“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD
FEW HAVE FOUGHT HARDER AGAINST AMERICAN WORKERS THAN NAFTA JOE BIDEN!
Nabisco workers at three US production plants go on strike
Some 200 workers at a Nabisco bakery in northeast Portland, Oregon, went out on an indefinite strike on Tuesday, August 10, demanding, among other things, a fair contract and a halt to company plans to change the traditional workweek schedule. They have now been joined by hundreds of Nabisco bakery workers in Richmond, Virginia, and Aurora, Colorado.
Nabisco workers have been confronting years of deteriorating working conditions, the elimination of pensions, cuts in health care benefits and the threat of plant closures.
Despite the record profits Nabisco has made during the pandemic, with revenue rising 2.8 percent to $26.6 billion in 2020, the company is attempting to slash the living standards of its workers even more brutally than in previous contracts.
In 2016, Mondelez International, the parent company of Nabisco, slashed half of the Nabisco production lines at its Chicago plant and laid off over 400 workers, while closing its Fairlawn, New Jersey, and Atlanta, Georgia, plants, slashing over 1,000 jobs in total.
In 2018, the company eliminated the pensions of thousands of workers and retirees, instead shifting to a 401(k) plan, two years after the contract with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers (BCTGM) expired.
Instead of mobilizing its thousands of members in defense of the pension of the Nabisco workers, the BCTGM belatedly agreed to the elimination of pensions, after it had already been in effect, two years later in April 2020.
Now the workers are fighting against the attempts of the company to eliminate daily overtime after eight hours and premium pay for working weekends, as well as an increase of temp workers by 25 percent and further cuts in health benefits.
The BCTGM union, which “represents” Nabisco bakers in the US, has attempted to divert the focus of the strike to attacks on workers in Mexico. It has stated for the last decade that the main issue confronting the Nabisco workers is “outsourcing” of jobs to Nabisco plants in Mexico, and called for a reactionary boycott of all Nabisco products made in Mexico.
BCTGM International President Anthony Shelton issued a statement on the strike, declaring that, “In all three locations, our courageous members are speaking with one clear, strong voice. They are telling Nabisco to put an end to the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and get off the ridiculous demand for contract concessions at a time when the company is making record profits.”
Despite the rhetoric about contract concessions, the unions have collaborated with the company to lower labor costs in order to boost profits off the backs of workers. As a result Nabisco workers have faced a relentless assault on their standard of living and the complete elimination of pensions.
The BCTGM is isolating the strike from the rest of the working class, including workers in Mexico and the thousands of workers which work for the parent company Mondelez International, along with other snack food production workers, such as Frito-Lay workers, who face the same dire working conditions.
A BCTGM member wrote on Twitter, “I feel for the guys in Portland. At least they had the guts to go out and fight. International waited til they closed 2 plants and lose 1000 Union members to now have a local of less than 250 members to strike???”
The fact that the Nabisco workers from the three different facilities went on strike simultaneously shows there is a willingness to fight, but for their strike to succeed, workers at Nabisco must take stock of the experiences of the Frito-Lay strike.
Workers went on strike at Kansas and Topeka Frito-Lay factories after rejecting four sellout agreements brought to the workers by the BCTGM. The strike was shut down by the BCTGM after starving workers on meager strike pay and then forcing through a sellout. As the WSWS noted, “The BCTGM bears full responsibility for the passing of the agreement. The contract will not alleviate the brutal working conditions, and in the next contract negotiations, the BCTGM will feign amnesia as it denounces working conditions it agreed to and enforced.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” --- Karen McQuillan
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama, Joe Biden BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Exclusive–J.D. Vance: Ruling Class ‘Actually Enjoys Plundering the Greatest Country in the World’
J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, says the nation’s ruling class “actually enjoys plundering the greatest country in the world” rather than investing in American communities.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, Vance said a “fundamental problem” in the U.S. is that economic and political elites have no obligation to America’s working and middle class.
LISTEN:
“I think a lot of these people have unfortunately convinced themselves that they don’t owe anything to the country that gave them so much wealth and so much power,” Vance said:
It’s not just the bad policies of the Biden administration that we have to push back against, that’s obviously important, it’s the entire leadership class in this country in the government, in the bureaucracy, in the private sector … these people do not see themselves as Americans first, as owing an obligation to the country that gave them all the incredible opportunities. And that is maybe the fundamental problem in this country: The ruling class that instead of investing in this country — building institutions, making the people who live here wealthier, happier, more prosperous — it actually enjoys plundering the greatest country in the world because it doesn’t see that it owes anything to the people who live here, to the previous generations that actually built this country. [Emphasis added]
On immigration, for instance, Vance said economic elites are stripping investment from middle America and sending that money to the coasts as a result of their desire for mass illegal and legal immigration to drive down U.S. wages.
Vance said:
I was at a dinner in 2017, 2018 with a lot of corporate leaders. I was sitting next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in the world. He said ‘Look, President Trump’s immigration policies are forcing me to raise wages for my workers’ and he was complaining about this. And I said ‘Okay, well explain this to me.’ And he said ‘Look, in the past, if I wanted workers, I could just go across the southern border and get a bunch of Central American foreigners to do this job for poverty wages but now because I can’t tap into those people, I have to go to Americans and I have to give them higher wages to do it.’ And again, this guy was talking about this like it was a bad thing but this is what the elites do with immigration is they use it to undercut the wages of American workers. [Emphasis added]
…
The other problem is that it actually takes investment away from our own communities. The whole way that our economy grows is by investing long-term in the American worker and American productivity. But if you can just get cheap people at poverty wages anyway, you’re not going to invest in your own communities, you’re not going to invest in your own country and that makes us poorer over the long term. It’s no surprise that maybe the biggest competitor to the United States right now is China — a very low immigration society that has generated its economic gains by investing in its own economy, not foreign workers. [Emphasis added]
Vance also railed against President Joe Biden and the national security establishment for their botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan after former President George W. Bush launched the war in October 2001.
“I’m sick of sending our people to that country to die and to bleed and to suffer, to spend our money for a country that clearly doesn’t want the things that our leaders want them to have,” Vance said.
“This should be a national scandal. We have been told for 20 years that if we just invest a little more in this far-fledged region of the world that we’re going to turn this place into a flowering democracy,” Vance continued:
We have been gone for a few weeks and Afghan army has revealed itself to be a total farce … why isn’t it a national scandal that this army that we built for 20 years folded in the face of the Taliban in a matter of a few weeks. Heads should roll over this. This is the biggest problem with our country. When our leadership screws up, there’s no accountability. Why is there no accountability for the people who told us that Afghanistan was heading in the right direction? Clearly, it wasn’t and they should suffer the consequences for lying to us. [Emphasis added]
On inflation, Vance said he is “so sick” of Biden and elected Democrats proclaiming themselves to be defenders of the working class when they are attempting to drive up federal spending at the risk of raising prices on working and middle class Americans, and specifically, senior citizens.
“This is a disaster for middle class Americans and you know who it’s really a disaster for is seniors who live on a fixed income,” Vance said. “This inflation, which is really just a tax on the middle class, is the biggest tax on our seniors that you could imagine.”
“I think about the Democrats, they have this self-confident assurance that they stand for working people and I get so sick of it,” Vance continued. “Let’s go talk to the grandparents who are raising their grandbabies in southeast Ohio and tell them that you stand for working people when the basic essentials that they depend on are going up 5, 10, 15 percent. It makes me sick and these people, our people, need somebody to fight for them.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
In the wake of the sycophantic eulogies to late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, it is worthwhile to review the biography of a man whose life embodied the transformation of the US unions from working class organizations into corrupt appendages of corporate management and the state.
The universal praise that Trumka has won, from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America on the nominal “left,” to the pages of the Wall Street Journal , comes not despite this record, but because of it. The suppression by the unions of organized resistance to the class war policies of big business has helped lift the stock market to record heights, filling the portfolios of the wealthy and their well-heeled political and media hangers on.
Trumka embodied the reactionary instincts of a corrupt and privileged labor bureaucracy, steeped in anti-communism and nationalism, that long ago separated the unions from any connection to the defense of workers.
Trumka started his career as a lawyer, not a miner. He worked on the staff of Arnold Miller, who was elected UMWA president in a Labor Department-supervised election in 1972. The US government saw Miller as a “safe” alternative to the corrupt, gangster leadership of Tony Boyle, which had organized the murder of Boyle’s chief opponent, “Jock” Yablonski, in December 1969.
Miller, however, was forced to resign in the wake of the bitter 1977-1978 national coal miners strike in which miners defied a Taft Hartley strikebreaking injunction imposed by Democrat Jimmy Carter. Miners twice rejected contracts supported by Miller, and he faced a mounting rebellion by the rank-and-file.
The stand taken by the miners against the Carter administration led big business to conclude that the militancy of the American working class had to be decisively curbed in order to restore the competitiveness of US industry facing global economic pressure. In 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as head of the US Federal Reserve who drove up interest rates to unprecedented levels. Mass layoffs and industrial bankruptcies spread. In 1979, the United Auto Workers agreed to unprecedented concessions to Chrysler.
The attacks escalated with the firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers by newly elected President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The AFL-CIO refused to defend PATCO, encouraging a wave of unionbusting throughout the US.
After Miller’s resignation, Trumka went back to work in the mines in order to be eligible to run for union office. His chance came in 1982, when he won election running against UMWA President Sam Church, reviled for a 1981 sellout deal with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association. While Trumka was elected on a platform of “no concessions,” he in fact presided a series of disastrous defeats. He abandoned the tradition of national strikes in favor of a “selective strike” policy that left miners isolated in unequal struggles against mine owners backed by police and armed thugs.
Trumka preached collaboration with the bosses, insisting that miners had to help slash labor costs so that US-base coal companies could undercut overseas competitors. In place of the militant traditions of mass picketing, Trumka substituted toothless civil disobedience stunts and appeals to corporate stockholders.
Trumka’s treachery, which paralleled the betrayals being carried out by unions across the US, reflected the response of labor bureaucracies around the world to the deepening crisis of world capitalism. Based on their pro-capitalist and nationalist program, the US the unions worked to slash wages and benefits in order to boost the declining competitive position of coal, steel, auto and other US industries.
The events in the US were part of a global process involving the transformation of nationalist labor bureaucracies into direct appendages of the corporations. This was epitomized by the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The A.T. Massey and Pittston strikes
In the A.T. Massey strike of 1984-85, Trumka refused to mobilize the union’s 100,000 strong membership in support of the striking workers. He eventually called off the strike, caving to management and leaving hundreds of miners fired and blacklisted.
In the wake of the strike, five A.T. Massey workers were framed up for involvement in the shooting of a scab coal truck driver. Four of the miners were eventually convicted and sentenced to decades in prison. UMWA Local 2496 President Donnie Thornsbury, David Thornsbury, Arnold Heightland, James Darryl Smith were only released starting in 2007. A fifth miner, Paul Smith, was acquitted. Trumka never lifted a finger to defend the men or assist their stricken families.
In 1989, nine miners on selective strike at Milburn Collieries in West Virginia were arrested and framed up on charges of arson, bombing and conspiracy. The UMWA pressured eight of the nine miners to plead guilty, while a ninth miner refused to plead guilty and was later acquitted after it was revealed at trial that a government provocateur had staged the incident.
In the 1989-1990 strike against Pittston Coal Company, Trumka again imposed a selective strike policy and organized a defeat. Trumka even ordered Pittston miners in some locations to continue working, effectively scabbing on their brothers on the picket line. While coddling the coal operators, the UMWA leadership targeted supporters of the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party, and their newspaper the Bulletin, invoking violent red baiting in an unsuccessful attempt to keep them off the picket lines.
One day after a mass rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in which Workers League supporters distributed a statement calling on miners to defy Trumka and spread the Pittston strike, a wildcat walkout ensued that at one point involved 50,000 miners in 11 states.
Trumka made himself scarce during the wildcat, afraid to speak in front of militant miners demanding decisive action in support of the Pittston workers.
In the midst of the wildcat action, Trumka issued a desperate plea to the coal bosses and the government, warning that the union’s effort to bring stability to the coalfields was being undermined by Pittston.
In a candid and revealing statement, Trumka warned that if the union was broken, “When it comes back, I think the form of the union probably will be different. Its tolerance for injustice will be far less and its willingness to alibi for a system that we know doesn’t work will be nonexistent.”
In other words, the role of the unions was to “alibi” for a system that doesn’t work, capitalism.
Trumka eventually secured a return to work based on the lying claim that Pittston was retreating from its demands. He eventually signed a sellout deal with Pittston, dictated by the Bush administration, granting all management’s major demands, including around-the-clock, seven-day production and an end to contributions to the UMWA 1950 Benefit Fund.
In the wake of this betrayal, UMWA miner John McCoy was killed in an ambush by company thugs while picketing a nonunion mine near Welch, West Virginia. Over 700 miners attending the funeral, but Trumka and UMWA Vice President Cecil Roberts refused to show. Three weeks later, the UMWA cut off strike benefits to his widow and children.
Trumka likewise abandoned another West Virginia miner, Jerry Dale Lowe, who was arrested and tried for the shooting of a nonunion contractor at an Arch Mineral mine in Logan County, West Virginia in 1993. The UMWA collaborated with the prosecution in helping railroad Lowe, who ultimately was sentenced to 11 years without parole on federal charges of interference with interstate commerce.
The results of the defeats inflicted on the coal miners, the most militant section of the American working class, were devastating. UMWA membership plummeted while strikes virtually ceased. Nonunion coal production spread in former union strongholds such as eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.
However, as union membership plummeted the UMWA, like other unions, established ever-closer corporatist ties to management. While betraying workers interests, the UMWA secured new, lucrative sources of income through these measures.
In the following decades, Democratic and Republican administrations have moved to scrap health and safety protections won by miners in previous years, such as limits on coal dust exposure. This has led to a resurgence of deadly and incurable black lung among miners in the Appalachian coal regions.
Trumka left the UMWA in 1995 to take a post as AFL-CIO secretary treasurer, the number two man behind the newly installed president, John Sweeney. Under Sweeney, the unions continued to hemorrhage members while living standards for workers declined further. To help shore up the union apparatus, Sweeney enlisted the support of various pseudo-left groups, such as those around Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
In 1996, Sweeny was caught up in a scandal involving a scheme to illegally divert Teamster dues money to the re-election campaign of TDU-backed Teamster President Ron Carey through the intermediary of Democratic Party-aligned donors. The election was later voided.
Testimony revealed Trumka was involved in discussions over funneling AFL-CIO money to the Carey campaign as part of the scheme. In 1997, Trumka invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify on the matter. Sweeney, however, refused to sack Trumka despite union rules requiring the dismissal of union officials invoking the fifth.
Trumka’s tenure as AFL-CIO president
Trumka was elevated to the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 2009. Almost immediately after being sworn in, Trumka oversaw the restructuring of the auto industry and the halving of wages for new hires imposed by the Obama administration with the support of the United Auto Workers and the AFL-CIO.
Under Trumka, strike activity in the US fell to new lows, with just five large strikes in 2009 and seven in 2017. At the same time, social inequality reached new heights. By 2016, the net worth of the richest 400 Americans rose to $2.4 trillion while wages stagnated, temporary and part time worked expanded and student loan debt soared.
Disillusionment with Obama paved the way for the election of the far-right demagogue Donald Trump in 2016. Trumka immediately sought to find common ground with the Trump administration on the basis of strident American nationalism and trade war against the foreign rival of US capitalism, in the first place China.
Trumka accepted an appointment to Trump’s Presidential Council on Manufacturing, sitting side-by-side with a who’s who of top corporate executives. He later criticized trade war measures taken by the Trump administration against China as insufficiently aggressive.
He later lent his support to the restructuring of the North America Free Trade Agreement. The replacement for NAFTA, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, is a protectionist bloc directly aimed at China as well as America’s European rivals.
Trumka’s last years were marked by a resurgence of class struggle in the US, with the eruption of teachers rebellions in West Virginia and other states in defiance of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. In 2019, workers at General Motors carried out a 40-day strike, the first major auto walkout in decades. In every case, the AFL-CIO worked to isolate and defeat the struggles of workers.
With the eruption of the global pandemic in 2020, the AFL-CIO collaborated with the Trump administration and big business to impose the homicidal policy of workplace and school re-openings that are continuing to take a terrible toll on human life.
Under the Democratic Biden administration, Trumka and the AFL-CIO put their full resources behind suppressing mounting worker opposition to the herd immunity and austerity policies of the corporations. The AFL-CIO has worked to isolate and betray a series of militant strikes, including Hunts Point workers and graduate students in New York, St. Vincent nurses in Massachusetts and Warrior Met coal miners in Alabama.
Since taking office, the Biden administration has sought to shore up the unions as a critical bulwark against growing social discontent. Biden’s program, embraced by the various pseudo left organizations, is aimed at the further corporatist integration of the unions into governmental/business structures in the interest of suppressing the class struggle and preparing for war. This was underscored by the appointment by Biden of a task force to encourage the institutionalization of the unions that will include Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chairman Janet Yellen.
Just before his death, Trumka recorded a speech addressed to Warrior Met coal miners in Alabama who have been on strike five months after rebelling against a sellout contract foisted by Trumka’s successor as president of the UMWA Cecil Roberts. Trumka engaged in his trademark demagogy, declaring, “I stand with my brothers and sisters at Warrior Met … I’ll stand with you for as long it takes for you to win a fair contract.”
In reality, the AFL-CIO has not lifted a finger to aid the Warrior Met miners, while the workers have been starved on a strike pay of $325 per week.
The walkout at Warrior Met is part of an incipient insurgency against the very trade union apparatuses that Trumka served for so long. In the background of the worried paeans to Trumka from the Democratic Party and establishment media are concerns that the unions are losing their ability to suppress the class struggle.
This was evident in the five-week strike by Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia, who voted down by massive margins sellout contracts brought back by the United Auto Workers. With the assistance of the World Socialist Web Site, Volvo workers established the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee independent of the UAW. The committee quickly emerged as a focal point of opposition to the attempts by the UAW to isolate and betray the strike. It issued appeals for support to Volvo workers in other states as well as globally.
It is critical for workers to assimilate the lessons of this record and draw appropriate conclusions. In the first place, to organize their struggles workers need new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves. These committees, uniting workers in different factories and industries, establishing global links, must advance demands corresponding to the needs of workers, not the profit requirements of big business.
This points to the necessity of fighting for socialism, the reorganization of society based on production for human needs, not private profit.
In opposition to the reactionary nationalism peddled by the unions, workers of all countries must unite in defense of their shared interests. This is doubly true under conditions of a global pandemic, escalating climate disaster and preparation for world war. We call on workers to take up the call by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International for the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. Only a unified international movement of the working class, independent of the nationalist and pro-capitalist unions, can secure the future of humanity.
Federal corruption probe of UAW officials continues
The federal investigation into corruption by officials in the United Auto Workers union (UAW) is continuing, according to a report earlier this week by the Detroit News, despite the settlement reached between the US government and the UAW last December.
The years-long investigation has revealed widespread criminality among the top echelons of the UAW, including bribe-taking in exchange for company-friendly agreements, embezzlement of union dues, and kickback schemes with vendors. The illicit funds were used to pay for lavish lifestyles for UAW executives, such as months-long getaways at Palm Springs, endless golf outings, luxury goods and high-priced meals. While the incomes of UAW officials swelled though both illegal and “legal” means over the last 40 years, workers’ jobs and livelihoods have been decimated in one sellout contract after another.
To date, 12 UAW officials, including two of the last four union presidents, and three Fiat Chrysler employees have pleaded guilty to various charges stemming from the investigation.
In December, the UAW and federal prosecutors settled the government’s case against the union itself. Neil Barofksy, a former regulator of the bank bailouts during the Bush and Obama administrations, was selected in April by the US Attorney’s office as the independent monitor tasked with overseeing and enforcing the terms of the six-year consent decree established by the settlement.
According to the Detroit News, federal prosecutors requested last month that Barofsky be granted access to search warrants and related documents from earlier in its investigation. As monitor, Barofsky is nominally tasked with continuing to investigate corruption within the UAW and has the ability to initiate disciplinary proceedings against UAW officials for criminal behavior or for associating with “barred persons,” including those indicted in the corruption probe.
Significantly, the US Attorney’s court filing states that “[s]ome of the overall investigation remains pending,” and asked that the search warrant documents remain sealed and unavailable to the public. Federal prosecutors had indicated in a filing earlier this summer that the government had “not yet completed its criminal investigation of all targets of the UAW corruption investigation.”
Additionally, Barofksy is reportedly set to meet with former UAW President Gary Jones, who oversaw the sabotage and betrayal of the 40-day General Motors strike in 2019. Jones was indicted and pleaded guilty for his role in a scheme to embezzle over $1 million in workers’ dues.
Clearly desperate to serve as little as possible of his slap-on-the-wrist sentence of 28 months in a white-collar prison, Jones may well be seeking to rat out more of his fellow gangsters. The Detroit News reported that Jones aided federal prosecutors in securing the indictment of Dennis Williams, Jones’s predecessor as UAW president. Williams also pleaded guilty to his role in the embezzlement scheme and received a similarly light 24-month sentence.
The News points to one current UAW vice president, Cindy Estrada, and one former, Jimmy Settles, as potential targets of the ongoing federal investigation.
Settles oversaw the UAW’s Ford department until his retirement in 2018, after which he received a lucrative appointment from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan as head of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods. According to the News, members of Settles’s staff were previously questioned by federal investigators, who also issued grand jury subpoenas, as part of their probe of his ties to a top union vendor.
Estrada, for her part, currently oversees the UAW’s Stellantis department, as well at its department of higher education, having previously led the union’s GM department. Estrada is particularly despised among autoworkers for her role in negotiating secret agreements with GM to outsource jobs at its Lake Orion and Lordstown Assembly plants, which in the latter case was the prelude to the shutdown of the plant.
Like her fellow top UAW executives, Estrada has seen her pay rise dramatically over the last decade, taking in $220,506 in compensation in 2020, up from $167,000 in 2015, while autoworker pay has consistently failed to keep up with inflation. UAW tax filings also show that the union paid more than $7,000 in legal fees for Estrada between 2019 and 2020. Estrada had previously been vying earlier this year for the position of UAW secretary-treasurer but withdrew from the running.
Charities run by Estrada and Settles were reportedly the subject of earlier investigations by federal prosecutors. A charity run by then-UAW Vice President for Chrysler General Holiefield, the “Leave the Light on Foundation,” was found by prosecutors to be the conduit for payouts from company executives. Holiefield died in 2015, before he could be indicted.
While the Detroit News, which has maintained close ties to federal officials throughout their investigation, pointed to Estrada and Settles as targets, they are by no means the only possibilities. Rory Gamble, who retired as UAW president at the end of June, was previously cited as the subject of investigations by the News. Current UAW President Ray Curry, who was union secretary-treasurer from the beginning of the federal corruption probe, has also had legal fees paid for by the UAW for unexplained reasons over recent years.
As the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter previously explained, Barofsky’s powers as independent monitor are limited to responding to only the most egregious misconduct within the union, and he does not have oversight over contract negotiations between the companies and the UAW, which will retain their pro-corporate character.
At the same time, the selection of Barofsky—a prominent critic of the Wall Street bank bailout program following the 2008 economic crisis—is an indication of the seriousness with which the government continues to view the question of the UAW’s stability. The Biden administration and broader sections of the state are no doubt concerned that the UAW’s credibility among workers continues to disintegrate despite the years-long effort to “clean up” the most blatant criminality by union executives.
The growing hostility of workers toward the UAW has been increasingly apparent this year, above all in the rebellion of workers at Volvo Trucks in Virginia. Workers there carried out two strikes and rejected three UAW-backed concessions agreements in recent months, with the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee leading the opposition to the union’s attempts to force through sharp increases in health care costs and the continuation of the tier system.
Contrary to prosecutors’ claims, any attempts by the state to carry out a further mopping-up operation of the worst criminals in the UAW are not aimed at making it into an organization that “represents the membership.” Rather, it is an effort to perform a cosmetic makeover on a fundamentally pro-corporate, anti-worker institution, one that has become a business in its own right, with over a billion dollars in assets.
Workers cannot place any trust in the Justice Department, which represents the interests of the corporations and the financial elite. To reverse the decades of wage and benefit concessions given up by the UAW, a real movement of the workers from below is required. To help meet this need, the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter is assisting workers in establishing a network of rank-and-file committees. To learn more about joining or forming a committee at your workplace, sign up today.
The policies of the Biden administration have been driven by the interests of Wall Street and the super-rich.
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Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
Six months of the Biden administration—A balance sheet
Six months ago, Joseph Biden was inaugurated president of the United States, under conditions of unprecedented crisis of US capitalism and the entire social and political order.
His predecessor, Donald Trump, did not attend the ceremony, signaling his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Only two weeks before, on January 6, Trump’s supporters had stormed the Capitol and temporarily halted the congressional certification of state electoral votes. The aim of the attempted coup was to stop the transfer of power and establish a personalist dictatorship. In the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment.”
When Biden took office, 400,000 people were dead from the COVID-19 pandemic, while millions were unemployed. Just months earlier, every city, town, and village in America had seen protests in opposition to police violence.
Biden marked the six-month anniversary with brief remarks presenting American society in glowing terms. “For all those predictions of doom and gloom six months in, here’s where things stand,” he said. “Record growth, record job creation, workers getting hard-earned breaks.” He added, “Put simply: Our economy is on the move, and we have COVID-19 on the run.”
Summing up his prognosis, the US president proclaimed: “It turns out capitalism is alive and very well.” The truth is that the policies of the Biden administration have entirely failed to resolve the social crisis in America and they cannot, because they are based on the framework of American capitalism.
The pandemic, far from being “on the run,” is undergoing a new resurgence. Since Biden took office, an additional 225,000 people have died from the pandemic. All indications are that by the winter, with the new surge accompanying the spread of the Delta variant, the death toll under Biden will have exceeded that under Trump.
The policies of the Biden administration have been driven by the interests of Wall Street and the super-rich. This is why, despite occasional criticisms of Trump’s callous and anti-scientific response to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has pursued the same policy of restoring corporate profit-making by forcing workers back to work and children back to school as quickly as possible, regardless of the dangers to their lives and health.
Trump’s response to the economic depression that accompanied the onset of the pandemic was to pour trillions into bolstering the banks, hedge funds and corporations, with bipartisan bills like the CARES Act. Biden pursues essentially the same policy, although with less support from the Republicans than the Democrats gave Trump. He boasts of success on the economic front, although seven million fewer workers have jobs today than before the pandemic began, and millions face wage cuts, poverty, eviction and foreclosure.
Only in foreign policy is there a significant shift from Trump to Biden, and this in tactics only, not strategy. Biden has placed more emphasis on the US utilization of NATO and the “Quad,” a de facto alliance with Japan, Australia and India. Significant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus backed Biden against Trump because they sought a more effective mobilization of US power against Russia and China.
And if Biden’s statement that “capitalism is alive and very well” were true, it begs the question: Why is there a mounting fascist threat to American democracy?
In the six months since Biden’s inauguration, the Republican Party has maintained its intransigent opposition to any serious investigation into the events of January 6. Half-hearted Democratic proposals, first for an “independent” bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, then for a bipartisan congressional investigation, have been blocked outright or endlessly delayed.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to emerge of the central role played by Trump and his allies in Congress in seeking to carry out a political coup d’état to overturn the results of the election and maintain himself in office. But neither Trump nor his accomplices have even been questioned, let alone tried, convicted and jailed.
Instead, Trump has renewed his agitation against the election, seeking to transform the Republican Party into an openly fascistic movement subordinated to his personal authority. And his supporters in the Republican Party are using their control of state legislatures to enact unprecedented and sweeping attacks on the right to vote.
Biden himself acknowledged something of the reality of the crisis of American capitalism in a speech last week in Philadelphia, when he declared “We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” But he offered no way forward, except to appeal to “my Republican friends in the Congress, states and cities and counties to stand up” against this assault—although they are the very ones carrying it out.
In an effort to prop up illusions in the Democratic Party, the representatives of its “left” wing, portray Biden’s policies in extravagant terms. Last week Senator Bernie Sanders claimed that Biden’s “reconciliation” bill on social spending amounted to “the most consequential piece of legislation for working families since the 1930s.” Or, like Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, they express disappointment in what has been achieved so far, but express the hope that “Biden has shown a willingness to think big,” and that additional pressure should be brought to bear on congressional Democrats.
For his part, Biden uses every possible occasion to make clear he has no intention of implementing any measures that challenge the interests of the financial oligarchy, declaring last weekend, “Communism is a failed system, universally failed system. I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute.”
The truth is that the Biden administration is based on Wall Street and the military, mobilizing behind it sections of the upper middle class through the utilization of identity politics. Well aware of the explosive social conditions developing in America, moreover, the administration supports the union “organization” campaign at Amazon and the PRO Act, to make it easier to install unions at work locations where they otherwise would have difficulty convincing workers to pay dues for the privilege of having their wages and benefits cut.
It is telling that when workers engage in genuine anti-corporate struggles, like the strikes waged by autoworkers against Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia, the supposedly “pro-labor” president falls completely silent. Biden is for the unions, not for the workers, because he correctly sees the unions as an instrument of the US ruling class in policing the working class.
Workers must draw the lessons of six months of the Biden administration. None of the problems confronting the working class, from the disastrous pandemic response to unparalleled levels of social inequality, to the danger of imperialist world war and fascist dictatorship, can be addressed without breaking the grip of the financial oligarchy over every aspect of society.
This means breaking with both the Democratic and Republican parties and building a new, mass political party of working people, based on a socialist program. All those who seek to reorganize society to meet human need and not the demands of Wall Street
Ford targeted older salaried employees during 2019 layoffs, documents in age discrimination lawsuit reveal
Ford Motor Company specifically targeted older salaried employees for layoff in a bid to shed pension and other employment expenses during its years-long, multi-billion-dollar cost-cutting campaign, according to recently unearthed emails. The documents, uncovered as part of a class action lawsuit against the company, were obtained by the Detroit Free Press, which published extended interviews with a number of the employees involved in the suit on Friday.
The layoffs took place in 2019 under then-CEO Jim Hackett, who was elevated to his position in 2017 and tasked with carrying out a sweeping restructuring of the company’s global operations to reinvigorate Ford’s slumping share price. Despite an international campaign involving plant closures and thousands of cuts to white and blue collar jobs, Hackett’s “turnaround” plan was ultimately judged to be insufficiently aggressive by Wall Street and he was ousted in 2020, replaced by current CEO Jim Farley last October.
Ford laid off at least 7,000 salaried employees in 2019, 10 percent of its global white collar workforce, as part of its euphemistically named “Smart Redesign” restructuring, as well as 12,000 mostly hourly workers in Europe.
The layoffs were part of what the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter characterized at the time as a jobs bloodbath throughout the auto industry, including most notoriously the 14,000 job cuts and five plant closures by General Motors announced in November 2018. Despite years of record profits, the corporations were seeking to offset stagnating sales and the investment costs in electric vehicles by slashing their workforces and ramping up the output of those who remained.
The lawsuit by a group of salaried employees at Ford, many if not all of whom were in management positions, was initially filed in June 2019, shortly after their termination the prior month. Their suit accuses Ford of violating federal labor and tax law, as well as civil rights protections against age discrimination, when it targeted employees for layoff who were older and had higher pension costs. Ford employees hired before 2004 qualified for pensions, which have come to be viewed as an intolerable drain on profits by America’s financial oligarchy.
In one December 2018 email quoted by the Free Press, a director of a Ford vehicle line at the time told his ex-wife: “As you probably have heard, Ford is in the process of a ‘Smart Organization Redesign’ that is targeted to eliminate 25% of the LL6 through LL2 [a salaried pay grade rating] population by 2nd quarter 2019. They are targeting the most senior leaders first (29+ years of service and 50+ years old).”
According to the suit, Ford hired an outside firm, Boston Consulting Group, which developed an algorithm to find which employees’ termination would reduce costs the most, using birthdates and the number of years employed as factors.
The Free Press cited an email from Ford’s “chief people and employee experience officer,” Kiersten Robinson, who wrote to the consulting group in May 2019 shortly before the layoffs were carried out. Robinson described a board of directors meeting on the layoffs in which they “challenged” whether the layoffs were “aggressive enough” and pressed to make sure “junior” (i.e., younger and lower-cost) employees would be elevated after the cuts: “Thank you again for your help with the BoD [board of directors] discussion on SRD [Smart Redesign]. Overall it went well. There was sensitivity in the room to the employee sentiment, a desire to understand the communications plan, challenging whether we are being aggressive enough and a request to understand/ensure we are using this process to identify and elevate junior talent in the organization. Not sure how we realize this last request. Would love your thoughts.”
A number of those interviewed by the Free Press say that they were months or even weeks away from reaching pension milestones, with the result that their termination left them with only a fraction of the retirement income they had expected. Requests to find some means to bridge the time to reach full retirement age, even if it meant demotion or pay cuts, were coldly rejected by Ford, they said.
One parts distribution manager told the Free Press, “I would have retired at age 50, which is next year, making $60,000 a year in pension. Now I have to wait until age 62 to get $10,500 in pension a year.”
Describing the abrupt manner of his firing, he said he was called into a Ford facility and told his employment was ended “that hour.”
“I had my company car, a Flex, and had to give up my only means of transportation. I couldn’t even get home. I couldn’t pick up my daughter from school. They told me to call Uber but it was such a small town.”
While Hackett himself was ultimately pushed out from his position as CEO, his fate stands in stark contrast to those who suffered the jobs axe below him. Hackett received total compensation of $17.4 million in 2019, and in 2020, he received $16.7 million for just nine months.
Meanwhile, Ford’s large investors are reaping the benefits of the staggering rise in the stock markets during the course of the pandemic, fueled by the provision of virtually free money by central banks. Ford’s share price has risen substantially over the last year, more than tripling since it hit a low of nearly $4 a share in April 2020. The company’s stock is now trading at its highest level in over five years.
Although the lawsuit centers on Ford’s ruthless treatment of white collar employees—whom in many cases it tossed aside after decades of employment—it is of a piece with the brutal attacks the company has been carrying out on its global workforce for decades.
Ford, along with the other automakers and large industrial firms, has long been seeking to rid itself of “legacy” workers, particularly those with pensions and relatively better benefits, which themselves were the product of struggles carried out by earlier generations. The Big Three companies have relied upon the willing assistance of the United Auto Workers union to shred these gains and force out older workers through speedup and other means, increasingly replacing them with low-paid temporary workers, an employment category with virtually no job security or benefits.
Pointing to the connections between the company’s callous treatment of both salaried and hourly employees, a Ford worker in Louisville, Kentucky, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “The exact same thing is happening in the plants, especially to people who have been injured.”
He said he had seen management harass senior coworkers, looking for ways to push their output to the limit. “They do a time study on older people, and ride them hard. I’ve seen them make fun of an older guy because he couldn’t keep up. They changed his job so he was doing two people’s work. He was walking like 15 miles a day, while he was on dialysis two times a week after work. He never complained, always did his job and kept up. They’re ruthless.”
General Motors announces massive profits in second quarter as new COVID-19 surge builds strength
General Motors made $2.8 billion in profits in the second fiscal quarter, the auto giant reported on Wednesday. The results, which shattered analysts’ expectations, followed similar huge profits by crosstown rivals Ford, which reported $1.1 billion in profit last quarter, and Stellantis, which reported $7 billion for the first half of the year.
The financial results are a further demonstration of the continuing profit orgy by American capitalism, which has largely reversed losses incurred during 2020 by ending whatever remains of public health measures and reopening the economy despite the impact on human life. During the second quarter, which runs from April to June, 3.2 million Americans were infected and 50,000 died of coronavirus.
This figure likely includes thousands, if not tens of thousands, of infections and dozens of deaths among autoworkers, although a precise count is not publicly known because of an ongoing coverup of information relating to COVID-19 in the plants by the auto companies and United Auto Workers.
At the same time, GM and other auto companies, with the full complicity of the UAW, have imposed brutal levels of forced overtime and hired thousands of low-paid temps to replace workers who have taken time off out of health concerns or lack of child care.
The sharp increase in profits came despite the global microchip shortage, which has forced the company and its competitors to idle many of its plants for weeks at a time. The industry largely compensated for this, however, by shifting what supply of chips remained to plants making the most profitable models, mainly sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks. In addition, the company’s financial division benefited from the sharp spike in the prices of used cars caused by the ongoing shortages in new vehicles.
The Detroit-based automaker increased its sales by a whopping 40 percent. GM’s biggest surge came from high-end models produced at its Arlington Assembly Plant near Dallas, including the GMC Yukon (126 percent increase), Chevy Suburban (90 percent) and Cadillac Escalade (120.3 percent). The combination of rising sales and tightening supply has contributed to a situation where dealers are selling vehicles almost as soon as they arrive on the lot, with one dealer telling the Detroit Free Press his “turn rate” has declined nearly 90 percent from 112 to 12 days.
However, in many cases the auto companies have continued production at plants even without chips, stockpiling tens of thousands of unfinished vehicles awaiting chips before they can be shipped to dealers. The Detroit Free Press counted tens of thousands of such vehicles sitting in lots outside GM plants across the country, including 10,000 in Arlington alone. A local news report in May found that Ford was taking similar measures at its two auto plants in Louisville, Kentucky, with vehicles crammed into lots as far as 53 miles away from the plants.
One would expect that GM’s earnings would have been cause for sunny optimism among its investors. It also increased its year-end earnings forecasts, and CEO Marry Barra said in a statement that she expected the chip shortage to begin to clear up by the fourth quarter.
But for Wall Street, drunk on the biggest stock runup in history driven by the infusion of trillions in cash from the Federal Reserve, GM’s record quarter was not enough. According to Barron’s, which ran an article with the headline “GM Earnings Destroyed Expectations. Its Stock Is Dropping Like a Stone,” the automaker “also raised full-year operating-profit guidance from a range with a midpoint of $10.5 billion to a midpoint of $12.5 billion, implying earnings of about $4 billion in the second half of the year. Investors, however, wanted more.”
Wall Street punished the company by tanking its stock by more than 8 percent, the worst reaction to an earnings report in nearly a decade, according to Barron’s.
Investors are sending the message that they will not countenance any letup in the runup of profits by the increased exploitation of the working class. This is the chief consideration behind the elimination of all remaining safety measures by the Biden administration and state and local governments, including the planned reopening of schools to in-person instruction this fall. The reopening of schools in Detroit is seen as particularly vital for the auto industry to force workers, particularly mothers, back into the plants.
For workers, the past three months have been a continuation of the social disaster they have experienced for the past year. The auto companies and the UAW, following the lead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced an end to all remaining safety measures, including temperature checks, cleaning breaks, social distancing measures during shift changes and universal mask requirements. However, the latest surge in cases has forced the UAW and the companies to reverse themselves on this last measure, first, in individual plants in states with high case rates, and then nationwide earlier this week.
One of the plants to officially reinstitute safety measures early was the Wentzville Assembly plant near St. Louis, Missouri, which produces the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon mid-sized trucks. GM reopened the plant on July 12, when it was already apparent that a new surge of the coronavirus was erupting in the state, which has been among the hardest hit in recent weeks. The company and the UAW waited a week before reintroducing a mask requirement at the plant on July 19.
However, a worker at the plant told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter that in practice virtually all COVID safety precautions have been discarded. “It’s ridiculous. We don’t have sanitizer all over the plant anymore. Everyone is touching the same napkin dispenser to get a mask, no gloves, no sanitizing your work area, no temp taking. It’s a mess.”
She said that the mask requirement has been only haphazardly enforced. “Yesterday, I went to the snack machine, and the guy filling it up with products: no mask anywhere. The outside contractors are still working here: no masks. It’s a mess. What if someone gets really sick or dies? Is GM liable?
“They said today that the plant manager is supposedly going to be at the door to make sure people are wearing their masks when they leave. How’s the manager going to be at all three exits? There hasn’t been any social distancing on the shift change. They have been doing it like a herd of cattle.”
Neither the company nor the UAW has released any information on new cases of COVID-19 at the plant, either confirmed or suspected, she said. “Our dumb committee man hasn’t said anything.”
The state government is completely ignoring the crisis, she continued, as has been the case elsewhere. “Our governor is mostly concerned with holding the Missouri State Fair, which is going to be another super-spreader event. He has livestock and cattle he’s trying to sell. And [Chicago’s outdoor concert] Lollapalooza too, it was crazy. There’s no way they could monitor everyone coming in, a 100,000 people, was vaccinated or tested negative.”
A social and public health disaster is looming in the fall and winter. Only one month after Biden declared the pandemic over and called on people to “take [their] masks off,” coronavirus cases are up sharply, with more than 100,000 new cases a day. This will be compounded by the ending of temporary social assistance, such as the federal eviction moratorium, which Biden has only given a brief extension. Such measures will undoubtedly impact autoworkers heavily, among whom there are many who were working two or three jobs to makes ends meet even before the pandemic.
While no official figures have been released, it is likely that new outbreaks are already underway in plants throughout the country. There have been sharp increases in cases in Southern states with substantial auto production, such as Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, with Michigan not far behind. Yesterday, UAW Local 1264 sent out its first text alert in months notifying workers of a new COVID-19 case inside the Stellantis’ Sterling Stamping Plant north of Detroit.
“They don’t care about the workers,” a Louisville, Kentucky Ford plant worker told the Autoworker Newsletter about the auto companies raking in profits. “If that would be the case, they could distribute some of those profits to supplement workers’ food, rent, and other needs. It’s a travesty.”
However, the critical role in the auto industry’s profits has been played by the UAW, without whose assistance the Detroit automakers could not have posted such results. While concealing information the true spread of covid outbreaks in the plants through corporatist bodies such as the Joint COVID-19 Task Force, the UAW has worked to suppress and quarantine outbreaks of the class struggle in the auto industry.
For more than a month, the powerful strike by Volvo Trucks workers in Virginia was subjected to a total information blackout by the union, which did not even inform its membership in other plants that the strike was happening. However, when informed the strike by the World Socialist Web Site, autoworkers immediately expressed immense support for a joint struggle with Volvo workers. Indeed, only days after news of the Virginia strike reached a Volvo cars plant in Belgium from a WSWS campaign team, autoworkers at the plant carried out wildcat strikes against a company-union deal to extend their workweek.
The UAW eventually shut down the Volvo Trucks strike by forcing workers to vote again on a contract they had just rejected a week prior, claiming the re-vote passed by only 17 votes.
In March 2020 it was the action of autoworkers in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, who conducted wildcat strikes in defiance of the UAW which led to the temporary shutdown of the auto industry saving countless lives. The subordination of human lives to the profits of the auto companies will only continue unless autoworkers continue to develop an organized opposition to the UAW’s betrayals through a network of rank-and-file committees in every plant.
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Blue State Blues: The Infrastructure Deal Is a Swampy Hoax
The $1.2 trillion “infrastructure deal” is a progressive-sounding label on old-fashioned pork. It will not grow the economy; it will not be “fully paid for,” as promised; and it will not even focus on the “roads and bridges” that are always being cited as the reason for the spending.
Though the media tell us that it will be a “huge political victory” for President Joe Biden, and a boon for Democrat-aligned interest groups, it is not clear what this bill does for the country.
Start with the economic news.
A major purpose of government investment in infrastructure is to provide the means for the private sector to generate economic activity. Public roads let firms move goods to market; aqueducts provide water to farms; trains help people get to work. Infrastructure projects also create direct and indirect jobs.
An infrastructure plan that fails to generate economic growth is worse than useless, a waste of public money that could be better spent.
So when the University of Pennsylvania Penn-Wharton Budget Model declared Thursday that the infrastructure deal would “have no significant impact” on economic growth, that ought to have ended debate on the matter.
That should also warn us that the main effect of the $1.2 trillion will be to divert capital that could actually have generated growth and will instead boost inflation even as lobbyists, unions, and the politicians who passed it eventually take their cut.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also panned the deal, revealing Thursday that it would add a staggering $256 billion to the federal budget deficit. President Biden promised that the deal would be “fully paid for,” assuming that Congress also passed his “corporate tax plan.”
Even if taxes are raised to cover the shortfall, Biden would be asking taxpayers to pay more for a plan that will not grow the economy — in short, simply for the sake of paying the taxes.
Biden is constantly talking about how the infrastructure deal is necessary to spur investment in the technologies of the future, like the electric vehicles he was touting on Thursday. And yet the White House chose an outdated, hopelessly fossil-fuel dependent diesel locomotive as their symbol of the deal.
That reflected Biden’s romantic attachment to the Amtrak railroad service, a perpetual money loser except for the Acela line that Biden uses and which few can afford.
There was a New Deal quality to the White House advertisement — and that may be exactly why Biden likes it. He always promised to deliver the most “progressive” policies since FDR, and the $1.2 trillion deal gives him his chance.
Trump wanted to invest even more — $1.5 trillion — but to limit the federal government’s portion to $200 billion, with much of the rest coming from the private sector. That terrified Democrats and Republicans alike: no pork to spend!
What will the infrastructure deal actually do? The much-touted “roads and bridges” amount to $110 billion, less than ten percent of the total bill. The rest is a variety show that pointedly excludes “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects that are urgently needed, but which Democrats don’t like, such as the border wall or the Keystone XL pipeline.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has proposed amendments to include them; it is notable that negotiators excluded them.
It is not clear what, in fact, Republicans obtained from their negotiations with Democrats on the deal, other than pork for their own constituents.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), that paragon of virtue, even admitted as such: “It’s fair to say if Democrats alone write an infrastructure bill, my state of Utah won’t be real happy by the time that’s done.” He had to be in on the deal, lest Utah be last in line at the trough. (I am certain there are Utahns who take a less pecuniary view.)
The Republican negotiators pride themselves on the $1.2 trillion price tag, which is something like half of what Biden initially demanded. But while Biden appeared to meet them halfway, he also promised another “infrastructure” bill, which would include everything Republicans rejected and would cost some $3.5 trillion.
Democrats still hope to push that bill through reconciliation, which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said is a necessary prerequisite.
So there is no actual “deal” — just a vote on whether Republicans are going to share the blame for inflation, debt, and corruption. And if Blackburn’s amendments fail, then Republicans will share the blame for Biden’s decision to stop building the border wall during a migration crisis, and to kill the Keystone XL in the midst of an economic crisis.
The infrastructure deal is a swampy hoax — or, in more “progressive” terms: it restores the Washington wetlands.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
“Workers are starting to wake up”
Tensions high in Volvo Trucks plant at end of first week back after strike
Tensions remain high inside the Volvo Trucks plant in Dublin, Virginia, as workers complete their first week back after being on strike for five weeks. For most workers, today will be their last day before a regularly scheduled two-week summer shutdown for maintenance and equipment upgrades at the New River Valley (NRV) plant.
Nearly 3,000 workers conducted a courageous fight against both Volvo and the United Auto Workers (UAW). The UAW colluded with the Swedish-based multinational to impose a six-year contract, which will continue to boost profits at the expense of workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions. Since mid-April, the workers struck twice and rejected three UAW-backed agreements before the union forced a revote on the company’s “last, best and final offer” on July 14. The UAW claimed the deal passed by 17 votes out of the 2,369 ballots counted and shut down the strike.
The new contract will impose higher out-of-pocket health care expenses, force younger workers to labor six years or more to reach top pay and allow the continued imposition of forced overtime. Raises for the top-paid workers average only 2 percent a year, well below the current rate of inflation of 5.4 percent.
Since the return to work there has been a virtual standoff in the factory. Supervisors want to ramp up production to make up for lost output during the strike. Workers are steadfastly refusing to accept extra duties and faster line speeds. Anger has been further fueled by the release of Volvo Group’s second-quarter profits of $1.1 billion earlier this week, bringing its total income for 2020 to $2.4 billion.
“The first shift got their checks today, and it did not include the bonus or the raises from the new contract,” one worker told the WSWS. “Everybody gets two checks before the shutdown, and the raises are supposed to take effect right away. That didn’t happen, but the amount of money the UAW is taking out in dues is going up,” he said.
According to workers, management is scouring the plant for volunteers to work during the two-week shutdown, but they are getting very few takers. “Usually, they canvas once or twice a week for overtime, but every single day the bosses are coming around and asking, ‘You sure you don’t want to work?’ People are telling them, ‘Hell no, I’m not working.’ Workers are saying, ‘I’m going to work for what I’m worth to them.’ This is not going to be short-term but from now on.”
Newer workers who have been employed less than 90 days have no choice but to work during the shutdown, the worker told the WSWS. He also said there is a rarely used stipulation in the contract that allows management to make workers with fewer than three years work during the summer downtime if they get vacation time another time of the year.
“They are using that stipulation now with the full backing of the UAW to round people up for work,” the worker told the WSWS. “They’re going to run 20 trucks a day, which is a lot fewer than the 60-70 they ran before the strike.”
He also said workers are concerned that Volvo and the UAW might try to bring in 10-hour workdays after the break. “They said they took their demand for a four-day, 10-hour ‘alternative work schedule’ out of the contract, after we voted that one down. But there is fine print in the contract saying the UAW and the company can revise it by ‘mutual agreement.’ The union never showed us the full contract, and we only saw the tip of the iceberg of what is going to be changing. If they try to do this, it is going to open one big can of worms.
“It’s the little things they kept hid that’s going to start coming out. We found out this week the new hires who didn’t get their 90 days in before the strike but stood out on the picket line all these weeks with us are not going to get the signing bonus. That’s not right. They deserve it just as much as anyone else.
“We should have voted down the contract on principle, even if they tried to send us back to work. A lot of people are mad, and not a lot of work is being done. But all over the country and the world, workers are starting to wake up. If we don’t, they’re going to try to take everything away from us.”
A veteran Volvo worker told the WSWS, “Overall, I thought the third TA [tentative agreement] sucked. Our last two contracts were brutal, but this one was the worst. The biggest complaint I’ve heard is on health insurance. For workers who are married and/or have children, the insurance cost increases have really upset them. Several people I know said they are turning in their union cards. They’re going to use the dues money of $70 per month for their health insurance premiums instead. They figure they don’t get anything in exchange for their dues money anyway.”
The worker explained how the UAW conspired with the company to ram through the contract. “Of course, there was economic pressure to vote ‘yes.’ Many of my friends were dead up against it, terrified. Some of them care for their grandchildren and said, ‘I have to take whatever they offer.’
“Several workers who ended up voting ‘yes’ were in the process of applying for a home mortgage, and the bank told them they would have to cross the picket line by August or lose their approval and the home they were getting. They were in the middle of this huge purchase—their home—and felt that they had to vote ‘yes’ because the bank was basically forcing them to.”
Commenting on the pittance the UAW paid in strike benefits, the worker said, “Where do they come up with $275 per week? I know they have millions in the strike fund. The UAW took a long time on both strikes in April and June to get us our checks.”
He continued, “There was never any communications from anyone at the UAW during both strikes and leading up to them. It is sickening the way everything was handled. They were so misleading and underhanded through every bit of it.”
To oppose the sabotage of their struggle by the UAW and provide workers with a voice and real leadership, workers formed the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee (VWRFC). With the assistance of the WSWS, the VWRFC broke the UAW’s news blackout and deliberate isolation of the strike and won support from Mack Trucks workers, autoworkers in Detroit and other cities and Belgian Volvo workers.
The VWRFC is campaigning for the expansion of a national and international network of rank-and-file committees to conduct a real fight to overturn decades of union-backed concessions.
As strike by Chicago-area auto mechanics enters second week, International Association of Machinists undermines struggle
In the second week of a strike by 800 Chicago-area auto mechanics, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local 701 continues its information blackout on negotiations with the New Car Dealer Committee (NCDC) of Chicago and has expanded the number of dealerships with which it has signed the “Defector’s agreement,” isolating the striking mechanics from the wider working class.
The mechanics went on strike on August 2, voting to strike by an overwhelming 99 percent after 97 percent voted against the NCDC’s contract to replace the previous four-year agreement that expired on July 31. The IAM had apparently been negotiating with the NCDC since the beginning of the year.
The auto mechanics are fighting against the NCDC’s plan to reduce weekly guaranteed paid hours for journeymen technicians, the top tier of pay, based on the dealership’s productivity demands rather than the number of hours workers spend at the shop. They are also fighting for better health care benefits, more funding for the training fund, an increase of qualified staff, an improvement to retirement benefits and more paid time off.
Far from fighting in the best interests of the workers, the IAM is carrying out strikebreaking by signing deals one by one with dealerships under a separate “Defector’s agreement,” replacing the Standard Automotive Agreement pattern under which the workers initiated their strike. It is still not clear what exactly is included in the Defector’s agreement, but it likely does not contain much that will advance workers interests, since the dealers have voluntarily agreed to them.
Workers must draw the lessons of the role played by the IAM in their 2017 strike. While Local 701 engaged in negotiation theatre, posturing as if they were in a head-to-head fight with the company, it used side deals to isolate the pickets and break the strike, agreeing to terms that set the stage for further fracturing of the workers’ struggle.
Now, both the union and dealerships in the NCDC are collaborating to end the strike by forcing through concessions that favor the dealers using the Defector’s agreement. By August 6, 55 dealers total had signed the Defector’s agreement, and Local 701 wrote on its home page that it was negotiating with at least a dozen more. The local’s website has not provided any other updates on negotiations with the NCDC since August 6.
There is a sentiment among workers that the IAM has consciously worked to weaken the strike by refusing to call out all the workers in the local on strike and signing separate agreements one by one over the past two weeks. The Local 701 Facebook page has not given any public updates on the negotiations with the dealers since August 4. As one worker commented bluntly on the page, “We are split up, which makes our strike less effective.”
Local 701 put forward its Comprehensive Counterproposal for workers under the Standard Automotive Agreement on July 31. But even if this is ultimately accepted by whatever dealerships remain under the Standard Automotive Agreement, it will not impact the dealerships’ profits and will only maintain, if not lower, the standard of living imposed on mechanics under terms of the last contract.
Under the union’s counterproposal, wages for the lowest tier of journeymen mechanics begin at $38.85 per hour in the first year and end at $43.15 in the last year of the four-year contract, barely $3 per hour above what the NCDC proposed. Apprentices will have their hourly rate increased to $21.00 per hour in the union’s proposal but will receive only a $1.00 per hour increase in the third year of the contract.
For lube rack technicians, the lowest paid tier of full-time workers, the IAM proposes an increase to $16.00 per hour, just $1.00 per hour above Chicago’s minimum wage, or a $0.50 per hour increase (whichever is higher) for the duration of the contract. None of these proposed wage increases will keep up with the projected rate of consumer price inflation over the next four years, which is currently higher in the Midwest than in the rest of the US, at 5.9 percent. The counterproposal also proposes limited health care benefits and for dealerships to pay into the training fund at a minimal rate.
Striking Chicago-area mechanics must oppose the efforts to isolate their strike. This means taking control of the strike out of the hands of the IAM, which is determined to sabotage their struggle in the interests of maintaining the profits of dealers.
The overwhelming strike vote by Chicago-area mechanics is part of a growing wave of working-class opposition around the country and the world to the austerity drive of big business. Fearful of this growing movement, the Biden administration is seeking to use the unions to control the class struggle.
Mechanics in the Chicago area do not need to repeat the experience of the 2017 strike. They should take matters into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and the twin capitalist political parties.
In 2017, the workers courageously voted down the first agreement that the IAM brought forward after workers had sacrificed weeks of pay while on strike, defied threats to cut off health care benefits, and withstood company and police harassment on picket lines. The union pushed through a second agreement after a total of seven weeks on strike by an 85 percent margin.
The IAM was able to carry out this betrayal in spite of the militancy and determination of the workers through its backhanded isolation tactics. As a result of the union’s strikebreaking in 2017, the 2021 strike began with less than half of the number of mechanics who went on strike in the 2017 involved in the struggle. In 2017, some 2,000 mechanics went on strike to guarantee a base rate of 40 hours per week. Now the IAM is willing to accept a tier of base rate pay at 36.1 hours per week, which is exactly what the dealerships proposed in the last contract.
The struggle by Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia shows the way forward. The autoworkers in Virginia recognized the international character of their struggle and formed their own organization to fight for their interests, the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee (VWRFC). The committee organized resistance to the repeated attempts by the United Auto Workers to force through a sellout agreement. The rank-and-file workers issued their own set of demands based on their needs and wrote statements to appeal to workers worldwide to take up their fight in solidarity.
The influence of the VWRFC was powerful and ignited solidarity actions and statements from workers throughout the US, as well as India and Volvo Cars workers in Ghent, Belgium. Through the influence and struggle of the committee for leadership, the workers voted down the pro-corporate UAW contracts three times before the UAW resorted to the most anti-democratic measures to implement a concessions contract.
Report: Joe Biden Cuts ICE’s Protection of Labor Rights
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will stop deporting migrants who violate Americans’ right to their own national labor market, according to a report in the Washington Post.
The Washington Post reported on February 7 that Biden’s draft policy says agents will not be allowed to deport illegal migrants caught taking American’ jobs and wages:
While ICE’s new operational plans are not yet final, interim instructions sent to senior officials point to a major shift in enforcement. Agents will no longer seek to deport immigrants for crimes such as driving under the influence and assault, and will focus instead on national security threats, recent border crossers and people completing prison and jail terms for aggravated felony convictions.
“Generally, these convictions [needed for deportation] would not include drug based crimes (less serious offenses), simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes, solicitation, or charges without convictions,” acting director Tae Johnson told senior officials in a Thursday email advising them on how to operate while new guidelines are finalized.
“They’ve abolished ICE without abolishing ICE,” an agency official told the Washington Post. “It literally feels like we’ve gone from the ability to fully enforce our immigration laws to now being told to enforce nothing.”
Biden’s policy “is a green light to businesses to discriminate against Americans” by hiring illegal aliens, said Rob Law, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The administration is depriving Americans of their right to earn a decent living … it is a blatant transfer of wealth and opportunity away from American labor, and to greedy corporate interests,” he told Breitbart News.
Under 8 U.S. Code § 1324a, passed by Congress in 1952, companies are barred from hiring foreigners unless the foreigners have work permits:
(1) In general
It is unlawful for a person or other entity—
(A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien (as defined in subsection (h)(3)) with respect to such employment …
The law has been the bedrock of Americans’ labor rights, social status, and economic prosperity because it forces wealthy employers to bargain with the limited supply of American workers — roughly 150 million — by offering decent wages and conditions.
If the law is ignored, unauthorized foreigners will face minimal risk of deportation for working illegally — providing they do not commit major cries.
The flood of illegal labor will allow all employers to cut their pay offers to Americans who need to maintain a decent living standard, buy homes, and raise children. The money saved from pay cuts is normally diverted to company profits and stock values, not productivity-boosting innovation, automation, and training.
The GOP’s business wing has repeatedly tried to abolish Americans’ right to a national labor market. For example, President George W. Bush touted his plan for “Any Willing Worker” plan.
Joe Biden's deputies have demolished the Guatemalan asylum deal as they try to expand migration into Americans' labor market.
They're also reopening their deadly Hunger Games trek to the US border – and will blame Americans for the inevitable deaths. https://t.co/MY7mHbw65X
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 6, 2021
Biden has given little evidence that he will step up the prosecution of CEOs for hiring illegal aliens.
During his tenure, deputies for President Donald Trump allowed some workplace enforcement, usually in low-wage worksites, such as chicken-disassembly plants. In August 2019, for example, Americans were able to get jobs at high wages following a series of workplaces rid by ICE in Georgia. President Barack Obama also allowed some workplace enforcement. But neither president did anything significant to enforce Americans’ workplace rights at white-collar worksites.
Biden’s deputies have already canceled an ICE office that was created to prevent discrimination against American graduates by CEOs who are eager to hire the many foreign graduates who accept low wages if they can stay in the United States.
At the border, Biden’s deputies have begun welcoming a massive wave of migrant families seeking to join their illegal migrant spouses and fathers who are now working U.S. jobs.
The importance of Americans’ right to their national labor market was described in July 2020 by Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital fund, Thiel Capital. In a July 2020 interview, he told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
You have the right to your own [national] labor market. Given that your country maintains a right to conscript you [for war, and] to tax you, [then one] part of the social contract is that [Americans] get a share in your country’s wealth through having a right [to work in the United States, without competition from foreign nationals]. Now the interesting part about it is, if we [elites] can just get your right declared [to be] an impediment to the free market, we can take your right [by forcing you to compete against foreign workers in the United States] without having to pay you anything for it.
The managerial elite — “the center” — is using migration to steal wages and value from Americans, Weinstein said:
There’s a huge problem that we need to get to, which is that the reason that we can’t get out of our national nightmare at the moment, is that the center has to make a move that it refuses to do. And the center — or “the core” would be a better way of saying it — has to admit that it became kleptocratic. And so the corruption of the core left and the core right means that there’s nowhere [for Americans] to turn.
Americans’ right to their labor market has long been diluted by the federal government’s willingness to import more labor for use by companies. The extra labor is delivered by legal immigrants, illegal migrants, refugees, legal visa workers, work-permit foreign graduates, temporarily legal illegal aliens, asylum claimants, and work licenses for illegal aliens.
Decades of data and experiences have persuaded the vast majority of Americans — and many elite economists, lobbyists, and legislators — that migration moves money out of employees’ pockets and into the stock market wealth of investors and their progressive supporters.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of innovative American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
The public’s recognition of this “Wages to Wall Street” economic policy comes amid perpetual insistence from business lobbies — and reporters — that supply and demand in the labor market are unrelated.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.
Another poll shows that "immigration reform" is a low priority for Americans, who – rationally & decently – prefer better jobs & wages for fellow Americans.
Progressives demean this 50-state union solidarity as "xenophobia."https://t.co/lYMCH7hf71
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 28, 2021
Jobless as Biden Packs U.S. Labor Force with Foreign Workers
Millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless for the next three to four years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), though President Joe Biden is looking to fill American jobs with foreign workers.
In a report released this month, CBO analysts said the number of jobless Americans — all of whom want full-time jobs — will not return to pre-coronavirus levels until around 2024.
“As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its pre-pandemic size in 2022,” the CBO report states. “The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its pre-pandemic level in 2024.”
The CBO analysis projects that while the unemployment rate, which hides the number of total Americans out of the workforce, will return to an average of about four percent between 2024 and 2025. Biden, himself, admitted on camera that the U.S. would not be at “full employment” until 2031.
“That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact,” Biden said.
President Biden on new jobs numbers: “At that rate it’s gonna take 10 years before we get to full employment. That's not hyperbole. That's a fact." pic.twitter.com/nlFGZ1JOEs
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 5, 2021
Before then, millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless though that has not kept the Biden administration from pursuing a labor policy that floods the United States labor market with millions of illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and green card-holders.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden has restarted the Catch and Release program, which frees border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the country while they await their asylum hearings. Previously, a series of cooperative agreements with Central America and the Remain in Mexico policy had effectively ended Catch and Release, drastically cutting asylum fraud.
Many of those border crossers and illegal aliens will hunt for mostly blue-collar American jobs that otherwise would go to Americans.
Similarly, Biden has suggested he will surge refugee resettlement to the U.S. by 2022, seek an amnesty for nearly all illegal aliens, and block reforms to various visa programs while seeking an increase in legal immigration levels.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which helps protect the U.S. labor market by enforcing federal immigration law, has been crippled by Biden’s orders that attempt to halt deportations and only prioritize the arrest of illegal aliens who are terrorists, national security threats, or convicted aggravated felons.
The initiatives are being cheered by Wall Street, Big Tech, and corporate interests who can boost profit margins by cutting the cost of U.S. labor via a flooded labor market.
Today, there are more than 17 million jobless Americans and another six million who are underemployed. All want full-time jobs with competitive wages and good benefits.
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants are awarded green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. and eventually apply for citizenship. In addition, another 1.4 million visas are given out annually to foreign nationals to take U.S. jobs, while 11 to 22 million illegal aliens currently live in the country.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
THE STAGGERING COST OF THE WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE BUILT BORDER to OPEN BORDER’
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/10/spencer-p-morrison-devastating-cost-of.html
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s 2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers a net $116 billion annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien annually. While high, this number is not an outlier: a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants (including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the course of their lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics Editorial found that illegal immigration costs America over $140 billion annually. As it stands, illegal immigrants are a massive burden on American taxpayers.
Study: 14.5M Illegal Aliens Living in U.S., Costing Americans $134B a Year…. THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS EXCEEDS 40 MILLION WITH THOUSANDS JUMPING OUR OPEN BORDERS AND JOBS DAILY. NOW DO THE MATH!
Roughly 14.5 million illegal aliens live across the United States, costing American taxpayers about $134 billion every year, a new study reveals.
An annual study released by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that the illegal alien population in the U.S. has grown by at least 200,000 since 2019 and has cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion since last year.
Though the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has increased, the FAIR study states that growth among the illegal alien population has slowed over the last year because of the Chinese coronavirus crisis and because of former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which stopped the practice of border crossers being released into the interior of the country.
“As many as 60 percent of all new illegal aliens in any given year are those who have overstayed visas,” FAIR researchers write. “Thanks to a timely travel freeze implemented by the Trump administration to stop the spread of the virus, far fewer people entered the United States in recent months, so far fewer people had the opportunity to overstay their visas.”
The growth of the illegal alien population and its fiscal burden on taxpayers has been enormous over the last decade, though. In 2010, for instance, FAIR estimated the illegal alien population stood at just over 11 million, indicating a more than 31 percent increase in the population in just ten years.
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