the US economy than soaring stock markets or the Fed
officials’ fantasies about “full employment."
"As Wall Street is celebrating the Trump administration’s plans for a massive handout to the corporations and banks, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has pledged that his corporatist and anti-working class organization is “absolutely” committed to partnering with Trump."
As attack on jobs escalates, AFL-CIO chief pledges to “partner” with Trump administration
As attack on jobs
escalates, AFL-CIO chief pledges to “partner” with Trump administration
By Jerry White
4 March 2017
4 March 2017
Friday was the last
day of work for 1,300 General Motors hourly employees at the GM
Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. Less than a year after being hired and
promised full-time positions by GM and union officials, the workers are out of
a job. Medical insurance is running out at the end of the month, and there are
few prospects for decent jobs in a city where 117,000 workers are unemployed.
The job cuts in
Detroit provide a far more realistic picture of the US economy than soaring
stock markets or the Fed officials’ fantasies about “full employment.” Yet the
layoff of 1,300 workers was not even deemed newsworthy by the local media. It
also did not rate a mention by President Trump, who has appointed GM’s CEO to
his corporate advisory board.
The Detroit job cuts
follow more than 2,000 GM layoffs in Lansing, Michigan, and Lordstown, Ohio in
January. They anticipate a far greater onslaught as US corporations restructure
in response to the global economic slowdown and increasing international
competition.
In the US, automakers
are cutting production due to a growing glut of unsold cars. Commercial
aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which cut eight percent of its workforce last
year, announced Friday that 1,880 workers had accepted voluntary retirements.
The company said more job cuts are expected in 2017 amid falling orders and
tight competition with European-based Airbus, which announced 1,200 job cuts a
few months ago. A new layoff announcement is made virtually every day in the
retail, banking and technology sectors.
These are part of an
international process. On Wednesday, China’s labor minister, Yin Weimin, said
the country will cut another 500,000 steel and coal jobs this year. Last year,
726,000 workers lost their jobs in the coal and steel industries, or 40 percent
of the 1.8 million jobs the government said would be eliminated in those
industries as part of a massive restructuring of state enterprises.
In addition to the
job cuts, corporations are seeking to transform their workforces into largely
casual, temporary laborers, hired and fired at will, like the Detroit-Hamtramck
GM workers.
According to the
Government Accountability Office, contingent workers now comprise 40.4 percent
of all employees. Under Obama, 95 percent of all new jobs created in the US
since the so-called economic recovery began have been part-time and temporary.
In the European Union, more than half of all new jobs since 2010 have been
through temporary contracts.
The corporations are
also accelerating their plans to dump their pensions and retiree health care
obligations and continue to shift the cost of medical coverage on to workers.
This month, 22,600 retired coal miners or their widows were notified that they
will be losing health care benefits on April 30, when funding for their
insurance plans expire. More than one million working or retired Americans are
currently covered by pension plans that are in imminent danger of insolvency,
according to the Pension Rights Center.
The Trump
administration, packed with billionaires, is planning to slash corporate taxes
and eliminate workplace safety, environmental and labor regulations. In his
address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump declared that his
government has “undertaken a historic effort to massively reduce job crushing
regulations.” The increase in military spending outlined in his new budget will
be paid for by slashing food stamps and other essential programs, while the
ultra-reactionaries appointed to key agencies set their sights on the
privatization of public education and the elimination of Medicare, Medicaid and
Social Security.
As Wall Street is
celebrating the Trump administration’s plans for a massive handout to the
corporations and banks, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has pledged that his
corporatist and anti-working class organization is “absolutely” committed to
partnering with Trump.
Trump’s fascistic
rants against immigrant workers and endless claims that foreign countries and
foreign workers are destroying jobs and lowering wages is a calculated effort,
aided and abetted by the unions, to divide the working class and block a
unified response to the escalation of the class war policies at home and ever
greater imperialist militarism abroad.
Responding to the
speech, Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO labor federation, told Fox News
that the unions were prepared for Trump to “rewrite the rules of the economy,”
particularly on trade and immigration policy.
Trump’s speech was
the president’s “finest moment,” the union head said, signaling that “he’s
about to start doing business rather than playing for the camera—that was a
good sign.” Far from condemning the president’s xenophobic and racist slanders
against immigrants, the AFL-CIO head signaled his support for an even more
brutal immigration policy, including against legal residents.
“I was actually
pleasantly surprised,” Trumka said, “to hear him say the system is broken and
its legal immigration, as well as undocumented people—he talked about them a
lot—but this was the first time he spoke about legal immigration being used to
drive down wages. We’ve been saying that for a long time.”
Trumka said that
workers voted for the president because “they wanted him to rewrite the rules
of the economy—not for the rich, not for the wealthy, not for corporate
America, not for Wall Street but for them—and so he’s been a mixed bag on
that,” he said. The unions would tout the good things he did and criticize the
bad, Trumka said, echoing the lie that trade wars and mass deportation were
good for American workers.
“Will we partner with
him? Absolutely,” Trumka said. “Will we partner with him to try to rewrite the
immigration rules of the country? Absolutely… Using the bully pulpit to say
this is your country, this is where you owe your allegiance, this is where you
should be investing and building, that is a good thing.”
The trade unions have
been a chief conduit for spreading nationalist poison among workers for a very
long time. In the early 1980s, as American capitalism fell into decline and its
corporations confronted international competitors, the unions promoted economic
nationalism to justify their integration into the structure of corporate
management and collusion in the destruction of the jobs and living standards of
the workers they claimed to represent.
While the unions have
worked closely with the Democrats in overseeing the attack on jobs and wages
for decades, they now see income opportunities in Trump’s efforts to entice
corporations to “Buy American, Hire American.” This has nothing to do with the
interests of workers. Rather, the executives want to restore their lost income
through the influx of new dues-paying members, regardless of whether they are
earning poverty wages.
The unions are not
“workers’ organizations,” but labor-management syndicates that are hostile to
the interests of the working class. New organizations of struggle, including
rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, democratically controlled by
workers and committed to the methods of the class struggle, must be built to
resist the coming attacks on jobs, living standards, essential social services
and all the basic social rights of the working class.
Above all workers
must reject economic nationalism. Workers in every country face the struggles
and confront the same enemy: the global capitalist system, which enriches a
handful of billionaires at the expense of the broad masses of working people
whose collective labor creates society’s riches.
To unite the working
class—black, white, native born and immigrant, in the US and around the
world—workers must build a political movement, independent of both capitalist
parties, the Democrats and Republicans, to fight for international socialism
and against the danger of world war.
THE OBAMA WAR ON AMERICA: His OFA Party is Dedicated to Destroying
American and Building the Obama Muslim-style dictatorship funded by crony
banksters.
Daniel
Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild
than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”
*
"Obama is no
fool and he understands -- having encouraged Black Lives Matter and the war on
police and law enforcement, having facilitated ballooning welfare rolls and
doubling student debt to $1.35 trillion, having presided over a flood of
immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, and having pushed
unprecedented deficit spending that added nearly a trillion dollars annually to
the federal debt and doubling that debt in eight years to $20 trillion -- that
the U.S. is nearer collapse than at any previous time. And every Marxist knows
that socialist transformation first requires collapse of the old order."
THE
TRUMP AMNESTY…. Yes, he lied again!
"If true, it
shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having
the courage to state his
true beliefs to the American public who
elected him. That's always been
my biggest problem with Trump:
his lack of integrity and consistent belief
system." -----
ED STRAKER
JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
…. which one has it good under the Dems???
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent
Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work.
Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose
$190 billion annually (DATED FIGURES) in depressed wages caused by
the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” ---
Christian Science Monitor
"The UAW and other unions long ago abandoned any
struggle against the employers adopting the corporatist
outlook of labor-management “partnership.” Over the last
four decades, the unions have suppressed every form of
resistance by workers while handing over the hard-won gains
of generations of workers in the name of making US
corporations more competitive and profitable."
Sanders covers for UAW at Mississippi Nissan rally
By Ed Hightower and Jerry White
7 March 2017
7 March 2017
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the keynote speaker at a rally Saturday in Canton, Mississippi where the United Auto Workers (UAW) is campaigning to win recognition at the local Nissan auto factory. Having lost more than 1 million members since 1979, the Mississippi campaign is the latest effort by the UAW to boost its dues revenue by reversing the string of defeats at manufacturing plants in the southern US.
While Sanders and the unions have blamed “right to work” laws and Republican state officials, the chief reason for the defeats is the perfidious record of the unions and their decades-long collaboration with the corporate-government attack on the jobs and living standards of workers. Sanders, who enjoys close relations with the unions, has very deliberately sought to conceal the real record of the UAW.
Bernie Sanders told the rally, “If you are a member of a union in America, you are going to make 27 percent more than a non-union member. If you are a member of a union, you’re far more likely to have paid family and medical leave. If you are a member of a union, the likelihood is that you will have better health care and a better retirement plan than non-union members,” Sanders said.
To the extent that such a differential still exists, this represents the residual of the mass struggles of workers between the 1930s and 1970s. The UAW and other unions long ago abandoned any struggle against the employers adopting the corporatist outlook of labor-management “partnership.” Over the last four decades, the unions have suppressed every form of resistance by workers while handing over the hard-won gains of generations of workers in the name of making US corporations more competitive and profitable.
Today conditions in UAW-organized GM, Ford and Chrysler factories in the North, not to mention auto parts plants, increasingly resemble those at the Mississippi Nissan plant where an estimated 40 percent of the 6,400-person workforce are temporary employees and wages are on a tiered system, ranging from a meager $12 per hour to $24 at the high end.
Actor and Democratic Party activist Danny Glover, along with NAACP President Cornell Brooks and UAW President Dennis Williams, sought to tie the union’s efforts to increase its base of dues-paying members with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The basic thrust of the argument was that poor wages and conditions at Canton, with its 80 percent African American workforce, are thereby civil rights and human rights issues.
The day before the Mississippi rally, the UAW sanctioned the layoff of 1,300 workers at the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. Most of the workers thrown into the streets with the connivance of the UAW were African American temporary workers, including young black women.
The effort of the unions and Democrats to wrap the Nissan campaign in the mantle of the civil rights movement is aimed at concealing the class division that exists between the working class on the one side, and the union executives like Williams who function as well-paid tools for the auto bosses.
It is also part of the historical record that the South became an anti-union haven because the then CIO unions abandoned the struggle to organize Southern workers in the late 1940s and 1950s. The then CIO unions ended “Operation Dixie” to establish even closer ties to the national Democratic Party whose southern representatives enforced the brutal Jim Crow laws against blacks. This coincided with the purge of the socialists who pioneered the building of the CIO in the 1930s and the organization’s merger with the AFL in 1955.
The UAW’s recent efforts to “organize” the European and Asian-based transplants in the South have chiefly been based on appeals to the employers, not the workers. In 2010, former UAW President Bob King urged employers to “re-examine their instinctive resistance to the notion of unionization, and consider some of the advantages of a positive, productive relationship with a union. Unions can and should play a positive role—and the results show the UAW is doing exactly that.”
Indeed, the Detroit automakers are reaping record profits due to the decades of concessions imposed by the UAW, the suppression of all strikes, and the abandonment of the most elemental interests of the working class. As a reward, the UAW controls billions in corporate stocks, seats on corporate boards and enjoys a myriad of labor-management business schemes.
The march follows a rejection by Boeing workers in South Carolina of union representation, a major blow to the labor bureaucracy’s push into the region, which is experiencing a boom in manufacturing. Production workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant likewise rejected a UAW drive in February 2014—despite or perhaps because the company openly campaigned for UAW recognition.
Prior to the Chattanooga vote, the UAW reached a “neutrality agreement” with the VW plant promising that any future contract would be committed to “maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other competitive advantages [Volkswagen] enjoys relative to its competitors in the United States and North America.”
The march, which garnered little support, specifically demanded that Nissan sign a neutrality agreement in advance of a union recognition vote at the Canton plant.
Workers at another Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee rejected the UAW in 1989 and 2001 votes. No election has been held at the Mississippi plant in Canton. The union has been trying to pressure Nissan through the French government’s ownership stake in Nissan’s business partner, the Renault Group.
Why should workers at Nissan or anywhere else pay dues out of their hard-earned salaries to organizations that function as tools of management and the Democratic Party?
Workers at the Nissan factory certainly need organizations to fight. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently fined Nissan $21,000 for safety violations at the Canton plant that led to a worker losing three fingers in a July 2016 accident. In November, a production worker at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee plant died from a crushing blow to the head, which could have been prevented if safety measures during routine maintenance met industry standards. OSHA also cited the Nissan Smyrna plant for similar violations in 2013 and 2015.
To wage a struggle against unsafe conditions, speed-ups, low wages and the lack of job security, workers will have to build new organizations, democratically controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves, and based on the methods of class struggle, not class collaboration. They must be thoroughly committed to the interests of workers, not the profits of the corporations. Moreover, these rank-and-file committees must reject any support to the two parties of big business and the fight for the broadest mobilization to defend the social rights of all workers.
Nissan workers in the US should also forge the closest ties with workers in Japan and throughout the world to wage a common fight against the efforts of the global corporations to force workers into a race to the bottom. That means rejecting all forms of nationalism, which is used by the corporations and the government to divide US workers from their international class brothers and sisters.
Sanders has had long and close relations with the UAW and works with the unions to divert social anger down the reactionary path of economic nationalism. During the 2016 primary election campaign, before telling his supporters to back the Wall Street shill Hillary Clinton, Sanders stopped at UAW Local 600 in suburban Detroit. This was just months after UAW officials rigged the vote to push through a sellout contract at Ford.
Sanders’ so-called “political revolution” has now morphed into open support for Trump’s America First economic nationalism.
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