nomination to head DHS has been praised by
the cheap foreign labor lobby, open borders
advocates, and the Washington, D.C. national
security establishment – which allied itself
with the failed “Never Trump” movement
during the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s DHS Nominee Will Tell ICE Agents: Focus on Illegals with Criminal Records
President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kirstjen Nielsen, says she will “clarify” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents not to target illegal aliens who do not have a violent criminal background.
In a hearing last week, Nielsen repeatedly conceded to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) that she would issue a directive to ICE agents to make sure that illegal aliens who have no other crime on their record besides entering the U.S. illegally are not targeted for priority deportation.
Nielsen told Harris:
HARRIS: And it has been widely reported that between January and September of this year, ICE arrested nearly three times the number of individuals with no criminal history, as compared to the same period last year. If DHS is, in fact, focused as you have indicated and, if confirmed, under your leadership, on true criminals, it is clear that the frontline officers have a different impression.And so, if confirmed, will you issue a written directive to the agents that they prioritize enforcement activities in a way that targets criminals who pose a public safety threat and not DREAMers or DACA recipients?NIELSEN: Yes, although I will say, understand that to be the current policy. But if there’s any question about it, we will clarify. [Emphasis added]
Nielsen’s statements directly contradict
previous statements made by Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, who has made clear
that if individuals are illegally in the U.S., they
are subject to deportation.
previous statements made by Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, who has made clear
that if individuals are illegally in the U.S., they
are subject to deportation.
“Everybody in the country illegally is subject to being deported, so people come here and they stay here a few years and somehow they think they are not subject to being deported – well, they are,” Sessions previously said in April.
Nielsen made the concession to Harris before also conceding that either she or ICE Acting Director Homan would issue a directive that made clear the policy not to target illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program or those who have no violent crime history.
HARRIS: OK, and in particular, will you agree to issuing a written directive to the agents, that that is the policy of the agency?
NIELSEN: Yes, I would. Or if appropriate, Acting-Director Homan would.
In her confirmation hearing, Nielsen confirmed her pro-amnesty, mass immigration views by saying that it is the United States’ responsibility to legalize DACA illegal aliens.
“I believe that we must and we owe it to them to find a permanent solution,” she said of passing a DACA amnesty that could potentially lead to a chain migration of 9.9 million to 19 million foreign nationals pouring into the U.S. legally. “It’s no way to expect anyone to live a month or two months at a time,” said Nielsen, even though the DACA work-permits each last for two years.
Nielsen was confirmed today in an 11-4 vote by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Committee, with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) saying he hopes Nielsen is approved by the full Senate “as quickly as possible.”
As Breitbart News reported, Nielsen’s nomination to head DHS has been praised by the cheap foreign labor lobby, open borders advocates, and the Washington, D.C. national security establishment – which allied itself with the failed “Never Trump” movement during the 2016 presidential election.
In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by Breitbart News, Nielsen explained how she would be “ready to work with Congress” on a plan to give amnesty to the nearly 800,000 DACA illegal aliens in the U.S.
Likewise, Nielsen chaired a committee at the World Economic Forum that promoted mass immigration to Europe and the U.S., claiming Western nations did not have a choice and needed to accept millions of migrants. That report, as Breitbart News reported, was co-authored by executives from multinational corporations and world banks.
Additionally, Breitbart News reported on Nielsen’s involvement with the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when more than 30,000 illegal aliens and foreign workers were able to come to the U.S. to take American blue-collar jobs which those devastated by the natural disaster had hoped to get.
Following Hurricane Katrina, 1.5 million Americans were displaced by the storm, and easing of labor laws by the Bush administration left many looking for work outside of the Gulf Coast because illegal aliens and foreign workers quickly dominated the clean-up effort.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Swamp Keeper Trump is hiring 70 illegals at his Swamp Palace of Mar Lago.
1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years
ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays
the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their
subjects to invade the USA. The expands
territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish
language, and culture and genotypes, while
earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as
Foreign Remittance Income.
Business Group Promises 300,000 Job Openings If Trump Enforces Immigration Laws
A lobbying group for wealthy investors predicts that 300,000 new jobs will be opened for Americans and legal immigrants in the months up to the November 2018 election if Congress allows enforcement of existing immigration laws.
The group’s promise of 300,000 open jobs recognizes that employers must hire Americans and legal immigrants as Trump gradually ends the DACA amnesty created by former President Barack Obama. Roughly 300,000 of 690,000 illegals will lose their temporary work permits by November, and the remaining permits will expire in 2018
However, the FWD.us investors’ group portrays the 300,000 job openings as a problem, in part, because it is trying to win a strategic victory in immigration policy.
Business groups, including the FWD.us group — whose founders includes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — are using the DACA controversy to distract media and congressional attention from Trump’s popular, pro-employee immigration principles. If Trump signs a congressional no-strings amnesty for the DACA recipients, he will have abandoned his immigration principles.
BLOG:
BLOG:
MARK ZUCKERBERG AND OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRES SAY
HELL NO TO PAYING LEGALS LIVING WAGES… not when there’s boatloads of Chinese
ready to take our tech jobs and work cheap!
That strategic defeat will allow lobbyists to push Congress to next raise the supply of young white-collar visa workers — such as H-1B workers, OPT graduates and L-1 visa workers — who can help lower salaries for middle-aged American tech workers and of legal immigrants. Any increase in the white-collar labor supply is likely to reduce labor costs, freeing up revenues to spike profits and investors’ returns.
Already, the various visa programs keep 1 million foreign white-collar workers employed in varied work-sites at universities, fashion companies, engineering firms, computer firms, pharmacies, and hospitals.
FWD.us director Todd Schulte described the group’s priorities in November 1 tweet.
The job-openings report was released shortly before the FWD.us group brought more than 40 business executives to lobby legislators on Wednesday for a greater supply of workers.
The visit is expected to showcase a few of the successful DACA illegals, even though a new report by the pro-immigration Migration Policy Institute shows that the DACA illegals have a college graduation rate that is one-fourth that of similar-aged Americans. The broader group of 3 million young illegals, dubbed “dreamers” by Democrats and business groups, has a college graduation rate that is one-tenth of the same-age American graduation rate. The vast majority of DACA beneficiaries and “dreamers” work in jobs sought by blue-collar Americans, including whites, African Americans, and legal-immigrant Latinos.
The cheap white-collar labor policy is backed by many tech companies, including IBM.
The pace of good-news job openings was sketched out in the November 6 report by the investors’ group.
The report shows that an average of 30,383 jobs will be opened to Americans and to legal immigrants each month in the eight months before the November election.
The increasing pace of employment opportunities may even force employers to start competing with each other for employees, so creating the first wage-raising “tight labor market” since the last two years of President Bill Clinton’s tenure. Any shortage of workers will also pressure employers to find, recruit, and train the millions of American voters who have been sidelined or untrained since the 2008 crash.
When invited to comment about the 300,000 open jobs, Schulte responded:
There is not a single economist – not a single one – who thinks stripping work authorization from nearly 800,000 young people and seeing many of them deported is good for the economy. In fact its a disaster.
Amid the huge annual flow of legal and illegal workers — which add up to roughly 1.5 million each year even as 4 million young Americans enter the workforce — wages and salaries have remained flat since Richard Nixon’s reelection, according to the Census Bureau. A September 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences showed how the extra supply of workers transfers roughly $500 billion a year from employees to employers and investors, which is equivalent to a 5.2 percent tax on wages.
The cheap-labor lobbying by business groups has met with little pushback GOP Senators, despite the shocking presidential victory in 2016 by a pro-American real-estate developer from New York. For example, Kansas GOP Sen. Jerry Moran recently told a pro-amnesty questioner that “I support a DACA fix … we’ll analyze the legislation when all the components are in place.”
Industry-funded “nation of immigrants” polls show that Americans want to welcome migrants. But “fairness” polls show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. That political power of that higher priority was made clear in November 2016 when Americans put Trump in the White House.
Several GOP Senators are developing an amnesty for the 690,000 DACA beneficiaries or an amnesty for some or all of the 3 million “dreamer” young illegals.
Some of those amnesty proposals are paired with offsets and safeguards that would end or shrink the huge inflow of chain-migration relatives and also end the visa lottery which has brought in 5 million immigrants from a variety of cultures and countries since 1990. This pro-American reform legislation is being pushed by Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.
In the House, more than 14 GOP members recently called for a DACA amnesty, although none suggested any realistic plan for winning public approval. The group of pro-amnesty GOP legislators is led by Rep. Dan Newhouse, a fruit-grower in Washington state whose district is now one-quarter Latino.
A task force set up by House Speaker Paul Ryan is also debating whether and how to deal with demands for an amnesty.
In contrast, Democrats and their business allies are pushing for a “clean Dream Act,” which would provide a no-strings unconditional amnesty for 3 million young illegals, and also allow them to bring in millions of additional chain-migration relatives. That cost of that mass immigration would be very large because few of the migrants are not skilled enough to earn enough in wages to pay taxes exceeding their federal benefits, such as Obamacare.
Several GOP Senators, including Ron Johnson (R-WI), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and James Lankford (R-OK) are pushing amnesties or programs to import foreign workers to take the place of Americans. In September, for example, Lankford praised the arrival of illegal immigrants, saying:
The job issue is an interesting issue, because those individuals are already in the job market. Many of these DACA students are actually DACA young adults, they already have access to the job market right now because they’ve been given deferred action. So they are in higher education, they are in the job market, they are currently a part of our economy, currently. That continual competition in our economy doesn’t hurt us, that continues to help us. It actually hurts us to put those individuals out of the economy.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 500,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor and spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Billionaire Mexicans tell their poor
to JUMP U.S. OPEN BORDERS and LOOT THE STUPID GRINGO… and loot they do!
Billions of dollars are sucked out of
America from Mexico’s looting!
1)
Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation
but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the
USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and
culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign
Remittance Income.
ZOGY POLL ON MEX RACISM AND VIOLENCE….. Half the murders in CA are by Mex gangs, and 93% of murders in La Raza-Occupied Los Angeles are by Mexicans.
ZOGBY
“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a country saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured the social development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks are harshly treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy. [22.3] In fact, racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US anywhere the illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the workforce is usually strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians, and others.”
PEW POLL: MEXICANS LOATH
AMERICANS, BUT AIM TO JUMP THE
BORDER ANYWAY…. THE LOOTING IS
STILL GOOD!
The Trump Secret Deal with Narcomex:
NO E-VERIFY, NO ENFORCEMENT, NO (real) WALL and NO LEGAL NEED APPLY to keep wages depressed….. but isn’t that the Democrat Party’s amnesty plan in a nutshell???
HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY WILL ADD ANOTHER 100 MILLION IMMIGRANTS TO AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS
Where does the jobs (for legals), housing crisis, homelessness and Mexican drug cartels’ expansion?
JEFF BEZOS, BILL GATES AND
WARREN BUFFET and SWAMP
KEEPER TWITTER TRUMPER….
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION II WILL IS PAVED BY THE LOOTING BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND WILL TRAMPLE THE POLS THAT GROVEL AT THEIR FEET FOR BRIBES!
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as 750 million people, more than the total population of Latin America and double the population of the US."
DACA THIEVES: WAVING THEIR MEX FLAGS IN OUR FACES AND THEN CASHING THEIR WELFARE CHECKS
JOBLESS AMERICA: Push 2 for English and go to the front of the line!
95 MILLION AMERICANS (Legals) HAVE NO WORK AS THE BORDERS ARE FLOODED WITH FOREIGNERS SUCKING UP JOBS, WELFARE AND VOTING DEMOCRAT FOR MORE!
Adios, California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
JUDICIAL WATCH
Illegal
Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/09/illegal-immigration-costs-u-s-taxpayers-stunning-134-9-billion-year/
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS AND THE STAGGERING
COST OF MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE AND CRIME TIDAL WAVE ON AMERICAN BACKS.
THE ENDLESSLY
HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it
is “ALL NEW”…. Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation
of plundering banks!
It’s Obama’s wet
dream!
“Through
love of having children we're going to take over." Augustin
Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers
of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los
Angeles, 7/4/96
“The cost
of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit.
Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President
Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million
illegals,
according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
“We have to make sure Jacoby Hennings
didn’t die in vain”
Workers
denounce scourge of suicides inside US auto plants
By
Jerry White
“We have to make sure Jacoby Hennings
didn’t die in vain”
Workers
denounce scourge of suicides inside US auto plants
By
Jerry White
15 November 2017
In the wake of the apparent suicide of 21-year-old Jacoby Hennings
at the Woodhaven Stamping plant outside of Detroit on October 20, autoworkers
from around the country have denounced the collusion of the United Auto Workers
(UAW) union with management and the oppressive conditions in the auto factories
which have literally driven workers to take their own lives.
Workers have contacted the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter to
report that suicides are tragically common occurrence at their factories. A
worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Jeep factory in Toledo, Ohio reported that five
workers at her plant had killed themselves over the last three years, including
three temporary part-time employees (TPTs).
A worker at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant said four workers at his
factory had committed suicide this year alone. Other TPTs who have written to
the newsletter have said they have contemplated suicide after being denied
full-time status for years, or after an abusive encounter with management or
the UAW.
While exact figures still must be gathered for the auto industry,
factory and production workers have the fourth highest suicide rate of the top
20 occupations in the US, according to the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention, with 35 deaths per 100,000 workers.
Only farmers, fishermen, lumberjacks and others in forestry or
agriculture (85 per 100,000), carpenters, miners, electricians, construction
trades (53) and mechanics and those who do installation, maintenance and repair
(48), have a higher suicide rate.
Overall, the CDC reports suicide rates rose by a staggering 21
percent from 2000 to 2012.
This rise coincides with the ever-worsening social crisis, the
growth of part-time and other precarious forms of employment in the so-called
Gig Economy, and the complete abandonment of any semblance of opposition by the
unions to the corporate offensive against workers’ jobs, living standards and
working conditions.
Far from providing workers with a collective voice and means to
oppose arbitrary firings and ever worsening conditions, unions like the UAW
have become the chief enforcers of the corporate dictatorship over the working
class. Far from uniting workers the UAW works relentlessly to undermine class
solidarity, pit workers against each other and offer them up as raw material
for exploitation.
During the eight years of the Obama administration, the unions all
but abandoned strikes, which fell to historic lows, paving the way for the
greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history. All
of the growth in jobs over the last decade is attributable to the proliferation
of part-time, temporary and contract jobs.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the auto industry, which,
due to previous struggles of autoworkers, once set the standard for job
protections and so-called middle-class wages.
Since Obama’s 2009 bankruptcy restructuring of General Motors and
Chrysler, labor costs have been drastically reduced as a result of UAW-backed
labor agreements that pushed out older, higher-paid workers and replaced them
with thousands of low-paid second- and third-tier workers. Due primarily to the
increase in the number of temps allowed by the 2015 UAW contract, labor costs
per vehicle have actually fallen for GM while remaining flat at Ford.
Although they pay union dues, TPTs have no job security and can be
fired, without recourse, for being late or missing a day of work. Hennings was
a TPT at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping plant while holding down a second temp job
at Fiat Chrysler’s Warren Truck Assembly Plant, 37 miles away. His coworkers
said he was hardworking and wanted to get a full-time position but often looked
exhausted. He also reportedly was worried he might lose his job when production
of the Dodge Ram pickup was removed from Warren Truck next year.
While the exact details are not fully known, on the morning of
October 20, Hennings was reportedly told by a supervisor to go to the UAW
office in the Woodhaven plant after he came in late. After an hour in the union
office, where his concerns were apparently left unaddressed, the young worker
reportedly took out a gun to threaten the union officials. Afterwards, police
say, Hennings shot himself when confronted by the cops.
Except for a perfunctory statement the day of the incident, the
UAW has not issued any further explanation of the tragic incident. A police
report obtained by the WSWS through a Freedom of Information request does not
include statements by the three UAW Local 387 officials who were with Hennings
that morning. The Wayne County Medical Examiner has still not released an
autopsy report.
The Autoworker
Newsletter urges workers to form rank-and-file committees to
unite and demand the truth about this tragedy, and to collectively defend
themselves against the abuses of the auto bosses and their paid-off henchmen in
the UAW. Such committees must take up the grievances and concerns of all
workers and revive the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all and
take up the methods of class struggle to abolish the two-tier system, demand
the hiring of all TPTs as full-time workers, and restore all UAW-backed
concessions.
An FCA worker with more than two decades in the plant told
the Autoworker Newsletter,
“I’ve seen things happen to TPTs but I am afraid due to retaliation to help
them. I am glad the newsletter is taking up this issue. It is very unfortunate
that this young man had to pass away and this had to come about. I’m very
concerned about how the second and third tier workers are being treated.
“I’ve seen the interaction between the union and management and a
lot of things are being done behind closed doors. There have been times when
employees have spoken up and were retaliated against, and we haven’t even seen
them anymore. I want to fight. The treatment of the TPTs is deplorable.
Sometimes people think that the older workers don’t care because we have our
retirement in place, our positions and seniority, but that is not true. When we
came in, it was the elders who are all gone now that warned us and tried to
educate us about what would happen when they were gone, and we have to do the
same now for the younger generation.
“It is hard to educate the TPTs and the new hires because you’re
fearful of the retaliation. But we need unity and a lot of people coming
together to make sure that this young man’s passing is not in vain. There are a
lot of us out here willing to come forward, but we can’t do it as individuals
because we have families to feed. We need the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter to
educate us on how to unify and fight to do better.”
“We have to do this for Jacoby, for future TPTs, so we can drive
down this suicide rate, and definitely make a change,” another worker added.
A worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Jeep plant in Toledo, where more than
1,200 TPTs are employed, told the newsletter, “The TPTs are bossed around and
bullied by the supervisors and the union stewards. If a TPT has an issue on the
line, they tell him ‘You are here to do as you are told or you can leave.’ You
hear it every day, they tell the TPT’s they have no rights and if they don’t
like it they can walk.
“The TPTs pay union dues and are union members but they are not
treated that way. One TPT felt what he was being told to do was unsafe. The
team leader and the union rep told the TPT he better do it or he would lose his
job. That worker was paying for his kids to go to school and he felt he had no
choice.
“With the holidays approaching, the company is hiring 50 TPTs
every week until the end of the year. That gives management more leverage to
tell these workers, ‘You do what you’re told or we’ve got a lot of workers
willing to take your job.’
“We are all under stress to pay our bills. At the Jeep plant, they
have hundreds of workers from Detroit who were employed under what most people
think was a kickback scheme for former UAW Vice President General Holiefield. A
lot of these workers were on welfare and are too poor to have a car to come to
work. There is a service called ‘V-Ride’ that drives about 700 workers in vans
from Detroit to the Toledo plant each day. On top of the stress of working
here, and the poverty many of these workers face, they have to come an hour and
a half to work each day.
“If a TPT is a half hour from work or just about to get there, the
company can call them and tell them they aren’t needed for the day, and they
won’t get paid. If they’ve already stepped in the plant when they get a call,
they are supposed to get paid for four hours. There are problems with the new
Jeep launch and they called off a lot of TPTs coming in for a shift. One worker
said she lost $50 that day after paying for gas and a babysitter.
“They try to get you before you come through the gates, and, if
you do, they hope you’ll just get upset and leave instead of sticking around. A
lot of TPTs don’t know the company has to pay them for four hours if they stay
there for four hours. Some just get sick of waiting and leave but others wait
or try to find someplace to sleep. If they are found sleeping they can get
fired.
“We just had a TPT fired for being sick for three days. It’s
better to be off sick for five days and hope that Human Resources will excuse
you with a doctor’s note. If you are out three days you have to rely on a
supervisor who has the power to accept or decline a doctor’s note. We’ve had
TPTs who get pregnant and have to be off for doctor’s visits. If they don’t
have a good relationship with their supervisors, they will let you go. You
can’t qualify for FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) protections unless you’ve
worked 1,250 hours.
“A lot of times, the company will screw up the hours you worked or
mark a TPT late even though they were on time. They can be called into work to
replace someone who went home early. That might mean a TPT arrives, let’s say
at 7:30 or later in the morning, instead of the regular start time for the
shift. They could be given an ‘occurrence’ for coming in late even though they
came in on time. I don’t know what the policy is at Ford but we should look to
see if that happened to Jacoby. After three ‘occurrences,’ which include
latenesses or absences, they will fire you.”
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