Teachers unions intensify efforts to suppress growing class struggle in the US
20
March 2018
On Sunday
night, the National Education Association (NEA) shut down the strike by 4,000
teachers and support staff in Jersey City, the second-largest school district
in the state of New Jersey. The NEA ordered educators to return to their
classrooms without providing any details on the tentative deal, let alone
allowing workers to vote on it. Presuming that an agreement actually exists, it
will do nothing to address teachers’ demands to end soaring health care costs.
The
one-day strike is the latest in a growing wave of protests and calls for
strikes that have spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona,
Tennessee, Colorado and other states, plus the US territory of Puerto Rico,
where teachers struck against school privatization yesterday.
The
struggle of Jersey City teachers exposes the role of the Democratic Party,
which supports the assault on teachers and public education no less than the
Republicans. At issue is a bill, known as Chapter 78, which forces public
employees to pay up to 35 percent of their medical insurance premiums and
eliminates fully funded pensions for future teachers. It was passed with the
backing of the Democratic-controlled state legislature in 2011.
Within
hours of the beginning of the strike, a Hudson County judge granted the city’s
Democratic Party-controlled school board an injunction to order teachers back
to work on the grotesque grounds that teachers—not the corporate-controlled
politicians—were doing “irreparable harm” to Jersey City school children.
The
Jersey City Education Association (JCEA) is acting in the same manner as the
unions in West Virginia, which opposed any struggle of teachers and worked to
end it and impose a sell-out deal as soon as they could. Under conditions of a
growing desire for a unified fight across the country, the NEA, the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the other state-affiliated organizations see
as their central task the suppression of class struggle. They will do exactly
the same thing wherever a struggle emerges, and not only among teachers.
Any worker who wants to understand the nature of these
organizations should make a careful study of the article, “If the Supreme Court
rules against unions, conservatives won’t like what happens next,” published in
the Washington Post on March 1. Written by Shaun Richman, a
former organizing director of the AFT, it spells out in extraordinarily blunt
terms the value of the unions for the American ruling class.
The motivation for Richman’s comment is the ongoing US Supreme
Court case of Janus vs. AFSCME, which will
rule on the constitutionality of “agency fees”—the requirement that workers in
public-sector unions in some states pay the equivalent of dues to unions even
if they are not members.
“What the
Janus backers (and most commentators) miss is that agency fees are not just
compensation for the financial costs of representation,” Richman says, “but for
the political costs of representing all the members in the bargaining unit and
maintaining labor peace. As AFSCME’s lawyer pointed out in his oral arguments,
the agency fee is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in most union
contracts. Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and
discord on their hands.”
That is, the steady income stream for these organizations—in the
form of a portion of workers’ income automatically deducted from their
paychecks—is quid pro quo for the “political cost” of
“maintaining labor peace” by preventing strikes.
Richman continues: “American labor laws, and the employers
who benefit from them, prefer that if there’s going to be a union, only one
should serve as the exclusive representative of all eligible employees in a
workplace. That scheme imposes on unions a legal obligation to fairly represent
all members of the bargaining unit, and a political imperative to
defend the terms of any deal as ‘the best we could get’ (even if it
includes concessions on benefits and work rules). It rewards the unions
with a guaranteed right to exist and a reliable base of fee-paying membership.
But it rewards employers with the far more valuable guarantee of
the right to direct the uninterrupted work of the enterprise while union
leadership has to tamp down rank-and-file gripes and discord for
the length of the contract.” (emphasis added).
That is,
it is not a matter of these organizations representing the workers against the
employers, but of them representing the employers against the workers—by
tamping down “rank-and-file gripes [!] and discord.” The unions are rewarded
with an income stream, the companies are rewarded (far more!) with
uninterrupted work, and the workers are “rewarded”…with concessions on benefits
and work rules.
Exclusive
representation, mandatory agency fees, no-strike clauses and “management’s
rights,” Richman declares, “are the foundation of our peculiar labor relations
system,” which, he says, is different from virtually every other country.
Richman’s
reference to the “peculiar” system of labor relations in America perhaps
unconsciously harkens back to an earlier “peculiar institution” in America,
chattel slavery. In any case, Richman is describing an arrangement that emerged
in the postwar period in which the unions, both private- and public-sector,
agreed to forego any challenge to the rights of management in the workplace.
This was bound up with a ruthless purge from the unions of socialist and
left-wing militants that formed the backbone of the movement for industrial
unionism in the 1930s.
In a 1956
address to arbitrators, Arthur Goldberg, the general counsel for the United
Steelworkers of America (later Secretary of Labor under Kennedy, and Supreme
Court justice), enumerated on management’s “inherent rights,” which were “not
modified or diminished” by collective bargaining. “The union cannot direct its
members to their work stations or work assignments… The union does not notify
people who are discharged to stay put. The union does not tell employees to
report for work after a layoff… Very often union men are disturbed by decisions
they consider entirely wrong. Nevertheless, a company’s right to make its own
judgments is clear.”
During
the postwar period, under conditions of economic growth and the undisputed sway
of US corporations over the world economy, workers were able to win certain
gains despite the domination of the unions by right-wing bureaucrats.
This
changed as American capitalism began its historical economic decline and the
ruling class shifted from a policy of relative class compromise to class war
and social counterrevolution. When Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers
and jailed their leaders, the AFL-CIO did nothing, initiating a decades-long
wave of unending betrayals that continues to this day. Incapable of any
progressive response to capitalist globalization, the unions blocked any
resistance by workers and colluded with corporations to shut down plants and
wipe out millions of jobs.
During
this period the unions went through a fundamental transformation. Though they
still called themselves “unions,” they abandoned any of the tasks traditionally
associated with unions, including calling strikes, addressing workplace
grievances and opposing speedup and management abuse. Far from expanding the
share of national income that goes to the working class, the unions colluded
with the corporations and the government to reduce that share, in order to
increase the share that goes to the top five percent of the population.
If the
American union leaders were to “defend the income of the bourgeoisie from
attacks on the part of workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes,
against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would
have an organization of scabs, not a trade union,” Leon Trotsky noted in 1937.
This is
exactly what these organizations have become. It is necessary to avoid the
tyranny of language. While workers have a desire to unite and organize joint
opposition, they confront in the “unions,” not workers organizations, but
corporatist instruments of management and the state, controlled by privileged,
upper-middle-class executives. (AFT President Randi Weingarten has an annual
salary of half a million dollars, while Richman was paid $200,000 for his
“service” at the AFT).
The
greatest fear of these organizations is that opposition will develop outside of
their control. If the Janus ruling undermines the monopoly of the unions,
Richman warns of “new unions that are more left-wing and militant (or at least
crankier)” and “will not be satisfied with the current work rules and
compensation and will have little incentive to settle.”
All those
pseudo-left organizations that defend the unions do so because they want to
maintain the organizational stranglehold that they have over the working class.
They denounce the Socialist Equality Party as “sectarian” for supposedly
refusing to “work within the unions.” In fact, the SEP carries out its
political work wherever workers are, including in the corporatist syndicates,
but it does so to fight for the independent organization and revolutionary
initiative of the working class, not to uphold the authority of
anti-working-class organizations.
For the
working class, what is posed is not the formation of new unions that accept and
defend capitalist property relations, let alone simply replacing the existing
leadership. While there may be something “peculiar” about the openness within
which unions in the US embraced the domination of management, the same process
of degeneration and transformation has occurred within the nationalist,
pro-capitalist labor organizations around the world.
Rank-and-file
factory and workplace committees, based on the needs and rights of the workers,
must be built to unify all sections of the working class in a common struggle.
In opposition to the UAW, AFT, NEA and other corporatist organizations, these
organizations must reject the subordination of the interests of the working
class to the capitalist system and the state, and the relentless demands for
austerity to enrich the financial oligarchy and finance new wars. Instead of
acceding to management dictatorship in the factories and workplaces, these
committees must assert the right to organize collective action to oppose all
forms of corporate abuse and exploitation.
Above
all, these committees must reject the lies peddled by Democrats and
Republicans, who say there is no money for public education, decent wages,
health care and pensions for public employees, while they squander trillions on
corporate tax cuts and endless wars.
While
fighting for such rank-and-file committees, the Socialist Equality Party
insists that the class struggle must be fused with a new, socialist perspective
and that the fight for the right to public education, living wages and fully
paid health care and pension benefits, will not be possible outside of the
independent political mobilization of the working class and a frontal assault
on the entrenched wealth and power of the capitalist exploiters.
Jerry
White
PARTNER WITH MEXICO, the LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY and the
PRO-BUSINESS GOP to keep wages for LEGALS depressed (today they are depressed
to 1973 levels).
But you will still get the tax bills for the Mex welfare state and
crime tidal wave!
*
“Illegal
aliens are not supposed to work, and knowingly providing shelter for illegal
aliens can be construed as harboring and shielding, elements of a felony under
federal law, Title 8 U.S. Code §
1324.”
“Where aliens
and jobs are concerned, even many categories of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary
visitors) including aliens who lawfully enter under the Visa Waiver Program or
with tourist visas may not work in the United States and immediately become
subject to removal (deportation) if they seek gainful employment.”
----MICHAEL CUTLER – FRONTPAGE mag
IMPOSE E-VERIFY AND YOU INSTANTLY CREATE MILLIONS MORE JOBS AND
FORCE WAGES UP!
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:
E-Verify Ignored in DACA
Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’
Members of Congress broadly oppose a
legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it
will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not
being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients
of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests
supportive of “mass migration.”
DEATH BY CORRUPTION:
What caused the destruction of the bankster-funded LA
RAZA SUPREAMCY Democrat Party in America?
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/07/peter-beinart-how-democrats-lost-their.html
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His
Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same
“special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are
profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers,
small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative
reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and
the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is
delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling
corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s
Obamanomics.
*
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same
“special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting
handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small
businesses, and consumers.
*
WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T
KNOW?
*
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are
employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS
JOHN McCAIN
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
July 1st 2008
Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack
Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg
Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.
Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to
raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have
contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily
News analysis of campaign records shows.
*
“The administration has been pushing hard for a settlement among
state attorneys general, the nation's five largest mortgage servicers — Bank
of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells
Fargo &
Co., Citigroup
Inc. and Ally
Financial Inc. — and certain federal agencies.”
OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY BETWEEN THE ACTOR
PRESIDENT, AND HIS BANKSTER DONORS!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants -Goldman Sachs
($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION
DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created
more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also
had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s
terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment