EVANSTON, ILLINOIS surrenders to LA RAZA
THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION and LA RAZA SUPREMACY
EXPANDS BORDER TO BORDER!
EXPANDS BORDER TO BORDER!
A
municipality just outside Chicago, Illinois has now pledged itself to be a home
for illegal aliens who want to be shielded from federal immigration law,
officially claiming the mantle as a sanctuary city.
Protest by Illinois auto parts workers wins broad support on Facebook
Protest by
Illinois auto parts workers wins broad support on Facebook
By Shannon Jones
7 January 2017
A video posted on Facebook of police removing
angry workers from the cafeteria of a factory in Belvidere, Illinois has been
widely shared and viewed, drawing attention to the brutal treatment routinely
meted out by corporate America to workers.
Some 258 workers at the Android II plant, an
auto supplier that builds engines for Fiat Chrysler (FCA), were laid off from
their jobs on December 23, two days before Christmas, after the company said
the automaker declined to renew its contract. Workers say the company
shortchanged them in their final paycheck, which did not include contractually
stipulated vacation pay. In some cases, the amounts owed were substantial—as
much as $1,500 after taxes.
Unable to get answers from local plant
management a few days later, scores of workers went to another Android factory
and asked to speak to management. The plant manager invited the workers to wait
in the company’s cafeteria, but then summoned police, who escorted workers
outside. The entire confrontation was recorded and posted on
Facebook. The post had some 46,000 views at the time of this writing.
Android is a multi-national corporation based in
Auburn Hills, Michigan that specializes in auto parts production and logistics.
It has 16 plants in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Spain.
Workers at Android II are members of United Auto
Workers Local 1268, which also serves as the bargaining agent for workers at
the huge Fiat Chrysler Belvidere Assembly Plant. The same day that the Android
II plant was shuttered, Belvidere Assembly closed for a five-month retooling.
The facility is being converted from production of the Jeep Compass and Jeep
Patriot in order to produce the new Jeep Cherokee. Belvidere assembly ended
production of the Dodge Dart in September in the wake of the announcement by
FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne that the company was ending small car production in
North America.
The Local 1268 web site did not contain any
mention of the protest by Android II workers, nor has the UAW issued any
statement on their fight. A call by this reporter to Local 1268 was not
returned.
At least four auto parts plants in the Belvidere
area that made parts for Fiat Chrysler were impacted by the shutdown. At least
700 workers were affected by job cuts. Unlike FCA workers, workers at auto
parts suppliers are not eligible for supplementary unemployment benefits (SUB).
Workers at parts suppliers typically make far less than workers at assembly
plants, sometimes earning poverty wages of $11 or $12 an hour.
Bridget Moyer, the Android II worker who posted
the video of the confrontation with management and who has emerged as a
spokesperson for the workers, spoke to a local web site, Rockfordscanner.com,
after the protest. She said that in some cases the company owed workers more
than 120 hours of accumulated vacation pay. “The contract I am speaking of is a
law abiding contract they are breaking… Not only did they take our jobs, but
now, two days after Christmas we are finding out we also lost our vacation
pay.”
In other comments posted on Facebook, Moyer
says, “The plant manager and human resource manager were giving us excuses, but
really not giving us answers. They invited us into the cafeteria to speak to
them; they really didn’t speak to us. In the process they called the police and
had us escorted out of the building.
“From the get go this company has done nothing
but screw all of us over. They are not giving us answers. They are saying
corporate agreed to this... we just want answers and we got kicked off the
property.”
The Facebook video shows Android II plant
workers peacefully assembled in the company cafeteria. Police arrive and tell
the workers they cannot force the plant management to provide any information
and that workers must leave the plant because it is private property.
The layoff of Android II workers in Belvidere
comes amidst a spate of layoffs by the Detroit-based auto companies as the car
sales boom of the past several years appears to be winding down. The UAW’s role
has been to facilitate the layoffs, smothering any opposition to the job cuts,
which it insists are necessary to preserve management’s “cost-efficiency.”
In the case of the temporary closure of the
Belvidere plant, the UAW has hailed the restructuring, which has forced the
4,500 workers who are being laid off to subsist on SUB pay and unemployment
benefits amounting to about 74 percent of their standard pay. Temporary and
contract workers, who under terms of the 2015 UAW national contract, comprise
an expanded portion of the workforce, are not even eligible for SUB benefits,
nor are regular employees with less than one year seniority.
Last summer, FCA eliminated a shift at the
Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) north of Detroit, as a move to phase out
production of the Chrysler 200 passenger car. SHAP was indefinitely closed in
December as it retooled for the production of the new Dodge Ram. Altogether,
some 3,000 workers have been impacted by the SHAP layoffs, with temporary and
part-time workers again taking the hardest hit.
The decision by FCA and other automakers to
focus production on larger, less fuel efficient vehicles such as light trucks
and SUVs, leaves automakers vulnerable if gas prices again spike. As always,
workers will bear the brunt of any collapse in the car market. Meanwhile, the
Detroit automakers continue to post near-record profits, with GM handing out
some $9 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to investors while at the same
time laying off workers.
AMERICA: One paycheck and two illegals away from homelessness.
"The economists found that the pre-tax share of national income
received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut
nearly in half since 1980, from 20 percent to 12 percent, while the
income share of the top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12
percent to 20 percent."
The class struggle in the US in 2017
The class struggle in the US in 2017
By Jerry White
4 January 2017
4 January 2017
The year 2017 promises to be one of increasing class struggle in the United States and around the world. In every country, the ruling elites and their political servants want to make the working class pay for the global economic crisis and the costs of war.
In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.
Trump wants to “Make America Great Again”
by eliminating any restrictions on corporate
profit, from minimum wage laws and
occupational safety, health and
environmental protections, to bedrock social
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social
Security. Workers will fight against these
attacks, and any illusions sections of workers
may have had in Trump are already being
rapidly dispelled.
by eliminating any restrictions on corporate
profit, from minimum wage laws and
occupational safety, health and
environmental protections, to bedrock social
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social
Security. Workers will fight against these
attacks, and any illusions sections of workers
may have had in Trump are already being
rapidly dispelled.
While hardly reported by the mass media, 2017 opens with a series of strike threats and labor contract expirations in the US. These include:
· 145,000 workers at the largest US railroads who have been working without a new contract for a year. The workers are opposing sweeping health care cuts, cuts to vacation time and unsafe working hours. They could face a strikebreaking intervention by Trump.
· More than 30,000 transit workers in New York City who are holding a mass meeting this weekend and have a January 15 contract expiration date with no agreement in sight. Another 460 bus drivers and mechanics for the regional transportation system in Dayton, Ohio have voted to strike on January 9 over health care and work conditions. In addition, 10,000 Chicago Transit Authority workers face a contract fight this year.
· 4,000 General Electric Appliance workers in Louisville, Kentucky, who rejected a wage-cutting deal recommended by the local and national leadership of the International Union of Electrical-Communications Workers of America in November. The same month, 1,200 airline mechanics at UPS’s super-hub in Louisville overwhelmingly voted to strike against health care cuts.
· 38,000 Illinois state workers who are in a contract impasse with Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s demands for sharp hikes in health care costs and changes to overtime rules.
· 700 workers at Momentive Performance Materials in Waterford, New York, north of Albany, and Willoughby, Ohio (near Cleveland) who have been on strike for three months. It was recently revealed that a key advisor to president-elect Donald Trump, Blackstone Group founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, owns a stake in Momentive.
The assault on health care, pensions and wages was at the center of Obama’s economic policies. This will only be intensified under Trump. Some 120,000 retired coal miners and their dependents face the cut off of health and retirement benefits, some as early as April, because of the near-bankruptcy of the United Mine Workers funds.
Thousands of General Motors workers are facing the elimination of their jobs over the next few months, as the giant automaker, working with the UAW, seeks to slash jobs as car sales slow. Trump has appointed GM CEO Mary Barra to his corporate competitiveness board.
With great fanfare on Tuesday, Ford and the UAW announced that the company was canceling plans to build a new $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and would invest instead in expanding a plant in suburban Detroit. Ford CEO Mark Fields said the decision was made because, “One of the factors we’re looking at is a more positive US manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the pro-growth policies he said he’s going to pursue. And so this is a vote of confidence.”
Indeed, the Ford executives and wealthy investors will certainly reap the benefits of tax cuts, deregulation and other anti-working class policies the Trump administration will pursue, while the UAW bureaucrats are more than willing to offer their services.
The growth of class conflict poses basic political questions for every section of the working class.
First, the struggles of workers must not be subordinated to the pro-capitalist trade unions, which in the United States and around the world function as instruments of corporate management and the state, not as workers organizations.
The past two years have already seen a significant increase in the efforts of workers to resist decades of declining real wages. In every case, they came into conflict with or were smothered by the pro-corporate, anti-working class trade unions, which worked closely with the Obama administration.
In late 2015, autoworkers rebelled against sellout contracts pushed by the United Auto Workers, which were only rammed through with a combination of lies, threats and fraud. Last year began with a series of wildcat sickouts by teachers in Detroit. The action of teachers was in defiance of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which shut them down and facilitated the passage of laws that deepened the attack on public education.
These actions were followed by the strike by 39,000 telecom workers at Verizon, a strike by 5,000 Minnesota hospital workers and a walkout by Philadelphia transit workers. All were isolated by the unions, which pushed through contracts that attacked jobs and living standards.
Workers must build new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by the rank-and-file, and based on the methods of the class struggle. Every division used to weaken the working class must be overcome and a common struggle waged to defend the social rights of all workers.
Second, a real struggle to defend jobs and living standards must reject the economic nationalism that has long been promoted by the unions to subordinate workers to the profit interests of their “own” corporate bosses.
The growth of the class struggle must and will take on an increasingly international form. Over the past year, major strikes and demonstrations broke out throughout Europe, including in France against reactionary labor “reforms,” and in Portugal and Greece in opposition to austerity measures dictated by the banks. India saw one of the largest one-day strikes in human history against the right-wing agenda of Narenda Modi, while in China the number of strikes and protests in the first half of 2016 was up 20 percent from the year before.
Strikes by teachers, oil workers and other sections of workers in defiance of state violence also took place in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. In Canada, the year ended with 9,300 teachers in Nova Scotia, Canada walking out over wage freezes and to demand increased educational funding.
Finally, the defense of the basic rights of workers is fundamentally a political struggle. In the incoming Trump administration, the reality of the state as an instrument of class rule is exposed in naked form. Yet anyone under the illusion that a Clinton administration would pursue a pro-worker policy need only look at the record of the past eight years and the response of the Democratic Party to the election of Trump. Rather than criticizing Trump for his right-wing agenda, the Democrats have denounced him for not being aggressive enough against Russia while pledging to work with him on imposing his policy of economic nationalism.
The political radicalization of American workers and youth in 2015 was expressed in support during the Democratic Party primaries for Bernie Sanders, who presented himself as a socialist and opponent of social inequality. Sanders’ carried out his assigned task of channeling this opposition behind the candidate of the status quo, Hillary Clinton. However, millions of people backed Sanders not because of his political treachery, but because they are seeking some way of opposing an economic system dominated by the corporate and financial aristocracy.
The essential question confronting workers in 2017 is the development of a socialist leadership for the momentous battles ahead. The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to unite every section of the working class and every struggle, for jobs, decent living standards, against police violence, war and the attack on democratic rights, into a single political movement to fight for socialism. We encourage all those who agree with the fight for socialism to join and build the SEP.
SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA AS IT
HANDS MILLIONS OF JOBS TO
ILLEGALS AND BILLIONS IN
WELFARE!
America’s Economic Distress Belt
Income inequality and poverty used to be separate phenomena in America. Today, it’s a different story: More than forty percent of U.S. counties have high rates of both.
But until recently, a county with higher inequality did not necessarily have a high concentration of poverty.
A new study from the Population Reference Bureau by Beth Jarosz and Mark Mather tracks the dramatic growth in inequality and poverty across America’s 3,000-plus counties over the past two-and-a-half decades.
Today, 41 percent of U.S. counties suffer from high levels of combined poverty and income inequality, up from just 29 percent back in 1989. Worse, as the table below shows, just 28 percent of counties have low levels of poverty and low levels of inequality. In other words, more than 70 percent of counties have either high levels of inequality, high levels of poverty, or both.
The maps below trace the growth in poverty and inequality across U.S. counties over this time. Green represents places with low poverty and low inequality, gold represents low inequality and high poverty, blue represents low poverty and high inequality, and red indicates the disturbing one-two punch of high inequality and high poverty.
While some commentators continue to extol the Sunbelt’s rapid growth and low housing costs, a rising number of people and places there are falling further behind both in absolute terms and compared to the rest of the country. Inequality and poverty are more than class issues: They are geographic ones as well.
About the Author
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Build the La Raza Democrat Party base with open borders, no ID to vote Democrat, no E-VERIFY and NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED TO APPLY.
Keeping wages DEPRESSED with endless hordes of looting Mexicans invading keeps these corrupt politicians’ paymasters on Wall Street generous$.
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!
VIVA LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
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