutes leading up to the tragedy, supervisors threatened to terminate them and their coworkers if they left the factory.

An MCP spokesperson called the allegations ​“absolutely untrue.” The company also claims there were regular emergency drills at the plant, but employee Jarred Holmes told the Associated Press there were no drills in the months he has worked there.

“We are very sorry for the loss of life that occurred. At the same time, we are really appalled that the opportunity probably existed for folks to be sent home or away from the factory, where they may have been able to shelter,” said Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.

“The workers were unnecessarily put into a dangerous situation,” Londrigan continued. ​“There were numerous reports of impending strikes by tornadoes moving through the area and it didn’t seem like those warnings were adequately heeded. Threatening to fire workers for being concerned for their safety is not acceptable.”

The husband of Janine Johnson-Williams, one of the factory workers who was killed, told the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting: ​“I just wish they had called and said, ​‘No one come in till it’s over, till we see what’s going on. Till it’s passed over.’”

Production at the candle factory was reportedly going ​“24/7” to meet demand for the holidays. In the days before the disaster, the company was seeking to hire more workers, offering a starting pay of $8 per hour and noting that ​“mandatory overtime will be required frequently.”

MCP had recently made an agreement with the nearby Graves County Jail to bring incarcerated people to work at the factory for an undisclosed amount of pay. Seven incarcerated people were working inside the factory when the tornado struck — all made it out alive, but a sheriff’s deputy who was monitoring them perished. Unlike the candle factory, the jail was ​“completely evacuated” before the tornadoes came through.

Londrigan noted that the incarcerated workers ​“didn’t have the option to leave” the candle factory amid the tornado warnings. ​“It’s indicative of the possibility of coercion and exploitation of those workers being leased out to the employer. The fact that a deputy had to be there raises questions about the use of taxpayer dollars for supervising inmates at private facilities that are profiting from their work.”

MCP has also sent representatives to Puerto Rico to recruit people to come work at the Kentucky factory for $10 to $12 an hour, including a man who sued the company in 2019 alleging he was fired for being overweight. The lawsuit, which was later dismissed by a judge, included a screenshot of a text message apparently sent by MCP’s chief financial officer stating: ​“We are working diligently to clean up the epileptic, obese, pregnant, and special needs issues.”

After Friday’s tornado, Kentucky’s state Occupational Safety and Health Program is launching an investigation into the candle factory, and at least three survivors are suing the company.

Workers and organizers stressed that the disasters at both the MCP factory and Amazon facility should prompt serious improvements to workplace safety.

“We don’t want to see this again,” said Ceniceros. ​“There should be protections for workers to be able to speak up for themselves without fear of retaliation, and they should be able to organize as well. Workers have that right. We need to hold Amazon and all these other companies accountable.”

https://inthesetimes.com/article/worker ... ths-storms

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Tornadoes ripped the roof off American capitalism | Will Bunch Newsletter

Image
A woman walks away from what is left of the Mayfield Consumer Products Candle Factory as emergency workers comb the rubble after it was destroyed by a tornado in Mayfield, Kentucky, on Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021. (John Amis/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
John Amis/AFP / MCT

by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Dec 14, 2021

America, let’s talk about folks who toil for $8 an hour when a tornado is coming.

When tornadoes tore a deadly path through six Midwestern and Southern states on Friday night — demolishing several small towns, where rescue workers are still searching for some of the scores of people who were killed — two powerful forces of modern American life also collided. In two communities in the path of the twisters, the Christmas crush of the nation’s chaotic, low-wage, just-in-time economy met the new realities of climate change, when not-normal pockets of hot air now can spark massive tornadoes in mid-December.

In Edwardsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis, a day of dire weather forecasts didn’t deter delivery drivers contracted by the online retail giant Amazon from making their appointed rounds right up until just after 8 p.m. That’s when a powerful tornado formed — according to company officials — in the parking lot right next to its large, boxy depot. One of the drivers, 44-year-old Alonzo Harris, was just pulling into the depot when he got an alarm on his phone. He raced to a shelter inside the structure, which did little good. “I felt like the floor was coming off the ground,” he told the New York Times. “I felt the wind blowing and saw debris flying everywhere, and people started screaming and hollering and the lights went out.

Another driver who’d started his job just weeks earlier, 46-year-old Army veteran Larry Virden, texted family to tell them he was gassed up and ready to flee the storm, but then sent a second text to his girlfriend: “Amazon won’t let us leave.” Virden would become one of six people, of the roughly 50 at the site, killed by the tornado.

Nearly 200 miles to the south in Mayfield, Kentucky, about 110 people working the night shift to meet the Christmas season demand for candles at stores like Bath and Body Works were directly in the path of one of the lines of tornadoes that would ravage the Bluegrass State. Many of the workers in this economically stressed corner of western Kentucky had just answered ads by Mayfield Consumer Products offering $8 an hour, including mandatory overtime. Seven of the Friday night workers were inmates from the Graves County Jail, through a deal with the county.

As the first tornado alarms sounded, some of the Mayfield workers reportedly begged to leave. “[Employees] had questioned if they could leave or go home,” 21-year-old McKayla Emery told NBC News. ”‘If you leave, you’re more than likely to be fired.’ I heard that with my own ears.” Officials have now found eight bodies in the twisted rubble of the factory that was torn off its slab foundation, injuring dozens more.

This weekend was a time to mourn the large death toll — at least 74 people were killed in Kentucky alone — and express condolences for their loved ones, while gawking yet again at the destructive force of Mother Nature. But with the sun out and the December chill settling in, it’s now time to start asking some tough questions about the nature of work in 21st century America. A probe by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, into building codes and safety procedures at the Amazon depot should be the first of many.

Among the many questions: Are today’s giant warehouses and open factories — the building blocks of our consumer economy — safe in an age when climate change is fueling stronger tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods? Do business practices aimed at maximizing production — Amazon seeks to ban employees from having cell phones on the job, for example — threaten worker safety in emergencies? Would the return of labor unions bring more protection for workers in the warehouse economy, as well as living wages that account for the dangers of today’s work?

Mindy Isser, the Philadelphia-based labor organizer and writer, whose recent work has focused on the intersection between workers’ rights and global warming, told me Monday that the deaths in Illinois and Kentucky show that “our lives, outside of productivity at the workplace, matter very little. Our safety and our families are completely ignored and belittled the vast majority of the time, and that includes during natural disasters.” She said the risks of working in extreme weather — including punishing heat, which has particularly been a problem at Amazon warehouses — make a compelling case for the Green New Deal, and for unionizing the workforce.

Weather experts noted that the extremely rare December twisters — fueled by a cold front’s collision with pockets of unseasonably warm air in the American heartland — were the kind usually seen in the spring. That’s key here, Jason Furtado, an associate professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, told NBC News. “We’re seeing these environments that can support tornadic activity.” But is the American workplace ready for this new era?

The past records of the employers involved in Friday nights tragedies are not promising. Mayfield Consumer Products had been cited in 2019 by OSHA for “serious” violations at the site, including along its exit routes. Recently, a worker from Puerto Rico sued the firm, claiming he was fired for being overweight, producing a text message from management: “We are working diligently to clean up the epileptic, obese, pregnant, and special needs issues[.]” Meanwhile, the Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Dave Clark who tweeted his “thoughts and prayers” to the Edwardsville victims was famously known in company circles as “The Sniper” for admitting he used to hide in the shadows at warehouses to catch workers slacking off, and fire them.

In modern America, it feels like it takes a horrific natural catastrophe — remember what Hurricane Katrina revealed about poverty in a major U.S. city like New Orleans? — to show us the grim everyday struggles of working-class Americans. Friday’s deadly tornadoes literally tore off the roof and exposed the hard life of this country’s low-wage workers, and we shouldn’t accept the status quo. Our neighbors who toil in these factories and warehouses need stronger representation, stricter rules, better enforcement, and a living minimum wage that takes into account the risks they face as essential workers. These things will mean so much more to the workers of Kentucky, Illinois, and the rest of America than 280 characters of empty thoughts and prayers.

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/att ... 11214.html

Well, what we really need is a revolution but this is from the Philadelphia Inquirer after all...
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 24, 2021 3:23 pm

Capping Off a Year of Labor Action at Amazon, Warehouse Workers Walk Off the Job in Illinois

For the first time, Amazon is experiencing a multi-site U.S. work stoppage. It comes at the end of a year marked by union organizing and labor militancy at the retail giant.
JEFF SCHUHRKE DECEMBER 22, 2021

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(PHOTO BY PATRICK PLEUL/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES)

On Wednesday morning, several dozen Amazon workers at two separate Chicago-area delivery stations staged a walkout to demand raises and safer working conditions, making it the first time the tech giant has seen a multi-site work stoppage in the United States.

Coming just three days before Christmas to ensure maximum impact, the action caps a year of intense organizing and protest by Amazon warehouse workers who have been on the frontlines of both the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather events.

Organized by the labor network Amazonians United, the walkouts occurred during the morning shifts at the company’s DIL3 facility in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood and at the DLN2 warehouse in the nearby town of Cicero.

“We’ve been underpaid, overworked, and also unsafely staffed going on months now,” said Ted Miin, a sortation associate and Amazonians United member at the DIL3 delivery station. ​“We’ve tried to raise these issues with management, but they’ve effectively dismissed our concerns.”

Miin told In These Times that at his warehouse in Gage Park, 65 out of an estimated 100 workers signed onto a petition demanding a $3‑per-hour raise and safe staffing. The petition was delivered to management a month ago, but the workers never received a response. ​“They’re not taking us seriously, so we’re walking out,” he said.

At the DLN2 delivery station in Cicero, Miin explained that management explicitly promised double-pay for those working on Thanksgiving, but only gave one-and-a-half time pay. He also said that new hires at the facility did not receive a promised $1,000-dollar sign-on bonus.

“We have not received the bonuses we were promised. There are people here who were hired as permanent workers, and then they took their badges away and made them temporary workers,” one Cicero worker told reporters on Wednesday. ​“They are staffing this place unsafely, making people work too fast.”

The Cicero workers say they are demanding a $5‑per-hour raise and a return to 20-minute breaks, alleging managers recently reduced their break time by five minutes.

“We’re willing to go back to work. We will work hard to make sure everyone gets their Christmas gifts, everyone gets their packages. But we just want to be treated fairly,” another Cicero worker explained. ​“This is the busiest month of the year. If Amazon can meet our demands, treat us right like human beings, we will make everybody’s Christmas a beautiful one.”

Asked for comment about the workers’ allegations, Amazon senior PR manager Barbara Agrait told In These Times: ​“We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so. We are proud to offer employees leading pay, competitive benefits, and the opportunity to grow with our company.”

The walkouts come as Amazon’s safety policies are under scrutiny after six workers were killed when a tornado ripped through a delivery station in Edwardsville, Illinois on December 10. Following that tragedy, at least 500 Amazon employees on the East Coast signed petitions calling for an end to the company’s ban on workers bringing their cellphones into warehouses, which limits their ability to get updates about severe weather events or other emergencies.

Amazonians United is a solidarity union of Amazon workers scattered across the country, functioning as a union but without seeking legal recognition through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Since 2019, its members have organized petition campaigns and work stoppages to successfully win paid sick leave, pay increases and safety measures.

By not seeking legal recognition, Amazonians United’s strategy is decidedly different from that of established unions like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which lost a high-profile union certification vote at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama this spring but will get a revote after the NLRB found that the company illegally intimidated workers during the election.

“We are a union. We’re a solidarity union. We take care of each other,” Miin said of Amazonians United, contending that in the legal realm of NLRB certification votes, the company has more power because it can hire high-priced lawyers and union busters. ​“We’re focused on building power where we have power, which is on the shop floor. Our union is our relationship with each other as coworkers. We build our union by engaging in struggle.”

The Chicago-area walkouts are supported by Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) — a worker center based in Joliet, Illinois that also organizes and advocates for Amazon employees.

“Just one week ago we saw the high cost of Amazon’s relentless pursuit of profit in the tragedy in Edwardsville, Illinois,” said Marcos Ceniceros, WWJ’s interim executive director. ​“Since then, Amazon hasn’t slowed its pace at all and is putting workers’ health on the line every day with no regard for their lives or livelihoods. We stand in solidarity with Amazonians United as they fight for the fair and safe working conditions we all deserve.”

Rep. Jesús ​“Chuy” García (D‑Il.), whose district includes Gage Park, also expressed support for the walkouts, tweeting, ​“Let’s stand with courageous workers from Amazonians United Chicagoland fighting for better wages and working conditions! It’s time for Jeff Bezos and Amazon to pay their fair share!”

Wednesday’s work stoppage was expected to last at least until the end of the morning shift, and Miin said he and his coworkers would wait to see management’s response before deciding on next steps. Employees at the Cicero facility allege that supervisors made illegal threats not to allow them back to work, but that they plan to return anyway.

“We know we’re being treated unfairly, and we’re doing something about it,” Miin explained, hoping other workers would follow Amazonian United’s example. ​“If we can in any way be encouragement or inspiration for others, we want our coworkers and all workers to see that we can get organized, we can fight back — and that when we fight, we win.”

https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor- ... inois-2021

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INTERVIEW WITH TONI GILPIN ON RECENT STRIKES AND THE NEED FOR FIGHTING UNIONS
Posted by MLToday | Dec 21, 2021 | Other Featured Posts | 0

Interview with Toni Gilpin on Recent Strikes and the Need for Fighting Unions
November 30, 2021 Fightback

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Toni Gilpin is a prominent labor historian, author and activist. She wrote the book The Long Deep Grudge which covered the militant history of the Farm Equipment Union whose members later merged into the United Auto Workers, including some the locals that recently struck for five weeks at John Deere, where Gilpin provided support on the picket lines.

Fight Back! was able to speak to Gilpin recently about the John Deere strike, the uptick in recent strikes, union leadership and elections, and what is needed in the American labor movement today. The following are excerpts from that conversation.



Fight Back!: What do you think is happening with the current uptick in strikes? And what does this mean for the state of labor in the U.S.?

Toni Gilpin: As a historian and someone who has observed the recent past, I am reluctant to call this a strike wave. We aren’t seeing the numbers of people going on strike that we would call it that. It certainly is oceans away from the strike waves of the 20th century – like the biggest one of all, the 1946 strike wave when we saw 5 million workers went out. So, we’re not seeing remotely anything like that, but we are clearly seeing something going on, which is this restlessness, the beginning of workers registering the discontent that they feel. And you know, that gets wrapped up in the number of people quitting jobs and not coming back to work. It is a major indication that workers are finally beginning to say enough is enough. I’ve been exploited enough. I’ve been mistreated enough. And I want to do something about it.

We need to have more of those people who are quitting jobs or just not returning to work in organized movements before we will really see the progress, we need to see in terms of pushing back against capital and really getting workers more of what they deserve. That’s what we are hoping to see, but these ripples and the activity we are seeing is encouraging and we need to see more of it.

In the national media and national networks like the New York Times and the major media who couldn’t have cared less about labor two years ago are now suddenly running all sorts of stories about the union movement, so we will see. I have made the point before that once the labor movement gets really threatening, all of this favorable media will suddenly turn sour and suddenly all of these media entities that are themselves big businesses will not be too happy about a labor movement that really registers and affects consumers, that affects big businesses, that threatens the courts, and that could affect the printing of the New York Times or whatever, then I think we will start seeing negative press again. But that’s what we actually want. That would prove that labor is actually back. And that can happen in a heartbeat as it has happened in American history before.

Fight Back!: What do you think is holding workers back from doing that in an organized way now?

Gilpin: I think it speaks to many decades of resistance to organized labor and the fact that the labor movement has been thoroughly decimated by the major pushback against it in the post-World War II years and the resistance that was engineered by big business and capital along with their minions in Congress who passed legislation that crippled union’s ability to organize and to progress to strikes that could be effective across industries. And then you had a labor leadership that was undermined by its own rejection of left-wing unionism, of militant unionism, and its embrace of cooperative conduct that seemed to be ok when it delivered the good in the 50s and 60s, but we are seeing the bankruptcy of that ideology now. You have union leaderships like in the UAW that are entirely devoid of any ability to even think about how to conduct themselves as unions in any other fashion than to cooperate with management and to promote contracts that were actually at the expense of workers.

There is a long way to go to overcome all of the obstacles that unions now face, and workers now face if they want to organize, both in the law and in going up against these hugely powerful companies, but the one thing that I can always fall back on is that workers have seen worse before.

In the 1930s when the CIO emerged we were talking about these enormously powerful corporations with no check on them whatsoever in terms of what they might do to crush workers organizing and that didn’t stop at using violence, and murder or at having their own private armies that they used to destroy workers’ movements, and yet, in the 1930s workers prevailed. If that could happen in the 1930s with all of those obstacles, then workers now can find ways to get around the obstacles that seem to be in front of them now.

Fight Back!: What do you think it will take to get there again?

Gilpin: Well, if you want to look at the John Deere strike, here you have this union, UAW, that has made headlines in the past four or five years for corruption. And yet you have the rank and file in the union, these strikers, who remain loyal to their union even if not to the leadership and that’s because they understand how critical a union is and they define the union as themselves, and not the corrupt leadership.

So one of the things we need to propel the labor movement forward, whether it is the coal miners on strike in Alabama, or auto works striking in Moline and in Iowa, to bring that message forward, to talk to unorganized workers about what a union means and how it democratizes the workplace.

Even with how many problems remain in UAW plants, having the union beside you when you are not treated fairly or when your paycheck is short and they are robbing you of what is rightfully yours, a union can address these things. If you are an individual worker alone up against Amazon or Walmart or one of these big healthcare companies you are not going to get very far. No one understands that better than a worker who has been in a union for several decades or even a couple of years. And that is why despite all these problems, these workers who are out on strike are holding up these signs that say UAW. They think of themselves as the union. We need that kind of solidarity and spirit and we need to draw on that resource to foment some new passion for organizing in the rest of the working class.

Fight Back!: You mentioned the corruption and bankruptcy in leadership of many unions, and unions being collaborationist with management. Do you see a role of workers fighting to change leadership as part of the solution?

Gilpin: Well, in the UAW there is an election right now to determine whether union members will be able to directly elect their officers. So that can change the trajectory of that union. We have seen an administrative caucus in the UAW that has hand picked the leaders for decades and that leadership was hardwired to reproduce itself, so not only were they picking leaders who were cozy with bosses, they were perpetuation the idea that no other kind of union is possible. If workers have the ability to directly elect their officials instead of this kind of delegated system that made that difficult, we could see some real changes in the direction of the union.

Then you also have this Teamster election going on right now and it looks like the slate that has been endorsed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union that has been working for so long to change that union, is going to get elected [the Teamsters United OZ Slate has since won the election]. So that makes it look like maybe new things are going to happen. It doesn’t mean that the next day they will have strikes going on across the Teamsters, but it opens the door to the possibility that new ways of thinking and rank and file involvement that can really shake things up in the labor movement and provide all kinds of impetus for organizing in all kinds of new ways. The Teamsters union is obviously one of the biggest unions that we’ve got, so this is really a big deal.

So, it’s not just the strikes. It is also about what is going on in union leadership.

Fight Back!: What would it take for unions like the Teamsters to actually organize at places like Amazon? And will the OZ Slate winning leadership of the Teamsters open the door for this?

Gilpin: We certainly need new visions of organizing but really new aggressiveness from union leaders will promote real engagement, real confrontation with corporate owners than we have seen in a long time now. So new energy and new commitment to really challenging these corporate owners may energize workers too.

I hearken back to what it looked like in 1934 organizing at General Motors and what it looked like to organize in a company with that kind of power. We tend to think now that it would be so much easier to organize when all the workers in one place, but it didn’t look easy back then with all of these factories full of all different workers from different ethnic backgrounds and animosities and gender animosities and workplaces that were protected by hired goons and thugs and surveillance and laws to stop workers. It seemed pretty impossible then too.

We need union members and leadership who see Amazon and Jess Bezos as their enemy just as the organizers in the 30s did. As long as you maintain that kind of class consciousness and see the other side as your antagonist and not as somebody you can get along with and play golf with and cut deals with and retire to the bar afterwards, then we might really have real chance at progress for working people.

Fight Back!: You wrote a book about the history at International Harvester where FE, the Farm Equipment Union, represented the workers. How did a union with such a militant fighting history end up as members of the UAW? Let’s talk a little about that history and how folks at John Deere today ended up rejecting two contract offers and going on strike despite recommendations to accept the contracts by their union (UAW).

Gilpin: Hearing about the strike now and seeing UAW signs, people may think that John Deere workers were always represented by UAW. But, going way back to International Harvester in the Quad Cities, there was this union called FE that was one of the unions that emerged in the 1930s and it was dedicated to organizing workers in the agricultural equipment industry which included John Deere but also the giant of the time which was International Harvester.

The FE set out to organize International Harvester in the 30s. It was a major organizing campaign, and they weren’t just organizing there, they we reorganizing at John Deere and at Caterpillar at the same time. So, they succeeded at Harvester and at John Deere. They had a different orientation to unions like UAW. They were heavily influenced by their ties to the Communist Party at the time and embraced a Marxist framework that led them to see the McCormick family who owned International Harvester as their antagonist and they refused to embrace any cooperative model.

As opposed to the UAW under Walter Ruether that saw a more cooperative framework aimed at increasing productivity that they believed could benefit management and the workers alike. That was not a philosophy that the FE ever embraced. What that meant in terms of actual practice was that the FE believed only in short contracts instead of long agreements, they opposed no-strike clauses, they opposed productivity-based pay, they embraced broad networks of stewards in the plants so that grievances could be handled right in the job sites. The FE believed in immediate action on grievances which resulted in many walkouts across their plants. Hundreds of walkouts. We are looking now at dozens of strikes but at the height of their influence FE we we’re seeing hundreds of walkouts every year at every FE plant. So, that proved to be a pretty effective strategy that preserved the pay raises that people had fought for and keeping workloads reasonable.

But that was not what the UAW endorsed. So the FE as a communist-led union came under fire not just from the federal government but also from the labor establishment that became increasingly conservative. So, the FE was one of those unions that was expelled from the AFL-CIO on charges of communist domination in 1949. And the road forward for the union became increasingly difficult as the cold war really heated up. So the FE leadership ultimately made the decision to merge with the UAW and that is why the workers at these farm equipment plants are now members of UAW.

But even though there are none of those people working now who have memory of that time, there is still a legacy of militant unionism in the Quad Cities that the workers are drawing from. There is still that legacy of militancy in the Quad Cities today. Most workers don’t even know that there used to be this very different philosophy, but I think that through their community and legacy of resistance they are beginning to stir that up again.

Fight Back!: In recent years some large unions have started to say that workers can’t win through action on the shop floor, or through stopping production, and even that we need to move beyond the idea of collective bargaining. What do you think about this?

Gilpin: That has been a model in some unions for a while. To try to influence public opinion, and legislation, rather than relying on workers power to affect change. I believe that workers power derives from the work that they do and that is where they can exercise the most power and have the most influence and their organized might in the workplace is where we need to start.

Also, it is true that now, and the reason we can be encouraged by what is going on is that there has been so much disruption in production and in workplaces, or conversely like at John Deere, to have to work 12-hour shifts because they were deemed essential workers, while watching their CEO clean up as a result, while they were endangering their lives, I think it has forced a lot of people to examine their working lives and recognize that even though they were already engaged in exploitative and often life threatening labor before, they are now just really saying, “I don’t think we should have to put up with this,” and they are also recognizing how much power they have by not being at work actually may have. That’s where we have to start.

We want to have worker action and to recognize that a worker’s power is expressed at the workplace and that workers express their fundamental power by ceasing to work. That’s where you start but that doesn’t mean that you exclude community involvement; that is essential as well. But not as step number one, that’s step number two, or integrated by reaching out to the community. As workers in these places begin to express their power in the workplace as Black and as white workers together, they recognize that they can extend that power out into the community and begin to affect what is wrong there. Their power derives from the work that they do, and if unions lose sight of that then they are losing sight of their principle function and source of power.

INTERVIEWED BY FIGHTBACK STAFF

https://mltoday.com/interview-with-toni ... ng-unions/
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 30, 2021 3:18 pm

After years of setbacks, US labor demonstrates its power
2021 marked a historic year in labor organizing for workers in the US, with tens of thousands of workers in partaking in union votes and strike actions

December 27, 2021 by Monica Cruz

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Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York after learning that they are the first to unionize in the country. Photo: Twitter

2021 was a historic year for labor in the US. An eruption of strikes, major contract wins, and workers quitting low-wage jobs in unprecedented numbers all signaled that workers en masse are ready to reclaim their power. Workers organized union drives across nearly every industry, pushed for union reforms, and elected new union leadership, speaking volumes to their desire for a more democratic workplace.

For many workers, the pandemic revealed the cruelty of capitalism. Mainstream media and politicians campaigned for a return to business as usual during this second year of COVID. In particular, workers, called “essential” and “heroes” during the pandemic, were expected to continue sacrificing the most while receiving the least in pay and benefits. At the same time, the world’s biggest corporations made record-breaking profits and the richest individuals saw their wealth multiply.

Throughout the year, right-wing pundits and lawmakers cried wolf about a “worker shortage,” using this to justify cutting off pandemic unemployment benefits. In reality, the end of the year saw a near record number of people quitting their jobs. What’s clear is that workers are no longer willing to settle for low pay and terrible conditions.

As Kooper Caraway, President of the South Dakota Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, told BreakThrough News back in June, “I think that it’s not necessarily that workers are gaining more leverage, but that workers are recognizing the leverage they already have. And choosing to exercise it.”

Workers fight to unionize
In the most high-profile win, two Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York became the first Starbucks locations in the country to vote to unionize, despite an egregious anti-union campaign. Union drives are underway in several more states, with an election filing just recently announced in Tennessee.

After filing for a union back in May, 17,000 higher education workers at the University of California voted to strike for recognition. Two weeks later, the University agreed. The new union, Student Researchers United, is the largest new union formed in the country in recent decades.

After decades of decline, only 10% of workers in the US belong to a union. According to unionelections.org, there have been 1,314 private sector union elections filed and 907 union elections held in 2021. A new unit was certified in 571 of those elections. At the same time, approval of labor unions is at 68%, the highest point since 1965.

Year of the strike
Cornell University’s ILR School Strike Tracker reported a total of 363 strikes across the country (as of December 27).

The key characteristic about this year of labor action was not necessarily the quantity, but the quality, or rather the length and breadth of the strike actions in 2021. In major industries such as food service, education, industrial production, food production, and mining, tens of thousands of workers embarked on industrial action. Prestigious educational institutions saw some of the largest strikes. The largest ongoing strike in the country is taking place at Columbia University in New York City where 3,000 graduate student workers are on their ninth week of their strike to demand fair pay and healthcare benefits. A similar strike of graduate student workers took place at Harvard back in October.

Another critical aspect of the strikes were the similar conditions which pushed the workers onto the picket line. Workers at John Deere, Kellogg, and Frito Lay all went on strike—and won their demands—over proposed extensions to two-tier pay and benefit systems, an insidious tactic to divide workers and give newer workers less.

Workers in fast food and retail organized walk outs and strikes over long hours, low pay and measly benefits. From McDonald’s and Wendy’s, to Walmart and Family Dollar, thousands of workers in the industries that provide essentials to millions everyday demanded better and won.

Workers at United Metro Energy in Brooklyn, New York have been on strike since April. Despite several retaliatory firings, the workers have held out demanding better pay, expanded healthcare coverage, and a grievance process for disciplinary actions and firings.

In Alabama, more than 1,100 miners at the Warrior Met Coal Mines have been on strike for over eight months demanding an end to pay cuts, more time off and affordable health insurance. The workers have held strong despite multiple vehicular attacks on the picket lines and the company’s attempts to stop their picket. The workers, members of the United Mine Workers of America, even traveled from Alabama to New York City to protest at BlackRock, Warrior Met’s biggest investor.

At their picket back in July, striking miner Dedrick Garner told Monica Cruz, “Whatever it takes, we’re gonna be one day longer, one day stronger.”

Then there were the strikes that didn’t come to be, two of which scored major wins for healthcare workers, who have risked their lives day in and day out to care for the millions impacted by the pandemic.

Back in July, over 1,500 nursing home workers in Pennsylvania won historic pay raises less than 24 hours before the one-day strike was set to take place. These raises mean more than pay. For an industry whose low pay has played a huge role in it’s understaffing crisis, better pay is equal to a more safe and stable work environment for nursing home and home care workers.

The largest healthcare strike in decades was narrowly averted at Kaiser Permanente healthcare providers and hospitals. 35,000 workers who were set to strike in November won a four-year agreement that includes pay raises and measures to address understaffing. The company withdrew its proposal for a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires a third less than current workers.

In the days following the tentative contract agreement, Jeanne Narmore, a phlebotomist who’s been working at Kaiser for 25 years, told Monica Cruz, “The past two nights have been really rough, stressful, and sleepless for us.” She continued, “I am looking forward to seeing my patients and seeing the improvements being made for patient care!”

Workers take on Amazon
Without a doubt, Amazon was this year’s biggest labor boogeyman. Throughout the pandemic, the trillion-dollar company has become synonymous with unfair labor practices and inhumane working conditions, all while making record-breaking profits. With nearly one million workers and counting, Amazon is on track to become the largest employer in the US. In 2021, the megacorporation faced a level of worker organizing and resistance that it’s never seen before.

In one of the biggest labor stories of the year, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama struggled through months of captive-audience meetings, threats, and surveillance to hold an election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on whether to form a union with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU). Amazon trampled on labor law to nix any chance of a union win and succeeded in April. Some saw this defeat as an indicator that unionizing the world’s second largest retailer was impossible. But workers have continued to push forward union drives and organizing efforts from Bessemer to New York and Chicago.

Over the summer, the NLRB upheld the RWDSU’s charge that Amazon illegally intervened in the election. And earlier this month, a regional director formally granted workers a second shot at voting, which will happen sometime next year. Another victory at the NLRB arrived on December 23rd, when Amazon settled with the board to allow its warehouse employees to unionize more easily.

Amazon said it will email its one million plus past and present warehouse workers, notifying them of their rights and will give them “greater flexibility” to organize. Under the agreement, the NLRB will be more easily able to sue Amazon if it finds that the company has violated the terms.

In another memorable update, one of the largest unions in the country threw down the gauntlet in the fight to unionize Amazon. The 1.4 million member-strong International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted to approve a resolution calling for an all-encompassing campaign to mobilize and organize Amazon workers across the US. The Teamsters, which is the largest union representing workers in the shipping and logistics industries, has fought for decades to set better standards on pay, benefits and workplace protections for workers like those at Amazon.

Randy Korgan, the Teamsters’ National Director for Amazon, told Monica Cruz in July, “We want to be clear about one thing: we’re going to partner up with everybody. The reality is that Amazon presents a challenge in a way that, I think, shows everybody should be working together.”

In the spirit of working together, on Black Friday, Amazon workers in over 20 countries coordinated the biggest day of strikes and actions against the company ever. The Make Amazon Pay coalition, made up of 70 unions, environmentalist groups, non-profit watchdogs and grassroots organizations, planned the actions spanning four continents.

Right before Christmas, workers staged a walk out at two Chicago delivery stations to demand better pay and working conditions.

Big wins for more democratic and progressive unions
Unionized workers fought to make their unions a better representative of rank and file worker power in 2021. After a decades-long push, the United Autoworkers (UAW) “one member, one vote” referendum passed on December 1st, establishing a direct voting system for the union’s leadership. The effort to get this reform on the voting block heated up in the past couple years, when top union officials were prosecuted on a range of corruption charges. The details on how the new election process will work are expected to be a major point of contention at the UAW Constitutional Convention, set for June 2022.

For the first time in a quarter century, a slate backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union won in a landslide to lead the Teamsters. The Teamsters United coalition leaders have pledged to lead militant contract campaigns and end the two-tier system at UPS. Incoming president Sean O’Brien has stated his intentions to raise the starting pay of part-timers at UPS from $14 to $20 an hour and strike if necessary. This platform is a major improvement from that of past leadership, which overruled a strike authorization as well as a membership vote against a proposed two-tier pay system. The Teamsters is the largest private sector union in the country.

In news that didn’t make national headlines, public school teachers in San Francisco voted in the largest turnout in the union’s recent history of internal elections. Within the United Educators of San Francisco, the Organizing for Union Power slate won every seat it ran a candidate for. The slate ran on a progressive four pillar program, which included developing new leaders, empowering the membership, building coalitions and community power, and fighting for fully-funded and equitable schools.

Monica Cruz spoke with the then-newly elected President Cassondra Curiel, who emphasized, “It’s really about building out a program for our union structure that will accurately represent the members in a way that members can see themselves in some part of it.” She continued, “The work that I do doesn’t belong to me…the work belongs to the organization and the organization belongs to the workers.”

What’s next?

Facing year 3 of the coronavirus pandemic, historic income inequality and decades of stagnant wages, this labor revival is guaranteed to escalate in 2022. A data analysis by Bloomberg Law found that 185 large union contracts, representing more than 1.3 million workers, are set to expire in the new year. On top of the expirations are first contracts that have yet to be ratified, particularly for recently-unionized workers in media outlets and museums across the country. It’s safe to say that the dire material conditions facing workers in the US have awoken the sleeping giant of a militant labor movement and 2021 has proven that the workers united are not ready to be defeated.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/12/27/ ... its-power/

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As omicron surges: Teachers, students resist dangerous school conditions
January 13, 2022 Greg Butterfield

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Students at Lower East Side Prep High School joined a citywide walkout for COVID safety in New York, Jan. 11. Photo: Shawn Garcia

Jan. 12 – Members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted to take classes remote for several days in defiance of the city administration. Thousands of New York City students walked out of classes to protest unsafe conditions. Furious staff, youth and families from Oakland, California, to Columbia, Missouri, and Boston are demanding the return of remote learning options, increased testing and safety measures in schools.

We all remember Donald Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant slogan, “Build that wall.” Now the Biden administration and its allies in the corporate media have “built a wall” of dangerous denial around the spread of COVID-19’s omicron variant in public schools across the U.S. And teachers, school staff, students and families are fighting back.

Along with healthcare and retail workers, school workers and students have been on the frontlines of the pandemic since early 2020 – never more so than today. Crammed into overcrowded classrooms without adequate ventilation, testing or PPE, schools are omicron superspreaders – ones that federal, state and local officials insist remain open despite all evidence to the contrary. Why?

Advocates for keeping schools open and denying a remote option cite “learning loss” as their primary reason. But in cities like New York, home of the country’s largest public school system, so many thousands of students and teachers are sick that little learning is going on in most classrooms. In many schools, students who come in are packed into even more dangerous conditions – like auditoriums and lunchrooms – because so many peers and staff members are out sick.

As enraged teachers and students have been saying for weeks, most want to teach and learn in a classroom environment. But that can only happen when it is safe to do so. Withholding remote options and safety measures during a pandemic surge is the greatest source of “learning loss” as parents keep their children home and many students and teachers fall ill.

Childhood infections and hospitalizations have skyrocketed since mid-December. Omicron is a variant of COVID-19 that is highly transmissible and often results in “breakthrough cases” among those who are already vaccinated. But officials have only gotten more dug in about keeping schools open, without any remote option.

It’s not just pro-Trump anti-maskers who are responsible. Some of the worst offenders are Democratic allies of the Biden administration, including incoming New York Mayor Eric Adams and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who locked teachers out of their remote classrooms.

The real reason – which is becoming clearer to more and more workers – is that the capitalist economy demands it. Profit-hungry capitalists find their businesses short staffed. Keeping schools open is a way to force parents to come to work, often in unsafe conditions. The health of the community – including elders, people with chronic illnesses, and younger children who have not yet been approved for vaccination – is not a priority for the capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Baltimore: a case study

Baltimore, a predominantly Black city, is a case study in what is happening around the country, including larger cities like Chicago and New York.

The school superintendent and Democratic city administration refused to heed the Baltimore Teachers Union, which asked them to act preemptively to protect teachers, students and the community before the scheduled return to classrooms following the year-end holiday break.

On Dec. 22, BTU President Diamonte Brown said: “There is much we do not yet know, but what is clear is that transmissions are at record levels and vaccination does not eliminate infection. It is prudent and necessary for City Schools to consider all possibilities.

“However, there have only been minimal changes to the status quo and we have not heard of any contingency plans that could be enacted if circumstances continue to worsen.”

The union quickly laid out a clear course of action and preparation, calling on the city to open the winter session remotely and delay in-person schooling while testing and safety measures are put in place.

Instead, the Baltimore City officials plowed forward with reopening, with no plan, minimal testing and resulting chaos.

Baltimore activist Sharon Black of the Unemployed Workers Union told Struggle-La Lucha: “The community is outraged. It’s been up to teachers to raise money to provide N95 and KN95 masks, and not a thing has been discussed in terms of safety on buses at school rush hour – either for drivers or students.”

The School Board and Baltimore City Health Department claim they will have testing in place and possibly completed by the end of January – after schools have already been back in session and spreading COVID for weeks. School staff have reiterated that many air filters and purifiers are in need of further maintenance.

“It is profits before people that is driving this criminal neglect of the health of young people and teachers. ‘Get kids back to school, so parents can make money for bosses’ is their motto,” Black added.

Role of Biden and the CDC

The Biden administration has encouraged this dangerous behavior, with the president repeatedly saying that schools should remain open.

Biden’s Centers for Disease Control issued new guidelines Dec. 27 cutting the quarantine period for infected people from 10 to 5 days, citing “societal impact” (e.g., critical infrastructure and staffing shortages) as a major reason.

Even former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, a Trump appointee, advised against following the new CDC guidance, saying people should get a negative test before leaving isolation. Adams called the change “a compromise to keep the economy open in the face of inadequate tests.”

Shortly after the CDC altered its guidelines to benefit bosses at the expense of public health, it also issued a report that COVID infection may increase the danger of diabetes in children – a chronic, lifelong and potentially fatal condition that requires expensive maintenance drugs.

The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE-UFT) in New York pointed out the Biden administration’s hypocrisy, noting that on Jan. 2, as schools were about to resume in-person classes, the White House press briefing room was being reduced to only 14 seats due to concerns about omicron. “Cool, cool, but 30 kids in a classroom is fine.”

In truth, what we are seeing is Trump’s vision of mass infection unimpeded by public health measures taking shape under Biden and the “anti-Trump” Democrats. Because the capitalist class demands it, and both Republicans and Democrats at bottom exist to serve their interests.

The more Biden, Adams, Lightfoot & Co. barrel ahead endangering the lives of workers and their children, the more resistance they will face, and the more people will become aware that neither Democrats or Republicans can be relied on to protect their most basic rights.

Only independent organization in the spirit of the rebellious Chicago teachers and New York students can defend the lives and health of the people!

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... onditions/

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Brooklyn, N.Y., teachers demand ‘safety not swagger’
January 13, 2022 Greg Butterfield

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SLL photos: Greg Butterfield

Around 100 teachers, students and parents rallied at the Barclays Center sports arena in downtown Brooklyn, New York, Jan. 5 to demand real health and safety protections for public school communities throughout New York City. The action was organized by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE-UFT), a progressive faction of the United Federation of Teachers.

Signs and banners alerted onlookers that “NYC schools are not safe!” MORE-UFT activist Annie Tan, a special education teacher in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, led chants of “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!”

Speakers condemned the new mayoral administration of former cop Eric Adams and his predecessor Bill de Blasio for denying students and teachers a remote learning option during the surging COVID-19 omicron variant sweeping the city.

Before the December holiday break, omicron was spreading rapidly through city schools. Both the outgoing and incoming Democratic administrations refused to take measures to ensure the safety of school communities upon the resumption of classes on Jan. 3, and rejected numerous calls to postpone in-person classes to give time for all students and workers to be tested.

Many community members told horror stories from their own schools: sick children being sent to classes due to lack of testing and the Department of Education’s lack of communication with non-English-speaking parents; high numbers of teacher absences meaning students are crammed into auditoriums, further heightening the risk of spread; illness of food preparation workers leaving teachers scrambling to feed lunch to hungry kids.

Mayor Adams boasted of “New York swagger” as a reason to force students and teachers back into the school petrie dish. A sign held high by an African American teacher at the Jan. 5 rally responded succinctly: “Safety not swagger.”

Unfortunately, UFT President Michael Mulgrew has been collaborating with the city administration in covering up the extent of the crisis and refusing to listen to the demands of the union’s members and the broader school community.

MORE-UFT members held a follow-up action at UFT headquarters on Jan. 11, demanding action from the union leadership.

MORE-UFT demands include: KN95 or N95 for students, faculty and staff; weekly testing for all staff and students, and result data to be shared; repair or replace insufficient ventilation systems; student absences excused if parents choose to keep children home during the surge; and remote learning options.

New York residents are urged to call the city’s information hotline 311 and say: “I am very concerned about COVID safety in NYC public schools. I believe weekly testing of all staff and students is the only way to keep schools safe.”

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https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... t-swagger/

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EXCLUSIVE: LEAKED MEMO REVEALS KROGER EXECUTIVES KNEW FOR YEARS THAT MOST WORKERS LIVE IN POVERTY

“I literally work at a grocery store and can't afford to eat regularly.”

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January 13 2022
By Jordan Zakarin

An explosive new document obtained by More Perfect Union reveals that supermarket giant Kroger has long been aware that its workers can’t afford basic necessities and struggle to survive.

The internal presentation, titled “State of the Associate” and marked “confidential,” warned Kroger executives in 2018 that hundreds of thousands of employees live in poverty and rely on food stamps and other public aid as a result of the company’s low pay.

“Most employees are considered to be living in poverty and need State Aid as in food stamps, free school lunch, etc. just to get by,” one slide warned.

The presentation is peppered with quotes from unnamed employees that foretell the internal labor uprising that would come a few years later. “Something is wrong when the people who are actually making this company profitable are the ones deepest in poverty,” said one employee quoted from an internal survey. “I literally work at a grocery store and can’t afford to eat regularly. In short, pay us what we are worth; we know you can afford it.”


With $4 billion in projected profits in 2021, Kroger is America’s largest grocery chain, overseeing 16 brands including Ralphs, Food 4 Less, and Fred Meyer. CEO Rodney McMullen made $22 million in 2020, more than 900 times as much as the median worker. Kroger has one of the largest CEO-worker pay gaps of any major U.S. company.

Kroger representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

The presentation found that at least 1 in 5 Kroger associates were on food stamps, including at least 25% of “very loyal” associates who frequently also shop at Kroger stores. It said low wages were cited by 27% of workers who quit the company.

The document offered a graph of the federal poverty line and the hourly wages that would qualify workers for food stamps and Medicaid. It also noted that in Ohio, where Kroger is based, a worker needed to earn $15/hour to afford a basic two-bedroom apartment. The presentation further noted that in 2016, Kroger received $20 million in tax incentives from the state of Ohio.

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The document includes an internal analysis which found the stores that increased wages also had better employee retention and less turnover.

It quoted another unnamed worker who rebuked Kroger’s lack of pay hikes for long-time workers: “A pay increase that’s more than 25 cents a year, inflation is driving costs up and pay scale isn’t keeping up. People 10 years with the company on food stamps doesn’t seem right.”

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Four years later, in late 2021, salary data from Payscale.com indicated that the average pay for a Kroger on-site employee is $12.11. Earlier in the year, Kroger said that it was lifting its average wage to $16, but did not indicate whether that number was skewed by salaries earned by white collar employees. Many states where Kroger operates have raised their minimum wages.

On Wednesday, about 8,700 employees of the Kroger-owned King Soopers grocery chain in Colorado launched a three-week strike to demand better wages and benefits.

The company’s “last, best, and final” contract offer to UFCW Local 7, the union representing the workers in Colorado, included a starting wage of $16 an hour, just 13 cents above the minimum wage in Denver. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renting a two-bedroom apartment on a single full-time job requires a $27.50 an hour wage. In the Denver metropolitan area, that figure jumps to $30.87 and up to $33.15 in Boulder.

The Kroger source who supplied the 2018 presentation indicated that much of the company’s focus was on keeping wages down while burnishing the company’s reputation. In 2018, Kroger launched its Zero Hunger Zero Waste campaign, which seeks to help low-income customers attain government assistance, offers grants to nonprofits, and run food drives in the local community.

A survey released this week by the Economic Roundtable indicated that three-quarters of Kroger employees are food insecure and that 14% of the chain’s workforce experienced homelessness in the past year.

In a section of the 2018 report titled “Turning Our Insights Into a Leadership Call to Action,” executives are advised to recruit and train diverse associates, but also to “continue to develop automation, leveraging technology at store level.”

Last year, Kroger embarked on a massive project to build robot-staffed warehouses for online orders, with each warehouse costing at least $55 million. It also launched a drone delivery service.

https://perfectunion.us/exclusive-kroge ... s-poverty/

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Teachers in France stage massive walk-out over Covid confusion

Issued on: 13/01/2022 - 16:23
Modified: 14/01/2022 - 08:20

Huge numbers of French teachers went on strike Thursday, with the biggest teachers’ union saying half of primary schools were closed as staff demand clarity from the government on coronavirus measures. Late on Tuesday, after Prime Minister Jean Castex hosted union leaders, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer promised some five million high-grade FFP2 masks would be made available mainly to kindergarten teachers and several thousand substitute staff recruited to help "face the crisis".

Coming as France’s presidential election campaign gets under way ahead of an April vote, the walkout is awkward for President Emmanuel Macron’s government which has prided itself on keeping schools open to ease pressure on parents through the pandemic.

Tens of thousands also took to the streets, with the interior ministry saying almost 78,000 teachers and other education workers protested nationwide, including 8,200 in Paris.

While the education ministry said almost 40 percent of primary school teachers had walked out, top union Snuipp put the figure at 75 percent with one primary school in two closed for the day.

The strike “demonstrates the growing despair in schools”, Snuipp said in a Tuesday statement announcing the strike.

They complain that their members are unable to teach properly, are not adequately protected against coronavirus infection and frequently hear about changes to health precautions via the media rather than from higher-ups.

“The government announces things, but no-one thinks about what it means for staff on the ground,” Olivier Flipo, the head of a Paris school, told AFP this week.

“They’re asking hellish things of us and it’s all going to the dogs”.

With many pupils off sick and difficulty combining distance learning with in-person classes, “it’s not school that’s open, but a kind of ‘daycare’,” Snuipp said.

Some parents AFP spoke to on the street backed the strike.

“I understand the teachers and their position... classes are too big, they don’t get paid enough, their working conditions aren’t the best,” said Akim Aouchiche outside a northeast Paris school.

“It’s their way of making themselves heard,” said tax advisor Alexandra Stojek.

“I understand what they’re asking for, it’s justified, they’re not doing this to bother us.”

Crisis management

“Until now, the public thought the government and President Emmanuel Macron had managed the crisis properly,” Brice Teinturier of pollster Ipsos told AFP.

But if there is significant disruption from the strike, “that balance risks toppling”, he added.

Macron’s presidential election challengers have seized on the walkout, with far-left and Socialist candidates Jean-Luc Melenchon and Anne Hidalgo joining marchers in Paris.

The acting party chief of the far-right National Rally Jordan Bardella said the strike showed “the problem above all is Emmanuel Macron”.

Motivated by long queues for tests outside pharmacies, the government this week eased rules on Covid checks for students who have been exposed to an infected person, with Prime Minister Jean Castex announcing the changes on Monday’s evening news.

“We’ve listened and made changes,” government spokesman Gabriel Attal told reporters after a cabinet meeting Wednesday, acknowledging “weariness” among both parents and teachers.

The shift up the chain of command appeared to be a reaction to the anger teachers direct at Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.

But Blanquer has not backed down from tough talk, saying on television Tuesday that “you don’t go on strike against a virus”.

In a bid to ease tensions, Prime Minister Jean Castex hosted a meeting Thursday afternoon alongside Blanquer with education union leaders.

At the end of that meeting, Blanquer said some five million high-grade FFP2 masks would be made available mostly for nursery school teachers, as well as several thousand substitute staff dispatched to help “face the crisis”.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/2022 ... -confusion

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Unions allege petrol bombs, intimidation as strike intensifies at South African Dairy giant

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Amid threats and intimidation, the workers’ action at Clover has been strengthened by worker solidarity as well as the increasing support of civil society for its boycott campaign.

January 13, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

Workers from several organizations and unions held a mass meeting at Cathedral Hall in Johannesburg to discuss a strategy for the ongoing Clover Strike and the way forward. Photo: Workers & Socialist Party
Over a month and a half into the strike action which continues to intensify at South Africa’s largest dairy sector employer, Clover, unions allege petrol bomb attacks have been carried out to intimidate its members.

In a statement on January 11, the General Industries Workers Unions of South Africa (GIWUSA) and the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), which are leading the industrial action by 5,000 Clover workers since November 22, listed a series of attacks that have taken place since January 7.

“On the night of Friday 7 January, a striking worker’s car was petrol bombed. On the night of Saturday 8 January, another striking worker’s car was petrol bombed. On the night of Sunday 9 January, five carloads of men visited two striking workers and demanded that they end the strike. Also, on the night of Sunday, 9 January, another three striking workers received threatening phone calls at 23h45 demanding that they end the strike,” the statement read.

GIWUSA’s president, Mametlwe Sebei, told Peoples Dispatch that the unions will be filing a complaint to the police, naming the company as responsible for these attacks and threats. “That the company could encourage or use such techniques should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the background of its owners,” Sebei said, referring to the Israeli Central Bottling Company (CBC). It is the 60% owner of Milco consortium which bought Clover in a controversial merger in 2019.

Opposing the merger, unions and civil society groups at the time had argued that CBC, by operating in illegally occupied territories of Palestine, was in violation of the international law and hence should not be permitted to buy out South Africa’s oldest and largest dairy company. This objection, however, was disregarded by the Competition Tribunal on the grounds that it does not have jurisdiction to consider objections on such grounds.

Unions had also raised objections on the ground that the merger appeared to be a part of a restructuring program that was underway at the time and would result in massive job losses. The merging parties assured the Tribunal not only that no jobs will be shed as a result of the merger, but also that the ongoing retrenchments will be put on hold until October 2022 and 500 new jobs will be created in the meantime.

While the unions were skeptical of these assurances, the Tribunal was convinced and gave a go-ahead for the merger. The retrenchment (Section 189A) notices Clover has recently issued is an outright violation of the conditions on which the Tribunal had permitted the merger, the unions argue.

They have pointed out that the restructuring plan Clover has referred to in these notices will affect 7,382 jobs inside Clover and its subsidiaries. The company is contemplating at least 1,418 job losses.

Over 800 other jobs have already been shed by Clover by forcing workers to opt for Voluntary Severance Packages (VSPs) by relocating their jobs from inland regions to expensive coastal cities where they won’t be able to survive on the wages they earn.

“We are talking about a company complicit in human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territories. We are talking about a company that blatantly lied to the Competition Tribunal of a foreign country and took over its largest dairy company,” Sebei said, arguing, “it should not be incredible that a company with such a record” can opt to physically intimidate striking workers.

The attacks are “a sign of its growing desperation”

The petrol bomb attacks, GIWUSA’s president pointed out, have come at a time when the company has been unsettled by the victories the unions have recently had in this drawn-out struggle. Earlier this month, on receiving a written complaint by the unions in a meeting on January 4, the Competition Tribunal assured them that it would inquire into their allegations of Clover’s violation of merger conditions.

Less than a week later, on January 10, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) ruled against Clover and in favor of the unions, ordering the company to pay by January 14 the Christmas bonuses of the striking workers, which it had illegally canceled.

“Since the strike started, the wages have been stopped. By also withholding the Christmas bonus (paid usually in November), the company wanted to make it impossible for the workers to survive on strike. However, we survived December, and now, with the release of the bonuses, workers can afford to continue the strike for another month,” Sebei explained. The CCMA is also expected to soon rule on another dispute raised by the unions regarding allegedly “unfair dismissals” of hundreds of striking workers in December.

Coming amidst these setbacks faced by the company, the attacks are a “sign of its growing desperation”, he argued. “Even in the event that we cannot prove in the court of law that this person from the company paid these individuals to carry out these attacks – because these shadowy deals always happen in the dark – our argument remains that the ultimate responsibility rests at the company’s doorstep.”

“Even if they have not directly ordered the hit – which is a possibility we do not discount – they have created a climate in communities to promote such attacks,” he said.

Community organizations of the poor and unemployed which have historically stood in solidarity with working class organizations, such as the United Front in Gauteng, have allegedly been approached by one Bishop Mabena, promising its members permanent jobs in Clover to replace the striking workers.

“You must see this in the context of this sea of unemployment, which has driven the masses desperate for jobs,” he explained. “By approaching community organizations of poor people with whom we have historically stood in solidarity, with offers to hand over jobs which they know belong to our members, the company is creating fissures.”

Its maneuvers, Sebei alleges, may have led many individuals desperate for jobs to believe that they can curry favor from Clover by undertaking such attacks on striking workers and offering their services as strike-breakers. “So even if the attacks were independent initiatives of strike-breakers, the company remains responsible for creating an atmosphere to entice such acts.”

Growing solidarity

Nevertheless, support for the strike action continues to expand. At a mass-meeting on January 8, 25 organizations pledged solidarity with the strike action, and endorsed the call on consumers to boycott Clover. These include several community organizations, the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM), a hawkers’ association, agriculture and allied workers union, multiple Palestine solidarity organizations, left political parties, and other trade unions.

“The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) undertook to mobilize solidarity support, especially from trade union affiliates that are organizing in the workplaces and companies linked to Clover,” said a joint statement by GIWUSA and FAWU on January 9.

“In particular, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and Transport Action Retail and General Workers Union (THOR) are going to be approached. NUMSA organizes companies supplying packaging materials to Clover, like Nampak and Dairypak; and THOR organizes the retail shops that stock and sell Clover products.”

The Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) – an affiliate of the ruling ANC’s labor ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – has also committed to hold a “meeting with the striking workers to discuss possible solidarity support. SACCAWU organizes major retailers like Shoprite and Pick-n-Pay,” the statement added.

In the meantime, pressure on the government to intervene to stop the job-losses is increasing. Unions have called on the government to nationalize Clover on account of its alleged violations of merger conditions and to place the enterprise under workers’ management.

On Thursday, January 13, the striking workers will hold a demonstration outside the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC) and march from there to the Union Building in Pretoria.

“They will submit a memorandum of demands calling for divestment of (the CBC-dominated) MILCO (from Clover), reinstatement of Clover workers and for DTIC to intervene in stopping factory closures and retrenchments,” GIWUSA and FAWU said in a statement.

SAFTU’s general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, will be joining the workers in Pretoria. A separate demonstration will also be held by striking workers outside Cape Town. Many civil society organizations and progressive movements are expected to join these demonstrations.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/01/13/ ... iry-giant/
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Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 18, 2022 2:16 pm

Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back
January 15, 2022
Three centuries of mass resistance to privatization and dispossession

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Articles in this series:

Commons and classes before capitalism
‘Systematic theft of communal property’
Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men
Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class
Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back
by Ian Angus

In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a dissolved monastery, Wilton Abbey near Salisbury. Herbert didn’t need farmland, so he had the buildings torn down, expelled the monastery’s tenants, and physically destroyed an entire village. In their place he built a large mansion, and fenced off the surrounding lands as a private park for hunting.

In May 1549, officials reported that people who had long used that land as common pasture were tearing down Herbert’s fences.

“There is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert’s park that is about his new house, and diverse other parks and commons that be enclosed in that county, but harm they do to [nobody]. They say they will obey the King’s master and my lord Protector with all the counsel, but they say they will not have their commons and their grounds to be enclosed and so taken from them.”

Herbert responded by organizing an armed gang of 200 men, “who by his order attacked the commons and slaughtered them like wolves among sheep.”[1]

The attack on Wilton Abbey was one of many enclosure riots in the late 1540s that culminated in the mass uprising known as Kett’s Rebellion, discussed in Part Two. There had been peasant rebellions in England in the Middle Ages, most notably in 1381, but they were rare. As Engels wrote of the German peasantry, their conditions of life militated against rebellion. “They were scattered over large areas, and this made every agreement between them extremely difficult; the old habit of submission inherited by generation from generation, lack of practice In the use of arms in many regions, and the varying degree of exploitation depending on the personality of the lord, all combined to keep the peasant quiet.”[2]

Enclosure, a direct assault on the peasants’ centuries-old way of life, upset the old habit of submission. Protests against enclosure were reported as early as 1480, and became frequent after 1530. “Hundreds of riots protesting enclosures of commons and wastes, drainage of fens and disafforestation … reverberated across the century or so between 1530 and 1640.”[3]

Elizabethan authorities used the word “riot” for any public protest, and the label is often misleading. Most were actually disciplined community actions to prevent or reverse enclosure, often by pulling down fences or uprooting the hawthorn hedges that landlords planted to separate enclosed land.

“The point in breaking hedges was to allow cattle to graze on the land, but by filling in the ditches and digging up roots those involved in enclosure protest made it difficult and costly for enclosers to re-enclose quickly. That hedges were not only dug up but also burnt and buried draws attention to both the considerable time and effort which was invested in hedge-breaking and to the symbolic or ritualistic aspects of enclosure opposition. … Other forms of direct action against enclosure included impounding or rescuing livestock, the continued gathering of previously common resources such as firewood, trespassing in parks and warrens, and even ploughing up land which had been converted to pasture or warrens.”[4]

The forms of anti-enclosure action varied, from midnight raids to public confrontations “with the participants, often including a high proportion of women, marching to drums, singing, parading or burning effigies of their enemies, and celebrating with cakes and ale.”[5] (I’m reminded of Lenin’s description of revolutions as festivals of the oppressed and exploited.) Villagers were very aware of their rights — it was joked that some farmers read Thomas de Lyttleton’s Treatise on Tenures while ploughing — so physical assaults on fences and hedges were often accompanied by petitions and legal action.

Many accounts of what’s called the enclosure movement focus on the consolidation of dispersed strips of leased land into compact farms, but most enclosure riots actually targeted the privatization of the unallocated land that provided pasture, wood, peat, game and more. For cottagers who had no more than a small house and an acre or two of poor quality land, access to those resources was a matter of life and death. “Commons and common rights, so far from being merely a luxury or a convenience, were really an integral and indispensable part of the system of agriculture, a lynch pin, the removal of which brought the whole structure of village society tumbling down.”[6]

Coal wars

In the last decades of the 1500s, farmers in northern England faced a new threat to their livelihoods, the rapid expansion of coal mining, which many landlords found was more profitable than renting farmland. Thousands who were made landless by enclosure ultimately found work in the new mines, but the very creation of those mines required the dispossession of farmers and farmworkers. The search for coal seams left pits and waste that endangered livestock; actual mines destroyed pasture and arable land and polluted streams, making farming impossible.

The prospect of mining profits produced a new kind of enclosure — expropriation of mineral rights under common land. “Wherever coal-mining became important, it stimulated the movement towards curtailing the rights of customary tenants and even of small freeholders, and towards the enclosure of portions of the wastes.” In the landlords’ view, it wasn’t enough just to fence off the mining area, “not only must the tenants be prevented from digging themselves, they must be stripped of their power to refuse access to minerals under their holdings, or to demand excessive compensation.”[7]

As a result, historian John Nef writes, tenant farmers “lived in constant fear of the discovery of coal under their land,” and attempts to establish new mines were often met by sabotage and violence. “Many were the obscure battles fought with pitchfork against pick and shovel to prevent what all tenants united in branding as a mighty abuse.” Fences were torn down, pits filled in, buildings burned, and coal was carried off. In Lancashire, the enclosures surrounding one large mine were torn down sixteen times by freeholders who claimed “freedom of pasture.” In Derbyshire in 1606, a landlord complained that twenty-three men “armed with pitchforks, bows and arrows, guns and other weapons,” had threatened to kill everyone involved if mining continued on the manor.[8]

In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.

Turning point

In the early 1500s, capitalist agriculture was new, and the landowning classes were generally critical of the minority who enclosed common land and evicted tenants. The commonwealth men whose sermons defended traditional village society and condemned enclosure were expressing, in somewhat exaggerated form, views that were widely held in the aristocracy and gentry. While anti-enclosure laws were drafted and introduced by the royal government, they were invariably approved by the House of Commons, which “almost by definition, represented the prospering section of the gentry.”[9]

As the century progressed, however, growing numbers of landowners sought to break free from customary and state restrictions in order to “improve” their holdings. In 1601, when Sir Walter Raleigh argued that the government should “let every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for, and therein use his own discretion,”[10] a large minority in the House of Commons agreed.

As Christopher Hill writes, “we can trace the triumph of capitalism in agriculture by following the Commons’ attitude towards enclosure.”

“The famine year 1597 saw the last acts against depopulation; 1608 the first (limited) pro-enclosure act. … In 1621, in the depths of the depression, came the first general enclosure bill — opposed by some M.P.s who feared agrarian disturbances. In 1624 the statutes against enclosure were repealed. … the Long Parliament was a turning point. No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[11]

The early Stuart kings — James I (1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649) — played a contradictory role, reflecting their position as feudal monarchs in an increasingly capitalist country. They revived feudal taxes and prosecuted enclosing landlords in the name of preventing depopulation, but at the same time they raised their tenants’ rents and initiated large enclosure projects that dispossessed thousands of commoners.

Enclosure accelerated in the first half of the 1600s — to cite just three examples, 40% of Leicestershire manors, 18% of Durham’s land area, and 90% of the Welsh lowlands were enclosed in those decades.[12] Even without formal enclosure, many small farmers lost their farms because they couldn’t pay fast rising rents. “Rent rolls on estate after estate doubled, trebled, and quadrupled in a matter of decades,” contributing to “a massive redistribution of income in favour of the landed class.”

It was a golden age for landowners, but for small farmers and cottagers, “the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the seventeenth century witnessed extreme hardship in England, and were probably among the most terrible years through which the country has ever passed.[13]

Fighting back

Increased enclosure was met by increased resistance. Seventeenth century enclosure riots were generally larger, more frequent, and more organized than in previous years. Most were local and lasted only a few days, but several were large enough to be considered regional uprisings — “the result of social and economic grievances of such intensity that they took expression in violent outbreaks of what can only be called class hatred for the wealthy.”[14]

The Midland Revolt broke out in April 1607 and continued into June. The rebels described themselves as “diggers” and “levelers,” labels later used by radicals during the civil war, and they claimed to be led by “Captain Pouch,” a probably mythical figure whose magical powers would protect them.[15] Martin Empson describes the revolt in his history of rural class struggle, Kill all the Gentlemen:

“Events in 1607 involved thousands of peasants beginning in Northamptonshire at the very start of May and spreading to Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Mass protests took place, involving 3,000 at Hilmorton in Warwickshire and 5,000 at Cotesback in Leicestershire. In a declaration produced during the revolt, The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers, the authors write that they would prefer to ‘manfully die, then hereafter to be pined to death for want of that which those devouring, encroachers do serve their fat hogs and sheep withal.’”[16]

These were well-planned actions, not spontaneous riots. Cottagers from multiple villages met in advance to discuss where and when to assemble, arranged transportation, and provided tools, meals and places to sleep for the rebels who would spend days tearing down fences, uprooting hedges and filling in ditches. Local militias could not stop them — indeed, “many members of the militia themselves became involved in the rising, either actively or by voting with their feet and failing to attend the muster.”[17]

The movement was only stopped when mounted vigilantes, hired by local landlords, attacked protestors near the town of Newton, massacring more than 50 and injuring many more. The supposed leaders of the rising were publicly hanged and quartered, and their bodies were displayed in towns throughout the region.

The Western Rising was less organized, but it lasted much longer, from 1626 to 1632. Here the focus was “disafforestation” — Charles I’s privatization of the extensive royal forests in which thousands of farmers and cottagers had long exercised common rights. The government appointed commissions to survey the land, propose how to divide it up, and negotiate compensation for tenants. The largest portions were leased to investors, mainly the king’s friends and supporters, who in turn rented enclosed parcels to large farmers.”[18]

Generally speaking, the forest enclosures seem to have been fair to freeholders and copyholders who could prove that they had common rights, but not to those who had never had formal leases, or couldn’t prove that they had. The formally landless were excluded from the negotiations and from the land they had worked on all their lives.

For at least six years, landless workers and cottagers fought to prevent or reverse enclosures in Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and other areas where the crown was selling off public forests.

“The response of the inhabitants of each forest was to riot almost as soon as the post-disafforestation enclosure had begun. These riots were broadly similar in aim and character, directed toward the restoration of the open forest and involving destruction of the enclosing hedges, ditches, and fences and, in a few cases, pulling down houses inhabited by the agents of the enclosers, and assaults on their workmen.”[19]

Declaring “here were we born and here we will die,” as many as 3,000 men and women took part in each action against forest enclosures. Buchanan Sharp’s study of court records shows that the majority of those arrested for anti-enclosure rioting identified themselves not as husbandmen (farmers) but as artisans, particularly weavers and other clothworkers, who depended on the commons to supplement their wages. “It could be argued that there were two types of forest inhabitants, those with land who went to law to protect their rights, and those with little or no land who rioted to protect their interests.”[20]

The longest continuing fight against enclosure took place in eastern England, in the fens. From the 1620s to the end to the century, thousands of farmers and cottagers resisted large-scale projects to drain and enclose the vast wetlands that covered over 1400 square miles in Lincolnshire and adjacent counties. Aiming to create “new land” that could be sold to investors and rented to large tenant farmers, the drainage projects would dispossess thousands of peasants whose lives depended on the region’s rich natural resources.

The result was almost constant conflict. Historian James Boyce describes what happened in 1632, when constables tried to arrest opponents of draining a 10,000 acre common marsh, in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham:

“The constables charged with arresting the four Soham resistance leaders so delayed entering the village that they were later charged for not putting the warrant into effect. When they finally sought to do so, an estimated 200 people poured onto the streets armed with forks, staves and stones. The next day a justice ordered 60 men to support the constables in executing the warrant but over 100 townspeople still stood defiant, warning ‘that if any laid hands of any of them, they would kill or be killed’. When one of the four was finally arrested, the constables were attacked and several people were injured. A justice arrived in Soham on 11 June with about 120 men and made a further arrest before the justice’s men were again ‘beaten off, the rest never offering to aid them’. Another of the four leaders, Anne Dobbs, was eventually caught and imprisoned in Cambridge Castle but on 14 June 1633, the fight was resumed when about 70 people filled in six division ditches meant to form part of an enclosure. Twenty offenders were identified, of whom fourteen were women.”[21]

Militant and often violent protests challenged every drainage project. As elsewhere in England, fenland rioters uprooted hedges, filled ditches and destroyed fences, but here they also destroyed pumping equipment, broke open dykes, and attacked drainage workers, many of whom had been brought from the Netherlands. “By the time of the civil war the whole fenland was in a state of open rebellion.”[22]

Revolution in the revolution

For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, Charles I tried to rule as an absolute monarch, refusing to call Parliament and unilaterally imposing taxes that were widely viewed as oppressive and illegal. When his need for more money finally forced him to call Parliament, the House of Commons refused to approve new taxes unless he agreed to restrictions on his powers. The king refused and civil war broke out in 1642, leading to Charles’s defeat and execution in 1649. From then until 1660, England was a republic.

Many histories of the civil was treat it as purely a conflict within the ruling elite: it often seems, Brian Manning writes, “as if the other 97 per cent of the population did not exist or did not matter.”[23] In fact, as Manning shows in The English People and the English Revolution, poor peasants, wage laborers and small producers were not just followers and foot soldiers — they were conscious participants whose actions influenced and often determined the course of events. The fight for the commons was an important part of the English Revolution.

“Between the assembling of the Long Parliament in·1640 and the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 there was a rising tide of protest and riot in the countryside. This was directed chiefly against the enclosures of commons, wastes and fens, and the invasions of common rights by the king, members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops and great aristocrats.”[24]

Between 1640 and 1644 there were anti-enclosure riots in more than half of England’s counties, especially in the midlands and north: “in some cases not only the fences but the houses of the gentry were attacked.”[25]

The wealthiest landowners were outraged. In July 1641, the House of Lords complained that “violent breaking into Possessions and Inclosures, in riotous and tumultuous Manner, in several Parts of this Kingdom,” was happening “more frequently … since this Parliament began than formerly.” They ordered local authorities to ensure “that no Inclosure or Possession shall be violently, and in a tumultuous Manner, disturbed or taken away from any Man,”[26] but their orders had little effect. “Constables not only repeatedly failed to perform their duties against neighbours engaged in the forcible recovery of their commons, but were also sometimes to be found in the ranks of the rioters themselves.”[27]

The rioters hated the landowners’ government and weren’t reluctant to say so. When an order against anti-enclosure riots was read in a church in Wiltshire in April 1643, for example, one parishioner stood and “most contemptuously and in dishonor of the Parliament and their authority said that he cared not for their orders and the Parliament might have kept them and wiped their arses with them.”[28]

In 1645, anti-enclosure protestors in Epworth, Lincolnshire, replied to a similar order that ‘”They did not care a Fart for the Order which was made by the Lords in Parliament and published in the Churches, and, that notwithstanding that Order, they would pull down all the rest of the Houses in the Level that were built upon those Improvements which were drained, and destroy all the Enclosures.”[29]

The most intense conflicts took place in the fens. To cite just one case, in February 1643, in Axholme, Lincolnshire, commoners armed with muskets opened floodgates at high tide, drowning over six thousand acres of recently drained and enclosed land, and then closed the gates to prevent the water from flowing out at low tide. Armed guards then held the position for ten weeks, threatening to shoot anyone who attempted to let the water out.[30]

Many more examples could be cited. The years 1640 to 1660 weren’t just a time of revolutionary civil war, they were decades of anti-enclosure rebellion.

Defeat

Two centuries later, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities.” That was certainly true of the English Revolution — Parliament could not have overthrown the monarchy without the support of small producers, peasants and wage-workers, but the plebeians got little from the victory. As Digger leader Gerard Winstanley wrote to the “powers of England” in 1649: “though thou hast promised to make this people a free people, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, that thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us.”[31]

Since the king was one of the largest and most hated enclosers, many anti-enclosure protesters expected Parliament to support their cause, but their hopes were disappointed — no surprise, since almost all MPs were substantial landowners. Both houses of Parliament repeatedly condemned anti-enclosure riots, and no anti-enclosure measures were adopted during the civil war or by the republican regime in the 1650s. The last attempt to regulate (not prevent) enclosure occurred in 1656, when a Bill to do that was rejected on first reading: the Speaker said “he never liked any Bill that touched upon property,” and another MP called it “the most mischievous Bill that ever was offered to this House.”[32]

Like the royal government it replaced, the republican government in the 1650s raised revenue by selling off royal forests and supported the drainage and enclosure of the fens. It passed laws that eliminated all remaining feudal restrictions and charges on landowners, but made no changes to the tenures of farmers and cottagers. “Thus landlords secured their own estates in absolute ownership, and ensured that copyholders remained evictable.”[33]

In Christopher Hill’s words, in the seventeenth century struggle for land, “the common people were defeated no less decisively than the crown.”[34]

The last wave

There were sporadic anti-enclosure protests in the last years of the seventeenth century, especially in the fens, but for all practical purposes, the uprisings of 1640 to 1660 were the last of their kind. In the early 1700s, peasant resistance mostly involved illegally hunting deer or gathering wood on enclosed land, not tearing down fences. Long memories of brutal defeats, reinforced by fear of ruling class forces that were now even stronger, discouraged any return to mass action.

Until the mid-1700s, the large landlords who owned most of English farmland seem to have been more interested in reaping the rewards of previous victories than in enclosing the remaining open fields and commons. About a quarter of the country’s farmland was still worked in open fields in 1700, but so long as rents covered costs, with a substantial surplus, few landlords chose to make changes.

When a new wave of enclosures began about 1755, spurred first by falling grain prices and then by rising prices during Napoleonic wars, the social and economic context was very different. English capitalist society, we might say, had become more “civilized.” In place of the rough methods of earlier years, enclosure became a structured bureaucratic process, subject to political oversight and regulation. Enclosure required detailed surveys and plans prepared by lawyers and professional enclosure commissioners, all accepted by the owners and tenants of three-quarters of the land involved (which was often a small minority of the people affected), then written into a Bill which had to be approved by a Parliamentary committee and both houses of Parliament.

Marx referred to the resulting Enclosure Acts as “decrees by which the landowners grant themselves the peoples’ land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.”[35]

Most Parliamentary enclosures seem to have carefully followed the law, including fairly allocating land or compensation to leaseholders large and small, but the law did not recognize customary common rights. Just as with the cruder methods of previous centuries, Parliamentary enclosure didn’t just consolidate land: it eliminated common rights and dispossessed the landless commoners who depended on them. When a 20th century historian called this “perfectly proper,” because the law was obeyed and property rights protected, Edward Thompson replied:

“Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. …

“What was ‘perfectly proper’ in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions.”[36]


There were some local riots after enclosure was approved, often in the form of stealing or burning fence posts and rails, but as J.M. Neeson has shown, most resistance took the form of “stubborn non-compliance, foot-dragging and mischief,” before an enclosure Bill went to London. Villagers refused to speak to surveyors or gave them inaccurate information, sent threatening letters, stole record books and field plans, and in general tried to force delays or drive up the landlords’ costs. In some cases, villagers petitioned Parliament to reject the proposed bill, but that was expensive and rarely successful.[37]

Ultimately, however, the game was rigged. Sabotage might slow things down or win better terms, but landlords and large tenants who wanted to impose enclosure could always do so, and there was no right of appeal. Between 1750 and 1820 nearly 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed, affecting roughly 6.8 million acres. Only a handful of open-field villages remained. Despite centuries of resistance, the power of capital prevailed: “the commons in England were gradually driven out of existence, the small farms engrossed, the land enclosed, and the commoners forcibly removed.”[38]

Continuing enclosure

As Marx wrote, “the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” People who can produce all or most of their own subsistence are independent in ways that are alien to capitalism — they are under no economic compulsion to work for wages. As an advocate of enclosure wrote in 1800, “when a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings … the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work.”[39]

This series of articles has focused on England, where the expropriation involved a centuries-long war against the commons. It was the classic case of primitive accumulation, the “two transformations” by which “the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers,”[40] but of course this is not the whole story. In other places, capitalism’s growth by dispossession occurred at different speeds and in different ways.

In Scotland, for example, enclosure didn’t begin until the mid-1700s, but then the drive to catch up with England ensured that it was much faster and particularly brutal. As Neil Davidson writes, the horrendous 19th century Highland Clearances that Marx so eloquently condemned in Capital involved not primitive accumulation by new capitalists, but the consolidation of “an existing, and thoroughly rapacious, capitalist landowning class … whose disregard for human life (and, indeed, ‘development’) marked it as having long passed the stage of contributing to social progress.”[41]

And, of course, the growth of the British Empire, from Ireland to the Americas to India and Africa, was predicated on enclosure of colonized land and dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, extending the “blight of capitalist civilization” required

“the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development .… Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power.”[42]

That remains true today, when one percent of the world’s population has 45% of all personal wealth and nearly three billion people own nothing at all. Every year, the rich enclose ever more of the world’s riches, and their corporations destroy more of the life support systems that should be our common heritage. Enclosures continue, strengthening an ever-richer ruling class and an ever-larger global working class.

In the seventeenth century, an unknown poet summarized the hypocrisy and brutality of enclosure in four brief lines:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.


We should also recall the fourth verse of that poem, which urges us to move from indignation to action.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.


Notes

[1] Quotations in Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49.

[2] Frederick Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany” (1850) in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 10 (International Publishers, 1978), 410.

[3] Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Clarendon Press, 1988), 3.

[4] Briony Mcdonagh and Stephen Daniels, “Enclosure Stories: Narratives from Northamptonshire,” Cultural Geographies 19, no. 1 (January 2012), 113.

[5] Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell, 1999), 129.

[6] R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (Lector House, 2021 [1912]), 76.

[7] John U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1 (Frank Cass, 1966), 342-3, 310.

[8] John U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1 (Frank Cass, 1966), 312, 316-7, 291-2. See also Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 320-24.

[9] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

[10] Proceedings in the Commons, 1601: November 2–5.

[11] Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 51.

[12] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 162.

[13] Peter Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk, vol. IV (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 695, 690, 621.

[14] Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660 (University of California, 1980), 264.

[15] Such figures appeared frequently in rural uprisings in England: later examples included Lady Skimmington, Ned Ludd and Captain Swing.

[16] Martin Empson, ‘Kill All the Gentlemen’: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks, 2018), 165.

[17] John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Macmillan, 1986), 173.

[18] Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 84-5.

[19] Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 86.

[20] Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 144.

[21] James Boyce, Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens (Icon Books, 2021), Kindle edition, loc. 840.

[22] Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Bookmarks, 1991), 194.

[23] Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640-1660 (Pluto Press, 1996), 1.

[24] Manning, English People, 195.

[25] John S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives And Radicals In The English Civil War, 1630 1650 (Longman, 1987) 34.

[26] “General Order for Possessions, to secure them from Riots and Tumults,” House of Lords Journal vol. 4, July 13, 1641.

[27] Lindley, Fenland Riots, 68.

[28] Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 228.

[29] Quoted in Lindley, Fenland Riots, 149.

[30] Lindley, Fenland Riots, 147.

[31] Gerard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Penguin Books, 1973), 82.

[32] Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell, eds., The Good Old Cause, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2012), 424.

[33] Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (Schocken Books, 1964), 191.

[34] Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harper, 1972), 260.

[35] Marx, Capital Volume, 1, 885.

[36] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin Books, 1991), 237-8.

[37] The best account of resistance to enclosure in the 18th century is chapter 9 of J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[38] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Commons,” Social Research (Spring 2021), 5.

[39] Commercial and Agricultural Magazine, October 1800, quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin Books, 1991), 243.

[40] Karl Marx, Capital Volume, 1, 874.

[41] Neil Davidson, “The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 1,” Journal of Agrarian Change (July 2004), 229.

[42] Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, (Routledge, 2003), 352, 350.

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 12, 2022 4:22 pm

The Occupation of Ottawa is a Far-Right Assault on Labor and Democracy
Stephen Gowans COVID-19, Fascism February 10, 2022
February 10, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Some people believe the occupation of Ottawa is a leftwing, pro-working-class phenomenon, but that’s hardly the view of trade unionists, community organizers, activists and frontline workers here in the city.

We see, feel, hear, and experience the occupation first-hand, on the ground. That might be why we understand the occupation differently: not as a leftwing phenomenon and democratic expression, but as a far-right movement of racists, evangelicals, union-haters, and conspiracy-minded lunatics, inspired and supported by the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Elon Musk.

Image
A supporter carries a US Confederate flag during the Freedom Convoy protesting Covid-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions in front of Parliament on January 29, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada. – Hundreds of truckers drove their giant rigs into the Canadian capital Ottawa on Saturday as part of a self-titled “Freedom Convoy” to protest vaccine mandates required to cross the US border. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP)

To be sure, you don’t have to live in Ottawa to grasp the true nature of the occupation. Ben Norton, who lives in Nicaragua, is under no illusion about what Occupy Ottawa is all about.

Norton recently tweeted:
I've seen enough right-wing, foreign-funded, astroturfed "protests" in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Belarus, Hong Kong, etc. to immediately recognize one in Canada. Yes the neoliberal Trudeau gov't is awful, but allying with even more reactionary right-wingers against it is stupid.
Also…
It's so ridiculous that there are so-called "leftists" insisting we should oppose Canada's largest trucker union, representing actual working-class truck drivers, and instead side with Donald Trump and far-right US billionaires to support the rightwing capitalist convoy in Canada.
Teamsters Canada opposes the occupation and calls Covid-19 “the real enemy of truckers.”
Pierre LeBlanc, a local activist, recently wrote to Matt Taibbi, who has written an substack article describing the occupation as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Ceauşescu Moment.

In his response to Taibbi, LeBlanc summed up quite effectively why the Ottawa occupation is an anti-labor, far-right phenomenon.
Dear Matt,
I regularly read you and find much of your writings instructive. This time, you have overreached to cartoonish effect. Attempting to link Trudeau to Ceausescu was gross, baseless hyperbole at its worst. And it seriously erodes your credibility.
I despise Biden, the Clintons and Trudeau as much as you do, and have often said so in my writings, but you totally misrepresent what is going on here.
What is going on here in Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada is a full-on assault on Canadians by organised cadres of the extreme, fundamentalist, rightwing evangelicals, recently or forcefully retired RCMP and other police officers, one of Trump's advisors and a whole raft of Canadian and American conservatives and rightwing wingnuts. Much of it financed by American so-called donors and whipped-up by Fox News and many others. That you should associate your good name with them is sorely disappointing.
Firstly, this is not a truckers' protest. It is a planned insurrection, a version of color revolutions not unlike what went on in Ukraine, Georgia and Bolivia, and the ongoing attempted coups d'État against Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Peru, Chile and many other countries around the world, and the defense and promotion of Apartheid Israel. As well as the attempted,laughable political and economic throttling of Russia and China.
Real truckers who make their daily living crossing the border are few and far between. Indeed, this occupation is deeply damaging to them and their families - they will be long degraded by this cynical hijacking of their good name and profession. Even at the Ambassador Bridge blockade, there are only 5 transport trucks involved in that blockade. The rest are the same people who have been attacking nurses, doctors and other health workers in front of hospitals for over 2 years, and who have suddenly discovered that using their supped-up half-ton toys, 4X4s, SUVs and tractors as weapons is very effective. Much like Kissinger and Pinochet organized a fringe of truckers in Chile in 1973 to overthrow the Allende regime.
The cadres leading this are the who's who of Canada's supremacist extremists (you know the list) linked up with former RCMP officers (the latest iteration of the spokesman is ex-RCMP). They are holed-up in the luxury of an Ottawa hotel with one of Trump's advisors, linked up with other yahoos of the US oligarchy/billionaire club (Elon Musk, etc., and the military complex deep-state agents). Collectively, they are highly experienced in sabotage, artificially creating infrastructure and economic gridlock to bring a society to its knees and whipping up disaffected and naïve citizens as their film extras, blackshirts and peons.
But you surely know all of this, Matt; you're a student of capitalist/imperialist/fascist history. What I don't understand is what motivates you to such drivel. Unless it is some kind of nihilistic desire to replace Canada's capitalist, racist, colonialist system by any means, even if that means creating an even more fascist state.
You're either naïve, seeking attention or a classic disruptor, consequences and massive suffering be damned.

Pierre LeBlanc
The lunatic far right People’s Party is four-square behind the occupation, as are the interim leader and likely future leader of the country’s Conservative Party. When have anti-union, pro-business, social conservative parties ever embraced an authentic, pro-labor, left-wing movement?

The Ottawa police have done nothing to liberate the city, preferring to avoid confrontation and hob-nob with the occupiers, or avoid them altogether. The city’s chief of police, Peter Sloly, is an endless source of excuses for why he and his officers cannot act. Early on he declared “there may be no policing solution.” The chief’s inaction has led to calls for his resignation, along with that of the city’s mayor, Jim Watson, dubbed Mayor Milquetoast by a local newspaper columnist for offering nothing more than impotent pleas for the occupiers to go home. With what genuine leftwing, pro-worker, movement has the police ever been complicit?

A coalition of local labor unions, community organizations, and residents will hold a rally this Saturday in solidarity with frontline workers and Ottawa residents affected by the occupation.

It will

*Call for an end to the occupation.

*Show support for frontline workers.
*Say no to white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and all other forms of hate that the convoy has directed at residents.
*Call for public health measures that protect our communities.
*Call for immediate support for workers who have lost income due to the convoy, 14 paid sick days for all workers, decent pandemic pay, an end to the crisis in long-term care, and a strong public healthcare system.

A majority of Canadians and US Americans support Covid-19 restrictions. Occupy Ottawa is not a grassroots working-class movement, but an astroturfed corruption of far-right billionaires whose aim is to pressure governments to lift all Covid-19 restrictions and return to business-normal. As The Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of the hard-right billionaire class put it, “the message of Canada’s trucker protest” is that “it’s time for the pandemic emergency orders to end.” (How many legitimately leftwing, pro-worker, pro-democracy movements were ever endorsed by The Wall Street Journal?) If the far-right elite and its occupation shock-troops have their way, governments will transition from Covid-19 mitigation measures to a ‘living with Covid’ strategy, more aptly dubbed ‘dying with Covid’–over the opposition of a majority of their citizens.

The Journal acknowledged that most Canadians oppose the occupation of their capital. Musk, Trump, the Journal, Canada’s far-right parties, and the occupiers care not a fig for democracy, not one jot for the well-being of others, and not one iota for the welfare of labor. Their sole concern is to lift Covid-19 restrictions, and they appear ready to go to great lengths to achieve their aim, no matter how reactionary their goal and no matter how anti-democratic and thuggish their methods.

Pierre LeBlanc can be reached at pierrealeblanc@rogers.com

https://gowans.blog/2022/02/10/the-occu ... democracy/

There has indeed been a spate of articles supporting this stupidity, as there was similar when Covid first hit town. I see it on sites that have been or currently are friendly to anarchist 'analysis'.(sometimes ya gotta squint to discern the difference between anarchists and libertarians.) It is also of a piece with trotskyists, who have never seen a union they liked. To be sure the working class has many axes to grind with the ruling class, but Covid's seriousness ain't one of them. How it has been addressed compared to socialist countries is another story... It is perfectly reasonable to distrust the machinations of Big Pharma, but after many millions of doses have been administered with marginal side effect(at scale) and considering that every nation on the Planet, including socialist and those striving towards that goal are taking this thing seriously, then I think we should too.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 14, 2022 1:11 pm

Teamsters union denounces far-right so-called “trucker protest”
Walter SmolarekFebruary 12, 2022 984 1 minute read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/102110

Representing 1.4 million workers mainly in the trucking industry in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is speaking out against the far-right “freedom convoy”. Referred to in the media as a “trucker protest,” this group has been terrorizing residents of the Canadian capital Ottawa and blocking a key bridge between the United States and Canada, falsely claiming to speak for all truck drivers.

But Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa has now issued a statement refuting this lie. He said, “The Teamsters Union denounces the ongoing Freedom Convoy protest at the Canadian border that continues to hurt workers.” Hoffa added: “Our members are some of the hardest workers in the country and are being prevented from doing their jobs. The Teamsters call on the organizers of this action to end this protest.”

The Ambassador Bridge is a key artery for trade between the U.S. and Canada, especially for the auto industry, and its blockage by the far right protesters is taking a serious economic toll on union truck drivers.

François Laport, President of Teamsters Canada and Vice President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has taken the same position. In his statement titled, “The Real Enemy for Truckers is Covid-19”, Laport said:

“The so-called “freedom convoy” and the despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians does not reflect the values of Teamsters Canada, nor the vast majority of our members, and in fact has served to delegitimize the real concerns of most truck drivers today … what is happening in Ottawa has done more harm to Teamsters members, be they Truck Drivers who were trying to deliver their loads, or hotel, restaurant and healthcare workers who were intimidated, abused or prevented from accessing their workplaces, by several protesters.”

Laport also pointed out in his statement that 90% of the 15,000 long-haul truckers his union represents are vaccinated. While far right demagogues claim they are fighting for the interests of working people, organized labor knows the truth: Opposition to public health measures is in the interests of the bosses, who want to “reopen the economy” without regard for the death and suffering this will cause workers.

https://www.liberationnews.org/teamster ... rationnews

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The so-called Freedom Convoy was never about truckers, or border mandates

by James Menzies
January 30, 2022

Truckers who participated in a cross-country convoy culminating in protest at Parliament Hill this weekend have been duped into believing the convoy was about them.

It never was. It wasn’t about your rights to continue crossing the border unvaccinated. And by the time the convoy rolled through Ontario it had already fully morphed into something much bigger – and more dangerous – than what truckers were ever told.

I raised alarms early in a blog ‘The murky matter of protests and the donations that drive them,’ when I noticed who was behind the convoy. These weren’t truckers organizing a GoFundMe that at the time of that writing hadn’t yet surpassed $1 million, on the way to $8.5 million just a week later.


The principal fundraiser was Tamara Lich, the secretary of the federal separatist Maverick Party in Alberta. Prior to that role, she was active with other far-right movements such as Wexit Alberta – a party whose founder advocated for Alberta to separate from Canada and join the Trump-led U.S.

The blog fueled a lot of anger. How dare you question the motives of the organizers? Why don’t you support the revolution? How much money did Trudeau pay you to write such drivel? Take your jab and die.

Image
(Photo: John G. Smith)

It also brought a lot of attention to the fundraiser and the people behind it. GoFundMe froze the funds for a time until it was satisfied the money would be disbursed appropriately.

I received many calls from mainstream media outlets, asking me what the protest was about. I couldn’t bring myself to call this a trucker protest. I opined it was an anti-vax, anti-mandate, anti-government, and possibly even pro-separatist movement that’s attached itself to the frustrations of a small segment of the trucker population.


And then Canada Unity, another of the organizers, posted a ludicrous Memorandum of Understanding/Manifesto on its website, which it plans to present to the Governor General of Canada. It essentially calls for the resignation of everyone within the federal government, the formation of a new government comprised of the Governor General, Senate, and members of Canada Unity, and the removal of all Covid-related measures – even those put into place at the provincial level. The trucks will remain until the document is signed, organizers said, dubbing its mission Bearhug.

I understand the frustrations truckers feel over the border vaccine mandate, I really do. You’ve done your jobs safely for two years going back and forth across the border keeping our economy moving and our stores stocked, and were declared heroes as you did so.

Canada bungled the communication around its Jan. 15 vaccine mandate, creating confusion and for 24 hours giving truckers false hope they’d be exempted. But the reality is, Canada’s arrival requirements for unvaccinated Canadian truckers are completely moot now that the U.S. has put into place its own requirement.

It matters little what you have to do upon re-entry when you can’t travel into the U.S. in the first place. And if you think the Biden Administration is going to reverse that mandate over a trucker protest in Ottawa, well, that’s about as likely as the mass resignation of all our federally elected politicians in Ottawa.

I feel bad for the truckers who thought this was about them. It never was. There was never any discussion around the real issues you face every day. Lack of safe parking. Poor road conditions. Access to clean restrooms. Unpaid detention time at shippers and receivers.

You were taken advantage of, because you were frustrated and you have big, loud machines that can be quite disruptive. You became the rallying cry of an anti-government group whose ambitions went well beyond the reversal of the vaccine mandate.

The true objectives of convoy organizers became clearer as they neared Ottawa and are now on full display. The unruly behavior in Ottawa – the waving of Swastika and Confederate flags, dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, and desecrating the Terry Fox memorial – were shameful and were not the doing of truckers. But anyone who participated in or promoted this convoy is guilty by association. You were duped.

https://www.trucknews.com/blogs/the-so- ... -mandates/

Besides those truckers I think we can include some anarchist leaning sites as dupes. To be sure, workers have a whole lot of reasons to oppose the governments of their class enemies. It is the failure of the Left, and conversely the success of capitalist propaganda, which funnels worker anger into reactionary channels. We've got a lot of work to do and I think that starts with disassociation with the so-called 'left' of capitalist parties including the false and devious social democratic parties. In case you haven't noticed the far right has scored significant success defining themselves as opposed to 'RINOS'. This is possible within the Republican Party because both factions are reactionary. This is not possible with the Dems because despite their feel-good rhetoric they are absolutely wed to capitalism and we can settle for nothing less than it's abolition.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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