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 » Wed Jul 10, 2024 2:19 pm

US Inequality Is About Class, Not Generations
July 9, 2024

Baby boomers had the good fortune to come along at one of those rare moments in history when the richest among us were not doing so well in the clash of classes, writes Sam Pizzigati.

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Riding a scooter in midtown Manhattan, April 2018. (Billie Grace Ward, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

By Sam Pizzigati
Inequality.org

How much does the generation we belong to define the comfort of the lives we lead? Just about nothing impacts our comfort, suggests a recent spate of major media news analyses, more than our generation.

“Millennials had it bad financially,” as a Washington Post feature put it last month, “but Gen Z may have it worse.”

Demographers typically define millennials as those Americans born between 1980 and 1994. Gen Z covers the cohort that came on the scene between 1995 and 2012.

The tens of millions of Americans in both these generations, goes the standard analysis, enjoy precious little of the good life that has blessed America’s baby boomers, those lucky 60- and 70-year-olds born right after World War II between 1946 and 1964.

The New York Times earlier this year, for instance, interviewed a Michigan millennial who works as a university archivist. She’s still paying off, decades after graduating, her student loans.

Three years ago, this millennial bought a 10-year-old used car, a transaction that wiped out most of her savings. Many of her millennial peers, the archivist told the Times, are finally starting to buy homes and raise families, but “a lot of my generation has had to put that all on hold.”

Young people in Gen Z, the available data also make rather clear, are facing even greater economic challenges. Gen Z’ers are paying 31 percent more for housing than millennials, even after taking inflation into account, and 46 percent more for health insurance.

Gen Z has become, adds The Washington Post, “the first generation where recent college grads are more likely to be unemployed than the general population.”

Amid that general population, baby boomers stand economically supreme. Boomers, a group that makes up a mere 20 percent of the U.S. population, now hold 52 percent of the nation’s net wealth. The baby boom generation, sums up the Economist magazine, may well turn out to be “the luckiest generation in history.”

Analyses like these have been creating the fairly widespread impression that boomers have convincingly “won” what has been a generational war — at the expense of America’s younger generations.

But this “generational war” framing more distorts than describes the reality Americans are living. Millions of boomers in the United States today are not doing well economically. Significant numbers of millennials and Gen Z’ers are annually raking in millions.

What’s going on here? We’re not suffering through a generational war. We’re continuing to live through a clash of economic classes.

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Amazon union demonstration in New York, September 2021. (Pamela Drew, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Baby boomers just happened to have had the good fortune to come along at one of those rare moments in history when the richest among us were not doing so well in that clash of classes. These boomers found themselves born into a postwar America that average people — after years of struggle — had fundamentally transformed.

By the late 1940s, across huge swatches of the United States, most workers carried union cards. The contracts their unions bargained made the country they called home the first industrial nation in the entire world where the majority of workers, after paying for life’s most basic necessities, actually had significant money left over.

Throughout those same mid-century years, meanwhile, America’s rich were facing top-bracket federal income tax rates that hovered around 90 percent.

The tax code of those years did, to be sure, have loopholes that America’s wealthiest could exploit. But these loopholes largely benefited only a narrow sliver of Americans of means, mostly those rich who owed their wealth to fossil fuels.

On the first annual Forbes 400 list in 1982, nine of America’s wealthiest top fifteen had Big Oil to thank for their fortunes.

The poorest deep pocket on the initial Forbes top 400 — Apple’s Armas Markkula Jr. — sat on a 1982 fortune worth a mere $91 million, the equivalent of about $296 million today.

On the current Forbes 400, America’s poorest mogul holds a fortune worth $6.9 billion, a stash over 23 times larger than the 1982 fortune at the bottom of the Forbes first modern-era top 400.

The business network CNBC has dubbed the wealth gap within the ranks of millennials “the new class war.” The “vast majority” of this generation, notes CNBC’s Robert Frank, is facing draining student debt, low-wage service-jobs and unaffordable housing.

On average, millennials at age 35 have held 30 percent less wealth than baby boomers at that same age. But the richest top 10 percent millennials have averaged 20 percent more wealth than their baby boom top 10 percent counterparts.

Today’s concentration of millennial — and Gen Z — wealth suits the purveyors of luxury watches, wines and classic automobiles just fine, points out a new Bank of America study of millennial and Gen Z households holding at least $3 million in investable assets.

Some 72 percent of deep pockets aged 43 and younger, the study adds, deem themselves “skeptical” about investing mainly in traditional stocks and bonds. By 2030, a Bain & Co. report released earlier this year estimates, affluent millennials will account for 50 to 55 percent of luxury market purchases and Gen Z’ers another 25 to 30 percent.

All this should serve to remind us about a basic simple truth. We can’t change the generation we get born into. We can change how the world we enter distributes income and wealth.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/09/u ... nerations/
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 20, 2024 2:49 pm

Communist work in the trade unions

How should Marxists approach union work? Which demands are most useful in developing workers’ class-consciousness?

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When Lenin called trade unions a ‘school for communism’, he was talking about the potential for workers to organise and act collectively – in particular, what this experience teaches about the huge power they wield in the economic life of society. The type of unions that really give workers experience of their collective power can help build the confidence they need to move on from fighting for better conditions of exploitation to fighting for the end of the exploitative system of wage-slavery altogether.

Proletarian writers

Friday 19 July 2024

The question of how we approach trade union work is an important one for any revolutionary organisation. Britain’s unions today are much diminished as compared with their high point in 1979, when they had 13 million members. Today, that figure has halved to 6.5 million members, most of them in fairly privileged jobs, but this still represents a large force of organised workers whom we should of course be trying to reach with our programme.

Our aim in this area of work as in all others is to bring workers towards a higher level of class-consciousness, as well as to find recruits for the party – that is, to find those union members who are ready and willing to be trained as Marxist worker-theoreticians.

It should be borne in mind with trade union work, as with communist work in any other part of the working-class movement, our ultimate aim is not to run trade unions but to develop deep and meaningful connections for the party of the proletariat amongst the advanced and organised workers, and to use this connection to popularise Marxist science – the liberation ideology of our class.

Limitations of union work
As British manufacturing has continued to be exported and replaced by service-sector, retail and warehousing jobs, and as public services have been increasingly privatised, huge areas of employment have sprung up that are essentially unrepresented by the established trade unions.

In some of these sectors, new unions are arising, and we must be as ready to interact with those as we are with the older established unions. In particular, whenever any of them are engaged in active struggle.

As VI Lenin pointed out in Second International during WW1, Lenin noted how the imperialist countries, with Britain foremost among them, had managed to incorporate the trade union and Labour leaderships into the political establishment.

More than a century later, this phenomenon has become ever more pronounced and obvious – as a quick tally of former union leaders now gracing the House of Lords’ red benches will reveal!

Essentially, the upper leaders and institutional machinery of the trade union movement have been incorporated into the British state machine.

With the occasional honourable exception, Britain’s unions today are not building a militant class struggle in defence of workers’ pay, conditions and rights, but channelling and managing workers’ anger in such a way as to stop it posing any real problem for the ruling class.

For form’s sake, fringe meetings at the TUC conference regularly discuss the repeal of the anti-trade union laws which hamstring the use of workers’ collective power, but, in truth, the TUC’s leaders have been delegated the task of enforcing those laws – and they have shown themselves only too willing to carry out this task.

The Labour link
Besides the plethora of legislation that makes lawful union struggle essentially ineffective, the single biggest factor in ensuring the compliance and docility of the unions is the relationship between the largest unions (Unison, Unite and GMB) and the Labour party. This relationship was forged by petty-bourgeois Fabian ‘socialists’ and labour-aristocratic union bureaucrats in the earliest days of Labour’s existence and has remained in force ever since.

The pressure exerted by this relationship is a very effective mechanism of state control over workers’ struggle. The Labour party has for a century been the reserve party of government, to be brought in when the Tories have become too despised to effectively carry out the ruling class’s business; it has thus become an essential part of the state machinery.

When an attack on the working class is needed that the Tories might not easily get away with, a Labour government is installed to get the job done.

Using its relationship with the trade union leadership, Labour can exert pressure on the working class, breaking up militant struggles and breaking down class solidarity to pit one group of workers against another with far less resistance than the Tories – acknowledged and open enemies of the working class – would face if they tried to do the same.

This is why Sir Keir Starmer has become the ruling class’s favoured candidate for prime minister in 2024. The monopoly financiers believe that Labour will be better able than Rishi Sunak’s Tory party to push down even harder on the workers and accelerate the war drive. They know that every attack on the working class at home and every crime committed abroad will be accompanied by a campaign of ‘don’t go letting the Tories back in’ blackmail from the trade union movement, which they expect will be effective in crushing nascent opposition and controlling workers’ anger.

The official self-identifying ‘left’ is totally complicit in this charade.

In many major unions, the structures are dominated by a thin and unrepresentative layer of (seemingly ‘ultrarevolutionary’ although in reality merely provocateur) Trotskyites, (allegedly ‘communist’) revisionists and Labour party functionaries (both ‘left’ and ‘right’). These groups all pretend a great loathing for one other in theory, but in practice they work hand in glove to maintain joint control over the unions and to ensure those organisations’ continued servility to the Labour party and its electoral interests.

The same groups perform the same service in the antiwar, Palestine solidarity and anti-austerity movements, where their role is not to organise effective opposition to imperialist aims but to police who is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to say; to make sure no meaningful activity is ever engaged on, and to keep workers’ anger within safe bounds.

A programme of meaningful action
In light of all the above, but recognising that communists must aim to be present wherever groups of workers are gathered – and must especially prioritise places where workers are gathering in active struggle – our party has drafted a number of model motions, which can be found in section five of our Manifesto for the Crisis: Class Against Class.

These are the arguments we want to put before the organised working class – arguments that the Labour-affiliated bureaucracies avoid like the plague. Together they present the broad brushstrokes of the kind of class-conscious approach and activity that ought to characterise trade unions that really aim to represent the interests of their working-class members in opposition to the constant assault of the capitalist class – am assault that is as much a part of the capitalist system as the system of wage labour (wage-slavery) itself.

These motions are briefly summarised below. We strongly recommended following the links and reading each one in detail. The demands they contain need to be raised at every opportunity, both within the trade union movement (in local branches, regions and national congresses) and in wider society (on demonstrations, in newspapers and leaflets and at public meetings).

We should aim to popularise them so that discussion of their contents and a demand for their implementation steadily grows amongst the working class, whether unionised or not.

Any one of our readers or members should be proposing one or more of these at their trade union branch, if they have one. Comrades who aren’t unionised at work should talk to their workmates about the demands we have made as the opportunities arise. It is also worth discussing the possibility of unionising your workplace with colleagues if there is no collective organisation currently in place.

1. The urgent need for a programme to address the cost of living crisis. The programme of measures we have proposed contains nine areas needing urgent attention, from guaranteeing cheap housing and energy to supplying decent food and renationalising the NHS, an end to inflationary money-printing and British involvement in imperialist wars.

We should be talking about why these demands are necessary, and why the unions and Labour party are doing nothing to help working people as the inflation crisis continues to worsen. It ought to be an easy matter for the trade unions, with all their resources, to campaign around these demands, which would be hugely popular and would certainly garner them many new members.

The building of a mass campaign and the real threat of mass action by the organised working class is what is needed to force the ruling class to retreat from its current strategy of increasing profitability through privatisation of public services and constant cuts to pay, pensions, social services etc, of using tax revenues to bail out monopoly corporations, and of waging wars for domination and plunder.

2. The need for the unions to defy the anti-union laws, refusing to comply en masse with state intervention in trade union activities and making Britain’s current anti-union legal framework simply unworkable in practice. While the need to reverse all the anti-union legislation enacted over the last 40 years is often talked about by some of the (self-described) ‘left’ trade union leaders, it is never seriously acted on. Yet while these laws remain in place, and while the unions defer to them as if they had no other option, almost every legally-conducted strike is doomed to failure.

We must break the superstition, inculcated into workers’ minds from a young age via state education and media, that the laws of the land are handed down by some neutral and benevolent authority (God) for the benefit of all, reminding workers instead that current legislation is simply a reflection of the balance of class forces. Anti-union laws were put on the statute books when unions were in retreat and the ruling class was on the attack.

Part of turning the tables on this state of affairs will require removing this legislation, by any means necessary. The growing number of so-called ‘wildcat’ strikes show that there is a real urgent need and growing demand for our trade unions to revert to tried-and-tested methods of working-class shop-floor democracy that results in immediate action (as opposed to waiting for months for a government-approved postal ballot), which all working-class history has shown to be the only really effective way for workers to harness their collective power.

3. The need for unions to break their links with the Labour party. As explained above, this tie keeps workers from taking independent action in their own interests, and is thus another huge obstacle to their waging militant and successful struggles. By raising this demand, and by proposing motions to break the link to our branches, we can highlight this central problem and force its discussion.

Disenchantment with Labour has never been as high as it is now, and we should aim to harness and direct the growing grass-roots anger, which is totally unreflected in the actions of today’s union leaders.

4. Connected to all the demands above is the question of the trade union bureaucracy. Bureaucratisation (ie, professionalisation and proceduralism) is one of the ways in which the ruling class brings the leadership of the trade unions into its orbit.

Senior union leaders are often employed on salaries that are many times above what their members earn, and they enjoy a whole range of privileges that they want to maintain. This leads even the better ‘left’-leaning leaders to fall easily into the role assigned to them by the capitalists. If they play ball with the state and the employers, if they police the working class on the ruling class’s behalf, then an easy life and a seat in the House of Lords await them.

We must therefore put forward a programme for the democratisation of the unions and aim to popularise this amongst the membership.

All union officials who have any responsibility for representing workers and conducting negotiations with the employers must be elected (not hired by the union management). Union members must have the right to recall these officials if they are not representing their interests properly. As things stand, we have large numbers of full-time officials exercising great power over workers’ interests who are unelected and largely unaccountable to the membership. General secretaries and NEC members come and go, but many professional officials, often deeply reactionary, remain in a union’s employment for decades. Workers must have control over who is appointed to these positions and must have the ability to remove them as well.
All union officials should receive the average wage of their members. Keeping union officials on high salaries is a deliberate strategy to create a separate and privileged layer at the top of working-class organisations. This coterie has consistently shown itself to be more interested in defending its own position than in fighting for the interests of trade union members – ie, of the working class.
Putting forward these demands, which enshrine the basic principles of working-class democracy, can help us to attract sincere, grass-roots trade unionists towards the party and to grow a movement aimed at a complete overhaul of the union movement – whether this is ultimately achieved by reforming the present organisations or by establishing new and really democratic ones.

5. The need for a mass campaign of non-cooperation with the imperialist war drive in general (and now also with the Gaza genocide specifically). Union leaders have long played a disgraceful role in supporting the wars waged by British imperialism. This can be very clearly seen in regard to Nato’s war on Russia, but it is also true of the war in the middle east. Unite’s Sharon Graham has openly defended arms exports to the Israeli regime and, for all the talk of “solidarity with Palestine”, nothing is done to organise the actual delivery of such solidarity.

We must agitate untiringly around this point, pushing the idea of non-cooperation with imperialist warmongering and genocide, and underlining the class-collaboration and zionist complicity of Labour and the TUC. At a time when so many workers are actively demanding meaningful action on Gaza, we are pushing at an open door when we make this demand, and our model motion on Palestine can be freely adapted to suit any workplace or industry.

Taking this programme forward
All these motions are only suggested texts, to give an idea to workers about how to approach these issues in their workplace organisations. Union members should feel free to take whatever is useful and adapt them to suit the needs of the current moment and the realities of their particular workplace and industry. It is the basic aims that are important and which need to be conveyed to workers, the detail of how this is done is bound to vary according to the conditions.

We can expect the union leaderships to do their best to stop such topics being properly discussed at their conferences. Our job is to popularise these demands anyway, since they represent the true interests of working people.

In pushing for these discussions to take place, we will also help to reveal the reactionary stance of the leaderships – a vital step in developing class-consciousness amongst the rank-and-file membership.

Every opportunity must be taken to bring these demands to the notice of organised workers and to help them recognise what stands in the way of their being accepted and implemented.

We may be small in number. We may be a lone voice in our union on many of these issues today, but our demands are in the real interests of working people and will gain traction if we are persistent and confident in promoting them, especially in conditions where the economic crisis and war drive are daily making working-class life more difficult and the only ‘answer’ on offer from official trade unionism is for workers to put their faith in a Labour government!

Suggested further reading
CPGB-ML: Manifesto for the Crisis: Class Against Class

Harpal Brar: Britain’s Perfidious Labour Party

VI Lenin: What is To Be Done?

VI Lenin: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

VI Lenin: ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder

https://thecommunists.org/2024/07/19/ne ... de-unions/
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 16, 2024 2:32 pm

Attacks on UAW and Other Unions Seek to Curb Union Power, Not ‘Anti-Semitism’ (UE Statement)
August 15, 2024

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Logo of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. File photo.

By United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America – Aug 11, 2024

In the face of rising working-class militancy, anti-union forces have launched various legal attacks on the labor movement, using the false claim that union involvement in protests demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is somehow “anti-Semitic.” Most prominently, the federal monitor charged with rooting out corruption in the United Auto Workers has engaged in wildly inappropriate behavior, in a clear attempt to use his immense legal power over the union to shut down their criticism of Israel. The National Right to Work Committee and union-busting law firms like Jones Day have also launched a series of legal cases, including some against UE locals, aimed at undermining union shop and exclusive representation.

On December 13, a little under two weeks after the UAW released a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the union, Neil Barofsky, made a phone call to UAW President Shawn Fain, urging him to reconsider the union’s position. In February, Barofsky sent a letter to the UAW executive board reiterating his criticism of the union’s position, and also brought it up in a virtual meeting with the executive board on February 19.

Barofsky was appointed in 2021 as part of a consent decree between the union and the federal government, stemming from rampant corruption under previous UAW leadership. In his role, Barofsky has extensive power to oversee all aspects of the union’s operation, including the power to impose discipline on UAW officers and members. The current leadership of the union was elected to reform the union; they have democratized the UAW and led important and militant fights, and have in fact worked closely with the monitor to root out corruption.

The consent decree which gives Barofsky authority over the union charges him with “remov[ing] fraud, corruption, illegal behavior, dishonesty, and unethical practices” from the union. Nothing in this mandate is applicable to the union’s position calling for a ceasefire, a position voted on by an executive board elected through a democratic process overseen by Barofsky himself.

After the union refused to change its position, and sent Barofsky a letter raising concerns that he was acting outside of his jurisdiction, Barofsky opened a new investigation into the union and demanded that the union turn over more than one hundred thousand documents, including communications that could potentially expose the union’s internal plans for taking on corporations

The attacks on labor over positions on Israeli policy towards Palestinians are not limited to the UAW, however. In July, a lawsuit against the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and professional staff of the City University of New York, was appealed to the Supreme Court. The National Right to Work Committee, which is providing legal counsel in the case, seeks to further weaken public-sector unions by asking the Supreme Court to eliminate the principle of exclusive representation. If exclusive representation is eliminated, then employers will be free to reward non-members with higher wages and other perks. This would further undermine public-sector unions, which are already suffering under the effects of the 2018 Janus decision outlawing union shop in the public sector. Two UE locals have also been the target of legal actions making false claims of anti-Semitism to attempt to undermine the union shop in the private sector, instigated by the National Right to Work Committee and the notorious union-busting law firm Jones Day.

These lawsuits, like the UAW monitor’s attack on that union, are justified by personal differences of opinion with positions taken by the union’s democratically-elected leadership, or in some cases by the membership as a whole. However, in a democracy, differences should be resolved, not by lawsuits, but by persuasion. UE has never taken action against a member for holding an opinion which differs from the union’s policy. Indeed, the preamble to our constitution directs us to unite all workers regardless not only of “craft, age, sex, nationality, race, [and] creed,” but also of “political beliefs,” and we encourage robust discussion of the union’s policies through our democratic structures.

It is ironic that several of these legal assaults alleging that criticisms of Israel’s military actions constitute “anti-Semitism” are being supported by the National Right to Work Committee, an organization whose history is steeped in actual prejudice against Jewish people. Vance Muse, the lobbyist who was central to the passage of so-called “right-to-work” laws throughout the country in the 1940s, was both a rabid anti-Semite and a committed white supremacist. His organization, the Christian American Association, sought to portray CIO unions like UE and UAW as agents of “Jewish Marxism” — precisely because our organizations united workers regardless of race, creed, and political beliefs.



It is not an accident that these attacks are specifically targeting unions which are growing, leading militant struggles, and daring to take independent positions on U.S. foreign policy. In this and in many other ways, they resemble the attacks on the progressive wing of the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s when the unions which were growing, leading militant struggles, and taking independent positions on U.S. foreign policy were tarred as “communist-dominated” and subjected to government persecution — all of which only aided the corporations. The attacks on so-called “anti-Semitism” are nothing more than a new McCarthyism.

Just as we have always rejected any attempts by the government, corporations or special interests to dictate UE policy, we forcefully condemn the attempts by the federal monitor to influence the policies of the UAW, and to retaliate against them for taking a courageous and just stand for peace. We urge the court which appointed Barofsky to replace him with a monitor who will not exceed his authority.

More broadly, we condemn the cynical misuse of claims of anti-Semitism to attack union security and exclusive representation. We call upon the rest of the labor movement to close ranks against these attacks on exclusive representation, on the union shop, and on the right of unions to democratically take policy positions independent of the government or any political party.

Carl Rosen
General President

Andrew Dinkelaker
Secretary-Treasurer

Mark Meinster
Director of Organization

(UE Union)

https://orinocotribune.com/attacks-on-u ... statement/
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 03, 2024 2:27 pm

Will There Be a General Strike on May Day, 2028?
Posted on September 2, 2024 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor.” –Ecclesiastes 4:9

“If you’ve got ’em by the balls, the heart and mind soon follow.” –Author Unknown


Labor Day 2024 seems like an appropriate date to look forward to May Day 2028, the date for which UAW President Shawn Fain, fresh from his “stand-up strike” triumph with the Big Three automakers, has called for a General Strike[1]. It’s nice to have time to prepare!

In doing the research for this post, I came to understand how little I know about the labor movement, so I hope that readers will bear with me, and union mavens who know more will correct me. It’s a sad commentary that the only mainstream publication with a regular labor beat is Teen Vogue, where Kim Kelly writes the “No Class” column. It would be a fine thing if every newspaper had a Kim Kelly (or a Mike Elk). It’s also frustrating that much of the reporting on labor — at least that which gets amplified — comes from niche publications on the unmasked, brunch-focused, Democrat-servicing, NGO-aligned putative left. All this combines to make me feel that we really don’t know what’s going on out there in the locals, let alone the workplace itself, which does allow one at least to project a certain sense of optimism. Just possibly Shawn Fain knows more than I do, or any of them do.

In this post, I will first give some background on the general strike (definition; history). Then I will quote Shawn Fain’s views (2023 and 2024). Next, I’ll present friendly amendments to and critiques of Fain’s views. Finally, I will play the armchair strategist snd present my own critique (hoping I have made clear that I have no particular qualifications to do this).

The General Strike: Background

Here is the definition of “General Strike,” from the Teamsters site:

A strike by all or most organized workers in a community or nation.

Kim Kelly gives a somewhat more wide-angled definition:

A general strike is a labor action in which a significant amount of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action. Organized strikes are generally called by labor union leadership, but they impact more than just those in the union.

(I like Kelly’s definition better — sorry, Teamsters! — because her jurisdiction heirarchy is richer, and because she emphasizes the role of the community.

From the DSA, “Looking Back to Look Forward to 2028,” here is a potted history of general strikes in the Great Depression, which were critical to the formation of the union movement as we know it today

Ten years later when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, conditions appeared to have lurched back to the nineteenth century; the truth was more complicated. Important quantitative shifts had prepared the ground for a qualitative breakthrough. First, radicals led thousands of workplace organizing drives during the early Thirties. 1934 marked a turning point with general or mass strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, and East Coast textile mills, drawing in more than 1.5 million workers. Many of them joined the Communist and Socialist Parties, creating the largest left parties in U.S. history. Second, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo all won contracts and significant wage gains, touching off a war within the AFL and the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Some union leaders understood that if they didn’t lead the rebellion, they might be left behind. Others genuinely supported it and threw their (relatively) well-resourced unions behind it. Third, although Roosevelt’s New Deal had only a small impact on macroeconomic activity, his administration created the foundation for the modern interventionist federal state, both in terms of economic investment—which really only took root as war production cranked up—and increasingly significant regulatory power. If Wilson’s National War Labor Board was a test balloon, Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act signaled the federal government’s willingness to corral labor and business when it served its own interests.

It’s impossible to reduce what came next to the “right conditions.” Strategic, tactical, and political debates raged throughout these years, but it’s clear that mass strikes were central to winning.

Now let’s turn to Shawn Fain and the present day.

UAW President Fain’s Calls for a General Strike

I came into this thinking that Fain had delivered a single address, which then got amplified, but in fact he first broached the idea in his report to the UAW membership after winning the UAW contract with the Big Three. He’s followed through several times thereafter. Here are several examples:

October 29, 2023. Fain’s report to the membership (CC disabled, sadly, so no YouTube transcript):



UAW’s Facebook page (!) (quoted but not linked by Common Dreams) contains the key passages from our standpoint:

“The Stand Up Strike will go down in history as an inflection point for our union, and for our movement.

We went to each of the Big 3 and proposed an expiration date of April 30, 2028. We did this for several reasons.

First, this allows us to strike on May Day, or International Workers’ Day.

We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles.

If we are going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few, then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.

…This contract is about more than just economic gains for autoworkers. It’s a turning point in the class war that has been raging in this country for the past forty years.

Why contract alignment? Kim Kelly explains:

[S]ympathy strikes (in which workers join a strike in solidarity with strikers at another workplace) are, in most cases, illegal in the US. Due to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed in the wake of the women-led 1946 Oakland general strike, general strikes are effectively illegal too. This trampling of the right of workers to show solidarity has been a source of frustration for decades, but has also prompted union members and leaders to get creative when necessary.

So if, as Fain has suggested, a number of separate unions happen to set their contracts to expire at the same time, and happen to go out on strike as a result, there are no laws being broken. That’s just good timing. And then, for example, if thousands of other workers, union and nonunion alike, who are sympathetic to the cause, all happened to fall ill at the same time and had to take off work during the general strike… well, that’s just plumb bad luck.

January 22, 2024. The Guardian:

Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.

“We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired PATCO workers [here], everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out,” Fain said. “We missed the opportunity then, but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”

He reaffirmed ambitious plans to organize a general strike for 1 May 2028, coinciding with International Solidarity Day or May Day.

April 30, 2024. Shawn Fain, In These Times, “May Day 2028 Could Transform the Labor Movement—and the World“l

We wanted to ensure our contracts expired at midnight on April 30, 2028, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a rallying cry. We’ve asked other unions to join us in setting their contract expiration dates to May Day 2028 in hopes the labor movement can collectively aspire to building the power needed to change the world.

There’s been talk about a ​”general strike” for as long as I’ve been alive. But that’s all it has been: talk.

If we are serious about building enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.

A general strike isn’t going to happen on a whim. It’s not going to happen over social media. A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement.

As working people, we must come together. We can no longer allow corporations, politicians and borders to divide us.

And:

We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028.

The first is that, to reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender and nationality.

Critiques of Fain

(1) How serious is the UAW really? From Hamilton Nolan (2024), at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago:

A number of people in the room told Brooks that it would be helpful if their union leaders could have a set contact point at UAW who would help them coordinate, and he appeared to take that in in good faith, but the UAW doesn’t seem to have any sort of big ongoing staffed effort to coordinate this thing right now. They are in the “inspire others to do this thing which is a collective effort” phase, which is fine.

If such a contact point exists on the UAW website, I can’t find it. Indeed:

Image

There’s nothing on the UAW site about a general strike at all, now or in the past. So when is that “staffed effort” going to start? From In These Times:

We must see some tangible coordination of action across the U.S. labor movement. It is great when one union wins a contract, or organizes an important new company, but those isolated events will not be enough to take on the combined power of trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their political allies. Not even when they involve tens or hundreds of thousands of workers. Big unions, the ones with the most resources, along with whatever non-union groups want to help them, must be able to sit down and plan and carry out big national campaigns together if we want to have any chance at winning the class war.

(2) “Show some muscle” but to what end? It is true that Fain (above) mentions “universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity,” but concrete material benefits don’t seem to be in the forefront of his thinking (which might not be a bad thing; see the Conclusion.) I note in passing that “universal health care” is not single payer, let alone a National Health Service; in fact, I seem to recall some ObamaCare advocates claiming, back in the day, that a combination of private health insurance plus ObamaCare filling in the gaps was, operationally, “universal health care,” so problem solved! One sardonic comment from trainer Jane McAlevey:

In the old days, the thing that really turned me off from the organized US left was that every time I would show up at a Left conference, I’d be immediately swarmed by white guys hawking papers in four-point font with their political line. And that’s not going to build a class-based, effective movement that’s tackling race and gender.

Medicare for All being one such hawked thing, sadly. (Although I have to say that the idea of a class-based movement that doesn’t “tackle” class seems odd to me.)

(3) Contract aligment may be the best tactic, but is it the only one? Hamilton Nolan once more, from the same conference:

The man from SEIU made the point that a general strike doesn’t need every participant to have exactly the same contract expiration date. For a May Day 2028 strike, for example, people working under any contract that expired before that date could just keep their contract bargaining going until May Day. Also, anyone who had unionized but was still negotiating a first contract could grab onto May Day as a self-imposed deadline and participate in the strike. So rather than thinking about only unions that could get that exact expiration date as possible participants, think about all the unions whose contracts expire in a six month window preceding that date, along with all the unions negotiating first contracts, along with all the unions willing to say “fuck it” and strike illegally. That is a much, much larger pool.

(4) What about opposition from the national unions? The labor movement can rightly be said to be fractious. From Socialist Call:

One is the difficulty of getting many unions on board, because of the fragmentation of the labor movement, the siloes and leaders’ egos. The president of one union doesn’t see himself as needing a leader from a different union. The established leaders don’t know Fain well and they have reasons to distrust him — his origins in dissent, his radical rhetoric, and even his widely publicized winning strike against the Big 3 automakers last fall, an achievement others can’t point to. In 1997 the Teamsters’ strike at UPS was a resounding national success but it did not lead to other unions’ doing likewise.

In our Balkanized system it’s hard for successes to spread from union to union.

But:

A possible exception is the idea of reform from below, as reformers in other unions (Food and Commercial Workers, Massachusetts Teachers, Chicago Teachers, Professional and Technical Engineers, Machinists, Theatrical Stage Employees) have taken heart from the example of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and now Unite All Workers for Democracy, the movement in the Auto Workers, and begun their own caucuses. That direct learning from each other is part of what Labor Notes promotes. But with reformers decidedly not in control of many unions, the power of a good example of how to lead is… less powerful.

Leading me to—

(5) How about support from the locals?. From HuffPo:

Eight councils affiliated with the AFL-CIO labor federation have endorsed the [general strike] concept so far, said Connor Lewis, a union member, writer and president of the Seven Mountains Central Labor Council in central Pennsylvania. The councils span six states; the most recent to sign on was the council for Louisville, Kentucky, where Ford workers went on strike last year.

(6) Who organizes community mutual aid networks? From Kim Kelly, “Everything You Need to Know About General Strikes“:

Organizers stress the importance of first building mutual aid networks and strong community systems to care for people in the event of a mass labor action like a general strike, before asking people to hit the streets. It’s hard enough to go out on a planned strike during union contract negotiations…. In those cases, workers at least have the support of their union, and, hopefully, a strike fund to help cover bills.

(7) Isn’t the general strike a “one-shot” strategy? From Kim Kelly, “The UAW Strike May Have Finally Set Us Up for a General Strike“:

To be brutally honest, though, we’ll probably only get one shot at this before the government magics up a new set of laws to make it even more difficult to try.

I would imagine lawfare against the union leadership is also a possibility, especially under a Harris administration.

Armchair Strategy

Here is Fain’s favorite bible quote in full (the first verse being the epigraph). Ecclesiastes 4:9-12:

9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Let’s take that “threefold cord” as an omen or a heuristic, and ask ourselves which other two major, national unions besides the UAW would be sufficient for a general strike.[2],[3] If we consider the second epigraph (“If you’ve got ’em by the balls….”) then the question becomes which unions control which chokepoints. The answer can only be those unions that control essential parts of the supply chain. Kim Moody (not Kelly) urges:

Even as capital in the United States was consolidating in industry after industry, the ties that bind the production of goods and services together, whether locally or across space, were tightening in new and important ways…. One of the most important changes in the reorganization of supply chains is their geography, the concentration of workers in key “nodes” or “clusters” [chokepoints] along with their technological drivers and linkages…

(Moody goes on to recommend organizing the unorganized at those nodes, but I think the organized at those nodes could have good effect in a general strike).

Obvious candidates from supply chain unions are the Teamsters, the Longshoremen (ILWU), and the Flight Attendants (AFACWA). I think we can rule the Teamsters out, since Teamster President Sean M. O’Brien doesn’t mention a general strike in his Labor Day article, “The American Worker’s Power Is Greater Than Any Party.” That leaves the AFACWA, and the ILWU.

Interestingly, the AFACWA views itself as having threatened a general strike, successfully, in 2019:

Image

And the ILWU has this article on its website: “Logistics Workers Use Supply Chain Power to Win.” In a successful strike against Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics:

With unyielding supply chain solidarity from Local 23 leadership and members, workers re-centered coworkers day and night around a strategic vision of union power while dismantling the distortions, misinformation, and lies rolled out every day in meetings, memos, and daily management texts to all employees. “After each round of busting, we could look over at the ships and remember how strong we are and how scared they were,” said Milton Turner, a warehouse worker.

Messages of solidarity poured in from the Maritime Union of Australia, the Maritime Union of New Zealand, and the International Longshoreman’s Association, whose members work at Wallenius-owned job sites. MUA’s message to workers highlighted Local 23’s strong stance to back up Australian longshore for victory in their fight against WWL in previous years, and MUA’s readiness to do the same in return. Meanwhile, workers from P&B Intermodal just down the road in the Port of Tacoma shared with WWL employees their experience of striking to shut down their job site, winning a union through Local 23, and the incredible, transformative gains they secured in their first union contract.

So I would say there is hope for a “three-fold cord.” Shutting down air travel, plus shipping, with auto manufacturing, might indeed cause the “heart and mind to follow.”

Conclusion

So I guess I’m going to have to throw a flag on my own Betteridge’s Law violation. I don’t think the answer to the question in the headline is “No,” at least, though it will take a lot of staffwork, starting now, to carry it off. But there does seem to be a path to enough chokepoints with a “three-fold cord” (which reduces the scope of work considerably, control of scope being key to project success).

But to me, the emphasis on worker benefits seems a little misplaced, even if the benefit is as big as single payer. The issue, to my simple mind, is worker power, not worker benefits; worker benefits flow from, and only from, worker power, and not capital’s goodheartedness or even sense of self-preservation. The issue, then, is the same as it has been since the mid-Nineteenth Century (not long in historical terms): Worker ownership and control of the means of production. Can anyone seriously argue, for example, that Boeing would not be better off — not to mention the flying public, who must know worry about planes that fall out of the sky, or getting sucked out of open doors at 30,000 feet — if it were run as a worker’s cooperative, along the lines of the Mondragon co-operative in Spain? How about once-storied Intel? Or, for that matter, once-functional Google? If we’re going to have a general strike, let’s think big!

NOTES

[1] From Yahoo News, “How the UAW won a major victory and what it could mean for U.S. labor going forward“:

Fain is the first UAW president directly elected by the membership and the head of an insurgent bloc; his election followed years of corruption by union leadership, including two former presidents embezzling millions. An electrician from Kokomo, Ind., Fain provided constant video updates to his membership via social media, breaking from previous approaches where the work was done behind closed doors. He was combative in his approach to automaker executives, pillorying their salaries while wearing an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt and expressing a belief that billionaires shouldn’t exist.

“They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana,” Fain said in a speech earlier this month. “They look at you and see somebody they would never have over for dinner or let ride on their yacht or let fly on their private jet. They think they know us. But us autoworkers know better.”

Fain also mixes in Scripture with his speeches, telling the Atlantic that his favorite verse was Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 and his favorite line from it was: “A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” Fain says that the passage “speaks about what life’s about: standing together and helping one another and loving one another.”

Love the Bible quotes!

[2] Kim Kelly guesses “four or five,” but I would speculate Fain is trying to tell us something with Ecclesiastes 9i.

[3] Randy Weingarten’s AFT is the first and so far only national union to support Fain’s call. I discount this, first because of Weingarten’s miserable treatment of the AFT membership, allowing them to be forced back into poorly ventilated workspaces, unmasked, in the midst of an airborne pandemic; second, because of her support for genocide; and third because of her close alliance with the Democrat Party. Weingarten is exactly the sort of union leader who would cave when push came to shove, especially if it inconvenienced a Democrat administration or campaign to the slightest degree.

APPENDIX On Electoralism

Views of a Staff writer for The New York Times:
Justin T Brown
@jtbthought
·
Follow
My best case for Harris Walz, is that I want a general strike on May Day 2028 to bring this country and its billionaires, to their knees. When we withhold labor, we make the demands. Change doesn’t come from politicians, it comes from us. Kamala Walz will get in the way less
UAW
@UAW
The UAW has called on the rest of the labor movement to align contracts to May Day 2028. We have more power if we work together and strike together. Join the May 1 Stand Up Movement: http://uaw.org/may1
#StandUpUAW
Nobody seems to remember how Obama, through DHS fusion centers and the cops, orchestrated a seventeen-city crackdown on Occupy, a crackdown that broke the movement. Please, let’s not kid ourselves about what a Kamala administration would do.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09 ... y2028.html

(If Obama hadn't 'broken' Occupy it would have fallen apart of it's own discord. )
"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 Sep 23, 2024 1:54 pm

Economic Conditions and Hollow Victories

Among the very few things to look forward to on Labor Day is Jack Rasmus’s annual report on the state of US labor. Rasmus, an accomplished political-economist, riffs on the famous Frederick Engels book with Labor Day 2024: The Condition of the American Working Class Today. It may come as a surprise to some, but academically-trained economists are among the most intellectually shallow and ideologically tainted practitioners of the social sciences. Some are so in awe of their own academic specialty that they paint all economic trends through specialist lenses. Still others are so tied to their political biases that they cannot resist slanting their conclusions to reinforce their loyalties to one of the two political parties that we are currently allowed.



Rasmus is the rare university-educated purveyor who knows where to look, looks critically, and clearly synthesizes the data to draw broad and useful conclusions for working people. For a philosophically-trained skeptic and self-styled Historical Materialist, I have grown to trust Rasmus’s digest of the meaning of arcane, jargon-filled, often-misleading government reports.



Of course, we have had earlier times when similar data were available. For over three decades, Labor Research Associates-- a group of Communist and left researchers-- published a comprehensive Labor Factbook every two years that addressed “labor trends,” the “social and labor conditions” of the period, “people’s health,” the “trade unions,” “civil liberties and rights,” “political affairs,” and “Canadian labor developments.” This comprehensive book armed working people who cared to advance the cause of workers with a cache of ammunition in the class war. We don’t have Labor Factbook, but we are lucky to have Jack Rasmus’s report.



What does his report tell us?



● Despite $10 trillion in stimulus since the pandemic, the US economy has only produced an anemic recovery: GDP of 1.9% (2022), 2.5% (2023), and 2.2% (2024, to date).



● And the US worker fared even worse: “...with regard to wages, the American worker has not benefited at all from the $10 billion-plus fiscal-monetary stimulus. Real Weekly Earnings are flat to contracting. And take-home pay’s even less.”



● The great US job creation machine that US politicians celebrate is not performing so well: “It is important to also note that the vast majority of the net new jobs created have been part-time, temp, gig and contractor jobs. In the past 12 months, full-time jobs in the labor force [have] fallen by 458,000, while part-time jobs have risen by 514,000.”



Typical of an election year, official reports grab headlines, exaggerating job gains, only to be corrected later: “The jobs reports over the past year are revealing as well. They continually reported monthly job gains of around 240,000. But the Labor Department just did its annual revisions and found that for the period March 2023 thru March 2024 it over-estimated no fewer than 818,000 jobs!” [The September 6 employment report downgraded June and July’s job growth by a further 86,000 jobs!]



“The Wall St. Journal further reported that up to a million workers have left the labor force due to disability from Covid and long Covid-related illnesses. Neither of those statistics [is] factored into the government’s unemployment rate figures.”



● For working-class citizens, debt has been a paradoxical life-saver, supplementing slack wage growth. But it continues to grow at a dangerous pace and with increasingly unsustainable interest rates: “The last quarter century of poor-wage increases has been offset to a degree by the availability of cheap credit with which to make consumer purchases in lieu of wage gains and decently paying jobs. Actually, that trend goes back even further to the early 1980s at least.”



“Household US debt is at a record level. Mortgage debt is about $13 trillion. Total household debt is more than $18 trillion, of which credit-card debt is now about $1 trillion, auto debt $1.5 trillion, student debt $1.7 trillion (or more if private loans are counted), medical debt about $.2 trillion, and the rest installment-type debt of various [kinds].



American households carry probably the highest load of any advanced economy, estimated at 54% of median family-household disposable income. And that’s rising.



Debt and interest payments have implications for workers’ actual disposable income and purchasing power. For one thing, interest is not considered in the CPI or PCE inflation indexes and thus their adjustment to real wages. As just one example: median family-mortgage costs since 2020 have risen 114%. However, again, that’s not included in the price indexes. Home prices have risen 47% and rents have followed. But workers pay a mortgage to the bank, not an amortized monthly payment to the house builder.



One should perhaps think of workers’ household debt as business claims on future wages not yet paid. Debt payments continue into the future for purchases made in the present, and thus subtract from future wages paid.”



Since Rasmus penned his report, the Census Bureau released its report on household incomes. While there was an uptick in 2023, median household income adjusted for inflation remains below the levels of 2018, explaining why poll respondents (and voters) are feeling insecure about the economy. In fact, household incomes have only increased around 15% over the last twenty-three years-- hardly a reason for a victory lap by the last four administrations… or the capitalist system!



● Rasmus brings a necessary sobriety to the discussion of the state of the organized trade union movement in the US. While there are many exciting developments, the goal of building a formidable force to advance the interests of working people remains far off: “Since 2020 union membership has declined. There were 10.8% of the labor force in unions in 2020. There are 10.0% at end of 2023, which is about half of what it was in the early 1980s. Unions have not participated in the recovery since Covid, in other words, at least in terms of membership. Still only 6% or 7.4 million workers of the private-sector labor force is unionized, even when polls and surveys in the past four years show a rise from 48% to 70% today in the non-organized who want a union.”



“Recently the Teamsters union under new leadership made significant gains in restoring union contract language, especially in terms of limits on temp work and two-tier wage and benefit structures. The Auto workers made some gains as well. But most of the private-sector unionization has languished. And over the past year it has not changed much.



About half of all Union members today are in public-sector unions. It has been difficult for Capital and corporations to offshore jobs, displace workers with technology, destroy traditional defined-benefit pension plans, or otherwise weaken or get rid of workers’ unions. The same might be said for Transport workers, whose employment is also not easily offshored but is subject to displacement by technology nonetheless. But overall, union membership has clearly continued to stagnate over the past year, as it has since 2020.”



Rasmus’s candid conclusion: “The foregoing accumulation of data and statistics on wages, jobs, debt and unionization in America this Labor Day 2024 contradicts much of the hype, happy talk, and selective cherry picking of data by mainstream media and economists. That hype is picked up and peddled by politicians and pollsters alike.”



*****

And speaking of politicians…



A recent Jacobin piece stands as a sterling example of torturing facts and logic to build the case that Democratic Party politicians got the “stop the genocide” message at the Party’s national convention. Waleed Shahid writes that “the Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand…” in his article Why the Uncommitted Movement Was a Success at the DNC. The Uncommitted Movement didn’t win any demand-- immediate or otherwise-- at the DNC!



It takes some skill and determination to recast a near totally effective effort to stifle the voice of pro-peace and pro-justice participants and protesters into “not just a fleeting victory — it is the beginning of a strategic shift in how the Democratic Party grapples with its own contradictions.” Sad to say, it takes a twisted perception to see “victory” and “a strategic shift” while convention-goers derisively and dismissively stroll past demonstrators reciting the names of civilians murdered by the Israeli military.



Shahid attempts the impossible in likening the 2024 Democratic Convention to the 1964 Convention, when brave civil rights activists shamed the Democratic Party before television cameras and journalists into negotiating with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (See this sharp comparative account in Black Agenda Report). There was neither shame nor negotiations in 2024.



Like Democratic operatives before him, Shahid scolds those expecting more from Democrats to-- in the future-- “out-organize” the Neanderthals controlling the party. In other words, force them to do the right thing!



When one finds a credible political party to support, it should not be one that must be coerced to support justice.



*****

It is a commonplace on the soft left to advocate a broad coalition or united front to address the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America. Building on the ineffectiveness of the long-ruling centrist parties, the French RN, Germany’s AfD, the US’s Trump, and a host of other populist movements have mounted significant electoral campaigns. The knee-jerk left reaction is to advocate a broad popular front of all the oppositional parties or movements, a tactic modeled crudely and inappropriately on the Communist International’s anti-fascist tactic.



Most recently, the French left conceded to an electoral “popular front” with the ruling president, Emmanuel Macron’s party and other parties in opposition to Marine Le Pen’s RN. To the surprise of many, the left won the most votes and should have-- by tradition-- organized a new government. But President Macron “betrayed” popular-front values and appointed a center-right career politician, hostile to the left, as prime minister. To add insult to injury, Macron consulted with Le Pen for approval of his appointment.



Consequently, despite commanding the largest vote, the popular front is in a less favorable position and the right is in a more favorable position than before the electoral “victory” (see, for example, David Broder’s Jacobin article for more).



This move by Macron should sober those who glibly call for a popular front as the answer to every alarm, every hyperbole regarding the populist right.



Because of this gross misapplication of the united-front tactic, I can enjoy an I-told-you-so-moment. I wrote in late June: “The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois ‘solidarity’ only goes so far.” Where the left selflessly threw its support behind Macron’s party where it needed to win, Macron through his deal with Le Pen, threw the left under the bus!

https://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/09/ec ... ories.html

Hollow victories, indeed.



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com
"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 Sep 23, 2024 1:56 pm

Economic Conditions and Hollow Victories

Among the very few things to look forward to on Labor Day is Jack Rasmus’s annual report on the state of US labor. Rasmus, an accomplished political-economist, riffs on the famous Frederick Engels book with Labor Day 2024: The Condition of the American Working Class Today. It may come as a surprise to some, but academically-trained economists are among the most intellectually shallow and ideologically tainted practitioners of the social sciences. Some are so in awe of their own academic specialty that they paint all economic trends through specialist lenses. Still others are so tied to their political biases that they cannot resist slanting their conclusions to reinforce their loyalties to one of the two political parties that we are currently allowed.



Rasmus is the rare university-educated purveyor who knows where to look, looks critically, and clearly synthesizes the data to draw broad and useful conclusions for working people. For a philosophically-trained skeptic and self-styled Historical Materialist, I have grown to trust Rasmus’s digest of the meaning of arcane, jargon-filled, often-misleading government reports.



Of course, we have had earlier times when similar data were available. For over three decades, Labor Research Associates-- a group of Communist and left researchers-- published a comprehensive Labor Factbook every two years that addressed “labor trends,” the “social and labor conditions” of the period, “people’s health,” the “trade unions,” “civil liberties and rights,” “political affairs,” and “Canadian labor developments.” This comprehensive book armed working people who cared to advance the cause of workers with a cache of ammunition in the class war. We don’t have Labor Factbook, but we are lucky to have Jack Rasmus’s report.



What does his report tell us?



● Despite $10 trillion in stimulus since the pandemic, the US economy has only produced an anemic recovery: GDP of 1.9% (2022), 2.5% (2023), and 2.2% (2024, to date).



● And the US worker fared even worse: “...with regard to wages, the American worker has not benefited at all from the $10 billion-plus fiscal-monetary stimulus. Real Weekly Earnings are flat to contracting. And take-home pay’s even less.”



● The great US job creation machine that US politicians celebrate is not performing so well: “It is important to also note that the vast majority of the net new jobs created have been part-time, temp, gig and contractor jobs. In the past 12 months, full-time jobs in the labor force [have] fallen by 458,000, while part-time jobs have risen by 514,000.”



Typical of an election year, official reports grab headlines, exaggerating job gains, only to be corrected later: “The jobs reports over the past year are revealing as well. They continually reported monthly job gains of around 240,000. But the Labor Department just did its annual revisions and found that for the period March 2023 thru March 2024 it over-estimated no fewer than 818,000 jobs!” [The September 6 employment report downgraded June and July’s job growth by a further 86,000 jobs!]



“The Wall St. Journal further reported that up to a million workers have left the labor force due to disability from Covid and long Covid-related illnesses. Neither of those statistics [is] factored into the government’s unemployment rate figures.”



● For working-class citizens, debt has been a paradoxical life-saver, supplementing slack wage growth. But it continues to grow at a dangerous pace and with increasingly unsustainable interest rates: “The last quarter century of poor-wage increases has been offset to a degree by the availability of cheap credit with which to make consumer purchases in lieu of wage gains and decently paying jobs. Actually, that trend goes back even further to the early 1980s at least.”



“Household US debt is at a record level. Mortgage debt is about $13 trillion. Total household debt is more than $18 trillion, of which credit-card debt is now about $1 trillion, auto debt $1.5 trillion, student debt $1.7 trillion (or more if private loans are counted), medical debt about $.2 trillion, and the rest installment-type debt of various [kinds].



American households carry probably the highest load of any advanced economy, estimated at 54% of median family-household disposable income. And that’s rising.



Debt and interest payments have implications for workers’ actual disposable income and purchasing power. For one thing, interest is not considered in the CPI or PCE inflation indexes and thus their adjustment to real wages. As just one example: median family-mortgage costs since 2020 have risen 114%. However, again, that’s not included in the price indexes. Home prices have risen 47% and rents have followed. But workers pay a mortgage to the bank, not an amortized monthly payment to the house builder.



One should perhaps think of workers’ household debt as business claims on future wages not yet paid. Debt payments continue into the future for purchases made in the present, and thus subtract from future wages paid.”



Since Rasmus penned his report, the Census Bureau released its report on household incomes. While there was an uptick in 2023, median household income adjusted for inflation remains below the levels of 2018, explaining why poll respondents (and voters) are feeling insecure about the economy. In fact, household incomes have only increased around 15% over the last twenty-three years-- hardly a reason for a victory lap by the last four administrations… or the capitalist system!



● Rasmus brings a necessary sobriety to the discussion of the state of the organized trade union movement in the US. While there are many exciting developments, the goal of building a formidable force to advance the interests of working people remains far off: “Since 2020 union membership has declined. There were 10.8% of the labor force in unions in 2020. There are 10.0% at end of 2023, which is about half of what it was in the early 1980s. Unions have not participated in the recovery since Covid, in other words, at least in terms of membership. Still only 6% or 7.4 million workers of the private-sector labor force is unionized, even when polls and surveys in the past four years show a rise from 48% to 70% today in the non-organized who want a union.”



“Recently the Teamsters union under new leadership made significant gains in restoring union contract language, especially in terms of limits on temp work and two-tier wage and benefit structures. The Auto workers made some gains as well. But most of the private-sector unionization has languished. And over the past year it has not changed much.



About half of all Union members today are in public-sector unions. It has been difficult for Capital and corporations to offshore jobs, displace workers with technology, destroy traditional defined-benefit pension plans, or otherwise weaken or get rid of workers’ unions. The same might be said for Transport workers, whose employment is also not easily offshored but is subject to displacement by technology nonetheless. But overall, union membership has clearly continued to stagnate over the past year, as it has since 2020.”



Rasmus’s candid conclusion: “The foregoing accumulation of data and statistics on wages, jobs, debt and unionization in America this Labor Day 2024 contradicts much of the hype, happy talk, and selective cherry picking of data by mainstream media and economists. That hype is picked up and peddled by politicians and pollsters alike.”



*****

And speaking of politicians…



A recent Jacobin piece stands as a sterling example of torturing facts and logic to build the case that Democratic Party politicians got the “stop the genocide” message at the Party’s national convention. Waleed Shahid writes that “the Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand…” in his article Why the Uncommitted Movement Was a Success at the DNC. The Uncommitted Movement didn’t win any demand-- immediate or otherwise-- at the DNC!



It takes some skill and determination to recast a near totally effective effort to stifle the voice of pro-peace and pro-justice participants and protesters into “not just a fleeting victory — it is the beginning of a strategic shift in how the Democratic Party grapples with its own contradictions.” Sad to say, it takes a twisted perception to see “victory” and “a strategic shift” while convention-goers derisively and dismissively stroll past demonstrators reciting the names of civilians murdered by the Israeli military.



Shahid attempts the impossible in likening the 2024 Democratic Convention to the 1964 Convention, when brave civil rights activists shamed the Democratic Party before television cameras and journalists into negotiating with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (See this sharp comparative account in Black Agenda Report). There was neither shame nor negotiations in 2024.



Like Democratic operatives before him, Shahid scolds those expecting more from Democrats to-- in the future-- “out-organize” the Neanderthals controlling the party. In other words, force them to do the right thing!



When one finds a credible political party to support, it should not be one that must be coerced to support justice.



*****

It is a commonplace on the soft left to advocate a broad coalition or united front to address the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America. Building on the ineffectiveness of the long-ruling centrist parties, the French RN, Germany’s AfD, the US’s Trump, and a host of other populist movements have mounted significant electoral campaigns. The knee-jerk left reaction is to advocate a broad popular front of all the oppositional parties or movements, a tactic modeled crudely and inappropriately on the Communist International’s anti-fascist tactic.



Most recently, the French left conceded to an electoral “popular front” with the ruling president, Emmanuel Macron’s party and other parties in opposition to Marine Le Pen’s RN. To the surprise of many, the left won the most votes and should have-- by tradition-- organized a new government. But President Macron “betrayed” popular-front values and appointed a center-right career politician, hostile to the left, as prime minister. To add insult to injury, Macron consulted with Le Pen for approval of his appointment.



Consequently, despite commanding the largest vote, the popular front is in a less favorable position and the right is in a more favorable position than before the electoral “victory” (see, for example, David Broder’s Jacobin article for more).



This move by Macron should sober those who glibly call for a popular front as the answer to every alarm, every hyperbole regarding the populist right.



Because of this gross misapplication of the united-front tactic, I can enjoy an I-told-you-so-moment. I wrote in late June: “The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois ‘solidarity’ only goes so far.” Where the left selflessly threw its support behind Macron’s party where it needed to win, Macron through his deal with Le Pen, threw the left under the bus!

https://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/09/ec ... ories.html

Hollow victories, indeed.



Greg Godels

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

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 08, 2024 2:52 pm

Top Papers Quoted More Wine Importers Than Union Leaders on Port Strike
Paul Hedreen

Image

At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes.

In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim: to demonstrate the power of workers, and thus the necessity of meeting their demands, by depriving the economy of their labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association gained an initial victory in securing a 62% wage increase over six years for its workers. Other issues, like automation, will continue to be negotiated, with a January 2025 deadline.

It seems, however, that the more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive. To understand where media loyalties lie, one only needs to look at the experts they seek for quotes.

Big banking, big shipping, big banana
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Washington Post (10/1/24): “The effects are expected to ripple through the country, costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day and getting worse each day the longshoremen remain off the job.”
When media report on high finance or business dealings, readers will rarely if ever find a quote from a union leader, much less a rank-and-file worker, in the news reports. However, when dockworkers initiate a labor action, it seems the first call a reporter makes is to a Manhattan office tower.

Stifel is an investment bank that manages $444 billion worth of assets. It’s perhaps best known for tricking five Wisconsin school districts into losing over $200 million in bum mortgage investments ahead of the 2008 financial crisis (Reuters, 12/8/16).

Lately, the phones at the bank’s offices have been overwhelmed with reporters seeking comment on the East Coast port strike. Analysts at Stifel have been quoted a total of four times in the Washington Post (10/1/24, 10/1/24) and New York Times (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Post (9/28/24), presumably trying to prevent accusations of favoring finance over accounting, also sought comment from a chief economist at Ernst & Young.

If, when it comes to the economy, you prioritize banana availability above all other considerations, then corporate media has you covered. The Post (9/30/24) spoke to the Big-Ag lobbying and insurance group the American Farm Bureau Federation, who warned that 75% of the nation’s banana supply was at stake. Not to be outdone, the Times (10/1/24) tracked down their own source for the banana angle, Daniel Barabino, COO at the Bronx’s Top Banana, who warned a two-week strike would hit “all the banana importers.”

Later reporting by the Baltimore Banner (10/3/24) revealed that banana heavyweights Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita operate their own ships and are outside the trade group that represents management in bargaining, and thus their ships were still being unloaded. In other words, initial forecasts of banana scarcity were greatly overstated.

Naturally, logistics executives were well-represented in the news pages. The New York Times quoted the directors of two ports (9/24/24), as well as four members of management at different logistics firms (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Washington Post quoted at least seven logistics executives in their coverage (9/18/24, 9/28/24, 9/30/24, 9/30/24), not to mention numerous importers and business owners.

Missing workers
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The New York Times (10/1/24) ran an article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for wine importers—but no article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for dockworkers.
Union leaders were not totally silenced. Since September 24, four ILA leaders have been quoted by the New York Times (9/24/24, 9/26/24, 9/29/24, 10/1/24). For those keeping track, that is two fewer than the six wine importers the Times has quoted in coverage of the port strike (9/30/24, 10/1/24).

The number of rank-and-file dockworkers quoted by the Times is zero. To be fair, it seems that the union has instructed picketers to not talk to reporters, an understandable measure for message discipline.

However, in the lead-up to the strike, the Times found time to talk to Christmas tree, clothing and mango importers (9/24/24, 9/30/24). These people were understandably concerned for their livelihoods. However, by failing to interview even one dockworker or any of their families, the Times is showing their readers a picture where only the business owners are concerned for the economy, for their families, for the holiday season.

Will longshoremen have enough time to spend with their families or have enough money for gifts this Christmas? Readers of the Times have no idea.

Instead, Times coverage (10/3/24) has focused on Harold Daggett, the union’s president, and his “autocratic” style and “generous salary.” When the only union member profiled by the Times is depicted as rich, corrupt and incompetent, it encourages a dismissal of the union’s struggle as a whole.

Even once the strike ended, the Times (10/3/24) just couldn’t find a worker to quote. Instead, the piece extensively quoted the chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a corporate consulting firm, who was unhappy that the strike had been settled:

I cannot recall an episode that had so little effect on the economy, led to such a short strike and resulted in such a huge increase in earnings for workers who are already making over $100,000 a year…. We tend to shrug off the costs, but it does affect our ability to build things and export them.

During the UAW strike, Sarah Lazare noted that the Anderson Economic Group was used by media to decry labor’s threat to “the economy” without mentioning their auto-industry clients (American Prospect, 8/23/23). The firm was also cited on the danger posed by the UPS strike (FAIR.org, 9/26/23). It’s a group you would naturally turn to if your were looking for a quote decrying labor getting a larger slice of the economic pie.

Loud on wages, silent on profits

Corporate media coverage of longshoremen’s wages has emphasized that some union members make around $160,000 (Washington Post, 10/1/24). One story even reported that salaries for New York and New Jersey longshoremen range to “over $450,000” (Washington Post, 9/28/24).

Per the report that the Post seems to be referencing (they don’t bother to give a citation), the Port of New York and New Jersey elects to pay certain workers “special compensation packages,” which are not governed by the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, the Post is using some exceptional cases in the Port of New Jersey and New York, unconnected to the contract that’s up for negotiation, to suggest that some people are being paid nearly half a million dollars to load freight. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 45,000 dockworkers whose salaries are governed by the collective bargaining agreement are maligned.

The starting wage rate for a dockworker is just $20 an hour. Given that the top wage (after six years of service) under the current contract is $39, a 40-hour-per-week salary would net a senior worker just over $80,000. To earn in the hundreds of thousands, overtime is clearly needed. However, the New York Times (10/1/24) reports merely that dockworkers “say they have to put in long workweeks to earn that much,” with no elaboration on whether or not that is true.

When nearly every story on the port strike mentions that dockworkers make up to $100,000 or $200,000, the object is clear: Media want readers to question if these “workers without a college degree” (New York Times, 10/1/24) really deserve a salary commensurate with the 10.5 million Americans in management occupations.

These ports are up and down the East Coast, including in high-cost-of-living metro areas like New York and Boston. Labor unions are one of the few paths to middle-class security available to most American workers. Yet it is standard practice for labor coverage in corporate media to suggest that workers fighting for their share is tantamount to greediness.
Image
Soaring profits for shipping companies is an important business story (Economist, 6/27/24)—until it comes time for those companies to renegotiate labor contracts.
Shipping company profits, on the other hand, are rarely reported. When shippers’ high profits are mentioned, they’re often not presented as a fact, but as something that is “argued” by workers (e.g., Washington Post, 10/1/24).

However, outside of strike coverage, the shipping industry seems to be quite healthy. “Boom Times Are Back for Container Shipping,” according to a recent Economist headline (6/27/24). The windfall profits of the pandemic era, over $400 billion, are believed to be larger than the sum total of profits since containerization was implemented in 1957 (CNN, 9/26/24). Indeed, some of the pandemic-era inflation that has eroded dockworkers’ real wages may be due to the outsized pricing power of the oligopolistic shipping industry (Bloomberg, 1/18/22; The Hill, 2/2/22).

Why was there little mention of these profits in strike coverage? Readers are encouraged to view longshoremen as greedy and unreasonable, which is less sustainable when worker demands are juxtaposed with record profits. The easiest way to avoid that juxtaposition is to omit profits from the conversation. (In the same way, it’s easier to hate professional athletes for their multi-million dollar salaries when you ignore the billions they are making for the team owners.)

Frightening readers to management’s side
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New York Times (10/1/24) warned of “cascading effects — such as layoffs — at American firms, including in the auto industry.”
The economic effects of the strike have been much-bandied. The cost to the US economy, depending on your source, could amount to $3.78 billion per week (Washington Post, 10/1/24), $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion per week (New York Times, 10/1/24) or a whopping $5 billion per day, according to the brain trust at J.P. Morgan (New York Times, 9/30/24).

While these numbers are supposed to frighten the reader into siding with management, what they are really doing is demonstrating the importance of labor being paid well and treated well. The fact that dockworkers’ labor is necessary to facilitate up to $5 billion in commerce every day is evidence that their labor is of the utmost importance, and an argument for their being compensated as such.

Besides serving up run-of-the-mill worker bashing, the Washington Post (9/29/24, 10/1/24, 10/1/24) has taken the strike as an opportunity to raise the specter of pandemic-era inflation and price hikes. The Post (9/28/24) quoted Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco: “A work stoppage could slow progress on bringing inflation under control.” Never mind the fact that inflation has already been tamed (Politico, 9/11/24).

Other outlets have a more staid forecast, with the New York Times (10/1/24) noting that “a rapid acceleration in inflation” is unlikely.

Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

It’s not that workers are seeking to destroy the economy. However, it is up to the workers to look out for their own interests as labor share continues to decrease, especially in the face of automation (Marketplace, 4/12/24). Most Americans are sympathetic to unions and union members, but when it comes to labor actions, media try demonization above all else.

False choice
Image
This Washington Post article (10/2/24) closes with a warning to President Joe Biden against “an approach to industry highly deferential to labor unions.”
Corporate media attempted to use the economic chaos apparently on the horizon to paint a less-than-rosy picture for the incumbent Democrats. With the presidential election a month away, the strike has been posed as a tough choice for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris between supporting unions and averting economic destruction. The Washington Post (10/2/24) reported that

Biden told reporters Tuesday that he would not use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work…. But whether—or for how long—the president will stick to this posture has become a source of speculation in Washington, as Democrats try to project economic stability ahead of the November election.

Elsewhere, the Post (9/30/24) noted that some economic forecasters “assume that, with the election just weeks away, Biden will intervene in the labor dispute to head off more serious economic costs.” The New York Times (10/1/24) took a similar tone:

The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown…. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

The Times failed to actually cite any of these labor experts who said President Biden might use the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial law that began the slow demise of organized labor since 1947. However, this framing supports the idea that a strike is effectively a hostage situation, with the workers putting a gun to the head of the economy, and the government must choose one of those two sides. Left out of the equation are the corporations, who have the power to end the strike immediately by sharing some of their inflated profits with their workers.

It should not be surprising that corporate media redirect readers’ anger towards workers. US news outlets have a habit of omitting wealth and income inequality from their coverage, and coverage of labor actions is no exception.

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

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 21, 2024 3:04 pm

On the Boeing workers' strike
No. 10/98.X.2024

Most leftists, unfortunately, are economists. And not in the sense of their specialty, but in the sense of opportunism. They, consciously or not, believe in the "theory of stages": first, the proletarian learns to fight for his rights and economic interests, for higher wages, better working conditions and a shorter working day, and then...

True, this “then” never comes.

The most active and energetic leftists are slipping into trade unionism, i.e. trade unionism. Naive people might ask, what's wrong with trade unions? Of course, there's nothing wrong with them, they're a banal reality of capitalism, like hired labor itself, competition, and money. And, by the way, communists are fighting for a society in which there will be no place for trade unions and their struggle.

The left cannot accept the objective reality that the so-called economic struggle of the proletariat, firstly , can be considered class struggle in itself only nominally, formally, and secondly , is a completely normal, permanent process of bourgeois society, an integral element of the relations between capital and labor. The economic resistance of the proletariat is a spontaneous process generated by the very nature of not even exploitation, but the exchange of the commodity "labor power" for money . For price never coincides with value, and its fluctuations are determined by various factors, including the relationship between supply and demand. Therefore, thirdly , if we do not observe open forms of economic resistance (strikes, rallies, pickets and other organized actions), it means that it takes place in hidden forms. But it is not absent! Since the proletarian, as well as the capitalist, is guided by his own interests and tries to sell his ability to work more profitably.

What is the essence of the economic resistance of the proletariat?

Let's open the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

"The economic struggle is a struggle for the professional interests of workers (increasing wages, reducing the working day, improving working conditions, etc.). It counteracts the attack of entrepreneurs on the living conditions of workers, prepares workers for the struggle for broader goals, promotes their revolutionary education and organization. In this struggle, trade unions grew up, uniting 250 million workers throughout the world in the 1970s. The economic struggle, especially in modern conditions, is intertwined and develops into a political struggle. The number of strikes in the developed capitalist countries was 13,211 (annual average) in 1951-55, 12,790 in 1956-60, 15,323 in 1961-65, and 18,650 in 1966-70. From 1960 to 1970, there were 260 major nationwide strikes in the developed capitalist countries, significantly more than in the previous decade. The strikers are not only making political demands, but are fighting for the expansion of democratic freedoms and opposing acts of imperialist aggression. Marxists are fighting both against the reformists, who are trying to reduce the class struggle of the proletariat to the economic struggle, and against the sectarian underestimation of the economic struggle."

More than fifty years have passed since these lines were written. The USSR has already collapsed, and the capitalist camp has fallen into several large-scale crises. And how has the increase in strikes in the West led to anything? Has the revolutionary education and organization of the proletariat increased? Has the “lowest form of class struggle” finally begun to develop into the highest? What achievements in terms of the struggle for communism has the “economic struggle of the proletariat” demonstrated? Has it become intertwined with the “yellow vests”?

So maybe these sectarians are not so wrong with their “underestimation”? Maybe Marxism as a doctrine of victorious thinking has never taken the position of “the middle”, like, we fight both overestimation and underestimation, “the truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle”?

If we are to believe the author of this article, G. E. Glezerman, then the essence of the economic resistance of the proletariat is that it is the preparation for the struggle for communism, the initial stage of the class struggle. This means that, according to the logic of this position, the "economic struggle" contains in embryonic form everything that will make up the communist revolution. Is it necessary to prove that this is opportunist nonsense and the same "theory of stages" in other expressions?

Let's get down to specifics, to the reason for writing this article. A loud event happened in the USA, the main world news of the labor struggle - Boeing workers went on strike. On September 13, 2024, more than 30 thousand workers did not show up for work, as the union did not agree on a new draft collective agreement. Boeing management offered workers a 25% salary increase over four years and a one-time payment of $3,000 each. Moreover, the union bosses agreed on this project, but 96% of the workers voted against, for the strike. The workers put forward a demand: a 40% increase and higher lifting. The strike hit the capitalists hard, the production of civilian airliners 737 Max, 767 and 777 stopped, the corporation suffers fabulous losses for each day of downtime. The Biden administration has already intervened in the matter. New offer from management: 35%, annual bonus of at least 4% and $7,000 in signing bonus. Workers will vote on the 23rd and will likely accept it.

Why are Boeing workers so brave and courageous, while ours can't and don't want to do anything? This is the question that typical leftists usually ask. True, the strikers are not particularly interested in the fact that Boeing will fire 17,000 other workers in connection with this. But here, as they say, one's own shirt is closer to the body. And for some reason, none of the economists accuse the strikers of lacking solidarity with their class brothers. And the question still hangs in the air: why did the strikers work quietly for 16 years, and now they are striking? What was the reason and pretext?

The problem of the relationship between open, strike-meeting and hidden forms of economic resistance is not at all in the subjective factor, not in the courage, bravery, organization, etc. of the proletarians. Workers, employees, engineers go on strike when they feel their strength, feel that there are conditions to put pressure on the employer .

And as the example of Boeing workers shows, one group of workers quite easily gets a 35% raise, while another will head to the labor exchange. And such different fates of these people are not connected with the fact that someone knows how to fight for their rights and interests, and someone does not.

The point here is that the essence of the economic resistance of the proletariat is that it is a banal act of trade . The difference between the bargaining of a candidate at an interview and a strike is only in the collectivity of the latter, which strengthens the position of hired labor.

If a worker feels strong enough to make demands on wages and working conditions during an interview, and the objective state of the labor market is conducive to this, then on average it will be so. But if supply exceeds demand, then this will only cause laughter from the employer's representative. Trade unionism works in approximately the same way.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the strike movement was so widespread that one could say that the relations between capital and labor in Europe and America were only being “tuned up.” There was a large-scale struggle to determine the limits of the deviation of the price of labor power from its value. How much could the proletarian be squeezed out? Such pressure on the workers caused a response, strikes followed strikes, rallies followed rallies. And all this was associated with terror and the politicization of the workers. Of course, under these conditions, the communists set themselves the goal of combining the proletarian movement (whatever it was) with Marxism. In other words, the Marxists acquainted the striking, indignant workers, and the intelligentsia demonstrating for democratic demands with the real goals of progress, the means and paths of society’s movement toward communism. Thus, some joined the ranks of the communists, and first of all, the collectives of industrial workers, as the most educated, expressed their support for the party and their readiness to support the revolution. Naturally, the communists' "taking over" this or that trade union or leading this or that strike was also a wonderful acquisition and a means of political struggle. But not in the way the left imagines today, that a communist should dress up in the clothes of a trade unionist.

In short, the economic resistance of the proletariat in open, organized trade union and strike forms was a pretext for the spread of Marxism, the strengthening of party influence and the forging of cadres, and the workers' organization was a convenient place for propaganda and agitation.

Now, as you can see, there are fewer conditions for open forms of economic resistance, so there are fewer strikes, and trade union organization no longer seems like a special advantage and does not represent a special convenience as before. Today, it is much easier to communicate with the proletariat directly via the Internet (publish a newspaper, run social networks, blogs, etc.). In general, the situation and conditions have changed a little. But, of course, this does not mean that it is not worthwhile to conduct propaganda of Marxism in trade unions. You need to try to work in every possible way. The question is different: in the dominance of economism in the minds of the left.

So. There are real successful striking workers in the USA. They are literate, highly skilled, organized, and know their worth. And there are many of them - more than 30 thousand people, a whole proletarian army, they can go and storm "White" right now. In short, by all the parameters of economists, one can only dream of such a situation.

However, in reality, from the point of view of the struggle for communism, the strike of Boeing workers means nothing. No Marxists, even the most correct ones, are of interest to these workers. Even if you send a breakthrough landing force to them, it will not change anything. Because they are interested in the percentage increase in wages, and not communism.

Of course, one could consider that it is the labor aristocracy that is on strike at Boeing and therefore “doesn’t count,” but in reality, the “labor aristocracy” is not on strike, but is in collusion with the bourgeoisie and is living in luxury.

It is important to understand that trade union, strike, and rallies activity does not mean that the people involved are automatically more predisposed to Marxism or have a vested interest in communism . Some focus on such people in the past was due to two things: firstly , that those who are already doing something are more easily motivated, and secondly , that these people were, as a rule, more enlightened and literate than the silent majority. Today, these signs are much less significant.

Actually, strike

GoogleTranslator, protests and conflicts over wages and working conditions periodically break out in Russia. Depending on the situation, they receive different resolutions. And so far, no one has managed to attract at least some of the dissatisfied to Marxism. And this is not because we are untalented compared to the Bolsheviks (although this is true), but because the protesting proletarians, “suddenly”, do not develop a need for communism on their own, and persistence on our part does not bear fruit.

The first thing to think about is: why do workers not show a predisposition to communism? Most likely, because bare ideas are of little interest to anyone. If we, the breakthroughs, were a strong organization, a formidable force at least in terms of organization, will, and personnel, the situation might be different. We are quite far from the level of the Bolsheviks, even of 1903.

We must not rely on “economic struggle,” but rather forge cadres, strengthen our organization, develop theory, conduct deep and intelligent propaganda, thereby ensuring the growth of ranks and supporters.

A. Redin
10/21/2024

https://prorivists.org/98_strike/

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

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 24, 2024 2:25 pm

Examining Labor’s Political Captivity
Posted by Chris Townsend | Oct 20, 2024

Image

Every election year many of the U.S. trade unions scramble – or stumble – into action to elect “labor’s friends”. More likely they are involved mostly to try to stop those bent on liquidation of the unions, always the greatest part of the motivation to mobilize voters. Identifying the sworn foes of the union movement is not that difficult today – these forces openly declare their hatred of unions. As best expressed by the pathologic opposition shown toward the unions by most of the Republican Party elected officialdom today.

So far as picking friends, and then hanging the trade union seal of approval on them, the labor movement repeats year after year every imaginable “lesser-evil” decision-making gymnastics. Decade after decade this bar for support has been lowered by the unions, paralleling the slow but steady capture of the labor officialdom by the Democratic Party apparatus. Merely recognizing the very existence of the unions, or at best making fuzzy promises are all that’s required for Democrats to win labor’s political support. Track records of candidates are rarely – or selectively – kept, and the failure or refusal to deliver on promises by a candidate is almost never grounds for excommunication on labor’s part.

DANGEROUS MAN-MADE FOG

Outside observers of labor’s political action processes are frequently confused or mystified. But this should come as little surprise, since the bulk of the union activists – and certainly the membership – would likewise be unsure of what exactly is going on. As the unions are systematically assaulted by corporations and governments, frequently shrink as a result, and are blocked by corporate lawlessness from growing and rebuilding, the political and electoral union decision making and implementation becomes more and more clouded and obscured. In a labor movement predominantly “led” by administrators and not authentic labor leaders, the already warped political environment is destined for further distortion under these conditions.

FEW CHOICES ALLOWED

An assessment of labor’s political action, its methodology, its outcomes, and its challenges must begin with the incredibly limited choices that are permitted in the first place. With virtually all political direction being supplied to the unions today via the Democratic Party and its operatives, all independent thinking or third parties are routinely banned from any consideration of labor’s support.

Even at the lowest electoral levels the Democratic Party machinery seeks out and squashes all political thinking outside the “box” of mainstream Democratic policy and practice. A glance at the documented roster of attacks meted-out to any challengers of the two-party setup is chronicled in detailed fashion at Ballot Access News. ballot-access.org It is imperative to recognize that the failure of virtually any independent political alternatives to develop and take root in the labor movement is not just a freak accident, or the result of no base of support for them, it is the result of systematic interference and opposition to it by all levels of the Democratic Party. This lack of alternative political forces for labor has dramatically accelerated the decline of the labor movement.

Occasionally, unions still experiment with support for Republicans – as they are the only other party allowed in the corrupt two-party ”system” embraced by labor. But this phenomenon has been reduced in recent decades as the Republican Party has moved ever rightward. When left-of-center Democrats do emerge within the Democratic Party, the unions are advised by these outside guiding forces to be “realistic” and avoid any left taint. Few other choices exist in this barren political wasteland.

If left-leaning Democrats do manage to build some support among the unions they will still face an all-out assault by the Democratic Party apparatus. Only left elements are to be feared, and always opposed. Pro-business, right-leaning and outright reactionary Democrats are reflexively supported by their Party officialdom. Unelectable but politically “safe” candidates are often supported by this machinery with upstarts and progressives routinely confronted with Democratic Party operatives working to oppose and defund their campaigns. Only Democrats acceptable to the party machinery enjoy full support.

DNC INCORPORATED

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the leadership group governing and controlling much of the party apparatus, and it maintains an extensive focus on the trade unions. It is a multi-billion dollar corporate-type organism comprising many different sections. The overwhelming majority of DNC and wider Party funding originates with the corporate and wealthy donors. The unions do possess a coveted resource base of hundreds of millions dollars in political funds along with tens of thousands paid staff who can be press-ganged into supporting Democrats at all levels. The DNC resource universe also includes many thousands of functionaries from DNC-controlled consulting companies and non-profits, along with supplementary staff from elected lawmakers and lower level organizations.

This “DNC Incorporated” reality is little known or understood, although the union membership pays a steep price. These elements systematically influence and interfere in union affairs, play favorites in internal union elections, and sometimes profit handsomely from various consulting contracts with the unions. Staff are exchanged among the unions and the wider DNC operations, leading to diluted union loyalty at minimum. Meddling within the unions by the Democratic Party takes many forms and fringes on outright corruption at times. Jobs and perks for family, friends, and cronies, an endless stream of VIP trips and photo-ops, posh dinners and cocktail parties are all offered to a union “leadership” willing to play politics at the expense of their own members.

AIR FORCE ONE

As recently as the Clinton Administration, it was a common – but true – cliché among the Washington, D.C., trade union leaders and functionaries that the “price” for union support from a Democratic President was nothing more than a luxury ride on Air Force One for the union leader. Continuing a long tradition going back to the days when travel was done by presidential train, union leaders by the score then gathered family and paid flunkeys to all hop-on and “enjoy the ride”. Photo-ops were of course abundant, where union photographers snapped streams of publicity stills to show the rank-and-file the importance and status of their union leaders riding on the “Presidential special”.

But during the Clinton Administration the overall political standing of labor was steadily reduced by the White House and the DNC apparatus, with this high-profile practice nearly abolished today. This symbolic demotion of labor by the Democrats leaves more room today on Air Force One for large donors and business leaders, reflecting the increasingly taken-for-granted status of the labor movement. Rather than labor leaders jet-setting on Air Force One with the President, current labor bigs are instead relegated to attending contrived meetings with White House staff. Or taking seats at luxurious dinners and receptions where at best they can quickly shake hands with the President and exchange a mere few words.

Gone are the days when labor leaders would participate in serious conferences at the White House with the President and his staff, sometimes from both parties, where serious situations were deliberated, and sometimes even significant demands were made of the President on all manner of trade union issues. The unions have today been reduced to mere props for the DNC operation, and to visually reinforce the subordinated status of labor for all onlookers. Some of today’s labor leaders live for the rare photo-op with a President or Cabinet member, to see it splashed on Facebook or in the occasional union publication. All presumably to prove the important standing of the leader.

O’BRIEN AND HIS POLLS

The recent flap over Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and his refusal to support a presidential endorsement of either Harris or Trump showcased another crisis for organized labor. A social media firestorm was unleashed by Teamsters and outsiders, all weighing-in with opinions on the merits and demerits of the O’Brien decision. But one of the primary points was lost in the momentary bedlam. Few know that union after union repeatedly poll their own membership to ascertain their political opinions. The goal being for the union “leaders” to safely support only those candidates and issues which a majority of their membership already supports. There is no political education associated with this process. There is no role here for authentic labor leadership. Most unions long ago abandoned internal trade union education, including political education, increasingly shrinking away from any discussion of difficult questions like political candidate choices and broad political positions.

This near-total abdication of the responsibility of union leaders to actually “lead” on the political front is one of the most disastrous crises now debilitating the labor movement. Real political debate and decision making are replaced with feelgood campaigns, inane pronouncements, mindless slogans, and polls commissioned by a leadership seeking “which way the wind is blowing” among their membership. O’Brien’s handling of this situation lacked any substantial discussion or facts, and his decision and methods both likely left all sides unhappy. This momentary heartburn for O’Brien of course masks the historically opportunistic basis for much of this union’s political strategy over the decades, a legacy that he is all-too eager to revisit.

OPPORTUNISM REPLACES EDUCATION

This tail-the-members style of political action is all too common in the labor movement. It is on its face an absurd style of operation, given that the responsibility of the union leadership is to actually lead, and not merely trail behind the perceived opinions of the membership. In the case of the recent Teamster kerfuffle it also masks the political opportunism of much of that union’s leadership, who want only to endorse the winner of the presidential election in November. Hoping for favors of some kind from either Harris or Trump, whoever wins, this strategy has been revealed repeatedly as a monumental failure.

The 1980 endorsement by the Teamsters of anti-union bigot Ronald Reagan remains the pinnacle of rank opportunism on labor’s political front. Hoping only to curry favor with Reagan as a means to avoid a federal criminal investigation of the entire leadership of the union, the gifting of the union’s endorsement to Reagan ended in humiliation and debacle. Lesser versions of this political horse-trading by union “leaders” continue today. Ultimately, it is an embarrassment that any union would have to poll its own members to determine the thinking of the membership, and it likewise is dangerous to promote this herd mentality. Adherence to real trade union principles is not easy today as all outside forces act to draw the members into the employer way of thinking. Trade union leadership must confront and counteract this, and certainly must not encourage more of this failed political drift.

The unions have for many decades faced a dire need to once again engage the membership in real trade union education, grappling with controversial subjects a part of that. Labor history revealing to members the heroic foundation of their unions, their militant beginnings in many cases, recognition of the class struggle reality today, and a serious discussion of alternatives to both our political and economic systems are all in order. Recipients of labor’s votes, money, and logistical support must also be held to account, with the unions willing to walk away rather than endorse and fund barely worthwhile candidates. An end must be put to the frequent labor support issued to obviously unfit candidates, usually pro-business Democrats and those who seek labor’s support in return for nothing – or almost nothing. Ultimately, a sound regimen of support for an independent course of action is required so as to break free from the control of “DNC Incorporated”.

MORE AND MORE CASH

Suffocating the entire political operation of the labor movement today is the question of financial contributions for the legions of mostly Democrats who chase after the unions as if they were ATM machines. These sums routinely now exceed more that one billion dollars in a national electoral cycle, and when the many hidden financial supports offered by the unions are taken in to account the amount is likely more than twice that much. Democrats today obtain the vast majority of these funds from the pockets of the rank-and-file membership – but with all decisions determining its distribution decided by union leaders based almost exclusively on their personal direction.

While political fundraising is certainly a necessary reality, the monies when collected are often secreted away by union leaderships who offer few if any reports to the membership about where the contributions and expenditures have been made. This scandalous situation must be ended, with all participants in union political fundraising provided with a full accounting of how much was raised, from which parts of the unions, and then followed with detailed and verified reports of just exactly which candidates were supported and what other spending was completed. These gigantic political funds are too easily converted to private slush funds in the sole control of union leaders. In such a situation the domination of the Democratic Party over the union officialdom allows for ample opportunities for union monies being applied to unproductive or even counterproductive purposes.

SOBERING REALITY TODAY

The once deep wells of progressive and sometimes leftwing political principles, practices, and beliefs among layers of the union leadership and membership have largely dried up, or been deliberately drained. This spreading political desert covering the unions is largely ignored until election time, when Democrats come out of the woodwork looking for money, volunteers, and huge numbers of votes from the embattled union garrisons. The unions frequently deliver all this dutifully, receiving at best an uneven and sporadic “return” for their immense efforts and expense. Vast opportunities exist to mobilize the membership with authentic campaigns of worthwhile political education, but are instead supplanted by hollow, low calorie political sloganeering and mindless cheerleading for Democrats regardless of their quality.

POLITICAL ACTION, OR PLAYING POLITICS?

Legendary founding UE leader James Matles UE | The Union for Everyone | Members Run This Union (ueunion.org) James Matles commented in the late 1960’s to a UE Convention delegate who had asked him “What’s wrong with labor’s political action?” Matles calmly observed that when the UE was founded, in its early years, the general labor movement leadership viewed political action as a negotiation with the politicians, with exact commitments being won as the price of the unions support. The political goal was to win tangible gains for union members broadly, as well as for the working class as a whole. He said, “When we conducted our political work back then you could see air between the bellies of the union leaders and the politicians.” But later, as the union movement grew, became wealthy, became infected with reactionary employer principles, and eventually was split by corporate and business union forces, Matles observed that “Today there’s no air anymore. You can’t see through. Their bellies are touching, and they are no longer engaging in political action, they are playing politics. That’s what they are doing today, they are playing politics.” A return to principled left trade union political action is in order, and only such a return can arrest the political decline that has delivered our labor movement to the brink of ruin.

(In February of this year the author examined additional aspects of organized labor’s political action challenges. See: What’s Wrong with Labor’s Political Action? – MLToday ).

https://mltoday.com/examining-labors-po ... captivity/
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 21, 2024 2:42 pm

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At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, cops swarmed and arrested an Amazon driver who stopped his van in support of the strike. Then they forcibly broke the picket line. (Photo: Luis Feliz Leon)

Cops bust picket line as Teamsters strike seven Amazon warehouses
Originally published: Labor Notes on December 19, 2024 by Natascha Elena Uhlmann (more by Labor Notes) | (Posted Dec 21, 2024)

Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers at seven facilities in the metro areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Southern California, and New York City are out on strike today, in what the union says is the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history. Unionized workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 fulfillment center have also authorized a strike and could soon follow.

Workers in all these locations—five delivery stations and two fulfillment centers—have already shown majority support and demanded union recognition. The Teamsters set Amazon an ultimatum: recognize the unions and agree to bargaining by December 15, or face strikes. Amazon hasn’t moved.

“They are skirting their responsibility as our employer to bargain with us on higher pay and safer working conditions,” said Riley Holzworth, a driver who makes deliveries from the DIL7 delivery station in Skokie, Illinois.

At the DBK4 delivery station in Queens, New York, cops swarmed and arrested an Amazon driver who stopped his van in support of the strike. Then they forcibly broke the picket line. In anticipation of a possible strike at JFK8, police had camped out by the facility in advance.

The Teamsters have made organizing Amazon a priority; the New York Times reported that the union has committed $8 million to the project, plus access to its $300 million strike fund.

‘ALL YOU CAN THINK OF IS SLEEP’
The strike’s timing is strategic: package volumes balloon around the holidays, known as “peak season,” so it’s no easy feat for Amazon to cope with disruption. During the 2023 holiday season, Amazon netted 29 percent of all global online orders.

To keep up with the surge in demand, many workers are forced to work mandatory overtime—childcare and other obligations be damned. “They give us one day extra, plus one hour extra a day,” said Wajdy Bzezi, a shift lead steward who has worked at JFK8 since 2018.

I barely see my son.

“When you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,” said Ken Coates, a packer who has worked at JFK8 for five years.

And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.

To help meet the increased demand the company has hired 250,000 seasonal workers across the country. This influx could also dilute strike power, though seasonal workers face the same stressors and often support the union push.

PEAK SEASON, INJURY SEASON
Rushed training for the seasonal hires has knock-on effects that leaves everyone less safe.

“Just this past month I think I ran into half a dozen new employees that didn’t know how to do the job,” Coates said.

Not due to any fault of their own, due entirely to the fault of their trainer not giving them adequate time.

For instance, Coates says, new workers assigned to rebin duties (moving items from the conveyor belt to a designated shelf so packers can package and ship them) can unintentionally push items too far across the shelf, where they fall off the other side and hit packers.

Peak season at Amazon means peak injuries for workers. A July interim report from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that injury rates skyrocket during Prime Day and the holiday season.

During the week of Prime Day 2019, the report found, Amazon’s rate of recordable injuries would correspond to more than 10 annual injuries per 100 workers—more than double the industry average. During that same period, Amazon’s total rate of injuries (including those that do not need to be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA) would correspond to almost 45 injuries per 100 full-time workers. That is to say, if they kept up the Prime Day pace, nearly half the workers would be injured in a year.

“There hasn’t been a year that I’ve worked at Amazon where we haven’t broken a record in the number of packages we’ve handled,” said Coates.

‘IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE A JOB THAT SHOULD BE LEGAL’
Even outside the busy season, the work is grueling. Amazon’s relentless productivity quotas are nearly impossible to meet safely, forcing workers to barter their backs and knees for $18 an hour.

A new report from the same Senate committee has found that Amazon’s injury rate is having a “significant and growing impact on the average injury rate for the entire warehouse sector.”

Amazon is a corporation that transports goods and breaks down bodies. And why wouldn’t it, when this level of exploitation is incentivized at every turn? Reporting requirements are easily bypassed; the company appears to be using its on-site health facilities to obscure the true number of injuries sustained by workers on the job, or to shift the blame to workers for using improper technique.

“I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been injured on the job,” said Coates.

In our bathroom there’s a mirror that says, ‘You’re looking at the person who is most responsible for your safety.’ It pisses me off every time I have to see it. That’s just them passing off the buck.

The OSHA penalties for instances that do get reported are capped at around $16,000 for each serious violation, the report notes. For a company making $70,000 in profits per minute, that’s just the cost of doing business.

“It doesn’t feel like a job that should be legal,” Holzworth said.

I’ve had a lot of different jobs in this industry, and this one by far feels like my employer is really getting away with a lot.

A GLOBAL FIGHT
Workers organizing at key chokepoints in the supply chain have managed to extract a few concessions from Amazon, including increased pay for Chicago-area delivery station workers and the reinstatement of a suspended air hub employee in San Bernardino and another in Queens.

But Amazon has made significant investments that reduce its vulnerability. The expansion of its fulfillment network allows the company to reroute orders within its network of warehouses and reduces its reliance on any one location in the event of strikes or disruptions. Building sufficient power to tip the scales will require organizing across the global supply chain.

Around the world, the company has fiercely opposed organizing efforts, leaning on anti-union tactics like delaying elections, holding captive-audience meetings, and going on a hiring spree ahead of a union election to dilute the vote.

Between 2022 and 2023, Amazon spent more than $17 million on union avoidance consultants. And where other companies are content to bring in these swindlers to train management, Amazon is sometimes cutting out the middleman and hiring them directly as managers.

‘TAKE SOME ACCOUNTABILITY’
For delivery drivers, there’s another wrinkle: The drivers officially work for third-party contractors known as delivery service partners (DSPs), allowing Amazon to skirt responsibility.

When drivers unionized last year at a DSP in California called Battle-Tested Strategies, Amazon ended its contract and cut ties with the contractor, effectively firing the 84 drivers (Amazon was the company’s only client, and the company hasn’t operated since.)

This year, Amazon pulled the same stunt when drivers organized at a DSP in Illinois, Four Star Express Delivery.

Amazon maintains that since drivers are employed by DSPs, it has no duty to bargain with the workers. But drivers call bullshit, insisting that Amazon meets the legal standard for a joint employer: “We drive your branded van, we wear your uniform,” said Rubie Wiggins, a delivery driver at Amazon’s DAX5 facility in Southern California.

Take some accountability.

‘WE CAN BRING THEIR STANDARDS HERE’

Safety is a central concern—and a key organizing issue. Delivery vans are packed to the brim, forcing some drivers to jam packages behind seats and behind any available crevice.

“It looks like a crypt in your van,” said Andrew Wiggins, Rubie’s husband, who works for the same DSP.

A lot of drivers put packages on the dash, wherever they can. It’s very unsafe, but people are just doing what they have to do.

Rubie and Andrew talk regularly with UPS delivery drivers about the benefits of a strong union contract. “It’s amazing what you hear that they have,” Rubie said.

They have mechanics on site, they can watch their vehicles on site, we don’t have any of that. When you see that UPS is less profitable than Amazon and they’re able to do that for their drivers, you really want to tell Amazon, ‘Please take care of me like that.’

“At Amazon it’s like, in order to perform, you have to think in your head a complete system of exact steps,” Holzworth said.

I’m gonna organize my packages in this way and as soon as I stop, I’m gonna engage the brake, pull out the keys, take off my seatbelt, in this order every single time so that you’re wasting as few seconds as possible.

“If Amazon can have this as their business model, what’s the future working conditions gonna look like for other corporations?” Rubie Wiggins said. “We have nieces and nephews, I have younger brothers. What’s the workforce gonna look like for them in a couple years?

“You get a lot of ‘Why don’t you work for UPS?’” she said.

We’re drivers already. We can bring their standards here. We can start making the working conditions better here.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/21/cops-bu ... arehouses/

Speaking of Amazon, two weeks ago an Amazon truck creamed our mailbox. Neighbor had it on camera. Five days later another Amazon truck administered the coupe de gras to the mailbox, backing over it. I doubt if drivers would be so callous if they weren't being driven to it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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