rankandfilers

The case for unionising unemployed and beneficiary workers

2008-07-08T15:31:00.001+12:00

[This rank and file worker makes the case for the proposed amalgamation of three unions in NZ to have the equal membership rights of unemployed and beneficiary workers along with employed workers written into the Constitution of the new union.]

.....

A worker once asked a rank and file union member, “Who controls the level of union membership at any given time?”

The union worker answered, “Well, if union membership drops because of closures, lay-offs and redundancies, then it must be the BOSSES plain and simple.”

Of course the other part of the equation is that it is helped along needlessly by an institutionalised union mindset that says union membership ends with the termination of paid employment. The biggest indictment against unions in relation to unemployed/beneficiary workers has been a failure to recognise them as WORKERS first and foremost. Workers solidarity is a Joke!

The Returned Services Association (RSA) in spite of its dubious politics has set a better example of solidarity by maintaining continuity of membership and benefits long after its members have ceased their military service. Within the RSA, ‘comrade’ means comrade and not merely a loose and shallow term of address as it is used among some union members.

Unions abandon unemployed

In the past, when unionism was young, the unions looked at the wage earner as the union member but also extended help to the family in times of adversity. This dropped away at the height of compulsory unionism when unions were better resourced with no compulsion for union bureaucrats to recognise or advocate on behalf of members whose paid employment had come to an end. Union reliance on the welfare system instituted by the first Labour Govt and maintained to this day by all successive Govt’s has divested any union involvement in the ongoing interests of these workers being kept on as union members.

The now defunct ‘Peoples Centres’ that advocated on behalf of beneficiaries, were one part of an attempt by volunteers who were mostly unemployed to address the problem. Hugely under resourced, they were always doomed to go under. Others still march on in support of the rights of beneficiaries; but it is an endless struggle. One such organisation, the ‘Whanau Resource Centre’ in Pukekohe South Auckland is contracted to Counties Manukau DHB and CYFS as a half way house for battered women and their children. It also doubles up as a beneficiary workers advocate service among other things. Its principal organiser has said that beneficiary advocacy belongs in the unions.

Bringing unemployed back into unions

A former DSW/WINZ frontline case manager and PSA delegate with 18 years experience in Christchurch, Manurewa and Pukekohe spoke of dealing with beneficiary advocate groups who were clearly out of their depth. Some could barely afford the gas to make it to WINZ offices and keep appointments. Keeping up to date information important for their clients was also a problem. [WINZ like the Dept. Of Inland Revenue is not in the business of informing taxpayers of their entitlements when there is a cost incurred by the respective Govt. Departments. That’s for the client to find out.]

In Christchurch the former WINZ worker remembered having to deal with laid off workers who were members of several unions including the NDU, SFWU, EPMU etc. In many cases, older union members in particular, lamented the passing of their union associations brought to a halt by the machinations of bosses. Some become so demoralised at being unemployed, that health/ psychological deterioration forces them onto one of the various sickness benefits and worse.

She went on to say, “It’s no use putting the thing in the ‘too hard basket.’ There exists more potential to grow a structure within the union movement to deal with unemployed workers than outside of it. Sudden policy changes have an immediate impact on beneficiaries. Without the support or security of independent unions, unemployed workers are forced to fend for themselves. Unions have to take ownership of this issue. They avoid it at their peril.”

Unite, union of low-paid, unemployed workers and beneficiaries

In 1992 in the wake of the introduction of the ECA, the TUF (Trade Union Federation) which came out of the temporary bust up of the CTU included among its ranks the newly formed union called UNITE. A pivotal plank in UNITEs constitution is a commitment to represent the interests of ‘unemployed workers and beneficiaries. To date, UNITE has never been able to fulfil that role.

Lack of resources and the perceived logistics nightmare of organising dispersed unemployed/ beneficiary workers are among the problems haunting UNITE in its current manifestation. Its internal politics with regards to a certain section of its own membership on this very issue has become acrimonious with no resolution in sight.

Amalgamation

It is now the task of the eventual amalgamated union to rise to the occasion and sort out the mess left in the wake of UNITE before it’s too late for all of us. Today as the uniting of the NDU, SFWU and UNITE inches ever closer, so does the challenge to incorporate within the new union, a sector dedicated to unemployed and beneficiary workers with its own organisers. Imaginative and bold use of new technology in conjunction with a new union call centre will ensure better delivery of services to all union members including this most vulnerable part of our community. As things stand, we have historically limited our scope in terms of union recruitment to paid employees while neglecting the collective potential of paid workers, unemployed workers and beneficiary workers together. This must change! The demands of future industrial struggle and political turmoil (Bush gearing up to bomb Iran), make it important for unions to be more inclusive of all workers irrespective of their being employed or otherwise.

Conclusion

Unions as a subset of the wider working class which constitutes the majority of the human race, must be strengthened on our terms and not the profit driven whims of the bosses. Unions have always been weakened by the continuous cycle of small advances and big retreats in terms of membership because we give bosses the ability to weaken unions every time there are closures, layoffs and government policies that are friendly to the interests of bosses. We have a mandate to inspire young workers to want to join unions and become involved in the wider political activities affecting workers. We have to show that unions will always provide security, support and solidarity when those same workers suffer bad health and fall victim to the shrinking job market.

The prospect of returning to the ECA is very real if National wins the next general election. We do not want to see history repeat itself.

Lets inspire the next generation:

Union Independence from the state

Union Independence from political parties

Whakakotahi nga kaimahi o te Ao! (Workers of the world Unite!)

By Rank and Filer, Site Delegate, Wood Sector, NDU

Free the Political Prisoners of Las Heras

2008-06-16T21:57:00.002+12:00

Appeal to Workers of the World

We reprint here an edited version of an appeal from Workers Democracy of Argentina which calls for international workers campaign to free the Las Heras political prisoners. This campaign shows that it is the militant vanguard that can mobilize and unite all workers struggles to remove the Kirchner government and form a continent wide force that breaks from the World Social Forum and opens the road to socialist revolution.

A little over two years ago, in February 2006, the oil workers in the south of Argentina, in the region known as "Patagonia", started an indefinite strike. It was the first strike confronting the "Social Pact" between the union bosses of the CGT and the CTA (the two Argentine central unions) and the bosses’ government of Kirchner.

This strike had its epicenter in the province of Santa Cruz, birthplace of Nestor Kirchner who was governor for 17 years, and now continues to rule through front men like the present governor Peralta. Kirchner and his wife Cristina are long standing allies of the oil companies in the region.

Equal pay and conditions for all

The main demand of the strike was for equal wages and working conditions for all oil workers. That is, equality between the workers "directly" employed by the big oil companies (Repsol, Vintage, Panamerican, etc.) who are members of the Oil Workers Union (benefiting from the relatively better working conditions, benefits, wages, etc.), and "the rest" of the oil workers, who work for the subcontractors (but alongside the "direct" workers, doing the same jobs).

The Oil Workers Union does not recognise the subcontracted workers as "oil workers", so does not recruit them or defend them. This plays directly in the hands of the bosses who say these workers are "construction workers" who get lower pay and worse conditions in Argentina.

Moreover, while the Oil Workers Union members has some job security, the "rest" of the workers were contracted as temporary or part-time workers, alongside permanent workers with the same hours, but were not paid extra hours, and are even "in black" (undocumented). Despite this distinction all the workers went on strike shouting "We are all oil workers!"

Down with the tax on wages!

The other important demand of the strike was the rejection of the tax on wages at the same rate as the bosses’ profits. As well as the devaluation of 70% of the Argentine peso en 2002, and the high real inflation rate of 20% that year the “better paid” workers were not exempt from the wage tax. The taxes made their devalued wages worse than ever. This is particularly unbearable in the Patagonian region, where the cost of living is much higher than in the rest of Argentina, as it a remote, isolated area with a very harsh climate.

The struggle around the demands for "equal pay for equal work”, and "down with wage taxes", united all the oil workers and threatened to spread to the workers in the rest of the country. The strike posed a threat to the Social Pact signed by the treacherous union leaders, the bosses and its government, to keep the workers quiet in spite of the loss of their wages and conditions, and to legitimate the repression of demonstrations and strikes.

It would challenge the Social Pact precisely because it is based on the divisions between workers on different wages and work conditions in the same job, the wage tax imposed on "privileged" workers, and the demand that workers increase productivity before they got wage rises. Its was also a rebellion against the against the role of the union bureaucracy that was preparing to sign a new condition in the Social Pact that would have capped wages at 16,5% annually, in two or three instalments, well under the rate of inflation.

Regime represses strike

The oil workers were striking at a very critical time for the economy and they had every chance of winning. Their victory would have opened the door for the rest of the working class. That is why the bosses and the government stroke back furiously, with the complicity of the union bosses of the Oil Workers Union.

The latter announced they did not back the strike and the demands, and left the Patagonian workers to fight alone without support from the many other oil workers in Argentina working for the same companies. The rest of the union leaders and the top leaders in the CGT and the CTA did not even pay the ritual lip service to the workers solidarity.

The government declared the strike was illegal and sent the police to arrest the delegates and take them to Las Heras (a small town of about 7.000 people). The workers of the nearby oil fields and plants rallied together with hundreds of other exploited people at the gates of the police station, to demand freedom for their representatives. The police responded with a brutal repression, with tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds fired over the heads of the people, who defended themselves by any means at their disposal. But after a long battle they could set their leaders free. But in the middle of the fight, a policeman was left dead.

The response of the oil companies and the Kirchner government, with the open and total support of the oil workers union bosses, was repression, like that of the state terrorism of the '70s. Workers and their families were attacked by armed troops and dogs in house by house raids, beaten and abused. Not even children, women or old people were spared. Arrests were made without warrant and without the right to a lawyer.

Some people were "disappeared" for a time. Undercover and intelligence agents were used. In the nights cars without registration plates filled workers neighbourhoods shooting indiscriminately to intimidate the people...

Political Prisoners not criminals

...The authorities applied the entire weight of the state repression on the strikers. On order of the oil companies they arrested dozens of activists and delegates, including their wives, partners and children. All of them were beaten and tortured in the police stations.

While they were charged with “murder" and locked up indefinitely without right of bail while the state looks for evidence to prove the charge. The oil workers had some of their demands partially met to defeat the struggle. As a result the prisoners were then isolated and apparently forgotten in their jails.

Meanwhile the prisoners were labelled "common criminals" and the union leaders made a public apology for the death of the "poor boy, that policeman", as if he had not been engaged in suppressing the strike!

The six main political prisoners have been jailed far from their homes to demoralize them and their relatives even more, under subhuman conditions, and are beaten, abused and harassed by the police daily.

Their families are also being harassed, and they along with their class brother in jail are strong because they are principled fighters and have the support and solidarity of those militant workers that did not abandon them.

Militant solidarity with the Six

The oil workers, despite the threats, the layoffs, the deployment of more police and gendarmerie to persecute the activists and their families in their homes, have not abandoned the fight. Yet while their struggle is supported by sectors of workers all over the country, the leadership of the main unions and those of the central unions have done nothing but keep silent or pay lukewarm lip service in their defence.

The Six comrades of Las Heras are held hostage by the same oil companies that lock up and torture the workers, exploited and anti-imperialist fighters, including children and old people, in the jails of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Guantanamo, etc., in order to defend their profits. But they are not the only ones in Argentina.

The Kirchner government also imprisons many other workers for similar causes, for example, Jose Villalba (head of an organization of unemployed that were demanding real jobs and not humiliating petty handouts). It is prosecuting more than 5000 workers under serious criminal charges.

Their only "crime" is opposing the interests of the bosses and the transnationals: striking, protesting in rallies and demonstrations against the governments starvation policies, demanding better conditions of work and transport, and rejecting the brutal increase in the cost of living while our rights are violated one by one.

Regime’s ‘double standards’

The Kirchner government boasts that it is a champion of Human Rights. To prove it they have put some of the killers during the dictatorship under ‘home detention’ in luxury homes or hotels. They have everything they want and can be visited freely by their families and associates, despite the fact that they have already been convicted of murders, torture, mass disappearances, baby kidnapping, etc.

The regime has done nothing to find Julio López a key witness to the trials of those charged with the "disappearances" during the dictatorship, who was himself taken more than a year ago. It has done nothing to protect other witnesses who have been attacked or threatened.

On the contrary, it has ordered the police, the gendarmerie and the coast guard to attack workers’ strikes with live ammunition, as was in the case with the teachers, state workers and civil servants, fish canning workers, etc. This resulted in the death of History teacher Carlos Fuentealba in 2007, and many other workers were seriously wounded, imprisoned and persecuted. Again, their only "crime" was to demand a living wage to allow their families to survive.

And where they have not send their direct agents to repress the workers struggles, they have not stopped the criminal activities of the gags of thugs paid by the treacherous union bosses, who have smashed with clubs, knives and guns the assemblies of striking workers, terrorizing the workers and their families, destroying their camps outside the locked out workplaces, such as at the French Hospital and the Boat Casino in Buenos Aires City, the workers of the fish packing plants in Mar del Plata, the metal processor and Dana auto parts in Buenos Aires, and many more.

Held as political ‘hostages’

Meanwhile, the prisoners are kept in the worst conditions, in bare, tiny and dirty jails in police stations or in local courts, where they are beaten daily, and their relatives are humiliated and abused and often denied visiting rights.

The families of the imprisoned workers live in a dismal poverty, full of suffering, especially in Patagonia where the temperatures can go as low as minus 22 Fahrenheit with winds up to 180km/hour and sometimes they don’t have money for fuel. They only survive thanks to the solidarity of their class brothers and sisters.

The government keeps them imprisoned in an attempt to terrorize other militant workers. They are held hostage by the bosses' state, by the transnationals and the national bosses, in order to prevent the workers from breaking the notorious Social Pact that was signed with the treacherous misleaders of the unions.

They are prisoners of the class war that the bosses have unleashed on us, to keep wages low, destroy the few social and labor benefits that we still have, and to increase their billions in profits, and forcing us onto starvation wages that cannot even buy the basic food and clothes we need.

They are held hostage to discipline us to accept job "flexibilization", work "in black"(undocumented), long working hours, and dangerous working conditions that every day cause deaths among the workers.

They want us to accept the 19th century conditions in health, education and housing conditions, under conditions that can only get worse with the developing world economic crisis and the skyrocketing of the prices of food and oil all over the world.

The social pact between the Cristina Kirchner government and the treacherous union misleaders, all of them servants of the transnationals and their junior partners, the local bosses, is so bad that it asks us to put up with an annual rate of inflation of 40% while our wages are capped and paid in instalments that are limited to 12% annually. This peg on wages is imposed on top of wages that have been falling behind inflation for many years.

They will not intimidate us!

Meanwhile the regime, the multinationals and the national exploiters take away our country's resources to make them huge profits for their businesses. Do get away with this they have to keep our best fighters in jail, and held hostage, humiliated, brutalized and on the verge of suicide. They have to starve their families and terrorise the working class to divide it and prevent it from acting on the most basic principles of class solidarity and internationalism. To do this they have to launch on us the thugs of the union bureaucracy, the police, the gendarmerie and the corrupt judges that "administrate justice" on the orders of the companies.

Yet they will not win! We are convinced that our class brothers and sisters all over the world will come to our aid, and with our united forces we are sure to set the imprisoned workers free, just as we will then free the imprisoned workers and freedom fighters all over the world, by means of international solidarity and struggle!

We ask that you make solidarity statement s, distribute widely the appeal of the workers and their families, and make financial contributions and messages of solidarity (letters, e-mails, fax, telegrams, messages, voice messages, etc.,) to the campaign, and address your demands for the freedom of the imprisoned comrades to the addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc., that we have made available below.

LOI (CI)-Workers Democracy, Argentina, Member of the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

28 May 2008

1) Casa de la Provincia de Santa Cruz

25 de Mayo 279 CP (1002ABE) – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires - Argentina

Telfax: 4343-8478 / 4342-7756

2) Gobernación de Santa Cruz

Alcorta 231 CP (9400) - Río Gallegos – Santa Cruz - Argentina

Conmutador (02966) 420421-422291-422757

mingobierno@santacruz.gov.ar

Sitio oficial del gobierno de la Provincia de Santa Cruz: webmaster@santacruz.gov.ar

Gobernador: Daniel Peralta: Tel. (02966) 420187 Fax (02966) 420139

e-mail: gobernador@santacruz.gov.ar

Vicegobernador: Luis Hernán Martínez Crespo:

Alcorta 431 – Río Gallegos

Tel. (02966) 422922

Secretario Privado: Juan Francisco Lagos Saavedra: Tel. (02966) 420187

Fax (02966) 420139

Asesoría de Asuntos institucionales (Vacante):

Tel. (02966) 420139

Escribana Relatora (Vacante):

San Martín y Mitre - Río Gallegos

Tel. (02966) 420051

Secretaría Legal y Técnica:

Alcorta 231 CP (4900) Río Gallegos

Conmutador (02966) 420421-422291-422757

Director Provincial de Investigaciones Administrativas:

Dr. Arturo Pedro Froment:

Comodoro Rivadavia Nº 185 - Río Gallegos

Tel. (02966) 422000-423090

fiscalia@speedy.com.ar

Dirección de Ceremonial y protocolo RRPP: ceremonial@santacruz.gov.ar

3) Gobierno Nacional – Ministerio del Interior

25 de Mayo 101/145 (C1002ABC) – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires - Argentina

info@mininterior.gov.ar

Tel.: 011- 4339-0800

4) Secretaría de Derechos Humanos – Gobierno Nacional

25 de Mayo 544 – (C 1002ABL) - Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires - Argentina

Tel.: 011- 5167-6500

5) Secretaría de Derechos Humanos - Provincia de Santa Cruz

Secretario: Alberto Marucco

Edificio Galeria: Av. Roca 952 2º piso, of. Nº 26 – Río Gallegos

Tel-fax (02966) 435517-423578 R.P.V. 1521

6) Juzgado Federal de 1º instancia de Río Gallegos (Santa Cruz)

San Martín 709 - Río Gallegos (9400) Santa Cruz

Telefonos: (02966) 420269/420037/420170

Juez Camaño - Tel. : (02966) 420253

Secretaría Penal Hebe Álvarez de Ramírez - Tel: (02966) 420253

Secretaría Civil Ana Álvarez - Tel.: (02966) 420256

Secretaría Electoral - Sofia Viritilne - Tel: (02966) 421790

7) Ministerio Público ante el Juzgado de Río Gallegos (Santa Cruz)

Fiscal Dr. Miguel Segovia - >Tel.: (02966) 420377

Defensoría Pública Oficial - Dr. Santiago Fassi - Tel.: (02966) 420376

8) Juzgado de Primera Instancia Nº 1 de Instrucción de Pico Truncado (Juzgado de la causa)

Seminario y Urquiza - CP (9015) – Pico Truncado

T.E.: (0297) 4992193/4992687

e-mail: instruccionpt.com.ar

Secretaría de Instrucciòn Dra. Griselda Rosana Revai

Secretaríaa de Instrucción Dr. Miguel D. Hubert

9) Ministerio Publico

Sarmiento y Urquiza – CP (9010) – Pico Truncado

T.E.: (0297) 4992697

Agente Fiscal: Dr. Sergio Armando Gargaglione

10) Comisaría de Pico Truncado

T.E.: (0297) 4993405

Venezuela: Reinstate Chirino

2008-06-16T21:52:00.000+12:00

Statement of Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

An international campaign to reinstate a leading member of the UNT (National Workers Union) Class Struggle Current to his job in the state oil company (PDVSA) is being made. Chirino led the oil workers union in the recent negotiations and came into conflict with the Labour Ministry, refused to join the PSUV and called for abstention in the recent referendum. He was sacked from his job as a result.

Return Chirino to his job!

· The quickest way to achieve this is for the the UNT to break all its links with the bourgeois state and Chavez'es bourgeois government!

· For the UNT to set in motion the Venezuelan working class armed with an independent class strategy and program!

From the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction we demand the immediate reinstatement of Orlando Chirino, a leader of the UNT and memeber of the UIT, who has been sacked under Chavezs orders, to his job and workplace in the PDVSA.

As a member of a workers organization being attacked by the bosses' state, we defend Chirino unconditionally, and we fight for his reinstatement in the same as we do in the case of any worker who has been sacked and attacked by the bosses. This is for us a fundamental question of principle.

At the same time, we cannot let it pass without saying that that unfortunately this attack on Chirino by Chavez and the "Bolivarian bourgeoisie" comes as a logical consequence of the policy of the UNT leaders' policy of Chirino himself. This includes the subordination of the UNT and the whole Venezuelan proletariat to the bourgeois state and Chavez government.

Chirino Chavez man on PDVSA

As Chirino explains in a letter to the PDVSA chairman, he (Chirino) was appointed by Chavez as a member of the PDVSA board of directors, along with other union leaders, after the defeat of the bosses' lockout in 2002. Chirino says they were appointed

"to constitute a team of labor and political consultants, in order to advance a plan for getting rid definitively of the old pro-coup, corrupt, bureaucratic union leadership [that of the former central union CTV] and from SINUTRAPETROL [oil workers union] to build a new leadership committed to the revolutionary process of the workers, and to continue to advance the battle against the pro-coup partisans, so providing a guarantee of "gobernabilidad" [that is, the ability of the government to rule without any threat to its legitimacy] of political and labor stability, and also providing a defence of the company (PDVSA) against further attempts at sabotage".

So it was Chirino in his capacity of a UNT leader who headed the Venezuelan delegation to the 91^st Conference of the ILO (International Labor Organization) in 2003. Moreover he was the chief delegate at the meetings of that gang of bureaucratic labor traitors chaired by the AFL-CIO in the following years (2004-2006).

Chirino was, along with Stalin Perez Borges and other leaders of the UNT, one of the main promoters of the “10 million votes for Chavez” campaign for 2006 presidential election.

For this reason, while we demand the immediate reinstatement of Chirino to his job at the PDVSA, we affirm that the only way to achieve that is through the UNT breaking every link with the Venezuelan bourgeois state.

It must also break with Chavez bourgeois regime and call for a Congress of rank and file delegates of the UNT to make the Venezuelan proletariat take up an independent working class strategy.

This is the shortest road to win the reinstatement of Orlando Chirino to his job in the PDVSA!

Castro and World Social Forum

2008-05-26T16:16:00.000+12:00

What has enabled the current bureaucracy of Castro to leap ahead in the process of restoring capitalism in Cuba? It is undoubtedly the suppression of the workers' and poor peasants’ revolution in Bolivia, and the containment of the pre-revolutionary situations in Chile and Mexico.

This represents the temporary defeat of the most advanced anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles of the proletariat and exploited in Latin America.

The Castro bureaucracy could not move towards capitalist restoration without the World Social Forum’s treacherous ‘Bolivarian Revolution’. In the years since the turn of the century the WSF has put all its efforts into preventing revolutions in Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia. It has stopped workers and peasants struggles in Chile and Mexico during 2006/2007 from embarking on the revolutionary road.

The Zapatistas and the Stalinists allowed the heroic Oaxaca commune to be crushed. In Chile, the Castroist FPMR [Popular Front of Manuel Rodriquez] prevented a general strike and allowed the "red pacos" [red pólice] of the Communist Party and the unión bureaucracy of the CUT to save Bachelet’s pro-NAFTA civil-military regime. In the United States the WSF subordinated the emerging opposition to the Iraq war and the struggles of migrant workers to the Democratic Party

Meanwhile, along with Chavez, the Castro bureaucracy is pushing a Contadora and Esquipulas style of agreement to stabilize Colombia by disarming the FARC. This agreement is designed to bring about a situation where the FARC and the Colombian bourgeoisie end the war and the FARC become a legalised ‘Bolivarian’-type party contesting elections.

Just as the betrayal of the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan revolutions in the 1980s allowed the Castro bureaucracy to move towards capitalist restoration, the suppression of the Bolivian revolution, the containment of the struggles in Mexico and Chile, and now the betrayal of the FARC today, has created the opportunity for the Castro bureaucracy to complete the restoration process and turn themselves into a new bourgeoisie.

This process will not be peaceful because to succeed, it has to crush the resistance of the Latin American workers and poor peasants.

So far the Castroists and the WSF have suppressed and contained the Latin American revolution, and the struggles of the US working class at the feet of the Democratic Party, but the continential proletariat has not been crushed by an historic defeat.

Cuba is undergoing the terminal decline of the foundations of the degenerate workers state. It is facing a crisis of insufficient production and shortages similar to that of the USSR in the late 1980s under Gorbachev and his policy of "perestroika”.

All foreign exchange and profits generated in the sector of the economy open to imperialist investment – tourism, nickel, petroleum, etc. – go offshore as royalties, patents and profit remittances to foreign monopolies, and as the income of the bureaucracy that goes into "off shore" accounts in the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands. The convertible peso –the "chavito" – that exchanges 1 to 1 for the US$ shows how profitable this sector is for foreign investors and the corrupt expropriation of foreign exchange by the bureaucracy.

Of those billions of dollars of profits extracted from the island, little or nothing is reinvested in Cuba. This is the cause of the insufficient production and shortages faced by the workers and peasants earning miserable wages (US$ 13 per month) in devalued pesos (34 pesos equal 1 US$!).

The devalued peso reflects the declining labour productivity of the obsolete and defective state sector of the economy. Many people are homeless and most autos are 50s US or Eastern European 60s and 70s models. Most people have ration books for food and the once high standards of education and health are deteriorating dramatically. Thus, as was the case in the 80s in the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe, Cuban workers are left with very few past gains to defend that have not been liquidated or weakened by the restorationist bureaucracy.

This crisis of insufficient production and shortages results from the failure to develop the productive forces within the limits of the traversty of "socialism in one island."

Since the bureaucracy cannot enrich itself on the backs of the declining state economy, the only way out for the bureaucracy is to finish the restoration of capitalism. The alternative of revaluing the peso doesnt work because there is not the production to back the currency, and hyperinflation would result causing increasing social inequality and growing hatred among the masses.

The only alternative for the bureaucracy is to raise labour productivity. But this would need an acceleration of the process of foreign investment in joint ventures with the bureaucracy. This intensifies the exploitation of Cuban workers and drives down its miserable living standards. In other words, another explosive cocktail that could blow up in the faces of the bureaucracy.

This shows that as Trotsky said in The Revolution Betrayed, restoration will not be peaceful. The bureaucracy in its attempts to restore capitalism and become a new bourgeoisie must overcome the resistance of the masses by means of civil war.

Therefore, the only course is the political revolution linked to the Latin American socialist revolution. This is the only way to stop the bureaucracy from becoming the direct agents of US imperialism, crushing the masses, finishing capitalist restoration and inserting Cuba into the global division of labour as a new “brothel” of America."

· For the Trotskyist program of political revolution to overthrow the parasitic bureaucracy, and to create a workers state, a true workers democracy with a government of armed workers, peasants and soldiers councils!

· For a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat that ends all the "privileges, ranks and medals" of bureaucracy, class inequality and wage labour, where the first task is to renationalize under workers’ control and all sectors of the economy that are open to foreign capital and "joint ventures", and to reimpose the monopoly of foreign trade and stop the flight of foreign currency which bleeds the of wealth of the Cuban economy.

This is the only way to end the perverse system of "two currencies", and return to a single Cuban peso, a healthy currency that represents the real value created by the economy of the island once the workers and peasants have regained control from the monopolies and corrupt bureaucracy all branches of the production and all the wealth they have been stealing.

It is also the only way to expel the parasitic bureaucracy and its foreign partners, and create a healthy workers state as a bastion of revolution in Latin America, North America and the world.

UNION DEMOCRACY IN NEW ZEALAND

2008-05-20T20:43:00.002+12:00

Class Struggle 77 March/April 2008

Union Democracy

In the last issue of Class Struggle we reported on the amalgamation of NDU, SFWU and Unite! being driven by the official without the active intervention of the membership. We have no reason to change that view. Reports in the news media claim that the new union will have 50,000 members and its strength will be in its numbers and ability to influence government. This was the same argument foisted on workers during the Fourth Labour Government when the CTU was formed. The CTU would unite the unions into a force that could act in ‘partnership’ with government and the employers to run the economy. The TUF stayed out of the CTU at the time fearing that the sheer numbers of the state sector white collar unions would make the CTU conservative. How right they were! It was these unions, despite overwhelming votes in support of a general strike by their memberships that voted to back Ken Douglas and prevent a general strike against the ECA in 1991. Now the amalgamation of Unite! with two older unions that have a history of backing Labour Governments is going ahead without full discussion by the rank and file. The members of these three unions need to use their existing union rules to challenge this process. It could be that the members would be happier to unite in struggles on the picket lines rather than formally amalgamate into one super union. If the amalgamation is to go ahead it should be run by the members and it should come up with a constitution that is much more democratic and independent of the state than the current constitutions of the three unions. Here we point to the shortcomings of the existing constitutions, and then we put forward some ideas on what a really democratic, militant union constitution would look like.

First we compare the existing constitutions of the three unions involved

1. Union Structure

The NDU and the SFWU are organized on both regional and sectoral basis, with specified numbers of delegates from each sector attending biennial national and regional conferences held on alternate years. In Unite! there is currently no constitutional provision for sectoral representation, though positions on the national executive (Management Committee) are reserved for regions, and the 2007 AGM announced a constitutional review with such measures in mind. NDU and SFWU also have national and regional representation for Maori, Pacific Island and Women at dedicated conferences and committees and with positions allocated on the National Executive. SFWU has similar representation also for Youth Affairs.

2. Policymaking & Governance

In the NDU the biennial delegates’ conferences are the supreme policymaking and governing bodies of the union at which remits are voted on. Only elected delegates have speaking and voting rights at these assemblies, though ordinary members are entitled to attend and may be granted permission to speak. AGMs are held at the same time at which all financial members have speaking and voting rights. It is unclear whether resolutions of AGMs take precedence over those of biennial conferences.

In the SFWU policy remits do not take effect until passed by AGMs, although before being put to an AGM they must first be put before delegates’ conferences, which vote on whether or not to recommend them. Speaking and voting rights at AGMs and delegates conferences are similar to those of the NDU.

In Unite!’s constitution it is the AGM which is the supreme governing body. Delegates’ conferences have no constitutional status, though constitutional amendments in the pipeline may change this if amalgamation does not eventuate. What in the other unions is called the National Executive is in Unite!’s constitution termed the Management Committee. NDU has a Management Committee comprised of designated officers as well as an elected National Executive.

3. Election of Officers.

In Unite! the national positions of President, Vice President, Secretary and Management Committee members are all elected at the AGM, that is annually. Thus all financial members get to vote on all positions.

In the SFWU all financial members appear to get to vote for national president and vice-president and for regional presidents, vice-presidents and secretaries, but the National Secretary is appointed by the National Executive from amongst the (elected) regional secretaries. In this reader’s recollection, the constitution did not clearly spell out how the elections are to be conducted, but according to a delegates’ manual it is at the AGM.

In the NDU only delegates get to vote (at biennial conferences) for national and regional officeholders. Their terms of office are thus for two years, with the exception of national and regional secretaries, whose elections are held only every second biennial conference and whose terms of office are thus four years.

4. Notification of Meetings, Elections etc.

The SFWU and NDU constitutions allow ample time before elections for the calling of nominations and publication of candidates’ manifestoes. The same applies to the calling for and publication of remits. Unite!’s constitution allows barely adequate time and its wording is ambiguous enough to admit of restrictive interpretation.

5. Recall of Officers.

Before their term of office has expired, officers performing unsatisfactorily or guilty of misconduct may in the SFWU and NDU be recalled by an SGM of the union. In either union this SGM may be called by the president or the national executive or by a petition of the membership. In the case of the SFWU this petition must hold 50 signatures of members entitled to vote for the position; in the case of the NDU it must hold the signatures of 10% of the voting membership.

In Unite! The Management Committee may by a two-thirds majority vote remove an official from office, with that official having the right of appeal to an AGM. There is no constitutional provision for ordinary members to initiate recall proceedings unless it is by remit to the AGM

.

6. Delegates and Site Meetings.

In Unite! delegates hold office for a term of one year. In NDU the term is for two years but there is constitutional provision for recall by a petition (to the Head Delegate) of 10% of financial members. In all unions site meetings may be called by authorised officials of the union or by petition of 10% of financial members.

Well now deal with how these provisions can be democratised starting with the membership and then the election of delegates and officers by the membership!

· Unemployed and other beneficiaries shall have equal rights with employed in the union.

This is a provision of the Unite! Constitution that is not practically implemented except in the Waitemata branch of Unite! It needs to be a central principle of any union, let alone a super-union, to represent all members of the working class, whether in paid employment, unpaid labour, on the unemployment benefit, or on any other benefit paid to a person whose main income would otherwise be the wage.

All members have the right to vote for delegates, officials and remits to annual conference. There must be equal funding and provision of resources for unemployed and beneficiaries as for employed members.

Union dues should be graduated according to level of income with unemployed and beneficiaries paying no more than 1% of income.

Members can be organized into locals, and regionals, for the purpose of uniting members from different sectors, worksites, employment status, and special interests.

Special interest groups must have the right to caucus separately, that is, to organize their own meetings, and to have speaking rights at workplace and other membership meetings.

· Delegates elected, accountable and replaceable by the membership that they represent.

All delegates should be elected by worksite membership, or by the unemployed, beneficiary and unpaid membership in each region, annually and at least six months before annual conference, on the basis of 1 delegate for each 20 members or less.

Delegates should canvass support in a written statement that may include qualifications to represent various categories of members, including special interest groups, two weeks before elections. In a super union of 50,000 members this would mean a national delegate body of 2,500.

Delegates are mandated by decisions of their membership to vote according to their decisions on remits and candidates for office with no individual discretion.

Delegates can be recalled by 10% of the membership they represent and replaced as delegates by a simple majority. Delegates are obliged to meet with the membership weekly to report on union affairs to discuss workers issues and educational material.

Officials, organizers etc, must arrange onsite or other meetings with member through the delegates. It is the delegates’ responsibility to collect membership dues and keep accounts open to the membership.

· Officers are elected by annual conference and return to the workforce after 2 years in office

The annual conference is the supreme decision making body of the union. The delegates are mandated by their members to vote as instructed on remits circulated at least two months before each annual conference. The delegates are mandated to vote for all those who hold a position of responsibility in the union according to the votes of their membership.

No elected or paid official should be paid more than the median wage [the largest group] of union members.

Elected officials can be recalled by 10%, and suspended by 50%, of the voting members, and replaced either at a SGM or the AGM by a simple majority of delegates. Special General Meetings can be called by 10% of the membership. Elected officials shall not be voting members or have the right to call SGMs.

· For complete rank and file control of industrial negotiations and actions

Agreements should be negotiated by a committee of delegates elected by the rank and file for that purpose. Negotiations must be reported back to the membership at least weekly. Stop work meetings most vote on all agreements before any ‘deal’ is signed off by negotiators.

Strike committees elected by the members on strike (or locked out) must be in charge of strikes, actions and pickets, and the use of strike funds. During strikes and lockouts, the strike committee must report to the membership daily for discussion and voting on proposals and actions. State funds for education and training under the control of rank and file committees.

· Review, and ratify endorsements of political parties by a 2/3 majority of members at each AGM.

Any political party supported with union funds needs to be have a budget limit set and ratified by 2/3 majority of members. Where 2/3rds of the membership do not support any exiting party, members can nominate candidates on a workers program in an attempt to get 2/3rd majority membership support.

SOCIALISE FISHER AND PAYKEL

2008-05-20T20:40:00.002+12:00

Class Struggle 77 March/April 2008

Socialise Fisher and Paykel

The closure of Fisher and Paykel’s Dunedin plant is further proof of the necessity to fight the devastating effects of capitalist crisis on the working class by our class taking control of the economy and running it for meeting our needs and not the bosses’ profits.

As US workers have found, globalisation has decimated industry and exported blue collar jobs. Since the opening and deregulation of the NZ economy in the 1980s NZ has undergone a similar de-industrialisation. The response of Labour Governments and the unions has been to try to increase valued-added production and up-skill the work force. Fisher and Paykel was the poster boy of the knowledge economy. It was no producer of raw commodities. As tariffs came down and much of NZ industry collapsed, F&P could export whiteware and compete on the world market by applying new technology to stay a world leader. What went wrong?

Capitalism is what when wrong. Not FTAs, and over-valued dollar or a ‘moral failure’ as the EPMU thinks. F&P is a capitalist firm. It has no obligation to its workforce to make a loss. Those who say that it was economic mismanagement, or China, or wrong economic policies, are reformists. They think that there are good capitalists and bad capitalists, and forming partnerships with good capitalists to manage the economy is all that it takes to benefit everyone.

The EPMU was very good at its ‘partnership’; with F&P. For many years they were virtually a company union, weeding out the ‘troublemakers’ like Peter Lusk, virtually acting as human relations managers for F&P. Now, F&P have proven the class collaboration of the EPMU over many years to be one gigantic betrayal of workers.

In the last issue of Class Struggle we criticised the gutless, undemocratic, paper tiger EPMU at F&P and called for the democratisation of the union. We now think that this was too kind to the EPMU. We said that workers should take control of their workplace.

We now say that this cannot be done by the EPMU. F&P workers need to form their own rank and file strike committee independently of the EPMU leadership, who are in partnership with the bosses, and prepare to occupy, nationalise and socialise the company.

· Demand more information: open the books! Workers will find that they are the ones who make F&P profits. The technical experts produce the new designs, and the process workers produce the machines. The only skill that managers have is to calculate how to make profits and when to leave to make bigger profits overseas. On top of that, F&P has had big subsidies from central and local government.

· The workers must demand that F&P Mosgiel plant is nationalised jointly by central and local government, and administered and managed by the workforce. Because it is the workers labour and skill, and government incentives, that make up F&P profits, (and workers have no savings and cannot afford to borrow money to buy back what is already theirs) we say that no compensation should be paid to the company!

· Take this fight to the Auckland plant and to F&P plants in Thailand, Queensland and Los Angeles! F&P management have given the same reasons for shifting production from Australia and the US. Lower costs. Australian production will be moved to Thailand, and the US production will be shifted to Mexico. We say Australian and US workers should fight this decision alongside the NZ workers. F&P say that the Auckland refrigerator plant will continue production for the Australasian market because it producers smaller models preferred by workers in those countries. But these workers will buy cheaper but bigger imports!

· In the face of the bosses offensive to cut costs at the expense of workers, we say the workers counter-offensive must be one of challenging the bosses right to own and control production!

In Iraq, the oil workers of Basra are fighting for workers control of oil to prevent big oil from plundering this resource.

In Bolivia, workers and peasants are demanding the gas be “100% nationalised” and to expropriate the MNCs.

In Venezuela, Chavez is nationalising key industries under pressure from militant workers.

In China and India, poor peasants are mobilising to prevent their land being expropriated.

In Australia, Aboriginals are demanding land rights. In NZ, Maori are demanding return of stolen land and control over Foreshore and Seabed resources.

When the workers and poor peasants of the world unite to go on the offensive against the bosses’ crisis, and take over the ownership and control of means of production, distribution and exchange, we shall be able to produce for our needs and not their profits.

We need a new 'Red Federation'

2008-01-26T21:11:00.000+13:00

As the Aussie comrade says, amalgamations, while making unions bigger, usually build bureaucratic monsters (or similar words). It is important for the rank and file to fight back now to take control of any amalgamations and rebuild the unions as fighting democratic organisations.

If you look at the Unite! and NDU (I don't know about SFWU) constitutions, they look good, especially the Unite constitution that aims at unionising lowpaid workers, unemployed and beneficiaries. The NDU one looks good too in that it seeks to represent industrial sites, has locals which bring local sites together, and represents 'special interest' groups like women and Maori.

Problem is that in practice these unions are anything but democratic in their representation of the members. The delegates may be formally elected by members but there is no obligation to actually represent the views, report back to, or be accountable to members. The 'supreme' decision making bodies, annual or biennial congresses or AGMs are reduced to rubber stamps of the officials and tame delegates.

Of course its got to be this way as the union officials are empowered by the bosses law to regulate and control their members. They must stay inside the limits of the ERA or risk court decisions against them and penalties such as loss of union assets etc.

And of course the officials cover their backs by saying that the members are inactive, passive, and need to be led by experienced 'unionists'. Of course they are if they are led to believe that the only thing they can do is follow the officials orders, stay inside the law and vote every 3 years for Labour. You can't get much more passive than that.

Getting active does not mean turning your back on this monster being born. After all the unions today are the rump of very powerful unions that were created over a century ago and which have survived against all odds putting up heroic struggles against the bosses and their state.

We need to reclaim the best traditions of that history of militant unionism. This means organising the rank and file to demand proper all up elections of delegates standing for the principles of rank and file democracy and campaigning for a living wage and decent conditions.

It then means pushing those policies to the limit and working for mass support and industrial unity across all unions to break the ERA and force employers and the state to concede the right to strike and of mass pickets. In the process the union officials will be left high and dry backing the ERA and the bosses.

We need new unions like those of 1890, Red Fed of the 1908-13 period or a TUC of the 1951 lockout. The popular wisdom (bosses mythology) is that these radical union movements were defeated. Yes they were, by overwhelming class forces. If they hadnt NZ would be a very different place today. Yet without these struggles the labour movement would be even weaker than it is today.

In the 1890s the new unions forced the bosses to go to court to deal with workers rather than face a spread of militant unions. This allowed the militant unions to develop and be strong enough to split in 1908 to form the Red Federation. The threat of revolutionary upsurges in 1913 and internationally in the immediate post war period forced the creation of the Labour Party to divert industrial struggles into parliament.

The price of this was compulsory unionism that gave the labour movement real power such as allowed the militant wing to prepare to take on the bosses and the state in 1951, when again internationally, in the face of decolonisation and the Chinese Revolution, the ruling class decided to try to smash the workers again. The bosses survived that one only by imposing a semi-fascist state clampdown on the country and bringing out the army to work the ports and mines.

Even though the '51 lockout was a defeat for the militant unions, its result was to entrench compulsory unionism and create the organised basis for workers to take back some of the value they produced for the bosses in the form of social welfare and relatively high living standards in the decades that followed.

So it is a myth to argue that these militant struggles led to total defeats. Each time workers were defeated, they were never forced to concede their most important historic gains. They kept their organisations and to some extent their material gains.

Rogernomics and the ECA did not force labour back 100 years as some argue. The unions were not smashed rather they were quietly deregulated. Ken Douglas and Co kept the lid on the fightback. But again, the old Labour tradition of state arbitration that goes back to 1894, was revived in the form of the ERA in 2000 by the Labour and Alliance Coalition Government.

This proved to be a charter to empower the officials to go onto job sites and recruit members. It was the only real result of the Alliance split and MMP. Of course it created the labour movement foundation for former Alliance leaders to get into the unions and put pressure on Labour from the left and to plan for a return to a Micky Savage-type Labour government in the future.

The proposed amalgamation above is a step towards the fulfillment of that plan. Building the biggest union in the growth area of the NZ semi-colonial economy, casualised cheap labour, will create the constituency for a future New Labour Party.

Today that party is conceived in the image of both 1930s Labour but increasingly 21st century socialism as it is taking shape in Venezuela. This is not some wild utopian dream either. NZ is heading downwards in the OECD and is virtually a colony of Australia. The populist politics of Hugo Chavez, and the indigenist politics of Evo Morales win lots of sympathy among young and Maori workers in Aotearoa.

The problem is that unions tied to populist parties there or here, cannot develop the working class struggles beyond parliament. Parliament is one branch of the bosses state, and for workers to get a living wage and decent conditions it is necessary to take power, smash the state, and expropriate the bosses property. Unions tied to the capitalist state hold back and prevent workers from taking power. That is there job.

To educate workers in what is needed to take control of their unions and turn them into organs for workers power, the battle must be to build fighting, democratic unions now - in a phrase, we need a new Red Fed.

Will Amalgamation Strengthen the Uniting Unions?

2008-01-20T14:32:00.000+13:00

The officers of the National Distribution Union, the Service and Food Workers' Union and Unite! Union have initiated moves towards the amalgamation of the three unions to form what would be the largest union in Aotearoa. While this could vastly strengthen these unions, members have a right to thoroughly consider the issue and be actively involved in amalgamation at every step of the way. Come and have your say.

Workers’ Forum 7:00 P.M. Tues 22 nd Jan 2008

Onehunga Community Centre

83 Church St, Onehunga

Hosted by Waitemata Branch of Unite! UnionHon Sec 1/16 Parr’s Cross Rd, HendersonPh 836 9104 email keithhend@gmail.com

A Monster Union or a Union Monster?

2008-01-20T14:27:00.000+13:00

A Monster Union or a Union Monster?

PRESS RELEASE FROM WAITEMATA BRANCH OF UNITE! UNION
Unite members will be interested to read in the media that amalgamation talks between the heads of Unite!, the Service and Food Workers’ Union (SFWU) and the National Distribution Union (NDU) have reached the point of 'agreement'. Of course the Unite News invited us as members to make submissions on this question. But that is a very different thing from the membership driving and controlling this process. Is that the way to build strong, democratic unions?
It seems to us that it is a good thing for relatively small, enthusiastic and campaigning unions like Unite!, SFWU and the NDU who work in the low-paid casualised job sector to unite. The bigger combined union will have more members and resources to fight or the interests of its members and recruit many more into the reviving union movement. But isn’t this something that the membership should be driving? Why is this amalgamation being done from the top down? The unions are its members, and those members should be in control of everything their union does. It’s called union democracy.There are a number of questions that we want to raise about this process.Why these three unions? Are there other unions in the low-paid sector that can be included? We hear that SFWU is offloading Elder Care workers to the Nurses' Union. Maybe there are other cases of groups of workers who need to be included in one big low-paid workers union. What about membership? Matt McCarten is quoted in the NZ Herald as wanting to introduce 'life membership' to cover members that may move from job to job. This is a very welcome move since it recognises implicitly that today's casualised low-paid job sector involves periods of unemployment 'between jobs'. But this 'portable' membership should not be confused with 'lifetime' membership which today means a membership that is earned by long service to a union.'Portable' membership should be equally valid for employed, unemployed and beneficiaries, recognising that the working class is composed of all of these groups. Unite under Matt McCarten has been reluctant to acknowledge the equal rights of employed, unemployed and beneficiaries according to the constitution of Unite!, a union established in the 1990s to all of these groups. Unless the rights of these groups are considered to be equal and recognised by any amalgamated union in its Constitution, then a bigger, more powerful union will not do anything to overcome these divisions in the working class.What about the new Constitution?We also see that Matt McCarten has generously offered the Unite! name to a new amalgamated union. We are right behind the spirit of this offer, but we would be very worried if the new union was to be organised on the basis of the existing Unite! Union. Matt McCarten has built up a strong membership of casualised lowpaid workers, but we don't think that these workers have any real democratic control of the union.In Unite!, for example, the officialdom has at Matt McCarten's instigation actively and successfully opposed democratic rights such as those of ordinary members to observe at Management Committee meetings and has successfully failed in its democratic duty to furnish branch secretaries with minutes of those meetings.We don't think that the elected officials of these three unions have the authority under their constitutions to make these decisions without the active participation of the members. Nor do we think that Unite! with its record under Matt McCarten is the model for a bigger, better union. 'Consulting' members to rubber-stamp a top-down agreement is not union democracy, its union bureaucracy.We think that the members of these three unions should be responsible for amalgamation negotiations, the conditions of membership and the Constitution of any combined union.To ensure the active involvement of the members in these negotiations Waitemata Branch of Unite calls for:

(1) each of the unions take the current proposals to all up meetings of their members, so that they can be debated and voted on, and for negotiation teams to be elected from these meetings to take forward any resolutions from the members.

(2) if the members agree to proceed with amalgamation, we call for a Constituent assembly of the delegates of all the memberships of each of the unions to meet to decide on the terms of amalgamation, membership and a new Constitution.

Forum: Leg Irons for Workers

2007-11-19T13:36:00.000+13:00

When the world is plunged into yet another of capitalism’s recurring economic crises the working class will be expected to pay for it with a return to lower wages and mass unemployment. In the necessary and unavoidable fight-back, workers will find we are shackled by draconian legislation.

“Leg Irons for Workers…”
What Links The Employment Relations Act and the Terrorism Suppression Act?
A Working Class Forum.
2.00 P.M. Saturday 24th November
Workers’ Educational Association
9 Henderson Valley Rd
Henderson
(Soon after going under the railway bridge)
Location Map: http://www.smaps.co.nz/nz/waitakere/henderson+south/henderson+valley+road/9/

Invited speakers, but all can participate.
Refreshments provided.
Koha for overheads.

Bring yourself, workmates, fellow unionists.
Family members-youth and children welcome.
Get union contacts for information and fight back
against the bosses and the government
Make friends
Fight back against WINZ
Join Unite!

Hosted by: Waitemata Branch of Unite! Union
The Union for Low Paid, Unemployed& Beneficiaries
President: rfox638@yahoo.com.auHon. Secretary: keithhend@gmail.com

Unions right to expel members - EU

2007-11-15T10:17:00.000+13:00

"The European Court of Human Rights has upheld a union's decision to expel a British National Party (BNP) activist.

The train drivers' union Aslef threw out Jay Lee, from Bexley, London, as he was an active member of the party." (BBC website)

As anyone who has been a member of a union will know, there are more often not a few bad apples in the cart, some who may share one or two narrow aims with the other members, but ultimately would not subscribe to the broader ideals of trade unionism. My experience derives from voluntary unionism, but there are of course many who have experienced compulsory and their perspectives may differ.

This example is starkly portrayed here (hard right v. left), however if the differences weren't so clear (centre-left union v hard left radical) it is easy to see why this judgment might be intriguing.

The judgment noted that Lee's rights were not affected as Aslef did not enjoy a monopoly of representation.

While there are some I would have dearly loved to have seen booted out from my last union I was in, I always reminded myself of the fundamental power play between capital and labour - that is, alone one person has very little power, with many, the opposite. The BNP spokesperson summed it though: "We are a nationalist party and the trade union leaders are the antithesis to this - they are internationlists."

Indeed, that basic premise of international solidarity is something fascism will always smash itself against for as long as they can, because it is the route to power by the many, rather than the few.

Would you like a fascist in your union?

Unionists debate Chavismo in Venezuela

2007-10-06T22:06:00.000+13:00

Venezuela

remains at the centre of controversy on the left about revolutionary strategy and tactics. Those who call for revolutionaries to enter the PSUV must pause to think when faced with the letter by Orlando Chirino, the leader of the C-CURA, the class struggle tendency in the UNT labor federation, to a group of comrades in the C-CURA in the state of Zulia on the question of the constitutional changes and the formation of the PSUV. We reproduce some sections from Chirino’s letter together with our own comments and analysis. The original appeared on Aporrea 9/17/07. The translation is by Earl Gilman which was posted to Argentina Solidarity http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Argentina_Solidarity/message/5289

In their statement, the comrades from Zulia state they support the Constitutional reform proposals of President Chavez [“Magna Carta”], and the formation of the PSUV as an “organization of revolutionary militants”. Chirino makes it clear that his positions on these questions are his own personal opinions and not that of the C-CURA. He says the existing Constitution is a bourgeois constitution and a huge advance which he would defend against reactionaries.

However, he says, “the proposal presented by the Executive Branch does some more retouching but there is nothing within a socialist perspective. That is, it does not question at all capitalist property. The fruit of our labor and our surplus value that we produce as workers will be appropriated by the businessmen minority and under the best of conditions by a State that administers the means of production from the point of view of capitalism. The real exercise of power is not transferred to the mobilized people so that they can make basic decisions to transform the country. The possibility is now open that the multi-nationals will have legal rights over the soil, marine areas and our natural resources through joint ventures. Bourgeois justice remains intact, the administration of which remains in the hands of the capitalists and will continue favoring the exploiters and the thieves in white shirts. The defense of the revolution will continue to be in the hands of a professional army and not the armed people trained to defend themselves against the enemies of the people and revolution.”…

“…That is why I have called for the necessity that all people and especially the workers to discuss the contents of the MAGNA CARTA through mechanisms more democratic and superior to what is being called "Parliamentarism of the Street", as we all know the limitations of this option. To overcome this limitation I propose that all debate and approval of the reform be through a new Peoples Assembly ...with delegates of workers, peasants, communities, students, members of the Armed Forces which would be superior to a Constituent Assembly which is based on "one person one vote." With a Peoples Assembly with this characteristics, that is fully democratic and representative of the fundamental social sectors of the revolutionary process...”

Here Chirino clearly counter-poses a soviet form of organization - a “Peoples’ Assembly” –to the Constituent Assembly which is a bourgeois parliament designed to redraft a bourgeois constitution. But would a Peoples Assembly representing the sectors in struggle throw out a bourgeois constitution? Not unless those sectors were engaged in struggles that brought them up directly against the regime, and the party of the regime, the PSUV.

Chirino states that he has always supported the building of a revolutionary party but that the PSUV is not it. Why not?

Because the PSUV does not allow organized fractions, and demands that all political currents dissolve themselves into the PSUV. To join a party alongside well known capitalists, members of the old bourgeois parties, corrupt bureaucrats and members of the ‘Bolibourgeoisie’ (Bolivarian state bourgeoisie), as well as known conspirators against Chavez in the coup attempt of 2002, without being able to freely organize as a revolutionary faction, would be crime against the working class.

The Militant leader Alan Woods says that to stay outside the PSUV and to fight for an ‘independent workers party’ is a crime against the working class because it will isolate the militants from the “real, actual, revolutionary process”.

On the contrary, to take workers into the PSUV without the elementary, democratic right to form a faction to fight for a socialist program against a bourgeois constitution would be a crime against the world’s working class. It would be to take workers into a party that is an agency of the bourgeois state in supporting the a bourgeois constitution without having a fight.

But, the weakness in Chirino’s position is that while he correctly identifies the barriers to workers democracy in the PSUV, he does not look for a tactical means to challenge them. Forming an ‘independent revolutionary workers’ party outside the PSUV is essential. But such a revolutionary party cannot act as a united front in mobilizing workers to fight inside the PSUV for workers democracy.

The task of revolutionaries inside the C-CURA is to form a party-bloc to build a workers united front to smash the Bolivarian popular front. That united front must be based on the principles of workers democracy and fight for those principles in all struggles, including during the process of the formation of the PSUV.

Therefore the pre-condition for workers entry into the PSUV must be that it is based on workers democracy. The C-CURA must resolve that in the pre-congress discussion period the ban on factions is thrown out. Second, the C-CURA must demand that the founding Congress of the PSUV be a Peoples’ Congress that represents the base of all the sectors in struggle, that has the authority to debate and vote on both the Constitutional reforms, and the constitution of the PSUV.

Only by this means will the workers vanguard engaged in the revolutionary struggle be able to take an independent stand against the popular front regime and use its authority in the class struggle to win over the majority of the workers, poor peasants and all oppressed and exploited people, from the Bolivarian revolution to the socialist revolution.

From Class Struggle 74 September-October 2007

Immigrant workers take action in New York

2007-08-26T10:39:00.000+12:00

Washington Post
Saturday, August 25, 2007; A01
30 Immigrants On Bikes Deliver A Labor Revolt
N.Y. Workers Gain Allies in Protest of Wages, Conditions

By Anthony Faiola

NEW YORK -- The deliverymen of Saigon Grill labored for years at the
bottom of Manhattan's food chain. Biking swiftly down the avenues in
biting cold and searing heat, they schlepped up high-rises and walk-ups
with bags of steaming noodles and shrimp fried rice.

Then they surprised their bosses -- and others in this seen-it-all town
-- by serving up something unexpected: a revolt.

The 30 men -- all immigrants, including undocumented workers frustrated
with the poor conditions and low wages that are often a fact of life in
America's underground economy -- banded together in an effort to
unionize. They demanded an end to what they say were salaries less than
half the minimum wage, and to penalties that included $20 fines for late
deliveries and $50 for shutting the restaurant's glass doors with a bang.

Saigon Grill's owner fired them. It might have ended there, but as the
immigrant labor movement gains steam in a number of major U.S. cities,
the men opted to fight back. With the help of local groups aiming to
organize documented and undocumented immigrants in New York, the men
filed a lawsuit against the owner. Then, in March, they began daily
picket lines at the restaurant's two Manhattan locations.

So far, hundreds of deliverymen, waiters, cooks and busboys from across
New York have joined their picket lines in shows of solidarity. Angry
deliverymen have slapped at least five other restaurants here with
similar lawsuits. Immigrants laboring in other types of restaurant jobs
have filed several more, targeting small takeout operations and upscale
establishments such as Devi, the critically acclaimed Manhattan eatery.

"We have been going under the assumption that because we have no papers,
we were powerless -- but we were wrong," Ke, a 35-year-old Chinese
immigrant and former Saigon Grill deliveryman, said through an
interpreter during a protest last week at the restaurant's fashionable
Union Square branch. As with others here, Ke requested that his surname
be withheld because he is undocumented. "We have discovered that we have
the power to act."

The New York deliverymen's revolt, observers say, is happening as a
number of immigrants are mobilizing into an increasingly organized labor
movement with the help of unions and a fast-growing assortment of local
activist groups.

Legal actions and demonstrations on behalf of undocumented immigrants by
groups such as Justice for Janitors have been going on for years. But in
the wake of the grass-roots mobilizations surrounding the immigration
reform debate in Washington, experts have noted an increase in lawsuits,
picket lines and work stoppages by immigrants who had long shied away
from more visible forms of protest.

Immigrants have also emerged as the cavalry in the United States'
flagging labor movement, which is embracing a group of people long
assailed by union members for driving down wages. The percentage of the
American workforce represented by unions has fallen to 13.1 percent,
down from 16.2 percent a decade ago.

But the number of immigrants, documented and undocumented, represented
by unions surged to 2 million last year, up from 1.6 million in 1996,
according to a study by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute
that is scheduled for release next week. By comparison, the number of
union-represented U.S.-born citizens dropped to 14.8 million last year,
down from 16.5 million in 1996, the study said.

The majority of undocumented immigrants in the United States, observers
say, remain too fearful to participate in such public actions. But a
growing assertiveness in some pockets of the country's illegal immigrant
community of 12 million people is beginning to answer at least one of
the hot questions in the immigration debate: What would happen if
exploited undocumented workers decided one day that enough is enough?

If New York -- a city whose key service and construction sectors are
highly dependent on cheap immigrant labor -- is any example, it will
mean higher costs for businesses and their customers. Fearing they could
be the next target, dozens of restaurateurs in Manhattan have boosted
wages for deliverymen, according to union officials, lawyers and workers.

Saigon Grill itself, meanwhile, has suspended food delivery -- which
reportedly accounted for as much as 25 percent of the chain's revenue. A
management official at the company who asked not to be named said it has
been forced to raise prices to cover some of those losses.

"It sort of makes you sit up and take notice, doesn't it?" said Kenneth
Kimerling, legal director of the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (AALDEF).

The challenges facing the immigrant labor movement remain formidable.
Tougher immigration enforcement and increased raids, observers say, have
had a chilling effect on organization efforts in some parts of the country.

But activists say that in big urban areas such as New York and Los
Angeles -- where local policies prohibit city officials from asking
about immigration status in labor or other disputes -- immigrant groups
have become strikingly bolder in demanding rights.

Observers say that is a direct result of increased efforts to organize
them. In May, for instance, dozens of unions in Los Angeles dispatched
liaisons to help organize the largely Hispanic, immigrant truck drivers
serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The result was an
organized work stoppage in which hundreds of immigrant workers demanding
better pay joined in a caravan protest that left port officials
scurrying to find replacements, said Maria Elena Durazo, board member of
the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Similar organizational efforts, she said, are underway at ports in Miami
and New Jersey. In New York, unions and activist groups are also moving
to organize immigrant construction, supermarket and nail salon workers.
Over the past decade, the number of "worker centers" -- or associations
for immigrant day laborers that strive to set standardized wages -- has
jumped from a few dozen to more than 200 nationwide, according to the
National Employment Law Project.

The courts are often on their side. Though a noted 2002 U.S. Supreme
Court ruling made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to seek
damages for being unlawfully fired, it did not preclude them from going
after back wages -- the primary goal of the majority of immigrant labor
lawsuits. Over the past three years, AALDEF -- one of the largest
immigrant activist groups in New York -- has won about $4 million in
claims for 87 clients.

"It's the American story: immigrants trying to assert their rights,"
said John Wilhelm, co-president of Unite Here, an immigrant-based labor
group of 450,000 that bills itself as the fastest-growing union in North
America. "Italian and Irish Americans did it 100 years ago; now new
groups of immigrants are trying to do the same."

For the deliverymen at Saigon Grill -- mostly Chinese immigrants -- the
move to organize came after word spread around town of a similar case
last year at another Manhattan restaurant, Our Place Cuisines of China.
After a deliveryman there was allegedly fired for talking back to his
boss, he organized workers at the restaurant with the help of the
Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA) and the 318 Restaurant
Workers Union, both labor groups that have succeeded in upping wages for
many Asian immigrants in New York's Chinatown.

"We began to sense that maybe we were not helpless, that maybe even
people like us could fight for our rights," said Ke, an immigrant from
Fujian province who illegally arrived in the United States in 1995.

After contacting CSWA and the 318 union in February, Ke said that he
helped lead a secret movement to unionize Saigon Grill's deliverymen and
demand fair wages. When the restaurant's owner, Simon Nget, an ethnic
Chinese Cambodian who had fled the Khmer Rouge and came to New York in
the 1980s, discovered their plan, the deliverymen say he offered to
increase wages from $1.60 to $4 an hour. But only if they dropped their
unionization bid. When they refused, they said, he fired them.

Nget did not return phone calls requesting comment. In a personal letter
to his customers, he alleged, however, that the men were trying to
"extort" him and called their demonstrations "outrageous."

Given the fairly high success rate of immigrant labor suits, employers
-- especially restaurants -- frequently settle out of court to avoid
unwanted publicity. For now, the deliverymen of Saigon Grill insist they
will keep up their protest for as long as it takes.

"We feel strong now," Ke said. "And that feels good."

Unite into one big union - lessons of fights in NZ, Australia and Fiji.

2007-08-14T19:49:00.000+12:00

In NZ lowpaid health workers recently won a victory over Australian multinational 'Spotless' which locked out 800 workers in July. The lockout was declared illegal and the company forced to accept a deal already signed by other contractors.
Meanwhile some unions in Fiji are on strike to recover the 5% pay cut imposed by the military regime that came to power in December 2006. The problem is that these are mainly unions covering teachers and nurses that are limited to ethnic Fijians and not open to Indo-Fijians. Not surprisingly, the strikes have fizzled out.
At the same time John Howard, Australian Prime Minister is on the attack against Aboriginals in Northern Territory and the unemployed with 'welfare reform' measures designed to force more unemployed into 'work-for-the-dole' schemes.
In NZ, National Party leader, John Key, who some months back 'discovered' an 'emerging underclass' dependent on social welfare, wants to borrow Howard's work-for-the-dole scheme under the euphemistic name of 'community activity'.
Despite the willingness of sectors of workers to fight these attacks, they are weakened by the divisions in the labour movement. In NZ, health workers are divided by the fact that they work for a number of contractors, and by membership of several competing unions. This can only be overcome by rank and file committees that unite all health workers, and that call for unity between all sectors.
In Fiji, the unions are divided by race so that some have gone on strike against the military regime while others back the regime. Not until the rank and file unite ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians in one non-racial union movement will this crippling division be overcome.
Last, but not least, workers in all countries are divided between those who have jobs and those who do not. Forced labour in work-for-the-dole schemes drive down wages for all workers and can only be defeated by unity between employed and unemployed in one big union that can halt production.
All these struggles prove that unions will never be able to mobilise the real power of the working class to stop production while they remain divided by sector, race, nationality and competition for jobs.

In NZ, Waitemata Unite! shows the way forward for all workers. Against the bureaucratised, state dependent unions of the CTU [Combined Trades Unions] Unite! recruits lowpaid, unemployed and beneficiaries into one union regardless of disability, race, gender, nationality, age, sexual orientation etc.

New Zealand Health workers win against Aussie multinational 'Spotless'

Around 800 striking workers locked out of 13 public hospitals by 'Spotless' on July 12 won a victory in the Employment Court, getting the lockout declared illegal. Spotless refused to sign up to an agreement reached with three other cleaning contractors to pass on wage increased to workers in the first 6 months of employment.

When workers took strike action Spotless locked them out. Playing a strong role in this result was the staunch pickets such as at Spotless corporate headquarters in Penrose, North Shore hospital and marching to WINZ to get the dole. Workers even picketed the Court showing that they were not scared of being seen to be pressuring the Judge.

The pickets were also successful in stopping some workers from doing the locked out workers jobs, but couldn’t stop all scabs from doing kitchen, cleaning and orderly work for Spotless. The court decision forced Spotless to accept the agreement signed up to by the other companies which is a victory for the workers.

The win over Spotless was a victory because it dragged Spotless up to the level of the other companies. But it still leaves the workers divided between a number of contractors, and at least two unions. A fundamental weakness of the strike was the fact that the Spotless workers were isolated. These divisions can start to be overcome by a successful campaign for a MUMECA (Multi-Union, Multi Employer Collective Agreement). But more is needed.

We need mass rank and file action

Solidarity and unity cannot be imposed from above by union full-timers ringing around and 'servicing' their members. The union is only as strong as the backbones of its active members!
For an Auckland-wide rank-and-file committee of activists, across all sites and unions, to plan the strategy and tactics of the next negotiations well in advance.

For a living wage based on shorter hours, shift allowances and overtime pay.
End the contracting out of work to private companies that compete by driving down wages and conditions to poverty levels.

Another weakness of the strike/lockout was the fact that all other health workers stayed on the job despite an obvious health and safety risk resulting from the lockout. Lowpaid health workers need to link up with other health workers like nurses and doctors too plan a common campaign to fight for adequate state funding for the health system, and for an end to the health system being managed by business people like Wayne Brown, chairman of the Auckland Health Board, who run hospitals like they are private corporations.

For a fully funded public health system operated and administered by the health workers themselves!
For a free public health system accessible to all in need when they are in need!

For Fighting, Democratic unions!

The SFWU is an ‘organising’ union based on an active rank and file. Going hand in hand with an active rank and file, is rank and file democracy and control of the union. This brings the rank and file up against the industrial law. The Employment Contracts Act passed by the Labour Government in 2000 treats employers and employees as equal partners in industrial agreements.
But employers and employees are not equal. Employers live off the wealth created by employees because workers have to work to live. Employers can sack workers or employ strike-breakers and scab labour and the unions are bound by the ERA to take them to Court. If workers want to take strong action that is outside the ERA to win their demands they have to make these decisions and act themselves. For example, building a mass picket to physically stop the employer from using scabs is illegal.

That is why we need to organise for mass, democratic, rank and file controlled unions that can use their power to close down industry to win their demands for a living wage, a shorter week, work for all, and to build a labour movement with the power to occupy and renationalise all former state assets, and to nationalise key industries without compensation to the bosses and under workers management and control!

Fiji Labour Unions Strike - what's behind the scenes?

While we certainly defend the right of unionists to go on strike for a wage increase, we question the motives of the particular unions involved in the latest round of strikes in Fiji. The Western media, including an Aotearoa Indymedia feature do not do any in-depth investigation into the political and economic background to these strikes. Most take the position of the US, Australian and NZ politicians that the latest coup in Fiji is an attack on democracy, so that the strike against the military government is seen as a progressive fight for democracy.

Unions racially divided

These strikes are ostensibly against the 5% wage cut introduced by the military regime when it took power in December 2006. But they are complicated by the fact that most Indo-Fijian workers have not gone on strike. This is notable because in general Indo-Fijian workers and poor farmers are worse off than ethnic Fijian workers such as teachers and nurses in the public sector. There is a racial division in the unions that reflects the widespread division in Fiji between those ethnic Fijians who supported the Qarase government, and the majority of Indo-Fijians who tend to support the military regime which includes prominent Indo-Fijian politicians.

Despite the usual claptrap about Bainamarama's coup being the ‘fourth’ coup, in reality his coup is directed at all those who supported the earlier coups and then sought amnesty for the coup-makers. These earlier Rabuka and Speight coups were designed to defend the role of the traditional Fijian chiefs as the dominant faction of the Fijian bourgeoisie doing deals with imperialism.

They both deposed Labour –or Labour dominated –governments which were expected to give the Indo-Fijians more or a central role in the development of Fiji. While ordinary Fijians do not benefit from these coups, or the deals that they promoted, many of them, even in the unions, remain loyal to tribal leaders. That's why Maori nationalist support for Bainimarama has been much less than that for Rabuka and Speight.

Speight sought to depose the Labour led government so that he could procede with his lucrative deals with imperialist MNCs for flogging off Fijian native hardwood timber. Bainimarama who was at the time a senior military officer stood up against Speight and barely escaped with his life. He was then instrumental in ending the coup and appointing Qarase as interim PM. A subsequent election saw Qarase elected as PM.

But his policies turned out to be just the same as the earlier coup makers, favouring the traditional elite at the expense of the Indo-Fijians and the common people of both races. Despite many warnings that the military would not put up with policies that favoured those behind the earlier coups, or proposed to free the coup-makers, Qarase continued with his pro-elite policies. When the level of corruption had reached epidemic proportions, Bainimarama stepped in and imposed a military regime.

In the light of this history what role is being played by the strikers? Are these strikes genuine workers' struggles, or 'political' strikes as Bainimarama says - that is, designed to oppose and bring an end to military rule? Or maybe they are both. Maybe the workers fighting for justice are also being used to campaign for ‘democracy’. So what is going on and what position should internationalist workers take on these strikes?

What is ‘democracy’ in Fiji?

Many leftwing commentators have criticised Australian and New Zealand's stance in condemning the latest coup and demanding an early return to 'democracy'. They point to the corruption of Qarase's regime and the fact that the major powers in the region benefited from the deals done to exploit Fiji's resources under his 'democracy'. They note that Fiji's economy is suffering from the economic and political boycotts imposed by these powers to force a return to democracy. What is at stake here seems to be a concern on the part of the Imperialist states in the region that Bainimarama could turn out to be another Chavez, or closer to home, a Pacifika populist who turns Fiji into a 'rogue' state and opens up investment to China, Japan etc and excludes the US, Australia and NZ.

In other words, the spat in Fiji isn’t really about ‘democracy’ at all, It’s about which foreign powers and their local agents are allowed to profit most from Fiji's valuable resources. Qarase was a reliable ally in this exploitation, but Bainimarama is not. So we can expect increased pressure on the military regime to destabilise it and create a 'regime change' to restore friendly relations between Fiji and the 'West'., For example: NZ Foreign Minister, Winston Peters threatened to cut aid to Solomons over the appointments of Moti as Attorney General and a new police chief from Fiji who promptly armed the police. We have numerous warnings from Howard and Clark about the situation in East Timor getting out of hand.

We can expect the regional ‘big brothers’ to continue harping on about 'democracy' and impose further boycotts against a 'rogue' state (rugby matches etc). We can expect personal attacks on Bainimarama and scaremongering about deals with China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela etc. But Bainimarama is hardly a leftist or Chavez type figure. We can also expect more pressure from the World Bank, IMF, and WTO on the military regime to restore normalcy or risk becoming a 'failed' state on the brink of economic collapse.

But even though Bainimarama's 'road map' for Fiji includes a promise to abolish race-based voter registration, we can't put our faith in the army any more than the chiefs to unify the nation and solve the problems faced by the people of Fiji. He may eliminate the racial electoral roll and put everyone onto a general role, but this will not stop existing political parties dominated by ethnic and Indo Fijian bosses playing their 'race cards’. What is needed is class unity between the workers of both races against the traditional elite's treacherous role as sell outs to imperialism.

Fight for a Constituent Assembly

The labour movement must demand that the military regime convenes a Constituent Assembly which is based on one vote for each person over the age of 16. Such a Constituent Assembly would have the mandated delegates of the people vote on a new national constitution. This would introduce a popular democracy and empower the majority of workers and poor farmers of both races.

However a Constituent Assembly is still an institution of the bourgeois state in which the capitalist class can guarantee the new constitution protects the private property of the ruling classes. Therefore, during the campaign for a Constituent Assembly workers should advocate the formation of a Workers and poor Farmers government, in which the military is replaced by a popular militia, elected by the people, to defend the government.
Its program should include:

repudiate the national debt, kick out the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation etc.,
nationalise without compensation, and under workers and poor farmers control, all of Fiji's vital resources on the land and sea, instead of letting the old ruling class, or the new entrepreneurs selling out to MNCs and pocketing the profits
form a government the ordinary working people of Fiji and their supporters in the ranks of the military, to take control of the economy and develop its resources for the benefit of all, especially those most in need!
For a non-racial popular Constituent Assembly!
For a Workers and poor Farmers Government!
For a Socialist Republic of Fiji in a Federation of Pacific Socialist Republics!

New Zealand National Party calls for 'Work for Dole' modeled on the Australian scheme

The National Party leader, John Key, spouts on about the 'emerging underclass' and now he wants to force the unemployed to work. He calls it “activity in the community”. The Aussie system is being touted by National as the 'humane' form of work for the dole. 48% go on to get jobs. What jobs? Howard’s reforms have meant that workers now face unprecedented casualisation. NZ is already a low wage country with wages 35% lower than Australia. Forcing the few thousand unemployed into the workforce will force wages down further and make life hell for more workers.

The figures show that NZ workers are no better off today than they were in 1987 before the new right reforms bit them in the bum. The rich have doubled their wealth several times over, while the poor have paid for it by taking cuts in real wages. This is exactly what Marxists predicted in the 1970s. NZs postwar wealth was a fragile balloon deflated by the long run downward grind of a shaky economy. New Zealand’s wealth was entirely dependent upon its comparative advantage in agricultural commodities which are extremely vulnerable to falling prices to pay for its overinflated imported lifestyles.

While the Labour Government pretends to want NZ to be a high wage country with profits coming from increased productivity, National knows that capitalism in NZ will always be dependent on the world economy. NZ can never be a knowledge economy when its biggest export is brains! NZ will continue to be an agricultural and service economy that imports foreign capital, and exports its profits and skilled labour elsewhere. Therefore its role is to exploit cheap labour in farming, processing and servicing the MNCs. Keeping wages and taxes down is the key to keeping profits up. This is called ‘community activism’. We reject that totally. The unions must mobilise against this threat to wages and living standards by unitjng employed, unemployed and beneficiaries!

Here is an article from the latest Red paper of the Communist Left of Australia on the experience of Work for the Dole since it was introduced by Howard in 2002.

Howard forces 80,000 more to Work for the Dole

When Work for the Dole was introduced by the Howard Government in 2002, many of the projects involved light community programmes such as assisting a food co-op or working on a history of migrants in the Marrickville area. Many supposedly progressive organizations took advantage of the scheme and were co-opted. .These schemes should have been carried out by paid community workers. Since then though, the work has got tougher and the hours of work longer. Older unemployed have also been forced to do it if they are classified as “shirkers”.

Work for the Dole has meant slave labour doing tasks such as concreting, teaching and nurse aid work, light construction, bush regeneration and other tasks. For this unemployed are paid a mere $15 dollars per week on top of their dole payment. In some extreme circumstances the extra money may not even cover transport to the project. Whilst the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has clamped down a bit, safety and amenities on many projects are still inadequate.

All this is a serious attack on the employed workforce as the jobs done under work the dole should be carried out by workers paid award rates and with award conditions. Work for the Dole as well as “mutual obligation” provisions are part and parcel of the government’s programme to undermine wage rates. From the employers point of view there is no reason to hire workers when there is a pool of unemployed forced to work for nothing. Work for the Dole is therefore a job destruction project and not a job creation project. If unemployed refuse to comply they are “in breach” and this may mean eight weeks without any income.

On the whole it is the public and community sector which has been taking advantage of this free labour e.g. churches have benefited from work on Church schools and community centres. Farmers suffering from the drought also benefit from free unemployed labour.

The current “welfare reform” is based on Howard’s belief that the official level of unemployment is effectively full employment. He therefore believes that everyone on Newstart for any length of time is a bludger. From now on all long term unemployed, “shirkers” or otherwise, will be forced to do it.

But the figures he uses are wrong. They do not include those who live off savings and don’t register. They don’t include underemployed who work for eighteen hours a week. They don’t include those who choose not to register or illegal immigrants. But also, just because there are plenty of jobs doesn’t mean employers will employ many unemployed.

Discrimination against older unemployed is rife. Many who were unemployed before this new boom do not have the skills to get a job in the current environment. Many are understandably demoralised. The jobs are not necessarily in an area where unemployed live. The jobs boom is linked to a boom in mining so those communities which need workers are in parts of Queensland and Western Australia. It is extremely difficult for those in the Hunter Valley (where there is a jobs shortage) to move thousands of kilometres to where the jobs are. Often in the new growth areas there is a shortage of housing.

Howard’s reforms will not create jobs. They will create suffering. It is difficult to live on the dole at the moment. It is tougher when you have to work for it. What should be crystal clear is that the “welfare reform” programme is not merely aimed at the unemployed. It is part and parcel of their overall programme to undermine the wages, conditions and union organization of all workers. It is therefore disgraceful that “welfare reform” or Work for the Dole hardly rates a mention at massive rallies against Work Choices. The unions including the supposedly “left” CFMEU (covering miners and building workers) and the Australian Manufacturers Union have dumped it in the too hard basket.

Especially treacherous is the Labor Party. When Work for the Dole came in “Left” leader Anthony Albanese was strongly opposed. Yet one organisation taking advantage of free unemployed labour is the NSW Labor Government led by Morriss Iemma. The state government uses unemployed labour to maintain gardens at Lidcombe TAFE as well as state schools. Albanese’s political ally Carmel Tebbitt, state member for Marrickville, explained that “Work for the Dole was part of the scenery” and was “ok when it was working well” She explained that this was the case at Lidcombe TAFE.

Slave labour is never justified. If Lidcombe TAFE wants labour to maintain its’ gardens then the state government should pay for the labour at full rates!

Work for the Dole is one issue on which ALP Federal leader, Kevin Rudd maintains his silence. He has actively support Howard’s reactionary “reform” to make single parents and those with disabilities be work tested and, if required, do work for the dole.
Work for the Dole must be smashed. We don’t object to unemployed people doing work. But all work must be full time work with proper conditions, paid at proper award rates. REAL JOBS FOR REAL WAGES!

The attack on unemployed people not only forces them to suffer it is part and parcel of Howard’s offensive against the workers movement. It is therefore a disgrace that the workers movement refuses to act. It is not surprising though. It is a product of the reformist and Stalinist politics which dominate the union leaderships and the degeneration of their politics.

Iraq: Puppet Govt uses troops against striking oil workers

2007-06-08T16:35:00.000+12:00

This strike started after a month of dialogue and promises for bonuses, other economic issues and including one point calling for union input in the pending law on the oil resources (both of which I sent out earlier.).

The threats to the strikers from the Malikii government described here show that actual pro-capitalist character of the newly-formed state (backed by US forces) under the completely liberal, reform pressures by the oil workers through their strike. It illustrates the fundamental nature of social reality as becomes apparent under this stress. This illustrates the importance of recognizing that capital is a system based on exploiting labor and which becomes apparent especially when challenged even on a reform basis by workers in collective struggle over reforms. Reforms means a fight over money and power; it poses the question: who shall rule? even if potentially and not explicitly.

After all, these oil workers did and do actually run the production and distribution system, even with almost no technical support from outside their ravaged country. Part of their goals is to minimize the control of international corporations from controlling the oil. In fact, it's either the capitalist market or a planned economy run for the common good by that working class. This strike contains seeds of that basic divide.

We should ask ourselves, what can we/I do here to help build sympathy and practical solidarity with those workers and their struggle? What can I/we do which also clarifies the capitalist nature of the occupation (and the regime it has brought into power)? one that points to the real potential of the working class not only to resist but also to take over and run the economy and society? Can our organizations send them messages, money, hold rallies, send messages to the US government demanding the troops be called off, etc.? Even if only to send personal messages of solidarity?

If anyone receiving this has ways to develop both sympathy and solidarity, please send them along here and widely.

in solidarity,

Earl

In a message dated 6/7/07 7:09:25 PM !!!First Boot!!!, NYCLAW@rly-me04.mx.aol.com writes:

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/53379/

Iraqi Troops Face Off Against Striking Oil Workers

By Ben Lando, UPI. Posted June 7, 2007.

On the third day of an oil strike in southern Iraq, the Iraqi military
has surrounded oil workers and the prime minister issued arrest
warrants for the union leaders, sparking an outcry from supporters and
international unions.

"This will not stop us because we are defending people's rights," said
Hassan Jumaa Awad, president of IFOU. As of Wednesday morning, when
United Press International spoke to Awad via mobile phone in Basra at
the site of one of the strikes, no arrests had been made, "but
regardless, the arrest warrant is still active."

He said the "Iraqi Security Forces," who were present at the strike
scenes, told him of the warrants and said they would be making any
arrests.

The arrest warrant accuses the union leaders of "sabotaging the
economy," according a statement from British-based organization
Naftana, and said Maliki warned his "iron fist" would be used against
those who stopped the flow of oil.

IFOU called a strike early last month but put it on hold twice after
overtures from the government. Awad said that at a May 16 meeting,
Maliki agreed to set up a committee to address the unions' demands.

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they
fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq's oil,
as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

"Apparently they promise but they never do anything," Awad said,
confirming reports the Iraqi Oil Ministry would send a delegation to
Basra.

"One person from the Ministry of Oil accompanied by an Iraqi military
figure came to negotiate the demands. Instead it was all about
threats. It was all about trying to shut us up, to marginalize our
actions," Awad said. "The actions we are taking now are continuing
with the strike until our demands are taken in concentration."

The strike by the Iraq Pipelines Union in Basra started Monday,
instigated by a decision by the Iraq Pipelines Co. to stop regular
bonuses to workers. It is part of a larger picture, however, of 17
different demands laid out -- beginning last month -- to the Iraq Oil
Ministry and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the Iraq Federation of
Oil Unions.

Since the strike began, two small pipelines delivering oil products to
Baghdad and other cities have been closed, as has a larger pipeline
that sends gas and oil to major cities, including Baghdad and
utilities.

The strike started with domestic pipelines transporting oil and oil
products, but Iraq's top oil unionist says it will soon encapsulate
the 1.6 million barrels per day of oil Iraq sends to the global
market.

Basra, home to much of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of oil -- the
third-largest reserves in the world -- is also Iraq's main port. Awad
said the unions will continue to restrict all oil exports, which bring
in 93 percent of Iraq's federal budget funds. Such a move, combined
with the choking off of much-needed supplies of transportation,
cooking and heating fuels, is what the unions hope to use as leverage
against Maliki.

Awad said "the atmosphere here is full of tension," and added that he
wants to pressure the government to agree to their demands, not topple
an already weak Maliki government.

"At the end we are hoping that the situation will not go that way," Awad said.

Maliki has been unable to meet a key benchmark set by the Bush
administration and backed by the Democratic-led Congress: to pass an
oil law. Many in Iraq, including oil experts and parliamentarians, are
calling for the law to be put on hold. Negotiators haven't been able
to agree on the best means of revenue distribution, whether central or
regional governments will have more power in the oil sector, or how
much access foreign investors will have.

Manfred Warda, general secretary of the International Federation of
Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions, Wednesday sent a
letter to Maliki condemning his tactics in addressing the strike.
"Genuine and democratic trade unions are a cornerstone of democracy
and at the same time are a force for reconciliation, peace and
stability in a society," Warda wrote.

The Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation and
London-based Trades Union Congress have also condemned the military
action and arrest warrants.

A top official with the International Federation of Chemical, Energy,
Mine & General Workers' Union said his contacts say the strike had
been toned down while negotiations were under way but has not ended.

"The strike began purely and simply at the pipeline," said Jim
Catterson, the energy industry officer for Warda's federation, based
in Brussels. IFOU "has membership capable of bringing an end to
exports."

Kamil Mahdi, an Iraqi economist on Middle East affairs at the
University of Exeter, said Maliki's swing from agreement with the
unions to a military presence and warrants is "very surprising" and
arresting the leaders won't quell the workers' demands.

"It may be the opposite. These are people who are highly respected in
the community," he said. If the strike isn't stopped soon, "the effect
on the global oil market will certainly be felt."

(Hiba Dawood contributed to this report.)

Trotsky on Unions and Imperialism

2007-02-12T15:26:00.000+13:00

This document is the theoretical foundation for work in the unions today, especially that which seeks to regain control of unions in the hands of the rank and file and to turn them into 'schools for revolution'.

Leon Trotsky’s 'Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay'

Written: April, 1940, Mexico City
First Published in English: Fourth International, October, 1941, pp. 251-252
Source: Fourth International, New York, February, 1941, Volume 2, No. 2. Pages 40-43
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive, 2003
Transcribed/HTML Markup: David Walters in 2003
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive www.marxists.org 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

(The manuscript of the following article was found in Trotsky’s desk. Obviously, it was by no means a completed article, but rather the rough notes for an article on the subject indicated by his title. He had been writing them shortly before his death.—the editors of FI.)

* * *

There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power. This process is equally characteristic of the neutral, the Social-Democratic, the Communist and “anarchist” trade unions. This fact alone shows that the tendency towards “growing together” is intrinsic not in this or that doctrine as such but derives from social conditions common for all unions.

Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at the head of mighty trusts, syndicates, banking consortiums, etcetera, view economic life from the very same heights as does state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of the latter. In their turn the trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises. They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions—insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property—to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of superprofits of imperialist capitalism. The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.

Colonial and semi-colonial countries are under the sway not of native capitalism but of foreign imperialism. However, this does not weaken but on the contrary, strengthens the need of direct, daily, practical ties between the magnates of capitalism and the governments which are in essence subject to them—the governments of colonial or semi-colonial countries. Inasmuch as imperialist capitalism creates both in colonies and semi-colonies a stratum of labor aristocracy and bureaucracy, the latter requires the support of colonial and semicolonial governments, as protectors, patrons and, sometimes, as arbitrators. This constitutes the most important social basis for the Bonapartist and semi-Bonapartist character of governments in the colonies and in backward countries generally. This likewise constitutes the basis for the dependence of reformist unions upon the state.

In Mexico the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions and have, in the nature of things, assumed a semi-totalitarian character. The stateization of the trade unions was, according to the conception of the legislators, introduced in the interests of the workers in order to assure them an influence upon the governmental and economic life. But insofar as foreign imperialist capitalism dominates the national state and insofar as it is able, with the assistance of internal reactionary forces, to overthrow the unstable democracy and replace it with outright fascist dictatorship, to that extent the legislation relating to the trade unions can easily become a weapon in the hands of imperialist dictatorship.

Slogans for Freeing the Unions

From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labor organizations. In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for the influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears. Such a position, however, would be false to the core. We cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes. It is infinitely more difficult to fight in a totalitarian or a semitotalitarian state for influence over the working masses than in a democracy. The very same thing likewise applies to trade unions whose fate reflects the change in the destiny of capitalist states. We cannot renounce the struggle for influence over workers in Germany merely because the totalitarian regime makes such work extremely difficult there. We cannot, in precisely the same way, renounce the struggle within the compulsory labor organizations created by Fascism. All the less so can we renounce internal systematic work in trade unions of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian type merely because they depend directly or indirectly on the workers’ state or because the bureaucracy deprives the revolutionists of the possibility of working freely within these trade unions. It is necessary to conduct a struggle under all those concrete conditions which have been created by the preceding developments, including therein the mistakes of the working class and the crimes of its leaders. In the fascist and semi-fascist countries it is impossible to carry on revolutionary work that is not underground, illegal, conspiratorial. Within the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian unions it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to carry on any except conspiratorial work. It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime. The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy.

* * *

The second slogan is: trade union democracy. This second slogan flows directly from the first and presupposes for its realization the complete freedom of the trade unions from the imperialist or colonial state.

In other words, the trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class. They cannot any longer be anarchistic, i.e. ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of peoples and classes. They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

* * *

The neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past, gone together with the free bourgeois democracy.

* * *

From what has been said it follows quite clearly that, in spite of the progressive degeneration of trade unions and their growing together with the imperialist state, the work within the trade unions not only does not lose any of its importance but remains as before and becomes in a certain sense even more important work than ever for every revolutionary party. The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organizations, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish.

* * *

Inasmuch as the chief role in backward countries is not played by national but by foreign capitalism, the national bourgeoisie occupies, in the sense of its social position, a much more minor position than corresponds with the development of industry. Inasmuch as foreign capital does not import workers but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat soon begins playing the most important role in the life of the country. In these conditions the national government, to the extent that it tries to show resistance to foreign capital, is compelled to a greater or lesser degree to lean on the proletariat. On the other hand, the governments of those backward countries which consider inescapable or more profitable for themselves to march shoulder to shoulder with foreign capital, destroy the labor organizations and institute a more or less totalitarian regime. Thus, the feebleness of the national bourgeoisie, the absence of traditions of municipal self-government, the pressure of foreign capitalism and the relatively rapid growth of the proletariat, cut the ground from under any kind of stable democratic regime. The governments of backward, i.e., colonial and semi-colonial countries, by and large assume a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character; and differ from one another in this, that some try to orient in a democratic direction, seeking support among workers and peasants, while others install a form close to military-police dictatorship. This likewise determines the fate of the trade unions. They either stand under the special patronage of the state or they are subjected to cruel persecution. Patronage on the part of the state is dictated by two tasks which confront it.. First, to draw the working class closer thus gaining a support for resistance against excessive pretensions on the part of imperialism; and, at the same time, to discipline the workers themselves by placing them under the control of a bureaucracy.

* * *

Monopoly Capitalism and the Unions

Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labor bureaucracy is driven away and replaced by the fascists. Incidentally, all the efforts of the labor aristocracy in the service of imperialism cannot in the long run save them from destruction.

The intensification of class contradictions within each country, the intensification of antagonisms between one country and another, produce a situation in which imperialist capitalism can tolerate (i.e., up to a certain time) a reformist bureaucracy only if the latter serves directly as a petty but active stockholder of its imperialist enterprises, of its plans and programs within the country as well as on the world arena. Social-reformism must become transformed into social-imperialism in order to prolong its existence, but only prolong it, and nothing more. Because along this road there is no way out in general.

Does this mean that in the epoch of imperialism independent trade unions are generally impossible? It would be fundamentally incorrect to pose the question this way. Impossible are the independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions. Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions which not only are not stockholders of imperialist policy but which set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution. In this sense, the program of transitional demands adopted by the last congress of the Fourth International is not only the program for the activity of the party but in its fundamental features it is the program for the activity of the trade unions.

(Translator’s note: At this point Trotsky left room on the page, to expound further the connection between trade union activity and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. It is obvious that implied here is a very powerful argument in favor of military training under trade union control. The following idea is implied: Either the trade unions serve as the obedient recruiting sergeants for the imperialist army and imperialist war or they train workers for self-defense and revolution.)

The development of backward countries is characterized by its combined character. In other words, the last word of imperialist technology, economics, and politics is combined in these countries with traditional backwardness and primitiveness. This law can be observed in the most diverse spheres of the development of colonial and semi-colonial countries, including the sphere of the trade union movement. Imperialist capitalism operates here in its most cynical and naked form. It transports to virgin soil the most perfected methods of its tyrannical rule.

* * *

In the trade union movement throughout the world there is to be observed in the last period a swing to the right and the suppression of internal democracy. In England, the Minority Movement in the trade unions has been crushed (not without the assistance of Moscow); the leaders of the trade union movement are today, especially in the field of foreign policy, the obedient agents of the Conservative party. In France there was no room for an independent existence for Stalinist trade unions; they united with the so-called anarcho-syndicalist trade unions under the leadership of Jouhaux and as a result of this unification there was a general shift of the trade union movement not to the left but to the right. The leadership of the C.G.T. is the most direct and open agency of French imperialist capitalism.

In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new “leftist” trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.

No less graphic, although in a different sense, is the picture of the development or the degeneration of the trade union movement in Spain. In the socialist trade unions all those leading elements which to any degree represented the independence of the trade union movement were pushed out. As regards the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were transformed into the instrument of the bourgeois republicans; the anarcho-syndicalist leaders became conservative bourgeois ministers. The fact that this metamorphosis took place in conditions of civil war does not weaken its significance. War is the continuation of the self-same policies. It speeds up processes, exposes their basic features, destroys all that is rotten, false, equivocal and lays bare all that is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right was due to the sharpening of class and international contradictions. The leaders of the trade union movement sensed or understood, or were given to understand, that now was no time to play the game of opposition. Every oppositional movement within the trade union movement, especially among the tops, threatens to provoke a stormy movement of the masses and to create difficulties for national imperialism. Hence flows the swing of the trade unions to the right, and the suppression of workers’ democracy within the unions. The basic feature, the swing towards the totalitarian regime, passes through the labor movement of the whole world.

We should also recall Holland, where the reformist and the trade union movement was not only a reliable prop of imperialist capitalism, but where the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization also was actually under the control of the imperialist government. The secretary of this organization, Sneevliet, in spite of his Platonic sympathies for the Fourth International was as deputy in the Dutch Parliament most concerned lest the wrath of the government descend upon his trade union organization.

* * *

In the United States the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.

* * *

The nationalization of railways and oil fields in Mexico has of course nothing in common with socialism. It is a measure of state capitalism in a backward country which in this way seeks to defend itself on the one hand against foreign imperialism and on the other against its own proletariat. The management of railways, oil fields, etcetera, through labor organizations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for in the essence of the matter the management is effected through the labor bureaucracy which is independent of the workers, but in return, completely dependent on the bourgeois state. This measure on the part of the ruling class pursues the aim of disciplining the working class, making it more industrious in the service of the common interests of the state, which appear on the surface to merge with the interests of the working class itself. As a matter of fact, the whole task of the bourgeoisie consists in liquidating the trade unions as organs of the class struggle and substituting in their place the trade union bureaucracy as the organ of the leadership over the workers by the bourgeois state. In these conditions, the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to conduct a struggle for the complete independence of the trade unions and for the introduction of actual workers’ control over the present union bureaucracy, which has been turned into the administration of railways, oil enterprises and so on.

* * *

Events of the last period (before the war) have revealed with especial clarity that anarchism, which in point of theory is always only liberalism drawn to its extremes, was, in practice, peaceful propaganda within the democratic republic, the protection of which it required. If we leave aside individual terrorist acts, etcetera, anarchism, as a system of mass movement and politics, presented only propaganda material under the peaceful protection of the laws. In conditions of crisis the anarchists always did just the opposite of what they taught in peace times. This was pointed out by Marx himself in connection with the Paris Commune. And it was repeated on a far more colossal scale in the experience of the Spanish revolution.

* * *

Democratic unions in the old sense of the term, bodies where in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist. Just as it is impossible to bring back the bourgeois-democratic state, so it is impossible to bring back the old workers’ democracy. The fate of the one reflects the fate of the other. As a matter of fact, the independence of trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International. This leadership, naturally, must and can be rational and assure the unions the maximum of democracy conceivable under the present concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International the independence of the trade unions is impossible.

Report on the IWW and fired warehouse workers in New York

2007-01-17T23:43:00.000+13:00

So I went to the MLK-day march in support of the fired
food warehouse workers in Brooklyn yesterday. It's
been over two weeks now since twenty two IWW union
supporters were thrown out of their jobs and hit with
all-too-common anti-immigrant attacks. I can't stress
enough how the success or failure of this campaign for
their reinstatement, and for the recognition of some
of their basic union rights, will be the acid test of
the new IWW -- will it make good on its plans to be a
revolutionary, class struggle alternative to the
conservative AFL-CIO-CTW union leaderships? Or will
workers realize that the anarchists in the leadership
of the IWW are just reformists bureaucrats without
fancy titles or money in the bank, in which case, all
other things being equal, they're better off joining a
big business union like the UFCW, UNITE-HERE, or the
Teamsters?

Here's what, as far as I could see, the IWW has not
done:

1. It hasn't made any serious effort to use the
resources it has nationally to defend the Brooklyn
warehouse workers, either by bringing its unattached
members to NY to picket the warehouses, or even making
any systematic effort at fund-raising from its members
and supporters nationwide, a large number of whom are
wealthy students at private universities.

2. It hasn't made any serious effort to mobilize the
heavy battalions of the working class in NYC, the rank
and file of the AFL-CIO-CTW union locals, to assist in
picketing the warehouses or even raising funds for the
union's defense and welfare efforts. Instead of going
to the workplaces and the union halls to appeal to the
union rank and file to defend their fellow workers,
like the conservative and narrow-minded bureaucrats of
any other business union, the IWW leaders gave an
uncritical platform to the usual suspects, the local
union hacks and bureaucrats, to pose as militants and
friends of labor when in reality they have not lifted
a finger to actually mobilize the workers they
supposedly represent in defense of the fired IWW
members. Giant inflatable rats are cool, but they do
not win labor battles.

What has the IWW done? Instead of appealing to the
working class where it is organized in the numbers
necessary to actually take "direct action" against the
warehouse bosses, the IWW is busy appealing to the
warehouse owners' fellow capitalists, the restaurant
owners, and their customers-at-large, to take the side
of the workers. The IWW is waiting for the state labor
boards to come down on the side of the workers. And
even in pursuing these secondary, reformist tactics,
it hasn't seriously tried to mobilize its own entire
membership nationwide, not to speak of worldwide.

The same IWW & anarchist leaders who were, a few hours
later, yelling radical slogans about "organizing to
smash the state" and "no war but the class war" at an
anti-war demonstration in Times Square that afternoon,
are showing once again that anarchists forget all
their revolutionary, class struggle rhetoric in the
moment when it actually becomes necessary to put it
into practice.

For AFL-CIO-CTW-IWW unity in action against the
warehouse bosses! Strike and blockade to shut down the
warehouses until all the fired workers are reinstated!

Fred Bergen

****
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
Labor Action discussion group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/labor_action/
Working Class Emancipation email newsletter:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emancipation_news/
****

The Swift raids: State's gestapo-style revenge for the immigrants rights movement

2006-12-29T21:25:00.000+13:00

From the January, 2007 issue of Working Class Emancipation

by Fred Bergen

At 6 AM on Tuesday, December 12, over one thousand armed agents of the
Federal Bureau of Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stormed six
plants belonging to Swift & Co, the country's second largest meatpacker.
At plants in Greeley, Colorado, Marshalltown, Iowa, Worthington,
Minnesota, Grand Island, Nebraska, Cactus, Texas, and Hyrum, Utah,
black-shirted ICE cops pulled workers from the lines, separated
"immigrants" from "citizens" by skin color, and hauled nearly 1,300
workers away by the bus-load to concentration camps, known
euphemistically in ICE-speak as "detention centers," most without any
charges, without lawyers, without warning. Hundreds of family and
friends of the workers, alerted to the raids by reports on the radio,
watched through the plant fences with tears of fear and rage as their
loved ones were taken away.

The impact was devastating. In Worthington, where ten cattle-cars/buses
lined up to take the kidnapped workers away to a prison in Sioux Falls,
Iowa, five children were dropped off at a local church by their school
bus driver when they returned home to find their parents disappeared.
Also in Worthington, "Jesus Alcantar, a Swift employee and union
representative, said ... that he had found four children knocking on
doors looking for their mother." (Worthington Daily Globe, 14 Dec. 2006)
In Greeley, Colorado, at least one hundred children lost their parents
to the federal immigration Gestapo. In Texas, four hundred children are
thought to be separated from their parents. In Utah, three hundred
children are thought to be without their parents.

The numbers are uncertain, partly because the immigrant population of
the meatpacking towns has been terrorized, and is wary of speaking to
journalists or government agencies, but primarily because the ICE
Gestapo was clearly unconcerned with the consequences of its mass
kidnappings. The most they offered to shocked families and community
members was an 800 number for inquiries about the disappeared. Arrested
parents were allowed to petition their captors for a thirty-day grace
period to prepare for deportation or present documentation. ICE shut the
prisoners off from the outside world at the remote military bases where
they were held. Lawyers attempting to visit the prisoners at the Camp
Dodge Iowa National Guard base were turned away by guards. On Wednesday,
December 13, lawyer Gail Boliver reported, "I was asked by family
members and friends to meet with immigrant workers now being detained at
the camp, but we were turned away at the gate and told, 'That's it,' for
the day. I even had a list with the names of my clients, but the answer
was no." (Associated Press, 14 Dec. 2006) A priest and a nun from a
church in Marshalltown were turned away from Camp Dodge when they went
in search of the mother of an infant in their care. The "ICE officer at
the facility 'wouldn't tell us anything about anybody,'" says the
Reverend Jim Miller. "The baby doesn't want to eat," says Sister
Christine Feagan, "another [volunteer] tried to breastfeed, but she knew
it wasn't her [mother]." (Des Moines Register, 13 Dec. 2006)

"Operation Wagon Train," the biggest ever government kidnapping of
immigrant workers, hit at the end of a historic year in the history of
the struggle for immigrants' rights. The US House of Representatives'
passage of Resolution 4437, known as the "Sensenbrenner Bill" after its
sponsor, James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), in December of 2005, sparked
massive marches and protests across the country the following spring. HR
4437 would have made it a federal crime to be an undocumented immigrant
in the United States (although the government seems to have no problem
with arresting people who are not guilty of any crime, either.) Massive
rallies were held on April 10. But they were only a prelude to the
historic May Day general strike, when millions of immigrants and their
supporters took to the streets in every major city and hundreds of towns
in the United States.

The developments following the historic May Day strike, leading up to
this December's racist atrocity at Swift, point to the need for a
class-struggle fight for immigrants rights, independent of the
Democratic Party and of the bosses. The betrayals by the established
movement and union leaders in the months since the May Day strike paved
the way for the Swift raids, and helped to undermine the possibility for
a strong response. Immigrant communities are boiling over with outrage,
but there has been no organized response anywhere near the scale of the
massive marches last spring. The United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW) union, which represents workers at Swift & Co. and other
meatpacking plants, has held press conferences condemning the Swift
raids and sought legal injunctions to stop the raids, but this does
nothing to free the hundreds of prisoners who were taken on December 12,
or to stop the ICE Gestapo from deporting over five hundred people every
day (ICE Office of Detention and Removal "Key Accomplishments in Fiscal
Year 2006".)

The May Day strike demonstrated the two contradictory tendencies in the
movement. While the millions of workers and young people who took to the
streets protested the draconian Sensenbrenner bill by exercising their
power as a significant sector of the working class, shutting down
meatpacking, ports, construction, agricultural, and retail industries,
the spontaneous nature of the protest and the lack of an organized
working class party allowed the union bureaucrats, local Democratic
party officials, and religious groups to position themselves in the
leadership of the new movement. Despite the differences that these
sectors may have had with the specifics of the Sensenbrenner
legislation, their goal was not to carry the fight for full citizenship
rights for all immigrants to its conclusion, but to divert the new
movement into a compromise with the bosses and the Democratic Party.

The employers, in general, were uncharacteristically cooperative with
the May Day strike, agreeing in advance to shut down for the day and
give workers the day off. Mainstream business interests do not want the
complete deportation of all or even a majority of undocumented
immigrants - doing so would cause the economy to grind to a halt. This
aspect of Sensenbrenner's legislation was aimed at stirring up the
congressman's far-right ultra-racist base of support for the coming
elections, not responding to the needs of the exploiters of immigrant
labor who bankroll congressional and presidential campaigns. The
consensus position of the business class was expressed by the
legislation that came out of the Senate, bill 2611, alternatively known
as the "Hagel-Martinez" bill after its principal sponsors.

While on May Day, the mass opposition in the streets to Sensenbrenner
briefly and roughly coincided with the tactical legislative program of
the majority of the capitalist class, the bosses were not at all
interested in granting immigrants' demands for equal rights and an end
to racist persecution. Their agenda, best represented by the Democratic
Party, was maintain a reliable supply of oppressed workers who, lacking
the basic rights of citizenship, could be pressured into accepting lower
wages and harsher, more dangerous working conditions. "Law and order"
measures, including massive roundups and deportations, are a necessary
part of this plan. Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked
Bush's immigration policy from the right:

"The record is clear: for more than five years, the President has failed
to secure our borders and to enforce our immigration laws. Republicans
in Congress have abetted that failure by repeatedly underfunding the
border patrol, refusing to hold the President accountable, and fighting
among themselves to destroy real immigration reform.

Seven times over the last four and a half years, House Republicans
rejected Democratic amendments to increase resources. Had the
Republicans not rejected all these amendments, there would be 6,600 more
Border Patrol agents, 14,000 more detention beds, and 2,700 more
immigration enforcement agents than there are now." (2 Aug. 2006)

In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, taking a page from the Nazi authorities
who required Jews to display a special identification (the star of
David) to facilitate surveillance and persecution, outlined a new plan
that she called the "orange card" system, involving a process of at
least six years, multiple background checks and measures of state
surveillance, and thousands of dollars in fines for each immigrant
wishing to obtain "legal" status. She boasted that the fines from her
proposed system would bring in $20 billion in revenues for the
government. (Speech from the Senate floor, 22 May 2006). Millionaire
real estate developer, Arizona Democratic Party chairman, and 2006
Senatorial candidate John Pederson pushed a "get tough" law enforcement
policy proposal:

"Compel the federal government to pay the $217 million owed Arizona for
incarcerating foreign nationals and expand the State Criminal Alien
Assistance Program (SCAAP) program, which provides grants to border
states that bear the brunt of Washington's failed policies. ... Improve
coordination and intelligence-sharing between federal enforcement
efforts and state and local law enforcement. ...
Recruit, hire, and train at least 12,000 new, highly-qualified Border
Patrol agents over the next five years. ... Expand the capacity for
detention facilities for foreign nationals. ...

Undocumented workers would be eligible to participate [in a guest-worker
program] if they pay a fine, undergo a criminal and security background
check, and pay back taxes. ... After six years, guest workers would be
eligible to apply for permanent residency, provided they pay a fine
[another fine?!], learn English, and successfully complete a series of
U.S. civics courses. After five additional years, they would be eligible
to apply for citizenship." ("Securing Our Borders and Getting Results",
2006)

As long as a sufficient level of unemployment is maintained, periodic
raids and deportations such as the Swift case, made possible by the
bipartisan law-enforcement-funding bonanza, are no more than a minor
nuisance to the bosses. Replacement workers, often other immigrants, are
easy enough to find. Swift & Co. was back to work the next day, and it
"anticipates no adverse long-term impacts to its operations." (San
Francisco Chronicle, 16 Dec. 2006) The advantages, maintaining a fearful
and disorganized workforce, and preventing union organizing, outweigh
the costs to the business owners. This anti-union conspiracy under the
cover of immigration enforcement was recently exemplified by the
persecution of union activists at Smithfield Foods' Tar Heel, North
Carolina plant. Seeking to intimidate immigrant workers who were engaged
in a union organizing drive, Smithfield began firing workers with
"no-match" letters alleging that the workers used fake Social Security
numbers. Instead, the intimidation attempt provoked a two-day wildcat
strike that forced the company to freeze its firings. (See the Dec. 2006
issue of WCE)

On May Day, the workers marched for an end to racist persecution and for
equal rights. The bosses, represented by the Democrats, used their
obedient servants in the labor bureaucracy to hijack the movement and
use it as a vehicle to promote their, completely opposite, political
program: more racist "law and order" and a permanent second-class "guest
worker" status for immigrant workers.

The labor and non-profit organization misleaders rushed to harness the
energy of the spring protests campaigns coordinated with the Democratic
Party, for "comprehensive immigration reform." What is comprehensive
immigration reform? It is a slogan formulated to mean absolutely
nothing, better yet, to mean whatever the Democrats wanted it to mean.
The draconian Democratic schemes outlined above, among others from both
parties and from President Bush himself, were all touted as
"comprehensive immigration reform."

The major labor unions formed a coalition with business groups and
think-tanks linked to the Democratic Party, the "We Are America
Alliance," with the goal of registering and mobilizing one million new
immigrant voters (that is, those whose voting rights have not been
denied) for the 2006 midterm elections, presumably to vote for the
union-endorsed "law and order" Democratic candidates. This alliance and
its co-thinkers turned the Labor Day marches into massive rallies for
the Democratic congressional hopefuls, despite their open support for
the ICE Gestapo, promoting the slogan Hoy Marchamos, Mañana Votamos
(today we march, tomorrow we vote). Since there was no formidable
socialist alternative at the polls that stood for full citizenship
rights for all immigrants, the vote results, whichever party they
favored, were destined to give a mandate to the state's outrageous acts
of racist cruelty, such as the Swift Raids that followed shortly
thereafter, in spite of the hopes of the millions of voters who were
told that they were voting for "reform."

The betrayals of the pro-capitalist union leaders had the inevitable
demoralizing effect on the workers and the immigrant rights movement. In
contrast to the huge outpourings of last spring, only isolated protests
and vigils have been organized against the Swift Raids. UFCW's actions
in response to the atrocity, limited to legal appeals in the courts,
have been completely ineffective. But this situation, in which righteous
anger at the government's mass kidnappings is counterposed by treasonous
inaction and class collaboration at the top of the workers'
organizations, is untenable. It cannot survive a further shock. The
workers have the power to shut down the entire meatpacking industry with
a general strike, to force the immediate release of the prisoners and
end the racist anti-immigrant persecutions. Workers at the Smith & Co.
plants are organized in the UFCW: the UFCW union must shut down all
meatpacking nationwide in protest! This will only happen when the
workers toss out the reformist betrayers at the head of the union
organizations, and replace them with a revolutionary leadership
completely independent of the "law and order" capitalist state and its
parties, the Republicans, Democrats, and Greens.

****
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
Labor Action discussion group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/labor_action/
Working Class Emancipation email newsletter:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emancipation_news/
****

Strike against workplace raids!

2006-12-20T21:40:00.000+13:00

UFCW Should Shut Down Meatpackers Nationwide!
Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Migra Arrests Over 1,200 in Packing Plant Raids
On December 12, federal immigration (migra) cops swooped down on Swift & Co. meat packing plants in six states, arresting almost 1,300. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICEE) division of the Homeland Security Department bragged that they were the largest workplace raids ever in U.S. history. Around the Midwest anger and anguish boiled over as workers and family members cried out, “What about the kids?” Five of the six plants are unionized, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has gone to court asking for an injunction. But much more is needed: the UFCW should shut down every unionized packing plant in the country, and all of labor should mobilize in defense of immigrant workers under racist government attack. Migra Arrests Over 1,200 in Packing Plant Raids (13 December 2006)

Another 1934 Is Just around the Corner

2006-11-20T21:22:00.000+13:00

By The Editors of Socialist Viewpoint

It's fair to say that all class-conscious trade unionists recognize
that the greatest labor upsurge in American labor history was
kicked-off by three citywide strikes in the year of 1934-by autoworkers
in Toledo, teamsters in Minneapolis, and longshoremen in San Francisco.

Most would also agree that the strategy that made the great labor
upsurge of the '30s possible-class struggle as opposed to class
collaboration-was imposed on the unions by the rank-and-file and the
new generation of working-class leaders among them. It's even more
widely understood that the Great Depression and the sudden steep
decline in working people's living and working conditions was the
objective force that fueled the mass rank-and-file rebellion that
erupted in 1934.

But what is not so well known is why it took five long years after the
1929 collapse of the economy before the American working class seemed
to draw the conclusion that either they must begin a no-holds-barred,
mass mobilization for a fight-to-the-finish for better wages, hours,
and working conditions-or sink ever deeper into pauperization.

To answer this question is one of the purposes of this statement by the
editors of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. But our main purpose is to
make the case that the five-year purgatory through which our
predecessors had to pass through back then is very similar to the
nearly three decades of purgatory many of today's workers have passed
through since a similar, but far more slowly developing, decline in
mass living standards began in 1980.

We will further argue that the sudden quickening of this long decline
in the living standards of the American working class, though it began
early in 1980, was actually set in motion in 1947 when the Taft-Hartley
"Slave-Labor Law" was rammed through Congress by the bipartisan
capitalist government.

Most union-conscious workers would also agree that the most
conservative pro-capitalist wing of the labor bureaucracy played an
indispensable role in the enactment of Taft-Hartley. But they played an
even more infamous role in the successful implementation of its various
anti-strike provisions, as well as having inserted clauses in most
union contracts forcing workers to cross the picket lines of sister
unions in the decades following the enactment of the labor law.

This, of course, was in gross violation of the principle of class
solidarity upon which trade unionism is founded. The principle is
embodied in the labor slogan: "An injury to one is an injury to all!"

In other words, the attack on the gains made by working people in the
years between 1934 and the end of 1946 can be laid directly at the feet
of the labor officialdom.

But only a minority of today's trade-union activists has come to
understand that this is the root cause of the transformation of the
working class from a force capable of bringing the mightiest industrial
corporations to their knees, into one that appears to have lost its
ability to defend anything whatever of what was won by workers in the
hundreds of years of class struggle upon which the heroic conquests of
the '30s were founded.

Most importantly, we are rapidly approaching a time when workers will
once again come to the conclusion that either they must also begin a
collective fight-to-the-finish for better wages, hours, and working
conditions, as our predecessors did, or sink ever deeper-down the
lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

But while it often seems that big changes like general strikes and
other semi-revolutionary and revolutionary uprisings happen all at
once, they are always preceded by countless small changes in objective
conditions and their reflection in the minds of the ordinary people. A
radical change has been steadily taking place in mass consciousness.

Take, for instance, the level of opposition to the war in Iraq and the
attitude most of us have that politicians and their votes on
legislation are for sale to the highest bidder.

However, when sudden changes in the world around us occur, such as
occurred in 1934, rarely can we see the point at which quantity changes
into quality. In fact, it is generally recognized that these radical
changes always come as a complete surprise, no one having predicted the
day, month, or even year that such events would occur. Nor could anyone
have possibly predicted that in 1934 there would be three strikes in
three cities in which virtually the entire working class of these
cities would play a vital part in deciding their outcomes.

It's a lot easier to see when a trend has begun that will have a
lasting impact. Thus, we can make such a prediction regarding the trend
toward worsening wages, benefits, and job insecurity now under way.
Despite the current state of deepening hopelessness and relative worker
passivity, it is our conviction that another 1934 is, indeed, just
around the corner. A new wave of revolutionary mass action is
inevitable, and it's closer than the great majority in the U.S. and the
world may think.

If we look back at the year preceding the sudden explosion of mass
worker resistance it will be seen that the mood of the working class in
1933, the fourth year of the Great Depression, was very similar to the
mood of workers in 2006 and the preceding few decades! In fact, it
could be said that the feeling of powerlessness that engulfed working
people for the first four terrible years after the stock-market crash
of October 1929 is comparable to the sense of powerlessness engulfing
workers in the year 2006.

Alongside the deepening discouragement among workers today, however,
there is a diametrically opposed trend in worker consciousness that
began in early 2006. This trend, though still restricted to a minority
of our class, is nonetheless an important manifestation of rising
class-consciousness and the kind of fighting spirit that had begun
spreading through the ranks of active trade union militants in 1933.

1933: Signs of changing worker consciousness

If we take a brief look back at 1933 for signs of an awakening of
American labor then, and compare it to the present year, it will
provide a basis for estimating the likelihood that such an awakening
has begun again.

In 1933, there were at least two events suggesting that a change in
mass worker consciousness was underway. From demoralization and
passivity, workers started to move toward the realization that the only
choices before them were either more years of hard and harder times or
else rise up and begin a collective struggle for higher wages and
better working conditions-or die trying.

The first indication that a spirit of class struggle had begun
spreading throughout the working class, both employed and unemployed,
was the outbreak of a mass organizing strike by thousands of newly
organized hotel workers in New York City. The spirit of renewed
combativity culminated in a strike that succeeded in paralyzing all the
city's biggest and best hotels, with a heavy impact on the tourist
industry.

The big hotel strike ended with a partial but important victory: For
the first time in years, hotel workers, who had lacked union
representation, won recognition of their union as the bargaining agent
for all hotel workers in the city. And while they won nothing yet in
the way of a contract, they won something more important. A flood of
unorganized hotel workers joined the union, multiplying the impact of
union recognition by the owners and managers of New York City's major
hotels.

The second indication that something new had begun was another mass
organizing strike, this time by workers in the coal-distribution
centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul, organized and led by Teamster
Local 574. This strike also ended in the same sort of partial
victory-recognition by the bosses of their union as its bargaining
agent and a much larger union membership.

A word is in order for those who may not know the difference between
union recognition won through the force of a strike and that won via an
National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] election. Recognition won by a
strike gives the union the upper hand when bargaining over wages,
hours, and working conditions begins. Recognition by the peaceful road
of an NLRB election does not have the same force.

These two partial strike victories were an indication that mass worker
passivity was turning into its very opposite. Masses of workers had
embarked on the road of class struggle.

2006: The emergence of Soldiers of Solidarity

Similar to the events in 1933 that were precursors of the three
citywide strike victories in the following year, 2006 saw the emergence
of Soldiers of Solidarity, which also augurs things to come.

While events in 2006 were not of the same kind that occurred more than
70 years ago, they demonstrated an even more advanced growth in class
consciousness-such as we saw in 1933, by a small but important layer of
trade-union activists, all of whom are concentrated in the strongholds
of labor power centered in America's industrial heartland.

Although in this case there was nothing like the two big strikes of
1933, we witnessed the rise of what can be most accurately described as
the formation of a class-struggle rank-and-file movement of workers. It
was precipitated by a carefully calculated decision by General Motors
and its spinoff Delphi Corp, to deal a major blow to one of American
labor's most powerful unions, the United Auto Workers.

Those who have read any of this year's editions of Socialist Viewpoint
know we speak of a small but growing formation that calls itself
Soldiers of Solidarity. Although SOS is only one of many similar
formations, it appears to have heavily influenced the strategic
orientation of most if not all of this wave of newly radicalizing
rank-and-file formations in what is still the industrial heartland of
mid-America-despite all the fluff about the "deindustrialization of
America."

So what exactly is there about SOS that makes it so important? It will
be helpful to first say what SOS and most of its counterparts are not:
It is not a more militant, nucleus of a rival union oriented toward
replacing the UAW. Neither is it a union caucus devoted exclusively to
challenging the incumbent bureaucratic misleadership for control over
the UAW. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

SOS has made it clear what it stands for in its numerous public
statements distributed throughout the movements of left-wing
trade-union activists in North America and beyond. They communicate
mainly through the Internet, a powerful medium of mass communication.
The Internet is a medium open to anyone with access to a computer. It
has supplied rank-and-file workers with a powerful organizational and
educational tool. And there can be no effective grass-roots organizing
without teaching workers the lessons of labor history, its victories
and defeats.

It's all there in the written histories and the sort of oral histories
one gets from old timers that are not only anecdotal but also contain
condensations of the lessons of class struggle. These are a mix of what
they learned from the books and from their own experiences in strikes
and other class battles.

But, of course, the most important lesson of labor history had occurred
in the explosive year of 1934. The new spirit of militancy and
combativity that marked the first 13 years of accelerating and
deepening class confrontations, had spread with amazing speed as
workers rushed on to the road of direct mass action to defend and
advance their class interests. It's as though anger and a rising sense
of class consciousness had been growing below the surface of mass
consciousness.

In fact, anyone who thinks seriously about the change in mass
consciousness from the time of the official beginning of the Vietnam
War can sense that a state of mass radicalization has engulfed America.

In our view, it is as deep in some respects as it had been during the
Great Depression. However, what has yet to crystallize is the advanced
state of mass class-consciousness that broke onto the surface
throughout the amazing year of 1934. In fact, it can break out just as
suddenly and explosively as it did then. And while no one can predict
when or what sort of event will serve as the straw that breaks the
camel's back, it's not likely that we will have long to wait before
quantity changes into quality.

In fact labor history teaches that when workers are demobilized and
demoralized by misleadership or the lack of a leadership that has
absorbed the lessons of labor history, they tend to be passive. And the
few mavericks among them who try to get the class struggle ball rolling
again often themselves become demoralized when they don't get the
response they hoped for.

Nevertheless, SOS did get a response from a very important layer of
newly radicalizing assembly-line workers, who show a far more advanced
level of class consciousness than any we have seen since the end of the
last great labor upsurge in 1946.

What is there about SOS that sets it apart?

There are five basic characteristics of what could be called a
class-struggle program of action for the trade-union movement as
presented by SOS.

It's first most distinguishing feature is its open advocacy of the
tactics and strategy of class struggle-as against the official UAW and
labor-movement strategy of class collaboration-although the labor
officialdom prefer to call their policy a "partnership" between labor
and capital.

Secondly, SOS welcomes-as most of its counterparts do-all workers into
its fold, both members of the UAW and members of other unions. But they
don't stop there; they also welcome into their ranks all unorganized
workers in America. This reinforces its class-struggle character.

Third, even though most international unions in this country are
formally affiliated to either the AFL-CIO or its recent splitoff,
Change to Win, which are in turn affiliated with one or another of the
world's international labor federations; rather than being champions of
class solidarity they give it empty and meaningless lip-service.

On the other hand, contrasting sharply with the bureaucratic
conservatism of the latter, SOS and most of its counterparts suggest in
many ways that they are genuinely committed to international class
solidarity.

Fourth, along with Soldiers of Solidarity, Members for CHANGE!, GM
Gypsy, Future of the Union, Live Bait and Ammo, Disgruntled Autoworker,
Catholic Worker, Solidarity Now, The Barking Dog, Factory Rat and many
others, most adhere to the guiding principle that workers can win from
the boss class only what they are strong enough to take.

Fifth, SOS and its counterparts adhere to the principle of genuine
workers' democracy, which is not at all the same as what passes for
capitalist democracy. Capitalist democracy is restricted, essentially,
to the right to vote for candidates on one day in an election year. But
almost every one of these politicians is a millionaire. Thus, workers
have a choice between not only pro-capitalists but also actual
capitalist politicians.

Workers' democracy, however, is far more democratic than the capitalist
variety, as could be seen during the best days of the labor movement.
But under bureaucratic administration and control, it is far less today
than it had been in the 1930s and early '40s. Even so, workers always
had and still have the power to make decisions at regular meetings
regarding local union policy, including the right to override decisions
made by full-time officials from one meeting to the next.

They also have a measure of control over the decisions made by their
delegates at meetings of higher bodies encompassing more than one local
union. But the higher up the bureaucratic hierarchy we go,
rank-and-file democratic control declines, reaching zero at the top.
Consequently, at those higher levels it takes semi-revolutionary mass
action to regain the kind of democratic rank-and-file control over
their unions that had been won in the 1930s.

Moreover, in the years before Taft-Hartley, most unions met weekly, and
election of local union officers was held once a year. After the
enactment of the "Slave-Labor Law," the frequency of most union
meetings had declined from weekly to monthly and the election of most
local union officers from yearly to once every three years. Now, most
regional and national elections of union officers are only once in
every five years.

But when the rank-and-file get riled up enough, union attendance always
tends to rise. And when workers are riled up and begin to hear their
own discontent and growing inclination to take direct control over
their union being voiced by more and more of their coworkers, quantity
changes into quality and confidence about what can be accomplished
rises.

It should be no surprise that the recent history of working-class
powerlessness has raised the question of whether or not workers still
have the power to change the world.

Lets take a closer look at how this notion has been spread far and wide
by the powers that be.

How the mass media fosters the illusion of powerlessness

If there is a theme that runs like a brightly colored thread through
the capitalist-owned-and-controlled mass media, it is that the working
class, like the old gray mare in the song, "ain't what it used to be."

The usual argument offered by so-called professional labor experts and
pro-labor professors-many of whom are on the payrolls of the
billionaire owners of the mass media-is the myth that there has been
and continues to be a process they call the "deindustrialization of
America."

But this is a cleverly contrived myth having no foundation in fact.
Industrialization, far from being diminished, has been uninterruptedly
intensified every minute in every hour of every day since World War II
brought an artificial end to the Great Depression (at the cost of 62
million dead, or 2.5 percent of the world population). All big lies,
however, are based on a grain of truth, and so too is the evidence
offered for what is wrongly labeled "deindustrialization."

What passes for deindustrialization is the never-ending process of
scientific and industrial development that serves to replace human
labor with ever-more productive machines. In other words, capitalism
creates ever-more efficient factories, employing ever-fewer workers
turning out ever-greater quantities of products. Rather than that being
de-industrialization, it's an advance in industrialization.

But this myth has another side to it. And that, too, is also a matter
of factual and logical sleight of hand. That is, by mis-labeling this
process as the "deindustrialization of America," the mass media's
manufacturers-of-public-opinion create the illusion that better-paid
jobs are disappearing only in America, when it is in reality a global
phenomenon!

In other words, machines are replacing human labor everywhere in the
capitalist world, not just in the USA.

The myth of deindustrialization serves another purpose for the
mythmakers. And this is its main objective. It is designed to create
the illusion that the enemy of American workers is their counterparts
in other lands (or other cities in the USA) who are stealing jobs by
"offering" to work for lower wages. Thus, the employer gives the former
the option of "offering" to work for even lower wages than had been
"offered" by the latter.

But that's not all this myth is designed to accomplish. In fact, in
addition to the purposes already described, its larger aim is to shift
the blame for decades of givebacks handed over to the bosses by labor
bureaucrats to purely objective forces beyond anyone's control. It is
the pseudoscientific version of what is called, "An Act of God!"

Workers 'ain't what they used to be'?

Bureaucrats, bosses and the latter's handmaiden, the mass media, have
belatedly recognized that the industrial workforce has far greater
economic power at its disposal than do commercial, financial, and
service-sector workers. Industrial workers engaged in production,
transportation, and other basic industries, are capable of bringing the
entire economy to a grinding halt, while those elsewhere in the economy
do not and cannot have such an impact.

In other words, industrial workers are the heavy battalions of the
working class army. But its here where the mythmakers' argument
falls-only the army as a whole can win the war. And it doesn't matter
what role workers play in the economy, as a class and as a majority
that dwarfs to pygmy size the capitalist minority, they have the
objective power they always had from the 19th century until the present
day.

Now let's examine the relevant facts more closely.

Although the workers in basic industry are certainly fewer, both
absolutely and relatively, they retain exactly the same power to make
the wheels of industry stop and go.

For instance, if say, all four million workers in basic industry went
on strike and kept it shut down tight, that would add up to a huge
power in the hands of this sector of the working class to impose its
will on the mightiest of the world's industrial corporations-as was
done in the 1930s.

But let's say, instead of 4 million there are now only 2 million
industrial workers, but nonetheless this smaller number was still able
to keep industry shut down hard and fast, in what way can the result be
different?

All other things being equal, the overall effect is the same as when
there were twice as many workers in basic industry.

The same dynamic applies to each plant or group of plants in the
industrialized sector of the economy.

However, it must be emphasized that the more inclusive is the action of
the working class, the greater is their power. In fact, the greatest
power that industrial workers intrinsically possess is not their power
to bring the entire economy to a halt, as important as that is. Rather,
it is that when workers act as a class to defend and advance their
common class interests; it is that which gives the entire working
class, acting as a class, the power to change the world.

Moreover, to act as a class in the interests of the class as a whole,
means to defend and advance the interests of all workers, throughout
the economy, irrespective of race, sex, religion, national origin, or
any other characteristic that differentiates one worker from another.
And that includes the millions of workers who perceive themselves to be
primarily a racial, religious, or national entity, with their existence
as workers, seemingly, a subordinate characteristic.

If proof of our argument is needed, we need only look back at the
official policy of the industrial unions that became the CIO in the
mid-1930s, as against that of most craft unions that remained with the
AFL regarding Black workers. All CIO unions welcomed their Black
members while most AFL unions rejected them or organized them into
segregated Jim Crow local unions. But when the UAW went on strike in
the 1930s, Black and white UAW pickets worked as a team to bar Black
and white scabs and strike-breakers from breaking through their picket
lines.

In other words, the only effective response to the capitalist strategy
of divide and conquer is class solidarity. And its ultimate expression
is the slogan, "Workers of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to lose
but Your Chains, and a World to Win!"

Thus, it's no accident that Soldiers of Solidarity came into existence
by forming the nucleus of a mass class-struggle left wing of the
working class before a major new labor offensive has even begun. Rather
it serves as proof of one of the most important lessons of
class-struggle history: When one giant step forward by the working
class ends and reaction takes over; it is invariably followed by the
next big labor counter-offensive to regain lost ground and conquer new
territory. But it always tends to begin from the highest point reached
by the previous leap forward.

And finally, besides what SOS has already done along the lines of
beginning from the highest point previously reached we have good reason
to make this prediction:

Whereas the last upsurge never broke politically with the twin parties
of American capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans, this one will
not only organize workers as a class in the economic arena of class war
but also in the political arena as well, and quickly rise to the most
advanced state of mass class-consciousness.

Neither can we discount the possibility that this time it may not stop
until the class war is won, capitalism is overthrown and the working
class and its natural allies seize state power and become the ruling
class. And from that point on, begins the process of abolishing all
class and other distinctions between members of the human race and the
state itself will wither away until there are no longer rulers and
ruled.

Socialist Viewpoint

Can the Oaxaca Commune survive!

2006-10-08T10:38:00.000+13:00

The Oaxaca Commune is rapidly becoming the focal point of the world class struggle. It has pushed the Zapatistas 'other campaign' off the map, even thought Chiapas is right next door to Oaxaca. The Zapatisas model of revolution from below in which indigneous peasants would lead the backward workers has backfired.

The Fox government repression of Atenco, just outside of Mexico City back in May showed that small traders, gutsy and determined as they were, cannot stop the state machine without the help of the organised working class. It was not the flower sellers of Atenco who lost this argument, but Delegate Zero (subcombatant Marcos) who came out Zero by refusing to unite the traders with striking steel and mine workers.

What the struggle in Oaxaca shows is that the trendy Western pacifism of power-shifting without taking power is exploded by the Oaxaca Commune. This Commune did not arise from an indigenous or peasant rebellion (and Oaxaca has around half of the indigenous people in Mexico). It arose out of a long strike by the poor teachers of Oaxaca fighting for better pay and conditions. The Teachers Union is Mexico wide and cripplingly bureaucratic - like most unions in Mexico that have been part of the PRI state machine that lives off the prestige of the 'frozen' Mexican revolution and the 1917 Constitution.

But in Oaxaca a minority inside the teachers' union won support for their strike and this has built into a hugely popular insurrection involving mass marches of over 1,000,000 and the ongoing occcupation of the city of Oaxaca and several radio and TV stations.

This shows that in Mexico as in the rest of Latin America, it is the organised working class like the radical teachers union, that can and must form the leadership of the mass movement which can met the demands of the peasantry, indigenous movements, and unemployed workers. It proves, against all those who say that that the working class is dead, and that social movements have taken over the anti-capitalist fight, that the working class lives!

It proves yet again, that it is the working class that will lead the fight for democracy and against imperialism, and carry through the national revolution to go all the way to defeat NAFTA and imperialism, and defeat the national bourgeois, completing the national revolution as a socialist revolution.

The original demand of the strike to get rid of the state governor, Ulises Ruiz, who is part of the PRI party machine and responsible for numerous killings of militants, has issued a direct challenge to Fox's successor Calderon, the 'winner' of the rigged Presidential election. That election of course has been challenged by the loser Obrador, or AMLO as he is called after all of his initials. Massive demonstrations and occupations of the center of Mexico City by AMLOs supporters led to the calling of a national 'democratic' congress of the parliamentary left in September, the CND, which declared AMLO as the 'alternative President'. But, apart from offering his body as a sympbolic shield against the repression of the Commune, AMLO's CND does not propose to rally the Mexican masses in the real defence of the Commune. That would lift the lid of Pandora's Box and along with the rest of the capitalist system AMLO would be history.

Meanwhile, Fox has sworn to remove the Oaxaca Commune before he hands over to Calderon on December 1. Troops are massing in Oaxaca, thousands of PRI paramilitaries are preparing to smash the Commune, and what to do becomes the order of the day. Most of the 'left' is hoping that some deal can be made, so that the Governor goes, some extra spending on education gives the teachers something to go home with, and everything goes back to almost normal. They cannot envisage an all out struggle winning, and the price of more deaths at this stage cannot be justified.

For revolutionaries the answer is like ABC. Already the Commune has built Barricades, and formed rudimentary Armed self-defence committees. They are not going to go home with any compromise deal. But this is minimal stuff. A few small arms from police stations, clubs and molotov cocktails are no match for the might of the paramilitaries armed with AK 47s let alone the Mexican army.

The Commune needs to be armed inside to resist military assault, but more even more important, armed outside, to undermine the state's ability to deploy its armed forces. The masses who occupied the centre of Mexico city to protest AMLO's 'defeat' by electoral fraud, have to say that the PRD needs more than a symbolic few bodies on the barricades in Oaxaca.
These workers need to flood to Oaxaca to boost the barricades. They need to call on all workers in unions to strike, independently of the PRI and union bureaucracy, to generalise their strikes into a general strike, and to set up barricades and road blocks. The long history of militant struggle in the mines and heavy industry shows that the rank and file of Mexico's huge working class can respond in crises with great solidarity.

This strike action must be generalised so that the solidarity actions are not isolated and open to repression. Self-defence committees need to be coordinated nationally as the basis of a people's army. This would put pressure on the ranks of the armed forces to disobey orders and to support the strike rather than kill the insurgents. By means of a general strike that brings the country to a halt, uniting the organisations of the working class, forming armed 'communes everywhere', the workers will create an alternative, or 'dual power' structure. By winning over the ranks of the military and defeating the paramiltary thugs, the question of state power is posed and the possibility of a revolutionary seizure of power put at the top of the agenda.

The Oaxaca commune can become the first revolutionary commune to follow in the footsteps of the Russian soviets and prove that the working class can 'storm heaven' as did the workers of Paris in 1871, but more than that, take the power at the head of the oppressed and exploited masses to build a new society as the members of the soviets did in 1917. But for this to happen, the vital ingredient that Paris lacked but Petrograd had, is the revolutionary party of the workers.

As Trotsky explains in his analysis of the Paris commune, comparing it to the Russian revolution, the mass movement has strong points and weak points. Its strength is it militancy and heroism. But its weakness is its absence of revolutionary leadership. Leadership cannot be simply responding to events willy nilly, but must condense the lessons of the history of workers struggles to know in advance what to do and what not to do. Without this leadership the strengths of the workers movements are dissipated by their weaknesses and lost.

In Paris 1871, the lack of a revolutionary leadership with the knowledge and will to unite and organise the struggle led to petty bourgeois leaders vacillating and opting for compromises with the enemy. The Commune did not seize power when they could have, but rather let it slip away in defeat. In Russia, by contrast, the Bolsheviks had decades of experience to draw on, and could guide the masses through the months in preparation for insurrection, without making fatel mistakes, until they were ready to seize power.

In Oaxaca the militancy and heroism of the masses are evident, but insufficient for victory. The majority of teachers are not yet revolutionary and are exposed to various competing political currents vying for leadership. Those who think that Obrador and the PRD can form the leadership will find that they are wrong, but at what cost? It is necessary to break the masses who have illusions in Obrador from the PRD. The revolutionary left is small, but does have a critical role to play. Some like the Militant tendency which is inside the PRD, puts its hopes in creating a split in the party. Others like the FT tendency reject working inside the PRD when its politicians are openly siding with Fox to defeat the Oaxaca commune. The main demand of the FT is to call for a 'revolutionary Constituent Assembly' outside the existing political constitutional structure.

Yet, working inside the existing constitution, or calling for a new even 'revolutionary' constitution, are both confining workers to the existing bourgeois power structures where individual electors vote for political representatives in the bourgeois/capitalist state. That is, all individuals or all classes get the right to vote. But the Oaxaca Commune is already creating an alternative power based on mass solidarity in which political representation is of the working class and other oppressed classes. The bosses and their petty bourgeois lackeys and goons are not represented, nor will they ever be. The military defence of the commune is therefore the start of any revolutionary program.

The revolutionary party in Oaxaca and Mexico must start from the lessons of the past communes - their successes and failures. The alternative power of the working class is the only basis on which the interests of the workers and oppressed peoples can be resolved. The program must be for a general strike to defend the Oaxaca commune; to create 'communes everywhere', armed and coordinated across the whole country, with workers and peasants militias to smash the paramilitaries and defend themselves against the state forces; to break from the state apparatus and the statised bureaucracy and their political parties; appealing to the ranks of the armed forces to refuse orders to suppress the Commune; and ultimately for a government of the workers and peasants that can expropriate the imperialists and the national bourgeosie and implement a planned socialist economy, as part of a federation of workers republics of the Americas.

Let us defend the Oaxaca Commune

2006-10-02T13:59:00.000+13:00

by Andreas Aullet (Oaxaca) and Martan Jua¡rez (Mexico City)
LVO No. 206 9/28/2006

unofficial translation by Yosef M. and Fred Bergen

The people and the workers in Oaxaca are on a war footing. The radio stations in the power of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) received calls from parents exhorting the teachers not to call off the work stoppage. The barricades and the sit-in are supported by workers, inhabitants and parents who are helping the teachers not to call off the sit-in.

Day by day, more workers give their support, like those of the Comision Federal de Electricidad, who "without their union having voted on it "refused to withhold electrical service from the APPO and radio stations. Or like the Coca Cola truck drivers, who pull up their trucks to use them in the barricades.

The fact that the mass communications media are coordinating the struggle, spreading solidarity and expressing the discontent of the oppressed, shows that dual power exists in Oaxaca. This is a key fact, since for the first time, the voice of the workers and the people in struggle is reaching the ears of those who are equally oppressed and exploited.

The role of the Comision de Mujeres de Oaxaca [Oaxaca Women's Commission] (COMO) in this struggle is of much importance, while it reflects the fact that the emancipation of their sex passes through taking their own destiny into their hands and becoming part of the struggle and taking it to the end: who better than working women and women of the people knows how to defend what has been won?

In their imagination, the people of Oaxaca are beginning to see the APPO as a real government, built on popular bases, and support has become massive for that reason.

Equally, the rank and file teachers' Caravan-March to the DF [Mexico City] continues its journey. In every place support and solidarity are rising, at the same time that the communities are setting up their local assemblies and greeting the march as it progresses, offering water and food with the cry, Fuera Ulises! [Ulises, get out!]. This shows that a real popular uprising against the government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) is gestating in the state, an uprising that can awaken the sympathy of workers, indigenous people and popular sectors not only in Oaxaca, but in Puebla, Estado de Mexico and in Mexico City, and can stimulate discontent with the government and regime throughout the country.

The government's traps against the movement

The reactionary institutions, the bosses, and the communications media are clamoring for an 'energetic' solution that could bring back order and tranquility to the governing class (see LVO no. 205). While these provocations are increasing, repression is still a difficult decision for the
government and the institutions, not because they would have any hesitation in repressing this heroic struggle, but because they know they would face its resistance, and that the 'legitimacy' of the regime would fall still further, strengthening the anti-fraud movement against the illegitimate government of Calderon and the PAN.

The discussion in the APPO

The government's trap with its proposals for â€œcooling-offâ€, opened a big discussion in the APPO, as was seen in its assembly on September 19 (see LVO No. 205). In the same way, the attempt to prevent the departure of the Caravan-March, and the consultation to return to classes, promoted by the leadership of Section 22 of CNTE (teachers' union), was rejected by the [rank and file] bases in struggle.

And it is a fact that yielding to the government's pressure and blackmail (as a sector of the leadership is doing, unfortunately) can led to the defeat and frustration of the movement and its demands. Faced with these threats of repression, it is essential to promote the extension of the guards, by generalizing the formation of self-defense committees that can constitute a real armed guard of workers and the poor, to guarantee the physical integrity of the members of the movement, and defeat the provocations set up by the government and reaction. The best way to strengthen the struggle and prevent police-military attack, is for the APPO and Section 22 to call for the broadest solidarity of the workers and people of all of Oaxaca and Mexico.

The big discontent that exists shows that there are conditions for a big national mobilization, as was seen in the millions who demonstrated against fraud in Mexico City. In the same way, union organizations, like the SME [electrical workers], the UNT (Union Nacional de Trabajadores) and the CNTE, as well as the forces that form "La Otra Campana," have the unavoidable responsibility of calling urgently for a big national solidarity strike and national coordination in support of Oaxaca, by multiplying initiatives like the Asamblea de Solidaridad in Mexico City. One such victory would strengthen the struggle against the illegitimate government of Calderon.

We of the LTS support the demand "Ulises Ruiz, Get Out," while we warn against any solution that imposes another regime politician (whether of the PRI, the PAN, or the PRD) with the goal of preserving the reactionary state institutions. The search for a "profound reform of the institutions," would preserve the essence of the current regime without meeting the demands of the people of Oaxaca and, in reality, would be a diversion for the struggle that would guarantee continued exploitation, oppression, and misery for the great majority of the masses who are now mobilizing.

And so it is that this heroic struggle puts on the agenda the seizure of state power, and how to completely resolve the demands of the great majority of the people. For this we must fight for the fall of URO and for the formation of a provisional government of the APPO and the other worker, peasant, and poor people's organizations of the state of Oaxaca. This government must convoke a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly over the ruins of the current regime, to discuss and carry out the demands of the people of the state, as part of a nationwide struggle against the regime of alternating parties. To advance on this path, it is fundamentally important to to broaden and coordinate the struggle across the entire state, to the towns and villages, along with
incorporating all of the workers, as has been the case withe the refinery and electrical workers, preparing a huge general strike of indefinite duration, until Ulises Ruiz is gone.

In order to do this, the APPO can take up the demands of the exploited and oppressed, such as a radical agrarian reform that expropriates the landlords and gives the land to the poor peasants, the right of the indigenous communities to autonomy, the demands for better wages and working conditions for all the workers in the state, promoting moreover the struggle for workers
control at the workplaces.

Likewise, the APPO would be greatly strengthened if it called for the incorporation of elected delegates from the workplaces, communities across the state, and displaced workers involved in the informal economy, who should be sent with a mandate from those that they represent. In the areas where the PRI has more control, we can call for the formation of committees to promote the APPO. To promote this perspective, it is fundamentally important to raise up a revolutionary workers party, composed of the most militant sectors that demand that the APPO and the workers and poor people's organizations hold their territory and extend it to cover the whole state, advancing toward a workers', peasants', and indigenous people's government of the state of Oaxaca, as the most realistic and effective solution for their demands. A party which, before the eyes of the millions of workers, oppressed and exploited people of the whole country, could be a great example of the struggle for a revolutionary defeat of this alternating-party regime that for them, only means more hunger, misery, and repression.

Long live the Oaxaca commune!
--
*****
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
Labor Action discussion group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/labor_action/
Working Class Emancipation e-newsletter:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emancipation_news/
*****

Oaxaca Teachers Agree to Continue Protest Until Gov. Ulises Ruiz Falls

2006-09-29T11:28:00.000+12:00

Some Claim the Current Business Strike Will Be Used as Pretext for Repression

By Hermann Bellinghausen
La Jornada

September 28, 2006

OAXACA CITY, Sep. 27: In a city permeated by tension in the face of widespread rumors of immanent attacks by Institutional Revolutionary Party-aligned “shock troops” and corresponding intervention by federal police, the state teachers’ union agreed to continue its struggle “in a massive and united fashion… until the fall of the tyrant Ulises Ruiz Ortiz is achieved, and only then begin the school year.” Enrique Rueda Pacheco, general secretary of the local Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers, publicized the agreements through a new consultation with the rank-and-file on the continuation of the strike, which began 129 days ago.

The teachers’ assembly, meeting in the hotel owned by the union, resolved that the departure of Ulises Ruiz “is not negotiable and cannot be conceded; it remains our sole demand.” As the 1,500 union delegates roared, “unity, unity!” Rueda Pacheco reaffirmed that his organization continues, “forward, together with the other organizations with which we form the Popular Assemblies of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials); we are not separate, we are a single front that will maintain this period of struggle.” This was followed by the chorus of teachers who filled the auditorium: “The teachers and the people united / Will never be defeated.”

Full Story at Narco News

No NZ Troops to Lebanon!

2006-09-06T12:33:00.000+12:00

Statement by Workers Against the War of Terror, Auckland NZ

Prime Minister Helen Clark sticks ‘peace’ label on US/Israel ‘war of terror’

The Labour Government may send troops to the Lebanon as part of the UNIFIL cease-file deal. This would lend legitimacy to an imperialist army acting for the Zionist state of Israel against the popular democratic Hezbollah resistance. It would give ‘democratic’ cover to Bush's military escalation of the crusade against popular Arab/Islamic resistance as a fight of democracy against fascism.

In doing this the Labour Government would be joining the war on the side of the US ruling class and Zionist Israel against the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. Kiwi mercenaries in blue helmets will be reviled the world over as picking up the dirty work of the Zionist army and the Bushite ruling class in Lebanon by disarming and displacing Hezbollah from south Lebanon and covering Israel’s retreat.

Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon more and more people all over the world including New Zealand hate the hypocrisy of a 'war against terror' that labels the liberation struggles of the Arab and Islamic masses as ‘terrorist’. The liberations struggles in the Middle East are becoming an inspiration for the masses struggles of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

The US has now labelled Islamic resistance movements Islamic-fascist

Why has Bush picked up the label of the rabid right and the Zionist reactionaries to condemn popular and democratic organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas as Nazis? This is raising the level of threat from that of ‘terrorism’ to ‘fascism’ against so-called Western democracy. We challenge anyone to prove that these Islamic resistance movements are less democratic than the Israeli Knesset which excludes most of the original population of Palestine from voting, and the Bush administration which rigs its own elections.

More than this, Bush has unleashed this latest attack on Islam to counter the success of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Mahdi Army in Iraq, and the Iranian leadership, in exposing Bush and Olmert as mass murderers. The biggest, most expensive and most deadly armies in the world are made to look stupid and forced to kill 10s of thousands of civilians to try to win their objectives, only to fail in Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon.

Now after a month of abortive attempts to defeat Hezbollah, while the US and the other imperialists deliberately refused to intervene, Israel has got what it wants. A UN rubber stamp of approval that disarms the enemy it cannot destroy behind the Litani River and uses UN mercenaries to protect Israel's borders. This is an imperialist occupation of Lebanon to serve the interests of Bush’s ‘New Middle East’.

Helen Clark has long been sucked into the US-led ‘war on terror’

Islamic ‘terror’ organisations were created by the US to fight on its side against the 'evil 'communism. But now that the US led re-colonisation of the Middle East to grab land, oil and water has alienated their former allies, Islamic terror suddenly becomes the new 'Red'.
Kiwi mercenaries are dotted about the world doing this dirty work for the US in the ‘war on terror’ for one reason only. Nothing to do with peace, but to improve NZ business' already servile 'friendship' with the US to get a few contracts, profits, or deals from the spoils of empire. For US dollars Kiwis will kill Afghans, Pacific Islanders, Palestinians and Lebanese to prop up US imperialism and Zionist Israel.

But there is no way that the popular base of Hezbollah will accept any deal by Sheik Nasrallah to disarm and move back to the Litani River, any more than the Taliban has gone away in Afghanistan, or Hamas militants accepted the Hamas politicians’ deal to recognise Israel!
Nor is there any prospect that the Syrian and Iranian national ruling classes will be able to contain their populations in the coming months as the US/Zionist crusade against Islam builds up. The US is completely bogged down in Iraq facing massive popular resistance. Increasingly the anti-imperialist movements will push their reactionary leaders aside and open the road to socialism!

NZ workers must condemn Clark's latest move in backing the Bush-led war of terror

The Labour Government always waits for the UN to authorise military actions. Sending troops to Lebanon will stick a 'peace' label on the intervention in Lebanon, to cover up the naked military aggression of Bushmert to smash and divide Lebanon and prepare for wars on Syria and Iran.

However, the UN Lebanon resolution cannot cover the hypocritical war of the US and Israel to defeat the popular resistance movements that stand between them and their spoils. All around the world, there is a growing movement of opposition to this demonisation and destruction of Islam. The latest, labelling Islamic resistance as 'fascism' can only intensify the growth of armed resistance to the Bushmert crusade. We must take the side of humanity against fascism!

No NZ troops to Lebanon!
Imperialist troops out of Afghanistan!
Israeli troops out of Gaza!
Victory to Hezbollah!
Victory to Hamas!
Defeat US imperialism and the Zionist state!

‘Teach-in’: “Stopping the US-Zionist W ar of Terror”
Sunday Sept 10th 1pm - 4pm, Grey Lynn Community Centre, 510 Richmond Rd
WAWOT (Workers Against the War of Terror) 12 August 2006 ph 027 2800080

Earl Silbar reports on Chicago workshop on "Immigrants and Unions"

2006-08-15T10:54:00.000+12:00

“Labor: immigrants and unions” workshop at the National Immigrants Rights Strategy Convention, Chicago, Sat. from 1-4 PM, Aug. 12th

I only attended this one workshop, so this is a very limited report. If you were there and have a different take or more to add, please send it along so we can get the best picture of this. As I understand it, this conference was organized by activists and groups that want to develop the working class aspect of the immigrants' movement. Other forces, like the Catholic Church and more, opposed the May 1st marches, for example, while these people supported and organized them. As several participants noted, this was the first time there was anything approaching a general strike here with political demands on the government.

Stated overall conference aims:

“To establish an independent, nationally coordinated network and promote a national strategy which focuses on the defense and promotion of workers’ and immigrants’ rights. Our struggle is for Civil and Human Rights and for all Workers’ Right to Work”

Stated workshop goals:
“Determine how to empower the organization of workers
Establish that workers rights equate with human rights
Generate strategies on how to protect immigrant workers.”

The conference points of unity included: legalization for everyone; no guest worker programs.

About 85 people attended, most working people, majority but not all union members with maybe 8 union staff people. Majority Spanish speaking, with maybe 15 or so who spoke little Spanish. Consequently, the group voted to have everything translated.

The meeting started with a round of brief intros, with everyone giving their name and a few words about themselves. Areas: L.A., MN- a group of packinghouse workers, CT, NJ, WI, AR, NY, IA, IN and Chicago. Unions: Unite Here staff and workers, maybe 12-15, UFCW staff and workers, AFSCME (white collar), IBT-staff, AFT, Laborers staff and workers, Operating Engineers staff, UE staff.

The intro was a talk by the Midwest Unite Here education/mobilization director. Basically, he outlined the two tendencies in the union movement over the past several hundred years: inclusive and exclusive towards immigrants. He used the example of Irish immigrants coming in the 1840s-50s and African Americans escaping slavery and entering the Northern workforce. He mentioned Northern union locals effectively disbanding while the members all joined the Union army. He pointed to the IWW’s leadership of immigrant workers’ struggles and the 1919 Steel Strike with a mostly immigrant workforce as the inclusive side. During this time, the AFL, skilled trades, opposed such organizing in the mass production industries where immigrants mostly worked and openly attacked these efforts, mostly with redbaiting. He didn’t point out that most of the ‘inclusive’ strand of unionism towards immigrants was led by left wing radicals who did not accept the capitalist division of society.

Most of the time we went around the large circle with people speaking about various issues and topics. One subset of discussion related to the different unions, with some alleging that other unions, especially in the Change to Win coalition (SEIU, IBTeamsters, Carpenters, Unite-Here), don’t support the position of the conference, that some unions publicly support the ‘indentured laborer’ guest-worker program in the Senate bill. A member of a Chicago workers’ group opened a door to talking about unifying our class and not just focusing on the unions when he pointedly said, “ Not all unions are good. Not as good as they say.”

One person took issue with a letter by Teamsters’ President Hoffa for a nationalist sales pitch that undermines workers’ solidarity across the borders. Hoffa’s letter talks about protecting ‘our’ country from dangerous (Mexican) trucks when plenty of non-union truck US outfits here have such vehicles on the road. Hoffa’s letter also alleged that many Mexican drivers put in 16 hour days, often using illegal substances. Again, Hoffa chooses to make unproven, scare-tactic, allegations against Mexican drivers while ignoring the same reality for tens of thousands of underpaid drivers already on the roads here and forced to put in long and dangerous hours.

One farmworker woman spoke of their conditions but was clearly upset when her comments alone were not translated. Otherwise, the translation was fabulous, by an activist who was not only super proficient but clearly identified strongly with the sentiments behind our words.

Several people focused on NAFTA and the larger economy driving much of the recent immigration wave. The UE regional president said that many of his members, like in other unions, do not agree with their official position supporting immgrants’ legalization, saying that union activists and leaders need to carry on active discussion with fellow workers to point out the mutual interest in better conditions and legal protections for immigrant workers. He added that many members he knows fear a flood of immigrants to the US if everyone here gets legalization or amnesty. From this he concluded that we must develop and fight for economic justice in the hemishpere, a regional approach being necessary, not just nice.

Another Chicago union leader, president of an AFSCME local, said we must address the fears of young people, including of Mexican and African American heritage “who face a future of crap jobs and no healthcare”. Without hope or a chance for a decent future, many of them fear immigrants as taking away what few opportunities they might have.

I followed by proposing that the immigrants’ movement take up an appeal to the wider working class here, including but not limited to unions, with banners and campaigns towards the following:

Legal rights for all; no ‘guest worker’ programs. $10 Minimum wage for all jobs here. National health care. Jobs for all. Secure, livable pensions for all workers. Get the US out of all these invasions and occupations, immediately.

Quite a few people stressed immediate campaigns. One that many spoke to is visibly supporting immigrant workers to be fired under a recent move where Social Security sends out “No Match” letters to companies when workers’ SSNumbers don’t check out with their names. Several union people stated that this might undermine their contracts that give such workers some protections and real delays in being fired. The new regulation gives companies only 63 days to take action. Another was the Smithfield boycott in solidarity with workers there, many immgrants.

Another was the need to literally stand with day laborers since organized racist and fascist groups have begun attacking these workers.

Report on Immigrants Strategy Conference, part 2

Yesterday I mentioned proposing that the national network take up the fight for Jobs for All, $10 hr. minimum wage covering all jobs, National Health Care, Guaranteed livable Pensions, and Getting the US out of the invasions and occupations. Here’s how I motivated this:

I started by saying that the workshop should be about Immigrants and the working class, not just the unions. That most major unions have been collaborating with corporate capitalism management and have not been mobilizing centers to help workers fight. And that we need to appeal to many ‘ordinary’ people who might be fearful and maybe prejudiced against immigrants without documents. That’s what banners and a real fight could do- give people hope in our struggle for a better, decent and equal world. This got good support, visible and audible with big smiles and applause. As I had to work the next day, I gave a written version to the person keeping notes as asked, to be submitted to the meeting on Sunday. If I find out, I’ll let you know what the group decided in the Sunday session.

Second, I’d like to share some of the comments in one of the left papers (Fight Back!) distributed in the hall. They come from demonstrators in the May 1st marches. They’re a good indication of how some people see this mainly in racial/ethnic/community terms and also as part of a larger fight for a world of equality.

“I’m more full of pride than anything else. It’s about what you stand for. We can and want to fight together with you for a better community. We are not just fighting for you, but for every American, for every person, for the dignity and respect that all people deserve.” From an organizer in Asheville, N.C.

“We will continue to fight until our rights and dignity as human beings are recognized”, declared a local immigrant student organizer in Minneapolis. “Speakers from the local Arab and African American communities talked about how the Latino struggle is linked to their communities and expressed solidarity with the Latinos.” The article continued.

“The march was beautiful, everybody marched like soldiers for the struggle of all peoples. We have to do it that way, together as one. The African-Americans and Latinos need to march side by side. This might give people in our community an initiative to unite just like the Latinos, so we can show force in numbers. People sometimes say that, ‘ they’re just coming to take our jobs, they should stay in their country,’ but some people begin to understand that people from all over the world are being displaced and need to look for a country that can offer a job, something so they can take care of their family- where there’s opportunity they go. I think that it is important that Latino and African-American communities unite and not have this stereotype that ‘they’re taking our jobs away, we need to get over that fear, that stereotype and realize that we are stronger together.” A Woodlawn, Chicago African American activist who marched with a small contingent from the Student/Tenant Organizing Project (STOP) against gentrification and for housing people can afford. STOP carried signs saying, “Black and brown united!”

This last statement shows the need and opportunity to figure out a common solution. It also shows the need to go beyond seeing the appearance of things –ethnic and nationality- and into the heart of the matter- class and common fate, up or down together.

I should note that this political organization putting out this paper, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, sees the struggle both as a fight for the ‘Chicano Nation’ and “as a challenge to the monopoly capitalists who rule this country”, with their editorial headline reading “ May 1 and the Fight for Equality and Self Determination”

In a sense, this represents a popular attitude that this struggle is based on race or nationality and that the promise comes from the unity of different races and people of different ethnicities.

They say, “ This wave of anti-immigrant legislation… and the rise of new white vigilantes is not just a tactic to build support for the right, for the Republicans. “ Just like trying to reduce the Black population of New Orleans… so too would the anti immigrant movement try to reduce the Mexican and Latino population. This is a direct attack on the Chicano Nation…”

“Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest have been forged into a Chicano Nation… Just as African Americans were denied their human rights through Jim Crow, so too are Chicanos, Mexicanos denied their human rights through unjust immigration laws. These laws are chains on the Chicano Nation…”

Clearly, the vast, overwhelming majority of people who came out from work and school in March and May 1 was of Mexican origin. They felt threatened by these laws, especially the Sensenbrenner law that would have made everyone here without current papers into felons, along with anyone who helped them in any way. And, just as clearly, the vast majority were workers and working class. It was both.

The question is: what is the heart of this? What explains these attacks and what strategy can best help develop the power to resist and move towards a better world?

The first thing is to recognize that this attack on immigrants is part of a wider attack against the working class and poor of the earth by capitalism, by what some call Corporate America. Capital invests more and more in cheaper wage areas, using that difference to attack better-paid workers here. They pass laws, like NAFTA, that open the doors for investors to use the cheapest labor to bring down everyone’s standard of living. We can see the results today in Steel, in Auto, even beginning among teachers.

From this beginning, we can open the door to a unified struggle and the awareness that this is one battle in the larger war. That we all have a real stake in this fight. That actually defending immigrants under attack is fighting alongside our brothers and sisters in the common struggle for a world of equality and human opportunity against the current world where we’re dominated by a system based on our mutual exploitation.

While there is no Chicano Nation with a separate economy of even a majority population that identifies as a separate nation, putting it this way encourages the idea of separateness. It builds a mental wall that hinders others from seeing this struggle as our own. A mental wall that hinders us from seeing this movement as a key part of the struggle to be liberated from the chains that capitalism places in so many lives. It makes it mainly ‘their’ separate Nation fighting for equality and justice. Others not Chicano thus become supporters, not fighters with a crucial stake in the outcome. Instead of building solidarity, this outlook actually helps distance, isolate, and undermine genuine solidarity, even though this is not the intention of the good people promoting this idea.

Yes, these laws and racist mobilizations do directly affect some of us, mainly but not only Mexican in origin. At the same time, they are an attack by our common capitalist enemy against a big part of our class and we must learn solidarity if we are to create the forces capable of bringing down our enemy and constructing a new world.

In fact, an injury to one IS an injury to all!

Earl Silbar Red1pearl@aol.com

New York Starbucks fires union organizer

2006-08-09T22:01:00.000+12:00

www.starbucksunion.org
By ELIZABETH M. GILLESPIE
AP BUSINESS WRITER

August 7, 2006

SEATTLE -- Starbucks Corp. has fired the co-founder of a union claiming to represent employees at six of its Manhattan coffee houses.

Daniel Gross, a barista and organizer for IWW Starbucks Workers Union, a branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, said Monday that he is challenging his termination, which followed a company investigation into an allegation that he made a threatening remark to a district manager at a recent union rally.

Gross, who has led union organizing efforts at Starbucks for the past three years, countered that he was simply making a statement of solidarity when he told District Manager Allison Marx that a fellow employee should not be fired.

Gross, 27, said the IWW filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday alleging he was wrongfully terminated.
Kilde: Starbucks Union
Kategorier: IWW News and Events, Union Sites, Worker Sites

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
STARBUCKS INFAMY: IWW Organizer Daniel Gross Terminated for Union Activity!
Submitted by SWU on Sat, 08/05/2006 - 5:15pm.

Updates:

1) Solidarity actions with the fired baristas have taken place in Germany, Austria, the British Isles, and the United States. Take action in your local community! Plus, please participate in the e-mail action.

2) Fundraisers to support escalated organizing at the coffee chain are being planned in several cities. Consider holding a fundraiser in your neck of the woods!

3) Groups including the Canadian Union of Postal Workers are taking a strong stand for the right of Starbucks workers to organize. Send solidarity statements to hschultz@starbucks.com and cc: starbucksunion@yahoo.com.

4) The national convention of Students for a Democratic Society has voted to co-sponsor the Justice from Bean to Cup! campaign launching on campuses this Fall. To get involved e-mail starbucksunion@yahoo.com.

5) Latest Media:

Workers Independent News on the termination of IWW baristas: http://www.laborradio.org/files/winhead080806.mp3

Journalist Doug Cunningham discussing the IWW stuggle at Starbucks on Air America's "Thom Hartmann Program": http://www.laborradio.org/files/Hartmann080706.mp3

Associated Press- Starbucks Fires Union Organizer: http://starbucksunion.org/node/1020

Anya Kamenetz at The Huffington Post- Starbucks Labor Revolutionary Canned : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anya-kamenetz/starbucks-labor-revolutio_b_26700.html

Liza Featherstone at The Nation- Would You Like a (Grande) Pink Slip With That Latte?: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=108956

TAKE ACTION NOW!

www.starbucksunion.org
August 5, 2006

The Starbucks "investigation" of IWW member Daniel Gross concluded today with his termination after more than three years of organizing at the company. Daniel's expression of solidarity at a union picket line with co-worker and fellow union member, Evan Winterscheidt, was deemed threatening by Starbucks despite multiple eyewitnesses who confirm that Daniel merely asserted to District Manager Allison Marx that Evan should not be fired. With the termination of IWW members Daniel Gross, Evan Winterscheidt, Joe Agins Jr., and Charles Fostrom in less than a year, Starbucks has demonstrated conclusively its intense hostility to the right of workers to join a union.

To provide additional cover for the unlawful termination, Starbucks issued Daniel a blatantly discriminatory performance review today with negative ratings for things like, "not communicating partner morale issues to the Store Manager." The manager confirmed that morale issues included complaints about wages and working conditions. Last we checked, an employer may not mandate an employee to engage in surveillance of co-worker's protected activities.

Far from breaking our campaign, Starbucks has done the opposite. The current and former Starbucks workers who proudly carry the red Industrial Workers of the World membership card vow to redouble our efforts to achieve an independent voice on the job. The right to free association at work is fundamental and not subject to compromise. But to vindicate our right to union membership, we need support from you, the working class; the class that built this society with our sweat and indeed with our blood.

The multinational retailers like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Borders seek totalitarian control of the workplace. The way forward to rein in these massive corporations is a social movement of workers and community members. The Wobblies at Starbucks have proven that by taking direct action against the company over issues of concern to workers and by avoiding the skewed certification process of NLRB elections, baristas can improve their lives on and off the job. This strategy only works however, if the company incurs significant economic, political, and social costs when it violates the right to organize by terminating workers for union activity.

Take action with us sisters and brothers. Together we will win:

1) Do not spend your hard earned money at Starbucks until the company respects the right of workers to organize and reinstates Daniel Gross and the rest of the IWW baristas. Let the company know you are taking a stand by participating in the email action: http://starbucksunion.org/node/1015

2) Obtain a resolution or pledge from your community group, labor union, or house of worship agreeing to stay way from Starbucks products until justice is done. Please send copies to starbucksunion@yahoo.com.

3) Hold a rally or leafleting action at Starbucks in support of the right to organize and in defense of the fired union baristas if you feel that's appropriate in your local community. Please check in with the baristas at the store before hand to involve them in the action.

4) If you are a student, join the Justice from Bean to Cup! campaign launching this Fall to ensure Starbucks doesn't operate on campuses without reinstating the IWW baristas, respecting the right to organize, and making a meaningful commitment to Fair Trade. Get involved by e-mailing starbucksunion@yahoo.com.

5) Make a financial contribution to the IWW Starbucks Workers Union to ensure a continued independent voice for employees at the world's largest coffee chain. Send checks made out to "IWW Starbucks Workers Union" or well-concealed cash to:

IWW Starbucks Workers Union
347 Maujer St. Apt. #C
Brooklyn, NY 11206

Defeat Mapp’s ‘Slave Labour’ Bill

2006-07-21T10:39:00.000+12:00

Mapp’s Bill is designed to remove workers rights in the first three months in any new job. It will open the gate to a more generalised attack on the unions and workers rights. Hone Harawira was right, it is a ‘slave labour’ Bill. The unions are geared up to get the Bill defeated in parliament. But defeating Mapp’s Bill in parliament is no guarantee that bigger and more severe attacks will not follow. Only an independent, democratic, and militant labour movement can put a stop to capital’s drive to make our labour pay for its crisis-ridden, rotten system.

Mapp’s Bill, AKA Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill

“This Bill will introduce a 90-day probation period for new employees in the Employment Relations Act 2000. New Zealand is one of only two OECD countries that does not have a probation period for new employees. The most common length of probation period in the OECD is three months.”

The National Party’s industrial relations shadow minister Wayne Mapp’s Bill passed its first reading on March 15. The combined support of National, ACT, United Future, New Zealand First and three members of the Maori Party saw the bill sent to select committee for further consideration.

Unlike the other three Maori Party MPs, Hone Harawira voted against the Bill. He called it a ‘slave labour’ Bill. Peter Sharples, Maori MP for Tamaki Makaurau, said he voted for the Bill to go to the Select Committee to hear the arguments for and against. He has since come out against the Bill. But there is no sign that Turia or Flavell have changed their minds, though there is a rumour that Flavell is wavering. Turia is on record as saying that young Maori need this Bill to get into the job market.

Labour, the Greens, and the Progressives opposed the bill. Labour is opposed because it would tip the balance of power in the Employment Relations Act back in favour of the bosses. The ERA’s sponsor, then Labour Minister Margaret Wilson, is a longtime advocate of industrial ‘peace’ where both workers and employers are equal and the state acts as referee.

Sue Bradford, Green Party spokesperson, called it “mean-spirited, anti-worker legislation [which] has no place in a modern and innovative economy, what Dr Mapp and some other political parties supporting this bill fail to recognise is that it is already possible to have probation periods for new employees under the existing ERA (Employment Relations Act). Where a probationary period has been negotiated, it can be taken into account when looking at whether a dismissal is justified or not.”

Sue Bradford is being a bit naïve. Of course the employers are well aware of the current provisions for a probationary period. They want to get rid of it because it imposes certain restraints on them in hiring and firing. According to the CTU, “Currently case law requires an employer to do just three things for a probationary employee: tell the employee about their concerns, hear the employee’s point of view, and consider it in a fair manner.”

To give the bosses the right to hire and fire Mapp’s Bill proposes:

“The purpose of a probation period for new employees is to enable employers to take a chance with new employees, without facing the risk of expensive and protracted personal grievance procedures. It will enable people who have not had previous work experience to find their first job and make it easier for people re-entering the workforce. That will enable greater growth and productivity in the New Zealand economy.”

According to Don Brash, a 90 day no rights period will help people who are, “too young, too old or too brown” to get a job.

Brash’s statement is seen by the CTU as an admission that employers currently discriminate against these categories of workers. Of course! Youth and age by themselves are no indicator of employability. Nor is ‘being brown’ as the drop off in Maori unemployment from 19% in 1999 to around 9% today proves. But Maori unemployed are still around 20% of the unemployed yet only 10% of the workforce. And the Maori youth rate while down from 32% in 1999 is still over 20% (there are no recent official figure for Maori Youth Unemployment!). The explanation suggested by the Labour Department is that Maori tend work mainly in the more unskilled jobs in the export sector or more insecure service jobs.

Mapp’s Bill is in fact a ‘trojan horse’ to open the gate to further attacks on workers’ rights.

Tariana Turia may think that foregoing hard won rights is a worthwhile price to pay for young Maori to ‘prove themselves’. But this is a return to the 19th century frontier style industrial relations that dumps on the proud history of Maori workers struggles that fought racism to get jobs and took a leading role in the development of militant trades unions.

But more than that, it’s not just about exploiting unskilled and untrained workers. It forces all workers taking on a new job to work with no rights for three months.

Being able to take the boss to a civil court under the Human Rights Act! –on legal aid (Ha Ha!) or the ERA to get wages owed is hardly a right.

Stripped of all the bullshit, Mapp’s Bill is designed let the bosses hire relatively untrained and unskilled workers from the pool of reserve workers to do shit work when it’s available and then fire them when they like. They want more builders' labourers, cleaners and delivery boys and girls, so along comes Mapp. Harawira is right, this is a ‘slave labour’ Bill.

As for the employers moaning about the cost of legal action to fire someone, the CTU say’s there is no evidence of many personal grievances being taken by employees in the first 90 days. But the CTU is being a bit precious here as it is not that bosses are unwilling to risk taking on “young, old and brown” workers in the first place, but that they want work them without rights and union coverage to extract the maximum profit.

The CTU also thinks that the Bill will make recruiting and keeping workers more difficult because it puts the first 3 months outside the ERA and its provisions for free mediation and dispute settlement. It says that the Bill would allow employers to shirk their duties to their workers. But it misses the point here, doing their ‘duty’ is not the bosses intention. They are not all converts to the ‘knowledge economy’ that empowers the CTU to act as labour pimps. They want the outright freedom to hire and fire. And they want a passive, compliant workforce that prepares workers to reject union membership and accept tough agreements after the 3 month period.

The reason that the CTU expects bosses to do their ‘duty’ is that CTU’s conception of the boss/worker relationship is a partnership that requires employers to do their job in encouraging and training workers, while workers do their job in increasing their productivity. This cosy collaboration allows the CTU union officials to act as the grease monkeys who keep the working class engine running.

So while the CTU’s campaign against Mapp’s Bill makes some obvious good points, it is designed to try to bully, shame and cajole employers into taking on their role as responsible partners in this cosy setup. But class collaboration was never a good basis for the defence of workers rights, as the many millions of workers lives sacrificed over the centuries to keep the capitalist system going testify.

A militant campaign to smash the Mapp sack!

A serious defence of workers rights means using the ERA as a defence for as long as it is necessary to build up the industrial strength to do away with the legal framework and assert workers control over the economy. The fact that some bosses want to abolish the ERA, starting with its limited protection of workers in what they call the ‘probationary’ period, means we need to defend it.

Therefore everyone needs to get behind the CTU campaign and lobby MPs to defeat the Bill. But when we lobby we should not beg. We should demand that these MPs vote against the Bill or be thrown out of parliament at the next election!

Most important, we cannot put any faith in parliament or in the CTU’s ability to protect workers. Parliament is the mouthpiece of the ruling class and its agents, the political parties of all colors, and the union bureaucracy, representing the interests of all those who have a stake in protecting and defending capitalism. It may be that Mapp’s Bill will not win a majority, but that is no reason for complacency. Mapp’s Bill is a trojan horse designed to open the gate to the destruction of the unions and the removal of all workers rights.

The ERA does not allow workers to go on strike to defeat this Bill. It limits the right to strike to periods of negotiating agreements and health and safety matters. This proves that the ERA is a ‘leg-iron’, like all labour law, that sets limits on workers struggles. Therefore, we have to start right now to rebuild the unions on the basis of a democratic and militant rank and file control of production. Only an organised working class can defeat all future attacks on our class, and go on to overthrow the rotten capitalist system and replace it with a planned, socialist society.

Auckland (NZ) Labour Forum Meeting

2006-07-12T18:04:00.000+12:00

Brief Report on Labour Forum on Howard's 'Workchoices' and Mapp's 90 Day Bill

by Dave Brown

11 Jul 2006

Industrial Correspondent wants a report on the forum.
Here's my own rough summary as I saw it.

25 people turned up, rank and file members of 10 unions (possible more I didnt see) and a few onside organisers. Political groups who had members there (not necessarily speaking for these groups) were Radical Youth, SWO and CWG. A useful step towards building an Auckland wide rank and file group I thought.

Keith of Waitemata Unite! chaired the session where Bill Keats spoke about Howard's Workchoices. Keith made the point that that phrase was exact. Howard chooses how workers should work.

Bill spoke for about 30 minutes. He introduced himself as a delegate from Standup [see previous post on this blog] a Sydney based unemployed workers union, funded by another union to visit NZ as a guest of Waitemata Unite!, and not least as a member of the Communist Left of Australia.

Bill explained some of the history and context of the Workchoices legislation, like how some of the rightwing don't like it because it takes away the conrol of the states (which even under Labor state governemnts have bad industrial legislation) because they fear that even a right-wing Federal Labor Governemnt might water down Howard's industrial legislation.

He spoke about the actual provisions of the new laws which most people have a basic grasp of since its understood to be similar to our old NZ Employment Contracts Act [ECA]. And that already many employers are using it to sack people, re-employ them on wages as low as $6, etc etc.

Most interesting and what stimilated a good discussion was the so-called 'fightback' or lack of it rather. Three big union organised rallies so far, well attended, but not raising the need to build strike action. Rather rallying 'wider Australia' around calls for 'fairness' and trying to build support among the better off workers to come back to Labor in the next election so that Beazley would win and repeal the legislation.

Bill said that some left groups and some of the more militant unions were calling for strike action and trying to build support for strike action but the potential for that was as yet untested. This is backed up by other material posted here on Indymedia.

Bill's own position (I hope I'm correct) was to organise strikes in support of the strongest sectors of workers to pull the weaker sectors in behind them and generalise the strike action with the object of bringing down the Howard Government.

The discussion was mainly around which groups were organising what sort of actions, and what lessons could be taken from NZ's experience under the ECA.

There were a couple of comments along the lines of Aussie workers not repeating the ECA experience but getting the rank and file to initiate actions and chuck out the bureaucratic sellouts in bed with Labor, made by comrades who went through the 80s and 90s struggles here.

This set the scene for a teabreak followed by a discussion on upcoming actions including Mapps Bill and organising, chaired by Alister of the rank and file group that has been meeting over the last couple of months.

There was a lot of cynicism about the NZ Council of Trade Unions campaign against Mapp's Bill. People were participating in the leafletting and rolling actions but I detected little enthusiasm for the demands, poor organisation and almost non-events. One comrade pointed out that the reason for this slack campaign was that the NZCTU expected the Bill to be dumped on reportback to the House.

The general view was that it was important to attend all these 'events' and denounce the Bill, but to raise more direct demands on Labour like end youth rates now, and to concentrate on publicising support for any actual disputes going on, and the need to get active unionists organised across all the unions in a sort of rank and file ginger group.

The next step was to organise an email and phone list so that information, actions and interventions could be coordinated. That was the note on which the meeting ended with the next meeting in around a month.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Howard's Workchoices and Mapp's 90 Day Bill

by IWD

Cheers Dave, Good report, sounds like a good discussion.

My impression in Australia was that for some time the socialist political movements in Oz have recognsed the nature of the Howard government and tried to organise against it.

On issues from refugees/detention camps/war/aboriginal rights the left has been mobilised, sometimes massively.

However it is only recently have the ACTU have slightly loosened the leash on workers getting also getting active.

This has occurred, in part due to the deplorable leadership of the ALP. The official labour-supporting Trade Unions see the prospect of a labour government receeding rapidly into the future.

They have no option except to mobilise workers to defend union rights, or by the time labour manages to crawl into power, workers organisations will be gutted.

Here in NZ the situation is nearly reversed.

For the last year and a bit there has been mini strike wave. Workers, nurses, doctors, carers, driver’s etc. have all been taking action around the basic workplace issues. Labour in power has awakened expectations, and workers are tired of waiting for bread tomorrow.

Yet the response from the organised socialist left has lagged far behind the workers 'spontaneous' mobilisations. Socialist political organisation is at low ebb and united front campaigns thin on the ground. This does vary around the country. In Auckland, earlier anti-war mobilisations and the youthful Unite project has roused some excitement, but the further south, the less the effect.

In part this is the result of conscious inaction by the trade union apparatus.
The official trade union organisations are still bound at the feet by their support for labour. The upsurge of workers industrial actions seem purposely isolated and sectionalised, and the possibilities for action are limited.
Compare for example, the ease with which the recent resident doctor’s strike was white-anted by the right and their senior doctor dupes, despite the widespread support of the population. Where was the union-organised community support campaigns?

Union bosses (like their Oz cousins, a year and a half ago) fear letting the lid off too much, worried by the possibility that a very real anti-labour resentment will boil over (and possibly spoil some intended career paths).

Yet the socialist left must also take some blame. Despite widespread distrust of the labour party, left unity projects have been unsuccessful or missed the ball.
The anti-capitalist alliance proved itself not up to the times and soon dissolved itself into one of its founder organisations.
The ‘new Chartists’ sponsored by the SWO look more comfortable with getting the support of big heads and big names than building the organising ability of rank-and-file workers. Time will tell.

Re: your comments Dave, on an Auckland-wide rank and file organisation.
If the socialist left is unable to intersect with the current volatile industrial situation, then workers struggles will continue to remain industrially isolated and to fall well below their potential for the duration of this labour government.

When labour is finally dispatched at the polls, national, act, dunne, peters and (probably) the Maori party will collude to carry out the final act in the ongoing effort to undermine workers organisation in this country.

Unless rank’file workers have built at the very least, the embryo of organisation by the time this occurs - then we are in for a major kicking.

Work for the Dole: more "reforms" to attack us!

2006-07-05T13:17:00.000+12:00

Monthly Newsletter of the Australian workers rights activist group "Standup"

June 2006

The gloves are off. The government has decided that some poor victims will have to endure "permanent work for the dole". This means they will have to work five days a week for their unemployment payment! They will still have to look for work through their job network agency.

This "reform" is aimed at long term unemployed who are supposed to have avoided getting work. When employers constantly reject you it is very easy to become demoralised and give up. For this we are being made to suffer. Life is tough enough on the dole. It is even tougher working for it, especially five days a week. The official rate of unemployment is just under five percent. They don't want it to go lower in case it threatens interest rates. Just under half a million people are therefore forced into poverty. This is according to the official figures. The real rate is at least twice as many.

A while ago they stopped soft option Work for the Dole projects such as movie making or community art projects. Work for the Dole is now more training and job oriented. There is a skills shortage. The government demands that we make up for all the skilled labour lost when factories were forced to close down years ago in the recession. We lost not just jobs but the chance to learn skills when this happened.

What the government is effectively doing is turning us into apprentices at discount pay rates. It's good that now we will be learning skills which will help us to get a decent job. But it is still slave labour. We will be forced to train on a wage (the dole) that we have to struggle to survive on. The bosses will be the ones to gain from our training. Any apprentice will tell you how they are forced to do all the shit work. Now we are being forced to do similar shit jobs. We are paid even less than an apprentice.

Whilst previous Work for the Dole projects offered minimal training now funding is available for work for the dole projects to employ trades people who will be trying to bring us apprentices up to scratch.

This month's budget left no doubt about the government's intentions since it came into office - to use Work for the Dole to provide a cheap source of skilled labour to undercut the wages and conditions of employed skilled labour. This dovetails with the government's assault on wages and conditions generally. The new Industrial Relations Laws are forcing down wages by pushing workers into individual contracts.

StandUp! opposes all Work for the Dole and all forced training. We believe that everyone deserves a living wage. This includes students, apprentices and trainees. StandUp! believes in our right to work. But what Costello's new philosophy of "welfare to work " means, in practice, is welfare to slavery. It is especially harsh for disabled unemployed. StandUp's recent phone-in uncovered seriously disabled being forced to look for work or face being breached and loss of social security payments.

This must be stopped.

Phone-In for "18%" disabled

The government, as part of its welfare to work laws, started forcing "18%" disabled people off benefits and on to the dole queue early this year. When we were handing out our newsletters we got complaints from people affected by this heartless legislation when we were handing out our newsletters.

One person told us that even though it was painful to walk from Redfern Station to CentreLink (about 200 metres), CentreLink staff had suggested that he register for Newstart and look for work! If walking is difficult then working would be even harder. Another, who we saw at a private job network agency, has to inject herself with five jabs of insulin per day. Things are difficult for her normally. It would be even more difficult for her if she were to do a full-time job

Quite a few people disabled are being reclassified. And what is worse, because their medical condition is not obvious to the Centrelink interviewers, they are being forced to register with a job agency to look for work which they are physically incapable of doing. Our phone-in in late April was designed to see how wide spread this was.

We got quite a few revealing phone calls. Three of them came from cystic fibrosis sufferers. This disease is deadly. Working could result in being hospitalised or their lives being even more shortened. One woman told us about a friend who was seriously ill with cystic fibrosis although she looked healthy. She was asked to work even though she could be dead before she reaches the age of forty.

Other victims of this viscious reclassification include:
A male, about 30, on methadone and with a hernia, who was being forced into Work for the Dole.

A male, mid-50s, no English, with a disabled arm from labouring (can't lift). He has a doctor�s certificate through the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Centre but has never received a Disability benefit and still has to look for work. He's worried that he�ll be forced back into labouring work and permanently lose the use of his arm.

A male, about 40, who was so frustrated by Centrelink�s dismissal of his attempts to prove disability that he was seriously considering jail as a preferable option to the bureaucratic brick wall.

A male,early 50s, with back and neck injuries requiring a brace. He got a six-month certificate from a Centrelink doctor but his physical 'rehabilitation' consists mainly of looking for jobs at his specialist Job Network provider.

A male, about 50, with spinal compression requiring a $30,000 spinal fusion operation which, not surprisingly, he couldn't afford. Centrelink rejected certificates from two specialists and he's being made to look for work. (Two of his previous employers went bankrupt - one of them is now in South America.)

A male, early 40s, with two slipped discs caused by an assault at work. His Workcover payments ran out after four-five years and he went to Centrelink to claim a Disability payment, but they rejected his doctors' certificates and refused him an assessment by one of their doctors. He threatened legal action and, after being run around three offices, was finally granted an assessment : the Centrelink doctor gave him a certificate for a further two years.

Standup heard of another person who, having had her doctors� certificates rejected, was threatening legal action for her right to a Centrelink assessment. The moral is, get a lawyer who'll work for nothing!

We have only discovered the tip of the iceburg. If you are disabled and forced to look for work, don't hesitate to contact StandUp! by either phoning 9558 5407 or by emailing
standup_@hotmail.com

StandUp! is a group of unemployed people and social security activists. We meet every 2nd and 4th week of the month. Next meetings are July 12 and 26 then August 9 at 6 pm South Sydney Leagues Club, Chalmers St. Redfern (opposite Redfern Oval)

THE TRAGIC FATE OF THE DELPHI STRUGGLE

2006-06-21T17:20:00.000+12:00

by Dave Stratman

Delphi, General Motors’ largest parts supplier, is in bankruptcy court seeking permission to break labor contracts which run through 2007 with its 33,000 hourly employees. Delphi is demanding a 40% wage cut and reductions in the benefits and pensions of current and retired auto workers. It plans to close 25 plants and fire 23,000 employees. Delphi claims it needs these cuts to become competitive in the global marketplace, the same argument that Ford and GM and countless other corporations have made in demanding wage and benefit give-backs.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents most Delphi workers, has a long history of collaborating with the auto companies against its members to make the corporations more profitable. The UAW has already pushed through drastic benefit cuts for Ford and GM retirees, and now seems poised to make huge concessions to Delphi. At its recent Constitutional Convention, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger declared that the UAW must help the automakers become more competitive, and that this would require big sacrifices from auto workers. Gettelfinger’s declaration should come as no surprise. As auto worker Bill Hanline has shown, two-thirds of the UAW’s annual budget comes from corporate funds. The UAW is in effect a subsidiary of the Big Three car companies.

Last fall some Delphi workers began to organize to resist Delphi’s demands.

The struggle got off to a promising start as Delphi workers Gregg Shotwell, Todd Jordan, and other rank and filers, acting without UAW sanction, organized a series of public meetings for Delphi and other interested auto workers and supporters. These meetings took place in Grand Rapids, Kokomo, Flint, Dayton, and other cities with large Delphi emplacements, and together they attracted hundreds of workers. Everyone who wanted to had a chance to speak, and the air was thick with angry denunciations of UAW betrayals and sharp insights into the meaning of the Delphi struggle for workers everywhere. At the meeting in Flint workers voted unanimously to found a new organization, Soldiers of Solidarity, to lead the struggle.

As the workers made clear at their meetings, there is a great deal at stake in the Delphi struggle–not only the livelihood of many thousands of current or retired Delphi workers, but the future of working people in America. Auto workers play a pivotal role in the work force. Anything that can be done to auto workers, traditionally the strongest among blue-collar workers, can be done twice-over to other workers. The Delphi struggle is taking place within a history of twenty-five years of serious defeats for American workers. American working people desperately need a win to get back in the game.

DECADES OF DEFEAT

The many working class defeats since the PATCO disaster of 1981 have some important things in common. One is that the striking or locked-out workers at PATCO, Hormel, Staley, Caterpillar, Detroit News, Accuride, and others were betrayed by the International unions. Another is that, in each of these struggles, the strikers restricted their focus to their own contract with their own employers and raised none of the larger strike-related issues which could have won them mass support from the public.

While they called for “No Concessions,” in none of them did the strikers explain to the public that their struggle was part of a larger class war over the direction of US society. They did not expose the anti-democratic, anti-human nature of the corporate system or attempt to rally other working people in a struggle against it. Their struggles expressed a different set of values from capitalist values–values which they share with most people in our society – but they did not try to connect with other working people on this basis.

In addition the workers engaged in these struggles did not expose the role that the unions had played in aiding and abetting the corporate attack on working people. Instead of forming fighting organizations outside the unions, workers in each of these fights allowed their struggles to be dominated by the very unions which were sabotaging them. Instead of calling on other workers to spread the strikes to their own workplaces, the striking workers merely called on sympathetic workers to send them food and financial support.

In short, in none of these struggles did the strikers do the most obvious and necessary things to win public support and win their strike, and in none of them did they call on workers to fulfill their historic mission: to make a new world.

The result was not only the defeat of each of these costly and bitter fights. The result was even worse: that nothing good came from them. No lessons were learned. No advances were made for the workers involved or for the working class as a whole. In the twenty-five years since PATCO, union workers have kept repeating the same mistakes, over and over again, like junkies coming back for another fix.

SOLDIERS OF SOLIDARITY: A NEW BEGINNING?

With the outbreak of the Delphi rank and file resistance movement and the founding of Soldiers of Solidarity, it seemed that here, finally, someone was marching in a winning direction: building the struggle outside the union and placing the particular struggle firmly in its context of the struggle of all working people. Unfortunately, though, this was not to be. Though it began with the appearance of being different, the current struggle at Delphi is in great danger of being only the latest in a long and tragic line. Under the leadership of Gregg Shotwell and the Soldiers of solidarity, the movement is repeating the same mistakes as earlier struggles and seems likely to come to the same isolated and futile end.

Workers at the public meetings clearly understood that the Delphi struggle has great significance for all workers. They understood that Delphi’s calls for wage cuts is the logic of capitalism. They understood that it will take a much broader movement than Delphi workers alone to win this fight. They understood that the real fight is over the direction of our society and what sort of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

Gregg Shotwell, however, and the Soldiers of Solidarity did not incorporate any of this understanding into their strategy. Instead Shotwell strictly limited the scope of the struggle. There would be no larger issues raised. They would not reach out to other workers to build a movement rejecting the capitalist logic of a competitive race to the bottom. They would not expose the treachery of the UAW. They would not speak of creating a better world. All their efforts would instead be focused on an in-plant strategy to put pressure on Delphi. Shotwell repeated the fatuous phrase, “Workers rule when they work to rule,” over and over, as if it had magical powers. The idea was that, if Delphi workers worked exactly by the book, they would in effect slow down production, thus making Delphi more vulnerable to a strike, should matters come to that (though Shotwell in his “Live Bait and Ammo”[LB&A] newsletters repeatedly cautioned against striking). The idea was also that waging an in-plant
work-to-rule would build solidarity within and between the Delphi plants.

But Delphi workers cannot win the public to its side except by rejecting the logic of global competition–unless they reject, in other words, the logic of capitalism. (Shotwell argues that Delphi’s problems are the result of poor management.) The livelihoods of the vast majority of people in the US are threatened by the same competitive logic. To reject this logic and the capitalist system behind it is the way for Delphi workers to get the great majority of people on their side. Delphi workers could say to the world, “We don’t have to live this way. It is only because we are in the grip of the global profit system and under the control of the rich that our lives are under assault.” Global competition is the only argument in Delphi’s favor. Delphi workers could turn this argument into Delphi’s and the corporate system’s Achilles’ heel. Who wants to live in a system that guarantees an ever-worsening future for your family?

The UAW is owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the Big Three and cannot be relied on. Yet rather than build a workers’ movement truly independent of the union, Shotwell has led disgruntled auto workers back into the arms of the UAW. When Shotwell in Kokomo announced the “Work to rule” strategy, he said, "It is important to pull in the official union to do a work to rule. That’s why we’re so fortunate that Gettelfinger [the UAW president] slipped up and endorsed work to rule." Shotwell was calling for workers already clear on the UAW’s multiple betrayals to work with the company-funded union to organize solidarity and prepare for a possible strike–a strategy that could only undermine the most astute and experienced workers and confuse the others.

Rather than exposing the UAW for its decades of betrayal, Shotwell criticizes only the current UAW leadership, the Administration Caucus, which he calls the “Concessions Caucus”–the inference being that all would be well if the UAW were under different leadership. Shotwell makes the bizarre claim that the UAW had been “tricked” by General Motors into decades of concessionary contracts, competitive programs designed to undermine worker solidarity, and strikebreaking. Shotwell has proclaimed that, while earlier generations had founded the UAW, “It is our generation’s turn to defend the union.”

The Delphi workers will either break the grip of the UAW on their thoughts and actions or they will go down to defeat. Shotwell has long been a member of New Directions, a reform caucus within the UAW. It appears that reforming the UAW is still his goal. Shotwell and a handful of Soldiers of Solidarity members won delegate slots to the UAW Convention, where they made predictably futile gestures in a totally stage-managed convention. Focusing on union reform and conducting a strategy in unity with the union guarantees that the Delphi struggle will never escape the union’s control.

Some supporters of Shotwell argue that Shotwell doesn’t really mean what he says about the UAW and doesn’t believe it’s reformable; he is forced to talk this way to bring the majority of UAW members along. But this condescending argument is a cop-out. It’s saying that UAW members, who have been fed decades of deception by their union, need to be fed more deception by the leaders of the Delphi struggle. Nothing good will come out of a movement not committed to telling the truth. If it is really the case that only a minority of workers clearly understand the truth about their union, then it is up to them to communicate that truth to others, not deceive and manipulate them.

There is still time for Soldiers of Solidarity to reverse course, to step clearly outside the UAW, to expose the union’s role for all to see, and to call on workers everywhere to join a movement which challenges the death-grip of capitalism on our society. If they would do this, at least something positive would have come from their struggle. It would mark the beginning of a new movement. Unless the Soldiers of Solidarity do reverse their course, the Delphi struggle will be but one more way station in the tragic race to the bottom for all workers.

Dave Stratman
_newdemocracyworld.org_ (http://newdemocracyworld.org/)
20 Moraine Street
Boston, MA 02130
617-524-4073

Chilean Students Walkout - Turn it into a General Strike!

2006-06-15T17:56:00.000+12:00

by POI/FLT
Leaflet distributed by the Internationalist Workers' Party of Chile during the June 5th 'Walkout' of Secondary students all over Chile.
The POI is a section of the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction .

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Long live the June-5 general walkout of the Chilean students!
Long live the heroic struggle of the Chilean youth!
For free state education for everybody, and to win all the demands of the Chilean working people!

This struggle must win! The heroic student movement has already confronted the civil-military, "concertacionista”-“Pinochetista” regime, and the government of “Bushelet”. (1) She wanted to put the brakes on the powerful drive of the student movement by making small concessions, in the same way as the great strike of the subcontracted copper miners against the precarious nature of their jobs was sold-out. This trap of cosmetic changes in the law that adjusted their contracts was forced upon them by the actions of the union bureaucracy that heads the CUT (Central Union) and of the leaders of the Chilean Communist Party.

But Bachelet did not succeed with the rebellious student movement. Very wisely, the student movement rejected the crumbs Bachelet offered them because the minimal demand of the students is “Free and state-owned education at every level !” This demand has driven hundreds of thousands onto the streets, to occupy schools and universities, to confront bloody repression, and the government of “Bushelet” and the FTA! (2)

Now the splendid walkout that the students have staged on June 5th shows once more that we need to struggle for all of our demands. The student movement has the full authority to call on the Chilean working class and exploited to make an indefinite National General Strike to win all their demands. In each factory, in the pits of the mines, in each workplace, office, shopping mall of port, in each school and university college, in the organizations of the Mapuche Indians movement, in the poor peasants unions, a motion has to be presented and voted for:

NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE, NOW!

For free state education at every level!(3) Down with privately owned education! Free entrance to University! The educational budget must be funded through taxing the big fortunes, refusing to pay the external debt and cutting 80% off the military budget that pays the “gurka” Chilean Armed Forces, lackeys of her the murderous Bush and Blair!

Enough of hostages packing the Pinochetista jails of the civil-military regime! Freedom now for the imprisoned fighting students, for the political prisoners of the Mapuche movement, for all the political prisoners!

As the Chilean students say, “Enough of skyrocketing copper while education is laying on the ground!”. (4) The struggle should be for the complete re-nationalization of copper under workers’ control, so that this immense wealth funds free education, workers’ health services, and bread, jobs, living wages for all working people!

The struggle for free and state owned education is the struggle of all the workers and people in Chile!

Down with the infamous contract laws of the slave-owner bosses and “Bushelet’s” government!
Equal pay and equal working conditions for equal work! Everybody should enjoy job-stability and the protection of collective bargaining aggreements!

The Mapuche Indians should be returned their ancestral land; land for the poor peasants!
For that, the big landowners and the imperialist corporations must be expropriated. Break with the FTA,! Chile must stop being another star in the US flag! Dissolve the murderous police of Pinochet-Bachelet! For self-defense worker-student committees!

FOR VICTORY NOW!

The heroic student movement has won in the streets, with their combat, all the authority to launch this call, now! Enough of union bureaucrats that sell-out the workers’ struggles and support the Pinochetista regime and President Bachelet , and prevent the workers from uniting with the students.

It is necessary to make a national congress of workers, students and peasants with delegates of the rank and file from all over Chile, to conquer the national general strike in order to get victory!

Today, dozens of unions will march along Santiago’s streets, in support of the students’ demand. After long weeks of unending students’ street fights, the union leadership can no more delay some kind of support nor extend their shameful silence about the Chilean youths struggle.

Because the immense majority of the Chilean workers and people see the demand of the fighting vanguard of the students as their own. But solidarity of the workers should be an effective one, it should become a single and united fight with that of their children, the fighting students, by attacking the property of the exploiters.

The interests and the property of the exploiters must be attacked, because it is they who support and benefit from the iniquitous fee paying regime that suffocates the Chilean youth. Only this will allow the heroic student struggle that has begun to be victorious.

The cry that echoes around Chile, together with the June-5 student walkout is:

For a NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE against the regime and the government of the FTA, which starves the workers and the people and plunders the Chilean nation.

Long live the June-5 student walkout and the gigantic solidarity of workers and people, that the student movement has conquered in the streets!

The Chilean students today, by their splendid example of struggle,have earned their place in the vanguard of the fight against the Latin American regimes and governments that under the guise of “socialism” or “nationalism” are continuing to enforce wage slavery to the imperialist corporations and governments that plunder our peoples and nations.

That is why the Chilean students have joined all the workers and exploited of the world, side by side with the heroic French youth who confronted -and still do so - the murderous 5th Republic of the French imperialists. The struggle of the Chilean youth is the struggle of the entire working class of Latin America and the world.

June 5th, 2006.-
Partido Obrero Internacionalista (POI-CI) (Internationalist Worker Party-FI) of Chile
Re-published by the Fracción Leninista Trotskista (Leninist Trotskyist Fraction)

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(1) The current President of Chile is Ms Bachelet, a “socialist” that continues the pro-US policies of her “concertacionista” (Socialist-Christian Democratic alliance) predecessors. The “concertacionista” regime was agreed between the supposedly “democratic” parties Pinochet and the Armed Forces, granting these latter that nothing would be changed by the civil governments of the deep structural reforms that had been accomplished by them in Chile during the military dictatorship days, and that no one of the responsible of the genocide was going to be punished. This included the absolute regulation, weakening and splitting of the formerly strong unions, the complete privatization of education, the loss of most of the historical gains of the youth, and the workers, the favoring of the “rights” of the corporations, etc.

(2) Chile was the first country in South America to sign the FTA, and it did that under a “socialist” (indeed “concertacionista”) government.

(3) Without previous selection exam or other forms of hindering the entrance to university of the poor and the workers’ children.

(4) Copper, the main Chilean commodity, amounting to most of its exports and revenues, has reached historical highs.

NZ: Workers Unite for What?

2006-06-10T14:57:00.000+12:00

The following article is reprinted from Class Struggle, #66 April-May 2006.

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Matt McCarten’s Unite Workers’ union sacrifices rank and file democracy for deals with bosses and parliamentary careers. McCarten is trying to enlist ‘his’ union as part of the World Social Forum reformist left bloc that tries to make deals between workers and ‘democratic’ bosses as the road to parliamentary socialism.

“My Union”

Unite Workers Association won a good wage increase from Restaurant Brands but how did it do it? By strike action! So far so good. Matt McCarten presented the victory as a “new historic deal” for young fast food workers. But then we hear that instead of taking the proposed deal back to a vote of the members he signed the deal behind the backs of the members. What was the rush? It may have got overwhelmingly support from the membership anyway. So why not take it back to the members?

We know that some fast food workers were upset by the fact that Unite was calling on workers to go on strike by text messaging them. One worker we spoke to who was also a job delegate was called into work to fill in for workers who walked off the job without any discussion or a vote on strike action. She was called a scab by those who walked off.

Were the Restaurant Brands deal and the charge of scab hurled at this young woman isolated cases of things going wrong? Or were they symptomatic of the McCarten political machine? We think the latter. This looks like McCarten using these young workers as media fodder to pressure politicians to back Sue Bradford’s Bill to eliminate discriminatory youth rates, at the cost of their own democratic right to discuss matters and vote on them. In other words the rank and file members of McCarten’s Unite branch are being used by him to back his own campaign to form a new reformist party on the left.

Why doesn’t this surprise us?

Well we’ve seen it coming for years. Back in 2002 when the Alliance lost out in Parliament we predicted that McCarten would regroup and try to find a union base for his politics. It took him about 3 years to insert himself into Unite by forming his own branch in Auckland, Unite Workers Association, and start recruiting members, but deliberately excluding beneficiaries and the unemployed.

All the while we kept up a running commentary on McCarten’s methods. First, he exposed workers to unnecessary risk of sacking by his flamboyant, high profile advocacy. Second, he started poaching workers from other unions. Third, he structured UWA so that he controlled the union from the top down. Fourth, he associated the union with the police in the ‘Comrades and Cossacks’ commemoration. Fifth he ran, and continues to run, a scurrilous campaign against Waitemata Unite! a branch of the union based on beneficiaries who have criticised within Unite! McCarten's bureaucratic methods and his exclusion of beneficiaries over several years.

But in spite of these problems, CWG backed the initiative of recruiting non-unionised workers especially young fast food workers. For us this is elementary united front politics. But we always said to Unite organisers that the members had to be in charge. We pushed to make Unite a genuinely rank and file based union. Those inside Unite who were in agreement with this principle assured us that they too were fighting for this objective. It seems however, with the Restaurant Brands deal, that our fears have been justified, and their hopes have been defeated.

Radical Youth ‘walkout’

Radical Youth originated the campaign against youth rates taken up by later by Unite which then steered it behind Bradford’s Bill. The ‘walkout’ organised by Radical Youth in March could not be contained by McCarten’s Unite. Both the Alliance and McCarten praised the walkout but then tried to steer the youth’s actions behind parliamentary reforms to make capitalism a ‘fair’, ‘democratic’, 'socialist' society.

But there is no future in such activism. It is no more than media fodder to support parliamentary reforms. Similar street activism was the routine tactic of the Peoples Centre in Auckland when Sue Bradford ran it in the late 1980's and 1990s without much success. It was also the preferred method of the university students against user pay fees in the 1990s. They made their point, but the protest fizzled because it was always designed to put pressure on parliament.

We don’t think that radical youth were prepared to be used as rent boys and girls on McCarten’s parliamentary roadshow. We see the walkout as part a wider movement of young workers globally that is taking on capitalism itself? This is a movement that goes beyond immediate reforms towards revolution? In this they are not alone.

Young people in France, migrant workers in the US, and oppressed Iraqis, all know there is no way that capitalism can afford ‘democracy’ and a living wage for them. Sure fast food outlets may pay more in NZ, but they are going to screw workers in other ways and in other countries to make their profits. Capitalism today is about taking these rights and conditions away from the weakest. And even the best organised workers in the world, the US autoworkers, are facing crippling job losses and pension and health ‘takebacks’.

So the more pressure radical youth puts on companies here, the more they will find that they are still exploited so that its not just low wages but the wage system that is the problem. Just like the youth in France right now i.e. facing wage slavery. The French youth won a small victory against the CPE, but it will take an unlimited general strike to stop the ruling class from bringing in the measures it wants in some other form.

French Lessons

In France the recent student rebellion proved that students, youth and workers can unite to fight not only bad laws but can mobilise to bring down a government. They were aiming for a general strike to defeat the law. But the union bosses are as usual playing a treacherous role. The Communists and Socialists think that a ‘social Europe’ can be won through parliaments to do everything they can to stop a real all –out general strike from happening.

But not only the open reformists. The leading so-called ‘Trotskyist Party’ the LCR [Revolutionary Communist League] joined with the Communist Party and Socialist Party and the Greens to sign a statement begging Chirac to throw out the new law and sit down to talk with the ‘left’ about a ‘consensus’ i.e. ‘compromise’. In other words the so-called ‘far left’ took the struggle off the street back into parliament to do a deal behind the backs of the young workers.

The LCR in France has close relations with the SWP [Britain] and the Socialist Workers in NZ. The LCR talked about a general strike but did not put this demand on the union officials to force them to call one. This is the same politics of the Workers’ Charter and McCarten’s Unite in New Zealand. They try to contain the spontaneous struggles of the youth, students and workers by making backroom deals with the bosses and with governments. Their reformist perspective is to build a popular front in which the ‘left’ can pressure the right. Fat chance! Right across the world, the parties of the ‘new type’ are no more than the broad left leg of the popular front alliance with the ‘democratic’ capitalists, sowing illusions in young, militant workers that they can deliver parliamentary socialism from above, and disarming them in the face of imperialist attacks.

Where to from here?

Fight for rank and file democracy! Challenge the leadership? Make McCarten accountable! Insist that all issues are debated at all up meetings. Insist that delegates are elected by the rank and file and are accountable and recallable. Stand up for your rights!

Unite for workers power, not bureaucratic power!
Build fighting, democratic unions, not parliamentary careers!

Reject the McCartenite, Workers Charter local kiwi branch of the World Social Forum bloc that draws young workers under the influence of the bourgeois and restorationist leadership of Chavez, Castro, Morales and Lula that is containing and strangling the revolutionary masses in Latin America!

Unions and Workers' Liberation

2006-06-04T22:00:00.000+12:00

Tom Wetzel in Z Magazine has written an article on how to rebuild the union movement from the bottom up to get rid of the 'coordinator class' (as he calls them) i.e. the bureaucrats.
A very good read with excellent examples on how not to organise as well as "how to" including the Hormel strike of the 1980s, Spanish unions, LA drivers etc.
I have a couple of differences with Wetzel which I'll mention here.

First, his conception of the 'coordinators' as a class shifts the concept of class from a relation of prodution to a relation of control (power over workers). Trotsky regarded the bureaucrats as a caste inside the working class acting as the bosses 'labor lieutenants'. Trotsky's position is consistent with Marxism in that it holds that bureaucracy like other 'middle classes' has no direct relationship to the means of production and so can only act as agents for 'ruling' classes.

Second, Wetzel follows the common view of Leninism as top-down 'management' rather than seeing it as a leadership genuinely representing the rank and file because it has won support for its program on how to fight and win socialism. Leninists don't join unions to impose their program from above. Unions are united fronts and Leninists like all political currents have to prove that their program works in the transitional struggle to create new organs of workers power such as councils or 'soviets'.

However, in terms of Wetzel's main argument - how to rebuild the unions as rank and file united fronts from below, there is much common ground.
Its quite long so here it is on Soldiers of Solidarity

Todd Jordan's Resolution on migrant labor to UAW Local 292!

2006-05-28T15:07:00.000+12:00

From 'Soldiers of Solidarity' Google Group
To sign up Google Google Group and search for 'Soldiers of Solidarity'

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WHEREAS the UAW has stated its commitment to improve the lives of working women and men beyond our borders to encompass people around the globe and to raise the quality of life for all working people worldwide.

WHEREAS we stand beside our sisters and brothers around the world who are carrying forward the struggle against exploitation.

WHEREAS in December 2005 the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would make felons of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants and anyone who helps them.

WHEREAS painting immigrants as law breakers and potential terrorists, politicians of both major political parties want to justify the super-exploitation of new comers and provide native-born working people with scapegoats for their afflictions, from falling wages to the draining of social service dollars.

WHEREAS the equally racist “guest worker” bills in the Senate promise to control the immigrant “threat” through new bracero programs that amount to indentured servitude.

WHEREAS the only real criminals are lining Mexico’s border towns with maquiladoras and paying poverty wages while taking no responsibility for the murders of hundreds of women workers in Juarez, for environmental destruction, or for other devastation caused by their contempt for the people and the things that generate their wealth.

WHEREAS in our hemisphere, workers and young people are marching for immigrant rights and also against “free trade” and the brutal conditions of globalization that force people to migrate from their native lands.

WHEREAS no worker in the United States of America is secure as long as immigrants are abused.

WHEREAS native-born and foreign-born women and men share one cause: freedom for all those who labor together to create the world’s wealth and that freedom can only be achieved by international working-class solidarity across borders.

WHEREAS the desperate young people, workers and families fleeing the ravages of “free trade” and globalization are no criminals.

WHEREAS the corporations know no borders.

WHEREAS corporations can come and go as they please across borders seeking the lowest wages and environmental standards to exploit and destroy lives in their wake.

WHEREAS working people around the world are unable to travel as they please to the highest level of wages and environmental standards as the corporations can for the lowest.

WHEREAS in the streets and the schools, immigrants and their defenders are rising up in a thrilling movement, one with profound potential to better the lives of all working people in the United States of America.

WHEREAS amnesty is a necessity for current immigrants, but only opening the borders will prevent the future exploitation and allow the civilization of immigrants.

WHEREAS no human being is illegal.

BE IT RESOLVED that we stand against the racist bracero programs and guest worker bills that only divide the working-class.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we demand unconditional amnesty for all undocumented immigrants and the opening of the borders for all working people.

Earl and Gregg on 'Working to Rule'

2006-05-21T14:02:00.000+12:00

While the title may be a bit grandiose, there's truth in it. The writer, Gregg Shotwell, has been a key activist in energizing the resistance he describes below. This speech was electrifying and several hundred union activists rose to our feet that day.

I spent two years building solidarity with an exceptional group of several hundred 'middle class' workers of A.E. Staley in Decatur, IL back in the mid 90s. To fight a take-back contract that would leave them defenseless against poisonous chemicals and murderous condition, they learned to work-to-rule..

They'd gone into the city with marches, fliers and picket lines. They went to the AFL-CIO honchos meeting in Florida, disrupted it, forced union leaders to pledge support and made national headlines. They had a hard-core who traveled the country as 'road warriors', bringing the news to workers and students in meeting halls from San Diego to Boston. They stood up to a huge multinational for two years, despite the betrayal of 'their' union leaders and the 'progressive' AFL-CIO leaders like Rich Trumpka.

The secret of their strength? The work-to-rule they developed in the plant, guided by Jerry Tucker and developed by them, from the hard-core few until they took over mandatory meetings with solidarity and a sense of their own power. Production fell by about 40% while they got a paycheck.

This was not some radical holdover from the 60s. Large numbers were Vietnam vets and very patriotic with deep-seated anti-communism. There was sexist and racist harassment of the women/black workers by other workers. Why mention this? Because if they could do this, then others can too. It was not easy. It did require leadership. The workers voted to hire Jerry Tucker and bring him in to help them. They voted to take out money for a Solidarity Fund to 'pay' those who would and did get fired.It was not spontaneous. It put power in the word empower, because they did create or discover their own power as workers, as Gregg describes.

Of course, since the owners still 'owned' the plant with 'the law' protecting that 'right', they forced the workers out with rent-a-cops and attack dogs. That's the start of another story.

nuff for now.

Earl

Workers Will Rule When They Work To Rule

May 18, 2006

Workers Will Rule When They Work To Rule by Gregg Shotwell

(The following is a speech by Brother Gregg Shotwell on May 8, 2006 at the Labor Notes Conference in Detroit, Michigan.)

When Delphi declared bankruptcy, threatened to cut our wages 60% and dump our pensions, the UAW International said, "We have a plan. We just can't tell you what it is." We couldn't wait to find out. A rank and file movement—soldiers of solidarity—sprang up from the grass roots. Now sparks of resistance in the form of solidarity committees are flaring up like brush fires all over the midwest.

We've held meetings and protests in Grand Rapids, Flint, Bay City, Saginaw, Lockport, Milwaukee, Dayton, Kokomo, Troy, Youngstown, Toledo, and Detroit. Offshoot groups inspired by SOS have organized in St. Louis and Peoria. In every meeting we have asserted, "This is not just about Delphi. This struggle is a fight for the dignity of all workers."

If Delphi is permitted to shelter assets overseas, and use bankruptcy courts to break union contracts and dump responsibility for retirees onto taxpayers, all the multinationals will follow suit. Bankruptcy isn't just the latest trend in the land of Casino Capitalism, it's a union busting plan. It isn't just about the money, it's about control over the conditions of our labor. It's a battle to determine who will rule the shopfloor. If we don't gang up and beat this bully, we will one day hear workers say, "If only the UAW had called a national strike at Delphi, we wouldn't be so weak today."

We commonly hear rank and file members say, "A general strike is needed." The rank & file doesn't need convincing, they need organizing. The biggest obstacle to the general strike is not worker apathy it's union bureaucracy. We are not only fighting the Goliath of corporate domination, we are also fighting Goliath's ugly sweetheart, the company union. We are struggling to free ourselves from the harness of a company union, and the bridle of cooperation with the corporate agenda.

How can we empower our fellow workers, not with rhetorical slingshots, grand theories, and political pie in the sky, but in the most fundamental way and in the most fundamental place, where we live and work every day?

Sam Gindin once said, "If workers don't believe that change is possible because of their experience in the union day to day, forget about politics."

Politics is the cart. Work is the horse, the driving force. If we can empower workers where they live and work every day, then and only then, can we organize a real resistance, a real union, a real social movement. Then and only then can we—as Jerry Tucker said— "Put the backbone back in the UAW"

If knowledge is power, what is it that workers know better than anyone? The answer is simple: work. And the conclusion is clear: work to rule is the fundamental building block of collective actiion.

Work to rule is not a political theory, it's a power tool. Workers may not understand Marxism but they understand tools. And they understand what Ani DiFranco meant when she said, "Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." Work to rule is not a political doctrine, it's concerted activity and it has multiple meanings.

First and foremost, work to rule is a method of controlling production, of slowing down, of showing the boss who's boss. The aim is to leverage negotiations and/or prepare for a strike or other collective action. But work to rule is also an invocation, a sort of call and response for broader and more direct confrontation because it raises workers' consciousness of the power they hold in their hands.

The old UAW had a culture of struggle, a tradition of direct action. I hired into GM and joined the UAW 27 years ago. I didn't know much about how unions worked. I soon learned. At 6:30 one morning we were sitting around sipping coffee and dressing out our grinders. A foreman who was new to the area told us to "Get up and get to work, right now." He said, "I'm the boss."

We said, "Yes sir, boss." And we went right to work. Thirty minutes later every machine in the department was down. Then skilled trades came out, tore the machines apart, left everything all over the floor, and went off to look for the missing parts. They didn't come back. There was no production that day. Every department behind us went down like a domino.

The next morning that same foreman said, "Good morning, gentlemen." Then he got the hell out of there and left us alone.

Workers controlled the shopfloor. The shopfloor was our turf. We didn't plan this direct action. We didn't even talk about it. It was automatic. We didn't call it work to rule. We called it, "Show him who's boss." That's what the old timers taught me about unionism.

The UAW cut its teeth on slowdowns. The UAW was born in conflict not collaboration. The UAW Concession Caucus intentionally emasculated the militancy of the UAW rank and file. The Concession Caucus promoted competition between workers and cooperation with the bosses. The Concession Caucus promoted alienation from workers in other countries and partnership with the company. When the Concession Caucus promoted "Buy American" all they did was provide cover for the corporations to invest our legacy overseas. Instead of promoting international solidarity, they promoted teamwork with the bosses and we, the workers, are the losers. We don't need collaborators, we need soldiers of solidarity who are willing to defend their turf. Soldiers who believe that we are worth fighting for.

When workers work to rule they assert the power of their knowledge and skill over the means of production and its owners. When workers work to rule human rights takes precedence over property rights. We can't begin to organize a general strike or even an industry wide strike until workers actually experience first hand the power of concerted activity on the shop floor.

Work to rule is not simply a method of slowing production, work to rule is a network of communication, a coded language of subversion. I don't tell workers to slow down. I say, "Give them what they deserve. Break the record."

African Americans were masterful in this art of communication. Hundreds of years ago they used work songs to instill solidarity, convey messages, and control the pace of the work. The song raised the collective consciousness of workers. The boss couldn't punish someone for falling behind or working too slow because everyone worked at the same methodical pace. They protected the elderly, the injured, the lame, and preserved strength and solidarity with song. The song not only controlled the pace of production, the song also communicated to workers important information. For example, the location of the boss. Such information allowed workers to take breaks, steal much needed supplies—food, medicine, tools, weapons— or even to escape.

Today we have more sophisticated means of communication. We have the internet. We have cell phones. But the object is the same: raise the collective consciousness. Working to rule is an underground network of communication. A network above and beyond, below and around, the control of the company or the official union.

Last February a protest was planned at the Delphi plant in Flint but the night before union officials with the help of the local television and newspapers called it off on account of rain. SOS went on alert. Our song traveled via internet and cell phone. We sang, 'Soldiers of solidarity don't melt in the rain.' We showed up. We picketed the plant and dominated the media with our message. "SOS is ready to strike." "SOS won't back down." "Soldiers of Solidarity don't melt in the rain." You can bet the rank and file took note of the difference between SOS and union officials.

Work to rule is also about workers exerting power in their own union.

When I went to Lockport, New York some workers asked me how to make a motion at a union meeting. I thought to myself, 'We are far down the learning curve here.' At the next meeting they went in with a plan and passed motions for full disclosure of all changes in the contract and at least a week between the information meeting and the ratification. The importance of that action was that they took control of the union meeting from the floor, not the podium.

On March 31 a supervisor at the Delphi plant in Flint informed Claudia Perkins that she was laid off.

"You must be out of your mind. I will be here Monday," she said.

Claudia called her Bargaining Chairman.

"Are you aware my seniority rights are being violated?"

He admitted he was aware but insisted he didn't know what to do because the International hadn't returned his call.

"Do you know how to write a grievance? Because I know how to sign one. I will hit the clock on Monday."

On Monday forty-five workers who'd been laid off hit the clock and refused to leave. They sat down and got their jobs back.

The Civil Rights Movement wasn't organized from on high. The march on Washington was built step by step; by a woman who said, I'm not giving up my seat; by young men who sat at lunch counters and endured physical, emotional, and psychological abuse; by an old woman who after a long day at work said, I'd rather walk than take that bus. Those people led us to Washington in 1963. Those small but enormously courageous actions were the building blocks of the Civil Rights Movement.

Our goal in Soldiers of Solidarity is long term and far broader than one plant or one company or one union. This isn't just about Delphi. Delphi is the harbinger. The vulture capitalists want to steal pensions, cut wages, slash benefits, and bust unions across the board. They won't be satisfied to stop at Delphi. Delphi's just a donut shop on the highway to Armageddon. SOS advocates that workers in all sectors assert their power at the point of production, stoke the brush fires, and reinforce the rank and file network of communication as a first step in the process of broad collective actions that directly confront Goliath, his ugly sweetheart, and their government bodyguard.

The fact is, we occupy the plants, the fields, the docks, the offices, the roads, the ships, the airways, every day. We've established a beachhead. But a general strike will not be organized from the top down. A general strike can only be organized from the ground up. Work to rule is the building block. Work to rule raises the individual worker's awareness of his or her power to control production and inflict maximum damage where it counts most— the bottom line. Work to rule fosters and reinforces the network of communication, the bonds of solidarity, necessary for broader collective action. Work to Rule is about controlling the work and directly determining the conditions of our labor.

When I am asked, "What can we do to support Delphi workers?" I say, "Organize your own workplace because Delphi isn't just a company name, it's a code name for a SWAT team coming to you on a fast train."

The workplace, not the bargaining table is the real battle ground. We can't beat Goliath in the courts. We can't beat Goliath in the back room. We won't beat Goliath in the election booth until we beat that bully on the shop floor.

Staughton Lynd, an attorney known for his civil rights and union activism, attended our SOS meeting in Youngstown, Ohio. Afterwards he remarked to Tony Budak that what impressed him most was that no one was running for office. No one was using SOS as a platform for their personal political ambitions.

SOS is a rank and file movement. SOS doesn't believe that if we elect a hero, he will save us. We are not hero worshippers. We understand that real unionism springs from the bottom up, and dies from the top down. We do not advocate replacing one puppet with another puppet. Changing the guards won't change the prison. SOS advocates that workers themselves become the leaders we have always been looking for and that we lead from the ground floor not from the top floor.

My old friend Dave Yettaw, said, "You can defeat a leader, but you can't defeat the idea." To which I might add, you can defeat a leader but you can't defeat the rank and file when they lead the battle. Workers will rule when they work to rule.

May 1: Port at Aztlan (Los Angeles/Long Beach) shut down for 24 hours!

2006-05-09T10:42:00.000+12:00

First, I would like to thank;

Industrial Workers of the World
Students for a Democratic Society
Southern California Anarchist Federation
Los Angeles Labor Collective
Anti-Racist
Socialist Workers Party
and everyone else

For their solidarity this May Day 2006.

I'm sorry that we kinda flopped with the park attendance as only about 100
troqueros showed up but with the solidarity of the community it doubled in
size and magnified in importance.
But, let there be no mistake.

The Port of Aztlan (Los Angeles/Long Beach), the largest container port of
entry in the United States, the very same port that strongly impacts all
asian countries, and is a central hub in international commerce,

CAME TO A COMPLETE HALT!

Further, word has reached us that all local rail activity was stopped as
well and our line haul brothers/sisters shut down the interior!

Was this a fluke, a result of the 2 major marches in Los Angeles?

The port was closed for the entire 24 hours and was only running at 20%
until mid-morning today, Tuesday, as most troqueros were reluctant to go to
work if there was a strike in the harbor. Many waited to see if there would
be picket signs. It was not a fluke. We shut down completely May Day 2004,
did it again this May Day, and will do it again sometime after May 13.

There was a meeting and conscensus was reached on the following;

1) The showing at the park was spirited and we did believe that we had
support but not enough to call for a prolonged strike. We need more
visible support and will have a meeting on May 13 at noon to set a date for
a strike and will begin to mobilize for it.

2) If anyone in the community gets fired for boycotting work and puts up a
strike sign we will honor the call and not deliver the containers.

3) If the migra continues more sweeps of any terminal we will ALL boycott
that particular terminal until the migra leaves. This goes for ALL
troqueros, even citizens.

4) The upcoming strike will be centered on the cost of diesel.

This May Day was a success because other than shutting down the harbor
99.9%,

the troqueros saw the solidarity from "los wobblies". The IWW is well
recognized by the troqueros as one of the 3 major unions; the other two
being the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win.
Without knowing all the details we understand that the IWW is the mother of
the Port Labor movement and is highly respected. The IWW was ready to run to
the harbor to put up a sanctioned picket line at any terminal that had any
substantial activity. During the day when we needed reports from the Line
Drivers the SDS was networked with the workers at different locations,
including the line drivers. The SWP, as always, brought reading material
and gave a very encouraging solidarity statement. The Troqueros saw for the
first time, an entire community that came out to support us. Students,
grass roots organizations, and the one "BIG UNION." Even the County
Commission on Human Relations and surpisingly, the local councilperson
Janice Hahn joined us for a few minutes. Can u imagine, an elected official
that came to a park full of "radicals?" Neither Villaraigosa nor the
Cardinal cared to join us at Banning Park. The troqueros saw that there is
an entire world out there that wants the port to change.

What the community saw, most for the very first time, was a real union
meeting the way it was meant to be and how it was 100 years ago. A bunch of
workers in a big circle all voicing their opinions, using their best
judgement, and coming to a democratic decision. A Labor Union with no
structure, no rules, no funds, no politicians, with only their labor to
bargain with. A Union Meeting in the open park, no permits, no stages,
nothing except the workers, and now, OUR COMMUNITY!

The meeting turned into a celebration as two sisters, threw out a grito, and
damm, just like that, there was a marcha going through Wilmington. The kind
not seen since the 1960s and the days of the Brown Berets! About 150 left
the park for a 3-4 mile marcha and about 250 marchers returned! We went
down Avalon blvd then west on Anaheim street to Wilmington Blvd to PCH and
then back to the park! My down syndrome daughter stayed at the park but
while marching I spotted 2 other down syndrome girls, one a little on the
heavy side but she MARCHED, all smiles at the rear of the procession! She
became my marching buddy. The cops were overwhelmed and at one point yelled
at me to get people off the streets and to stop going across red lights. I
was at the back and wasn't about to run the three blocks to the front to
take control. So much to his dismay I ignored the demand. While on the 2
hour spontaneous march all the cars slowed down, honked, and many waved
flags. We crossed the red lights and everyone honked in solidarity. No one
complained, except the nervous cops. Cars stopped in the middle of the
street, passengers jumped out and joined us, children waiving flags from
apartment buildings, cars slowing down and passing out water......

Upon returning to the park, one of the cars following us pulled over in the
temporary no parking zone to pass out some water and, a half-dozen patrol
cars encircled the car and forced it down to Eubank. I saw a 100 marchers,
children, middle aged women, students, run across the park to stand watch
over the 3 petite teenage girls, none over 110 pounds and 5' 2". A dozen
macho cops, most over 200 pounds, gave them a parking ticket. What I saw in
the faces of the community was a genuine concern for the safety of the
girls. There is something wrong in our society when the citizenry fears for
the safety of its' children at the hands of the police. It wasn't about a
$40 parking ticket. It was to remind the community and the workers as to
who carried the guns. We stayed with our sisters until they were released
and returned to the park. The troqueros then responded in the normal way, a
colecta was taken to cover the ticket and costs as the ticket was all of our
responsibility. It was meant to intimidate and I'm sorry if I offend anyone
but I have tried to validate the action as anything else and I can't. I
have delayed writing this report as I have attempted to ommit it but I
can't. It was wrong what the cops did. It wasn't about the parking
infraction. It was an attempt to communicate authority and demand
submission.

Our response was seen at the harbor as INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE stopped for a
day. Even better, the bond between the community and the troqueros has been
solidified and can never be broken.

Afterwards, I thought about running downtown or to Santa Ana to attend one
of the major marches with jointly over a million people. Instead, I went
home, closed my eyes, and tried to prolong and re-live as best I could, the
greatest May Day ever, May Day 2006 at the Port of Aztlan!!!

Solidarity to everyone that attended this small but historical event! (is
shutting down international commerce "small"?) : )

Ernesto Jesus Nevarez
Port of Aztlan

Reports from the Megamarch (May 1) Chicago

2006-05-06T20:33:00.000+12:00

This is a post forwarded from the working class studies list working-class-studies@lists.ysu.edu
Someone writes critical of the failure to challenge the Latino bourgeoisie, and to engage the Black and white workers in this campaign.
George reports on the quite significant union turnout at the Chicago march behind demands that did include Blacks and whites.
Earl accepts that this is noteworthy but reminds us that these unions are junior partners in managing US capitalism - i.e. still reformist.

It strikes me that there is some way to go before the movement is capable of challenging the reformist leadership. But the signs are that the mass is moving. I would say that the offical turnout of these establishment or 'partnership' unions was probably an attempt to keep the lid on what is obviously a potentially giant development in the most oppressed layers of the use working class - 'illegals'.
6 million who boycotted and 3 million who marched had to bring the unions out or get trampled on and left behind.
What's great about this movement is that it creates the conditions for the rank and file to break free of the established union leaderships and the Democrats.

---------------------------------------

George asked me to fwd this as he cannot. His report adds a level of missing and welcome info. For example, 400 SEIU folks is not nothing. Ditto for them raising or supporting national health care. Still, were there any banners or signs calling for that? Did the SEIU or other unions push for a wider program that could help mobilize support among the wider working class?

I was towards the back of the march, and saw none. George's report talks of the slogan "immigrant rights are workers rights". This slogan does not raise any goals or demands that speak to pressing issues like living wages, national health care, education, the military budget/war.

While giving due credit for their actual work and turnout, let's not forget that all of these unions are run as 'junior partners' with Corporate America. Just like the old AFL, their basic strategy is to help the employer make profits first, and within that, pressure for more.

They do not and their current leadership cannot lead the fights we need. Instead, they openly oppose the methods of the 30s and class struggle. Instead, they practice the same old AFL collaboration in exchange for dues checkoff and often minimal gains. Not to pour cold water on any gains since something is better than nothing, but let's not get carried away as if these unions are fighting forces either.

In fact, SEIU is marked by the twin strategy of 'partnershiip' and huge locals made up of many workplaces where workers can have little say unless they're part of the apparatus or part of a caucus with a different program and strategy. So far, I know of none altho we sorely need them.

in solidarity,

Earl

-------------------------------------------------------------------
In a message dated 5/3/06 12:17:04 PM, Red1pearl forwarded the following, quoting another person:

The leadership of this movement wants to confine it to demands which relate to undocumented and documented immigrant workers only. And they want to confine it to issues of legalization. They consciously and deliberately want to avoid the issue of low pay, bad conditions and poverty. They know that to raise these issues will immediately bring the movement into open confrontation with all sections of the bourgeois including the Latino bourgeois and political elite which in the main are the strongest influence in the leadership of this movement.

The result of this is that the movement has no demands which can draw in the
African American and White working class. If as well as demanding and fighting for the rights of immigrants the movement took up the call for a minimum wage of $15.00 per hour, free health care for all and free education for all then this great movement on the streets which we now see could be the basis for building a mass working class movement drawing in all sections of the working class.

Since the years of the civil rights movement in the 1960's there has been the strengthening development of a Latino bourgeois and petit bourgeois class. These leaders are very conscious of their role. They want to control any movement of the Latino working class and keep it within the confines of capitalism and its position as a low paid sector in capitalism. These leaders bargain with the ruling class as a whole in the country using their ability to keep the Latino working class in control in return for which they hold some leading positions in the system and have their own interests considered.

A similar process has taken place in the African American population.There too since the civil rights movement there has been a very serious strengthening of the black bourgeois leadership, in politics, the black churches, the economy. This leadership are trying to advance themselves as much as they can in US capitalism's racist society. They also bargain with their ability to keep the black masses in control and to remain as a source of cheap labor. This Black leadership have so far been able to keep the African American masses away from involvement in this movement of the Latino masses.

The capitalist class and its mass media as a whole have also been able to divide and rule and keep the white working class away from supporting this movement.

--------------------------------

May 3, 2006

Before these generalizations are shared widely, please bear with me while I laboriously report some facts. Although I don't expect some people to fact facts when there are easy platitudes and slogans to repeat, but I'll try because I can also use what I report here in other forums.

I am sitting here writing this wearing my union tee shirt, which reads "SEIU Local 73" on the front and "Immigrant rights are workers' rights" on the back. This morning, my two youngest sons were wearing similar shirts as they rolled around in our living room while I took photographs of them. There are easily 50 other shirts that were designed and worn on May Day 2006 in Chicago, and all of them reflect the themes linking workers' rights and immigrant rights.

The most important thing about the explosion of the past two months which culminated its first phase here on May Day is that its infrastructure was primarily from three places: unions; churches; and working class immigrant rights groups. At the finish line on May Day, many small businesses joined in, but only after they had faced the reality of maintaining some kind of social contract with their workers. Some of those even provided a handful of buses for their workers to attend May Day, but the largest number of buses (hundreds) were provided by unions and churches.

All of the unions involved in organizing for La Marcha and for May Day are actively organizing, many at the grass roots among the lowest paid-workers in the USA.

I think that some facts and eye witness reports are in order. Anything as large as La Megamarcha (as many in the Latino communities were calling it) has to be seen from many angles. Here I'll stick for the most part to what I saw myself and what I know because of my participation as a reporter (editor, Substance, www.substance news.com) and union person (director of research, SEIU Local 73, Chicago).

I attended the May 1 rally from the UNITE-HERE hall (333 S. Ashland) up Ashland Ave to Randolph, down Randolph to DesPlaines, and over to Jackson Blvd. a mile into Grant Park, and for two hours in Grant Park. I was on the march and photographing for a total of eight hours Monday, May 1.

I had a digital camera and carried official City of Chicago press credentials. During the events, I took 584 photographs along the entire line of march (which for me began at Ashland and the Congress Expressway before 10:00 a.m.), across Grant Park, and after the crowd began to leave in large numbers (roughtly 4:40 p.m. by my notes). I had press credentials, so I was able to take photographs from in front of the speakers' platform in Grant Park from the end of the rap music until after the Nation of Islam speakers (not there were at least three I counted, two of whom spoke in Spanish).

On several occasions, I found a spot that would give me some elevation so my photographs would give more of a sense of the crowd, just as I had done on March 10 (you can see two of those photographs in the April 2006 Substance at www.substancenews.com and others, without credit, on the SEIU Local 73 website, www.seiu73.org). I was at the front of the march when it finally stepped off at Union Park and stayed with it along the way. My first elevation for photographs took place about a quarter miles down Randolph St., where I was able to stand for a half hour on the berm Mayor Daley has put to house flowers in the middle of the street. I was there as more than 50,000 people passed. I was there as the Irish contingent came in from one of the side streets led by bagpipes. I was there when a Mexican grocery store began deploying its delivery trucks to distribute thousands of bottles of water.

One of the things written on the signs and on jackets and shirts was "Universal Health Care for All." You could see this on dozens of purple shirts and jackets worn by SEIU people. It's been a legislative priority for the unions for a long time in Washington and at the state level. (It is possible to alleviate some of the suffering caused by our horrid health care system with programs like Illinois KidCare, although they are no substitute for universal single payer health insurance...).

But that's one of the "demands" that was explicit on May Day in Chicago.

Allow me to digress to warn bloggers to avoid "facts" as they are filtered by the bourgois media. Consider:

At first on May 1, I had hoped to make a crowd estimate, as I had done with my "statistician" son on March 10. (At that time, we estimated the March 10 march, based on length and average number of people per block, at 180,000 to 250,000, with an additional 50,000 to 100,000 arriving from other directions than the march).

Had I been able to, I would have liked to have done a similar estimate for May 1, but I will take my colleagues' word for it that a half million people marched in Chicago, and let others quote the official police estimate of 400,000. As it was, some communications weren't easy, and I gave up figuring there would be a more honest estimate of the crowd on May 1 than there had been on March 10.

(Remember: The morning of March 10, the news reports, including NPR, stated that "about 10,000 people" were expected to march that day. When I arrived at Lake and Ashland on the Green Line at around noon, there were five or ten times that many people lined up from horizon to horizon along Ashland Ave.! By the day's end on March 10, the police were reporting "at least 100,000 people marched in Chicago. My count was three times that. But the bourgois newspapers downplayed the size and scope of the March 10 march, and The New York Times ignored it completely, despite the fact that people from their Chicago bureau saw it! They are still slanting their coverage of the entire debate, as anyone reading their "news" and "analysis" would agree. NPR is doing the same thing, so it's becoming even more dangerous for people -- especially those of the "Working Class" -- to rely on the bourgeois media for information, let alone for analysis).

I would respectfully suggest that the bourgeois media -- and this includes "liberals" like the neoliberal New York Times and across to the frothing crazies on Fox News with their fulminations about May Day and Communism -- is now engaged in a project to ignore the massive extent of union work in both marches (and in the April 10 events) and the fact that the union work crossed the border and was working with the Mexican unions that created the largest May Day in recent Mexican memory in Mexico City (and forced Vincente Fox into a kind of cloister).

Just about every corporate media report on the Chicago May Day has gone out of its way to avoid mentioning the depth of union organizing (on both sides of the main border) that went into these events.

Anyone who was paying attention on May Day in Chicago would have noticed large contingents from the following unions:

1. SEIU (six different locals that I counted, including Local 73, where I work as research director). The main speaker from SEIU was Jose Arreola, who is a member of the executive board of Local 73 and who works as a janitor at Oak Park River Forest High School. Jose was quoted in the page one story in the Chicago Tribune because he was one of the original organizers of both La Marcha (March 10) and La Megamarcha (May Day). The Tribune left out -- deliberately I think -- the fact that Jose is an official of a major local of the largest union in the United States. Between March 10 and May Day, Jose had to attend meetings in both Los Angeles and in Mexico as part of the buildup to Chicago's May Day. Another of the speakers at the Chicago May Day rally was Helen Miller (an African American) of SEIU Local 880, which is now the largest union local in Illinois. She told the crowd that Local 880 has about 80,000 members. Also speaking were Local 1 president Tom Balanoff, who gave a militant speech against globalization. Also speaking was Amisha Patel, who is community outreach director from Local 73. Amisha has recently been to India, where she worked with union organizers there as well. As you know, SEIU wears purple. Although the various locals marched in different groups, and not as one, there were more than 500 SEIU people in the line of march, and a good bit of the infrastructure for the march came from SEIU. Back at Union Park all afternoon, a number of SEIU people (many of them African Americans) were holding down the "tail" of the march while the "head" moved slowly to Grant Park. In fact, SEIU was represented during the speeches in Grant Park by two men (Jose and Tom) and two women (Helen and Amisha). Among them, they fulfilled anyone's "diversity" requirements, since Jose is Mexican, Tom is white, Helen is Black, and Amisha is Asian. The fact that the bourgeois media missed this natural reality coming from SEIU doesn't mean that someone trying to comprehend the "Working Class" should.

2. UNITE HERE (several locals and most of the regional leadership -- black, white, and Latino). UNITE HERE had at least two speakers in Grant Park. UNITE HERE had distinct signs (those round ones) and many of their people wore red hats and red tee shirts to identify themselves. I counted more than 1,000 UNITE HERE people, either by signs or red. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, in her speech at Grant Park, said that she was wearing her UNITE HERE hat because she is proudly a member of UNITE HERE.

3. TEAMSTERS. The Teamster regional president spoke on behalf of the 110,000 members of the Chicago region. There were several Teamster signs, and the huge Teamster organizing semi-truck was parked prominently in Union Park. Anyone who was in Union Park couldn't miss that semi truck, which has been on the prowl around Chicago for weeks. It's about as easy to miss as a gorilla in your bathroom. That truck, by the way, had been supporting all of the protests and demonstrations in Chicago organized during the previous weeks by Change to Win. These included pickets at the Cook County building and City Hall (April 20), at a scab construction site (April 24), at the Chicago City Council and the State of Illinois Building (April 26), at the Congress Hotel (April 27) and in front of the Crate & Barrel store on Michigan Ave (the "Magnificant Mile") on April 28, the Friday before La Megamarcha. None of those workers' actions included fewer than 300 people, and the largest (at City Hall) was more than 600 people (perhaps as many as 1,000). Earl stopped by for part of the Crate and Barrel demonstration.

4. Carpenters. There was a large contingent from the Carpenters union with two very nicely done signs behind which many of their member marched. I'd estimate there were at least 100 of them in that group, clearly identified.

5. Laborers' union. There was an equally large contingent from the Laborers' International Union, hundreds of them wearing tee shirts, holding signs, or wearing union caps. One of their officials was on the stage in Grant Park, although I didn't hear him speak.

6. UFCW. One of the largest and most visible union groups at La Megamarcha was from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), with their distinctive yellow signs, shirts, and, in some cases, caps. There were more than 1,000 people from the UFCW. Their president spoke in Grant Park.

7. Farmworkers. There was also a large contingent from the Farmworkers.

8. Also involved in the events was Dennis Gannon. Dennis gave a very militant speech from the main stage at Grant Park. Dennis is president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, which is still affiliated with the AFL-CIO. At one point during his speech, Gannon gestured to the skyline, and railed against CEOs, millionaires and billionaires who were stealing the American Dream from working people. On that skyline, a number of corporate buildings were obvious (the Aon building on the south end of Grant Park frames a lot of my photographs; I have some good shots with "Boeing" in the background during the march down Randolph St, by the way. Also obvious to anyone who knows Chicago are Paris Hilton's Conrad Hilton Hotel and the CNN building, to name a couple of others that were against that foggy skyline.

9. Also involved in the events of May 1 was Linda Chavez Thompson, vice president of the AFL-CIO. Her speech was as militant as Gannon's.

10. There was also a small and lovely contingent from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). And some anarchists who wore some nicely printed tee shirts. and various revolutionary groups and grouplets.

I had the advantage of having a streaming photographic record of the day (it took me two disks and two sets of batteries for my D-70). I spent a whole night downloading those photographs in order, then reviewing them in order and labelling as many of them as I could. This helped remind me of what I had seen (and in some cases almost missed) during the march.

I'm sure I missed about a hundred people who carry union cards who were active in the speeches and message of Chicago's May Day from the main speakers' platform itself Monday.

But one of the most poignant realities is the linking of May Day to its history. At the corner of Randolph and Des Plaines, as the march turned, there was a large sign that said "May Day..."

It was on the site where May Day began more than 130 years ago. I have a photograph of it, behind a phalanx of police. That spot was supposed to be the original end point for the May 1 march, but as the march grew, the political leaders of Chicago moved the march further east until two days before, they agreed that the only space large enough for the march and rally was the south end of Grant Park.

What that meant was that with each passing day, a larger part of the center of the third largest city in the USA was going to be blocked by people marching on May Day under the main slogal "Immigrants rights are workers' rights."

Some people may find some comfort in repeating the lie that the unions are not organizing right now, or that the unions were not working on Chicago's massive May Day. Organizing working class people into unions is laborious work, and then enforcing the rights people win from those union contracts is equally laborious (and certainly not as glamorous as Mondey in Chicago). The day after La Megamarcha I was meeting with some of the dozens of organizers who have fanned out across Chicago from SEIU over the past couple of years. During the past two weeks, I have been on the streets of Chicago with dozens of people, most of them relatively young, from the other unions that are changing the face of the union movement as we speak. Getting working class people to sign union cards (in whatever langugae they speak; there are four languages saying "Immigrant rights are workers' rights" on the tee shirt I'm wearing) and learn how to enforce union rights isn't easy. Sustaining those rights is equally difficult. I've carried union cards, as I've mentioned here, for more than 40 years. Imperfect as we are, please don't do the job of the bourgeoisie by repeating the lies that are going to be told across the nation about what happened here in Chicago on Monday.

This is all I have time to report right now. I would be glad to send along some of my photographs (on a CD, in JPG format) to anyone who wanted them for the price of a SASE (I'd say $1.35 postage will do it, plus a dollar for the CD. I only ask that you credit me and Substance if you reproduce them. I do this stuff for a living and right now don't have much of a pension for my family). These photographs will also be published in the print edition of Substance, which will appear on Monday (May 8) and on our website by June 1.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.com

Director of research, SEIU Local 73 Chicago

Support for migrant workers strike builds- IWW

2006-04-30T14:10:00.000+12:00

Inter Press Service declares,

In more than 100 years, people in the United States have not seen what they are likely to witness this May Day, with massive rallies and protests against the treatment of undocumented workers expected to take place all over the country.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33058

Just before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw that a broader basis for civil rights was essential to gaining real justice. He began to speak out not just on the unjust war in Vietnam, but also on the role of greed in suppressing peoples' rights. Dr. King's dream endures, but his tragic death was a dramatic setback for the struggle.

What we'll witness on May Day is more than a new civil rights movement. It is a movement for respect for all working people, and it is GRASS ROOTS. Who can they assassinate to stop this movement? No one.

The New Standard offers a nice overview of protest politics, which i include here. I also offer some comments about Organized Labor's role after the article.

Support Builds for Immigration Protests, Boycott

As May 1 action looms, undocumented workers discuss their power, solidarity
by Kari Lydersen

While the corporate-sponsored media report alleged splits in the
immigrant-rights movement and dwindling support for a boycott and general
strike, TNS found that solidarity and commitment are growing.

Chicago; Apr. 28 - In the 2004 independent film A Day Without a Mexican,
Californians woke up and all the Mexicans had disappeared. Lawns went
untended, hotel rooms sat uncleaned, and countless other jobs performed by
low-paid immigrants were left undone.

Immigrant-rights groups have frequently mentioned this film and the larger
concept behind it during the past six weeks of massive pro-immigrant
marches. In Chicago, where the first of the large demonstrations took place,
a central theme has been waking the American public up to the economic
importance of immigrants. Organizers say they want to show how much
immigrants, including close to 12 million undocumented ones, contribute with
their labor and with their buying power.

At the March 10 Chicago demonstration, during which more than 100,000
immigrants and their supporters hit the streets, a group handed out flyers
for a hastily organized boycott of Miller beer. Demonstrators targeted
Miller Brewing Co. because the company's PAC had donated $2,000 to Wisconsin
Republican Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., sponsor of the harshly
anti-immigrant bill that passed the House of Representatives last year.

Merchants on 26th Street, Chicago's main Mexican commercial drag in the
Little Village neighborhood, said that by evening customers were refusing to
buy Miller. The message reached beer distributors quickly, and by the
following week officials from the company's Milwaukee headquarters had met
with coalition organizers and put out a statement opposing the House's
legislation.

"A lot of immigrants are not eligible to vote, but we have the purchasing
power," said Salvador Cervantes, a member of the Chicago organizing
coalition.

But some organizers described hesitation to act as caving in to unions and
politicians that were pushing for a more moderate stance.

The idea amplified on April 10, when immigrant marchers in scores of cities
and towns across the country pledged to refrain from shopping, working or
going to school, wearing white T-shirts to symbolize their unity in creating
a "day without immigrants."

A boycott on May Day has likewise been called in many cities across the
country as part of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Called a paro in Spanish,
the term is generally understood to mean both refusing to buy and refusing
to work or go to school.

But the plan for a paro is not universally endorsed by all immigrant-rights
groups. In Chicago, the organizing coalition known as the Movimiento 10 de
Marzo, or the March 10 Movement, decided not to call for a boycott or
general strike in the city, largely because of the involvement of labor
unions that said they could not legally endorse such an action because their
contracts prohibit them.

The question of whether to participate in nationwide calls for a May 1
boycott was hashed out at a contentious April 22 meeting, where the local
coalition decided to support calls for boycotts in other cities, but refrain
from a boycott in Chicago.

"We consider it a matter of wording," said Jorge Mujica, Illinois secretary
general for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), a Mexican political party
and one of the central coalition organizers. "If people are marching all
day, they're not working, buying things or going to school. But since we
have the unions, we can't call a boycott or a strike. We'd rather have labor
on our side than call for a boycott. As for the national and international
boycott, we think it's beautiful."

Teamsters organizers said that rather than discussing a strike or boycott,
they were trying to get employers on workers' side.

But some organizers described this as caving in to unions and politicians
that were pushing for a more moderate stance.

"I wish the unions had stayed out of it and let people celebrate May Day the
way they wanted," said Rafael Cervantes, an activist from Monterrey, Mexico
who has lived in Chicago for decades. "The boycott was a symbol for people,
an icon, a way to say we matter, we are an important cog in this machine, we
produce and we consume. It's ironic that the unions are saying they could
not support it because it would be illegal, but the whole reason we're
marching is that people are here 'illegally.'"

Tom Hansen, founder and director of the Mexico Solidarity Network, a
grassroots organization working for social change on both sides of the
US-Mexico border, said the boycott is only one example of the larger
ideological battle that is going on in the immigrant-rights movement. "The
reformists want to 'manage' the movement with a lot of US flags and a
discourse about family values, et cetera," Hansen told The NewStandard. "The
more progressive elements want to move the discussion to one about
exploitation, labor rights and the meaning of citizenship."

On April 24 union leaders held a press conference supporting the march and
framing it as not only about immigration but about rights for all workers.
They said a boycott was beside the point for the labor issues they wanted to
highlight.

"We're not even putting it into the equation," said Moises Zavala, a Chicago
organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). "This is the
day to recognize our labor history and bring it full circle. In Chicago we're
not endorsing a boycott; we're out to march to show our numbers and
recognize the importance of May Day."

Thousands of truck drivers working out of the Port of Los Angeles and cab
drivers who serve Los Angeles International Airport are expected to strike
for the day or possibly the week.

Teamsters organizers said that rather than discussing a strike or boycott,
they were trying to get employers on workers' side; helping employees
petition their employers for time off or paid holidays to attend the
demonstrations.

In Los Angeles, where other mass protests are planned, some groups will be
carrying out work stoppages and boycotts and attending a daytime downtown
march. Others who plan to go to work and school will attend a separate
demonstration in the late afternoon.

Thousands of truck drivers working out of the Port of Los Angeles and cab
drivers who serve Los Angeles International Airport are expected to strike
for the day or possibly the week.

"If truckers aren't trucking, the port isn't working," said Los Angeles
attorney and organizer Jim DeMaegt. "If cab drivers don't drive, LAX will be
shut down. Nobody knows precisely what will happen, but there is a lot of
support."

DeMaegt thinks a massive strike would force policy change faster than some
other types of actions. "We say a day without shopping is good; going to
speeches, going marches is good," he told TNS. "But stopping work - a day
without workers will close the country. A day without goods going in and out
of the ports and airports of the US, and we'll have a policy change within a
week."

The truckers and cab drivers are organized but are not members of official
labor unions, giving them the freedom to strike without worrying about legal
issues binding unions.

The truckers and cab drivers are protesting against rising fuel prices and
low pay, along with calling for immigration reform.

DeMaegt said local Teamsters officials are not supporting a work stoppage
but support the overall mobilization.

Aquilina Soriano-Versoza, executive director of the Pilipino Workers'
Center, noted that many of their members are home-healthcare workers, so
they don't want to endanger their clients by skipping work; but they will
support the mobilization nonetheless.

"They can't leave their patients, but they're in solidarity,"
Soriano-Versoza said. "There are a whole range of ways people can
participate."

She noted that many employers, particularly in the Koreatown garment
industry, have given their workers the day off thanks to organizing by
community groups and employees.

Alexis Lanza, an activist with the Chicago group La Voz de los de Abajo (The
Voice of Those Below) and an immigrant from Honduras, said he supported the
call for a one-day boycott. "I think it would have been good if the US
united on that," he said. "But there are lots of interests, unions and
different groups, and it's not easy to balance those things."

Lanza would prefer long-term boycotts of products from companies that donate
to anti-immigrant politicians or promote policies that hurt Latin Americans
through international trade or employment policies. The Chicago committee
discussed proposals for a long-term boycott of Coca-Cola, with its notorious
human-rights record, and a local Mexican cheese company that buys from Rep.
Sensenbrenner's state, Wisconsin. But those proposals were not adopted.

"Calling a boycott for just one day strategically doesn't have that big an
impact; it's symbolic," said Lanza. "The next day you'll be buying the same
products again."

Lanza thinks even without an official boycott, the demonstrations will make
immigrants' economic power clear. "If you're calling on people to close
their businesses during the march, that's like a boycott, except you're not
calling it that," Lanza said.

Some groups in other cities have not endorsed the boycott out of fear there
will be a backlash against immigrants or that workers will lose their jobs
for skipping work. But in Chicago, where many workers fired for
participating in the March 10 demonstrations were reinstated after immigrant
organizers threatened to protest workplaces, advocates say they are not that
worried.

"I really feel this time around nobody is going to get fired," said Mujica.
"We have prepared this so well with the letters for employees to give to
their employers." He noted the group is distributing letters in several
languages for workers to download and use to explain their cause while
formally requesting time off.

In Arizona, the coalition that organized a 100,000-strong protest on April
10 in Phoenix waffled about supporting a boycott. Last week, the Somos
America (We are America) coalition announced it was supporting
demonstrations and other forms of protest, but not endorsing the boycott due
to fear of a backlash and concern for immigrants' job security.

But, according to the group's chairman, Roberto Reveles, who spoke to the
Arizona Republic, the recent arrests of 1,187 undocumented immigrants in
federal raids on pallet maker IFCO Systems locations in 26 states including
Arizona, spurred the group to change its mind.

Reveles told the Republic that his group wanted "to make a statement against
the latest raids," which came "at a time when they should be working toward
immigration reform rather than instilling additional fear in the lives of
undocumented workers and their families."

The success of the boycott, according to Hansen of the Mexico Solidarity
Network, will depend "on how many people participate, what the impacts are
and, most importantly, the kind of political consciousness that accompanies
the tactic."

"The idea is to change hearts and minds," he said, "and to give immigrants a
sense of their power. This is particularly important for a group that has
been repressed and exploited for so long, on both sides of the border. A
change in the collective appreciation of what is possible is the real goal
of the boycott."

© 2006 The NewStandard. All rights reserved. The NewStandard is a non-profit
publisher that encourages noncommercial reproduction of its content.
Reprints must prominently attribute the author and The NewStandard,
hyperlink to http://newstandardnews.net (online) or display
newstandardnews.net (print), and carry this notice. For more information or
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http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=3105

Others will put the entire May Day experience into perspective.

I offer some thoughts on Organized Labor's role.

Let us note the dilemma described in the article:

> since we
> have the unions, we can't call a boycott or a strike.

>
> Teamsters organizers said that rather than discussing a strike or boycott,
> they were trying to get employers on workers' side.

The mainstream labor movement has frequently sought to act as a "respectable" business partner to the corporations. This means, among other things, guaranteeing labor peace for the life of the contract. That's why AFL-CIO union members (and now, almost certainly, Change To Win union members) cross each others' picket lines, and are forced to undermine each others' labor struggles.

AFL-CIO unions represent members rather than mobilizing them, and workers who demand a more militant movement for workers' rights are undermined, ostracized, punished. That the mainstream union movement sometimes acts as an enforcer for business will come as no surprise to the union members who sought justice at a Hormel packing plant in Austin, Minnesota, or many other groups of workers who come to appreciate-- and regret-- how AFL-CIO leaders fear to jeapardize their good relationship with business leaders.

Some other unions, and many dissident groups within mainstream unions, do not share such views. We consider it absurd that union leaders could ever "get business on the side of the workers," except for short-duration tactical purposes. When it comes to money-- the bottom line for corporations-- the interests of business owners and the interests of working people are diametrically opposed. Businesses systematically and routinely use the wage system to cheat workers of the product of their labor, and workers' losses go directly to profits.

As a member of the I.W.W., i frequently support the struggles of working folk in mainstream unions. This sometimes means working with their leadership. Occasionally, that leadership is enlightened-- i'm particularly impressed with the successes of the Jobs With Justice coalition, an organization that seems to recognize and attempts to compensate for mainstream labor's shortcomings.

But i find that many labor leaders cannot get beyond their pro-business mindset. That many mainstream unions have "diversified" into selling insurance and credit cards is further evidence of such values. How can union leaders identify with dues-paying workers, when their organization's income is increasingly derived from marketing and sales, and leadership wealth is measured by the number of their shares in that non-public "union corporation," ULLICO?
_________

The Industrial Workers of the World statement on May Day activities follows:

May 1st - Defend the Rights of Immigrant Workers

Whereas the working class knows no borders or races, but exists wherever workers are exploited for the benefit of capital; and

Whereas all human beings are entitled to the means of obtaining the necessities of life for themselves and their families, regardless of any artificial barriers created by government; and

Whereas the nature of capitalist economies is to draw workers from all over to the centers of capitalist investment, while at the same time drawing wealth out of less-developed economies, thereby eliminating opportunities to earn a living within such economies; and

Whereas the recent rise in immigration to the United States of America is directly attributable to this process, as exemplified by the destructive free-trade treaties forced upon Latin America by the United States government, as well as the insatiable lust of North American employers for a dependent, immigrant work-force that can be compelled to labor under sub-minimum wages and deplorable working conditions and used to undermine the working conditions of all workers; and

Whereas all workers, wherever economic necessity may force them to seek work, are entitled to organize and take concerted, economic action for the defense and aid of their class, for which purpose the Industrial Workers of the World has sought to unite the workers of the world in One Big Union, regardless of nationality or place of origin; and

Whereas the struggle of immigrant workers is connected and integral to the struggle of all workers for industrial freedom and economic security, which demands the solidarity of all workers, in every industry throughout the world;

Now, therefore, be it RESOLVED,

That the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World declares its opposition to efforts to prohibit or criminalize the crossing of national borders by workers, and opposes efforts to prohibit the giving of aid and comfort to immigrant workers; and be it

further RESOLVED,

That, in order to advance the solidarity of all workers, and to demonstrate to the employing class that an injury to one worker is an injury to all, the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World hereby endorses the popular call for a general strike and protest in defense of immigrant workers in the United States, and calls upon all Branches and members of the Organization to participate in such a strike and protest, as local circumstances shall permit, on the first day of May 2006, the International Workers' Holiday.

General Executive Board
Industrial Workers of the World

General Headquarters
PO Box 23085, Cincinnati, OH 45223-3085, USA
(513) 591-1905

ghq@iww.org
www.iww.org

Industrial Workers of the World

May 1 immigrant boycott aims to 'close' US cities

2006-04-29T15:50:00.000+12:00

Thu Apr 27, 2006 7:58 PM BST

By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pro-immigration activists say a national boycott and marches planned for May 1 will flood U.S. streets with millions of Latinos to demand amnesty for illegal immigrants and shake the ground under Congress as it debates reform.

Such a massive turnout could make for the largest protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s, though not all Latinos -- nor their leaders -- were comfortable with such militancy, fearing a backlash in Middle America.

"There will be 2 to 3 million people hitting the streets in Los Angeles alone. We're going to close down Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tucson, Phoenix, Fresno," said Jorge Rodriguez, a union official who helped organise earlier rallies credited with rattling Congress as it debates the issue.

Immigration has split Congress, the Republican Party and public opinion. Conservatives want the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants classified as felons and a fence built along the Mexican border.

Others, including President George W. Bush, want a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship. Most agree some reform is needed to stem the flow of poor to the world's biggest economy.

"We want full amnesty, full legalization for anybody who is here (illegally)," Rodriguez said. "That is the message that is going to be played out across the country on May 1."

Organizers have timed the action for May Day, a date when workers around the world traditionally have marched for improved conditions, and have strong support from big labour and the Roman Catholic church.

They vow that America's major cities will grind to a halt and its economy will stagger as Latinos walk off their jobs and skip school.

Teachers' unions in major cities have said children should not be punished for walking out of class. Los Angeles school officials said principals had been told that they should allow students to leave but walk with them to help keep order.

In Chicago, Catholic priests have helped organise protests, sending information to all 375 parishes in the archdiocese.

CRITICS CHARGE INTIMIDATION

Chicago activists predict that the demonstrations will draw 300,000 people.

In New York, leaders of the May 1 Coalition said a growing number of businesses had pledged to close and allow their workers to attend a rally in Manhattan's Union Square.

Large U.S. meat processors, including Cargill Inc., Tyson Foods Inc and Seaboard Corp said they will close plants due to the planned rallies.

Critics accuse pro-immigrant leaders of bullying Congress and stirring up uninformed young Latinos by telling them that their parents were in imminent danger of being deported.

"It's intimidation when a million people march down main streets in our major cities under the Mexican flag," said Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman volunteer border patrol group. "This will backfire," he said.

Some Latinos have also expressed concerns that the boycott and marches could stir up anti-immigrant sentiment.

Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles archdiocese, an outspoken champion of immigrant rights, has lobbied against a walkout. "Go to work, go to school, and then join thousands of us at a major rally afterword," Mahony said.

And Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has long fought for immigrant rights, has said he expects protesters to be "lawful and respectful" and children to stay in school.

In Washington on Thursday, immigrant-rights activists brushed off talk of a backlash.

"This is going to be really big. We're going to have millions of people," said Juan Jose Gutierrez, director of the Latino Movement USA. "We are not concerned at all. We believe it's possible for Congress to get the message that the time to act is now."

(Additional reporting by Aarthi Sivaraman in Los Angeles, Dan Trotta in New York and Michael Conlon in Chicago)

Open Borders debate continues. . .

2006-04-26T11:38:00.000+12:00

Hope you feel better after your rant. Your energy and intelligence could be constructive, but....

I simply wrote that we face a challenge of building bridges across borders with our fellow workers. They're being used against us here. That this isn't new. The Irish came like that. My grandfather's generation came like that. All immigration waves, legal or not, are used by the employers the same way.

Some workers and others here see the immigrant as the enemy. Some see them as fellow workers, trying to make a living for their families, like us all, like my grandfather who died working in a furniture factory of a heart attack the month I was born and named for him. The issue is: are we against them or with them? Are we like the 'no nothings' KKK or the class solidarity IWW?

What about borders? I raised that we should _begin_ to build solidarity and not be divided by those borders. That these borders are open for capital. That they want to use lower-waged and more desperate workers to bring 'labor costs' down. That this is not new here or anywhere in the capitalist world. That these borders are creations of various ruling classes to mark their territory, like dogs pee to mark theirs. Not something for us to accept as the line between "us" and "them".

That our challenge is to bring us all up. In practical solidarity. That we, as a class ,either go down together or go up together. That we need to defend immigrants against scapegoating. That you've openly come out for 'enforcing our existing laws' which means pushing them out and lining up with the Minutemen who oppose class unity, in fact.

And your response? We get a down-home wing-dinger attack on the left. Why not actually respond to what I and others write? Why didn't you also curse out Abe Lincoln for his statement about working class solidarity across borders while you're at it? Or was he too just another out-of-touch, goofy lefty?

Ask yourself: just who breaks union contracts? Who steals billions and leaves workers with broken dreams, empty pension accounts? Who discriminates every day in jobs, promotions? Who controls the information people get? Who attacks other countries with our money and our young people who have no future under this capitalist system. Who? Is it the left? duh.

Try facing the challenge instead of your knee-jerk or just jerk reactions.

Earl Silbar

--------------------------------------------------

Mr. Silbar. Puleeeze. I have 'come out' REPEATEDLY against the 'scapegoating' of immigrants. Jeezus H Krist. You guys are just 'too much'.

Look, guys, If you want to pursue your narcissistic rhetorical fantasies of 'open borders', which 99.999999999%, (if not more), of the American citizenry, INCLUDING the American working class, considers to be ideas of the 'lunatic fringe', hey, guys,go right on ahead and knock yourselves the fuck out.

After you Left-wing narcissistic propagandists finish with your HUGE political damage to the Left, after the Corporate Elite has had their fun making 'hay' out of this narcissistic utopian rhetoric, those of us who are intent and SERIOUS about winning political power for the Left, (rather than just indulging ourselves in narcissism), will just have to do our best to pick up the pieces after you boys have had your narcissistic rhetorical satisfaction, and the American working class has been driven deeper into reactionary support of its own oppressors.

The narcissistic Left is not yet satisfied that a MAJORITY of the American working class considers the Left to be a 'lunatic fringe', and that a MAJORITY of the working class voted for Bush in '04, INCLUDING 4 out of every 10 dues paying members of trade unions. Not yet satisfied with that, the narcissistic Left wing propagandists want to further alienate the American working class by telling American workers that they should feel just 'fine', that they should feel 'solidarity', as they watch their jobs taken by immigrants, and that any American workers who might be upset about losing their jobs to immigrants are 'racists'.

Brilliant, guys. Just absolutely fucking brilliant. Some of you guys seem to think you have a direct 'seance' type contact with ole Karl himself. Me? I'll keep my own feet on the ground in the real world, and I'll maintain contact with real live flesh and blood American workers who care about making a living and taking care of their families, and don't know Karl Marx from Groucho.

You effete intellectual Marxists are just 'too much' fer an ole Kansas cowboy of a carpenter like me. All a dumb ole Kansas carpenter like me knows is 'how it is' for REAL flesh and blood working people who are stuggling to make a living, and don't give two good farts about effete and narcissistic Marxist rhetoric. Hey, Knock yourselves the fuck out, you effete intellectual champions of narcissistic intellectual rhetoric. Have a great old time indulging yourselves in your counterproductive narcissism.. Obviously, neither I, nor any measure of common sense, can stop your egoistic narcissism. Those of us who are SERIOUS about defeating the power of Corporate Capital, those of us who are intent on REAL WORLD tactics and strategy to accomplish that purpose, will just have to do our best to pick up the pieces after all this self-indulgent narcissistic rhetoric does its damage. We will stay in contact with REAL living flesh and blood 'workers', the carpenters, and sheet rock guys, and roofers, and warehouse workers, and the other REAL living flesh and blood workers in our own communities who are suffering from the serious effects of immigration. You effete Left-wing rhetorical snobs just go on ahead and knock yourselves the fuck out. When you knock your narcissistic egoistic rhetorical selves completely the fuck out, maybe people who are SERIOUS about improving the lives of American workers can begin to make some headway.

'Open borders'!!!! Let's do away with national borders altogether!!! That'll show them mean ole Capitalists!!! Never MIND that 99.999999999%, (if not more), of the American citizenry will consider this to be completely fucking crazy. Yippe Kay Yay, all you silly ass effete intellectual Marxist cowboys. Go for it!! Such a silly ass position is sure to get some real 'heavy duty' political traction.

And when yer done with yer self-indugent 'fun', those of us who are SERIOUS about defeating Corporate Capitalism will just have to do our best to pick up the pieces.

Zwarich

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: 'We Are America' Coalition Opposes May 1st General Strike

Tommy King's points are very real, in fact. Borders mean less and less for dominating, big capital (even as their governments spend more and more on weapons to defend national capitalism). As big capital flows across the globe the better to devour it, so they want labor free to move... for their purposes of lower wages, benefits (known as labor/ 'human capital' costs)maximum profit. The question is: should those here join the effort to throw 'illegal' immigrants out and protect the U.S. 'job market'? Should we join the movement for immigrant rights as super-exploited fellow workers or act to 'enforce existing laws' against them and their employers/exploiters?

I've argued here and elsewhere that we should work to develop class solidarity, not join the hounds chasing fellow workers. To do that, we have to fight for workers here who, as always, are hurt by some who 'take their jobs', that is, others more deperate take work for lower pay and no benefits. How to reconcile this conflict within our ranks?

The first is to explain that it's either go down or go up, together. Concretely, that means standing for immigrant rights and against scapegoating them. First off, 'illegal immigrants' don't cause unemployment. We've had that long before the U.S. took the Southwest away from Mexico. We've had unemployment, hunger, desperation as long as we've had capitalism and folks were forced off their farms.

Capital always seeks to increase its exploitation to increase their profit rates. That's not new. Nor is it new for capital to use cheaper labor to replace more expensive, with machines or lower-paid humans. I and others have given many examples of how capital uses lower waged areas as 'resources' to exploit. Moving textile factories from North to South in the U.S. Enticing European immigrants vs. native born workers 100 years ago to 'open up' mines, R.R.s, steel plants. NAFTA and WTO in our days.

Explanations alone won't cut it. People need jobs with living wages if they're not born into the 'right' class. Either we begin to fight for jobs with living wages for all alongside immigrant rights, or we are left with words alone. Taking this up means fighting for shorter workweek with no loss in pay, or for spending the military budget on the homes, schools, health care, bridges, and other things people here need. That's billions a day at stake; that's a huge fight. Either we fight for a future for all or it's dog against dog with a divided working class fighting each other.

Tommy King's states facts below. He poses the question, how do we move forward when borders are basically used by our enemies against us yet when masses of people strongly identify with the nations that have borders?

While Brother Zwarich dismisses Brother King's comments as 'utopian', isn't the challenge how to move to bridge the very real gulf dividing us? Zwarich has yet to come out against the scapegoating of immigrants, so far as I have read. In earlier posts, he called for 'enforcing existing immigration laws' that would mean putting millions of workers out of the U.S. Tommy King's ideas on borders go towards the need for building class unity across borders, not helping persecute fellow workers driven to come here to feed their families. In my view, we need ideas and proposals for common campaigns that defend immigrant workers AND LINK THAT to better pay and benefits FOR ALL.

Living wage jobs and benefits will cost billions. Who's got it? The money will have to come from the real criminals- those who take the wealth we create and use it against us. Billions go every day for their empire, both in day-to-day costs for invasions and to maintain their bases in 120 countries. This is the challenge. Starting point is either building class unity or further splitting our class and thus helping our real enemies. Up together or down seperately.

in solidarity and struggle,

Earl Silbar

"Either we shall hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall hang seperately." Ben Franklin

-----------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Zwarich
Subject: Re: fwd: 'We Are America' Coalition Opposes May 1st General Strike

Thanks to Mr. King for these comments. I agree substantially with these thoughts, and like Mr. King, I dream of a world that we might someday create in which national borders have become obsolete. But our utopian dreams that we derive from our rhetorical theories unfortunately have little effect on the real world in which we must operate in the meantime. When we begin to base our political 'positions' on utopian rhetoric, we are setting ourselves up for imminent defeat in the real world. When we pretend that our dreams are reality, and base our policy positions on those dreams, (rather than on actual political reality), we are indulging ourselves in narcissism, and in doing so, we are GREATLY weakening our political position in the actual real world.

Anyone advocating 'abolishing national borders' as a serious 'policy position', in a world torn by nationalistic strife, is indulging himself or herself in narcissistic fantasies, and is marking himself or herself as a member of what is referred to in the harsh heat of the Political Arena as the 'lunatic fringe'. Noble dreams should inspire us, but our political 'positions' on real world issues like immigration MUST be grounded in REALITY. If they are NOT, we are only setting ourselves up for a serious defeat, (BIG TIME).

RZ

----- Original Message -----
From: Tommy King
To: Red1pearl@aol.com ; rzwarich@gmail.com ; laboradvocate@kclabor.org ; AirAmericaRadio@yahoogroups.com ; americashope@yahoogroups.com ; CDUI@yahoogroups.com ; laborcoalition@yahoogroups.com ; DiscussPDA@yahoogroups.com ; MO-MultiIssue@yahoogroups.com ; missouripeacecoalition@lists.riseup.net ; libertyundergroundtalk@yahoogroups.com ; laamn@yahoogroups.com ; peacecenter@yahoogroups.com ; rule19@yahoogroups.com ; anticapdiscuss@yahoogroups.com ; gangbox@yahoogroups.com ; solidarityforallnow@yahoogroups.com ; clnews@lists.clnews.org
Cc: activism@pacbell.net ; jancel@igc.org ; rjbalson@gmail.com ; btb@rcn.com ; djdancer@cwnet.com ; bfletcher@transafricaforum.org ; antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com ; epearlag@earthlink.net
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2006 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: fwd: 'We Are America' Coalition Opposes May 1st General Strike

The real issue here is: National Borders.

National Bordrers don't exist for the Rich.
Nor do national borders exist for international corporations,
who with the backing of the U.S. military and state department and with backing of the World Bank, freely engage in the economic exploitation of any communities throughout the world,
often leaving formerly prosperous communities and even whole nations bankrupt, impoverished and in civil war.

National borders don't exist for arms dealers who sell guns to governments and nationalist fanatics who recruit soldiers from the working class to kill and die in defense of national borders.
Corporate folk are free to travel anywhere they want in search of cheap sources of labour.
National borders didn't exist for my "American" boss when he fired me and set up shop in China.

The myths of citizenship and national borders are imposed on working people, and only on working people, by international corporations and their Democrat/republican political machine(& it's currupt political allies in Europe and throughout the world).

The myth of national borders is as dangerous to working people as are racial purity myths or religious myths, because national borders only exist within the working class and only for the purpose of dividing workers against each other & to prevent international or (in this case) national labor solidarity.

Wealth flows from Latin America to the U.S.,
All working people being equel, immigrants Latinos have as much right to work in the U.S. as do 3rd generation Europian immigrants or anyone else.

Peace,Love,Solidarity,
Tommy King, Milwaukee.

Earl Silbar on solidarity with 'illegal' immigrants

2006-04-23T14:52:00.000+12:00

Earl takes issue with another worker who says that workers have to oppose 'illegal' immigration, as the movement grows for the May 1 nationwide strike, and 'Homeland Security' is trying to intimidate the movement and employers by raiding workplaces, arresting employers and workers and deporting 'illegals'.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clearly, brother Zwarich is correct that the original coalition has broken into different factions, organizing themselves around conflicting strategies. As he notes, this happens in other truly mass movements, from Civil Rights to Unions and beyond. The question is: what is the best way forward? and, what are we to make of all this?

Is it really so crazy for those of us here facing Corporate America's all-sided war on our living, our rights, and our future to embrace the cause of 'illegal' immigrants? I don't think so.

Brother Zwarich argues that it's obvious that we here should oppose illegal immigration since 'waves' of such immigrants are and will be used to lower pay and working conditions. While that is true and cannot be ignored or denied, there is another aspect we ignore at our peril:

Employers have _always_ used the worst off, the most pressed upon against the better paid, more organized sections of the working class. Think of how employers used slave labor in the South against better paid wage labor in the North. Should northern workers have turned their backs on their brethren held in bondage and who were used against them, in factories for example? Radical and revolutionary-minded northern workers, including Marx, argued that 'labor in white skin can never be free while enslaved in black skin'. Many white workers in the North and in England followed this call for class solidarity, not the call to turn their backs on our brothers and sisters. They helped turn the tide and set the basis for a higher level of unity and prosperity. Of course, this was not and never can be a unified response. Just as there are different wings of the immigrants' rights movement, with the 'moderates' telling us to 'be respectable' as if that ever won anything.

Think of how employers used legally 'free' but desperate Black workers as scabs against northern white workers when they went on strike, especially miners. The more advanced among them worked to recruit these would-be scabs in the struggle to better us all, as memorialized in the excellent movie " Matewan".

Think of how employers in the Northeast used immigrants against 'native' workers in the new factories. When those workers organized, often with class conscious leadership like the IWW, the employers left for the warmer climates of Southern hospitality, where racist divisions, individualism and that 'old time religion' meant lower wages and no unions. Wasn't the right thing to 'Organize the South'? Of course, and that's where the CIO 'moderates' kicked out the 'red's in the late '40s and never did 'Organize the South'.

Hopefully, my point is clear. If not, it's this: either we embrace our fellow workers as sisters and brothers, or we are (unwitting) allies of the employing/ exploiting class in keeping us divided and fighting each other and not them. Their system creates the hardships that drive so many out of their homes and away from their loved ones. Look at life in Mexico after their NAFTA, for one example. Their class always has and always will use the worse off against the better off so long as they hold power in society. Either we go along with this or oppose it.

If we do oppose this 'turn your back on our fellow workers' and work for solidarity as a class, we cannot then just ignore the very real harm that employers and their politicians do in using us as immigrants against us a 'natives'.

We cannot ignore the fact that our sisters and brothers are used against our conditions and work here. Construction is perhaps the worst example, where $6-8/hr labor replaces $15/hr in rehabbing and building new homes. The worse off are and will always be used against the relatively better off, until we build a leadership wing of our class to take us all the way. And that means creating a solid force to break their power and bring forth a new life and a future for all. Think of solidarity as the cement that turns loose bricks into a strong wall. Or the experience that frees our imaginations.

We must come forward with a program, a strategy and tactics. We need to raise the banner of decent work, living wages, good benefits for all. We need to encourage and join the fight for strikes, not oppose them. We need to raise the banners and organize contingents from work, community and church, not side with the 'moderates' like the Catholic Church and its allies. We must get active politically as well, since the U.S. government has worked to smash down the living conditions of most people and to crush the people's movements for revolution, as in Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc. Solidarity is a two way street; the defeat of those revolutions and workers' movements across Mexico and Central America set the conditions for the exodus under way. It is one system. What hurts our comrades there hurts us here. One system, one future.

In short, we must make solidarity practical as well as just. Turning our backs here against 'illegal' immigrants is what helps Corporate America. The challenge is on: are we joining the protectionists or creating a wing of solidarity and class struggle for all our futures.

in solidarity,

Earl Silbar

"The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting all working people of all nations and tongues and kindred." - Abraham Lincoln to the New York Working Men's Association, 1864

"Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose except your chains!" Karl Marx& Frederich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, 1848

PS
btw, who's the illegal immigrant, Pilgrim? Maybe the U.S. didn't steal the Southwest from Mexico? Maybe the 'Texas Republic' and the Alamo weren't fought to make Texas a slave state? Maybe the U.S. congress didn't make it illegal to show solidarity in action back in 1949 with Taft-Hartley? Let's not get so hot and bothered by this 'illegal' stuff, ok?

Make no mistake. The movement to attack immigrants works to mask the true cancer here. And that's Corporate America, also known as the ruling class and their capitalist system. Does this remind anyone else of how the Nazis used scapegoats like the Jews to mobilize fighters and distract attention in order to save their rotten capitalist system? Now and today, the 'Minutemen' advertise themselves to do just what is proposed below: to enforce the existing laws in communities and workplace inside the U.S. and not just on the borders. That's a witchunt we should oppose, not support. Those witchhunters will come after the malcontents and dissidents ('red') next. Solidarity is a two way street. That means doing the right thing, in action and in words.

And, as for Cesar Chavez, he is no role model for working class politics. He opposed farmworker unity, building on Chicano consciousness and opposing the Filipino farmworkers as class sisters and brothers, let alone 'illegal' Mexicans. He used mind-control tactics to turn the Farm Workers into a docile group. He cleaned house of all those who wanted a democratic union that would actually organize workers to fight the bosses and their politicians as part of the wider class struggle. Chavez put his undeniable and great talents to work to make the UFWA into a semi-religious, moralistic, and 'moderate' pressure group. Just as the CIO 'moderates' threw out the 'reds' and embraced the masters as junior partners. Which path is it going to be?

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In a message dated 4/21/2006 9:53:36 A.M. Central Standard Time, rzwarich@gmail.com writes:

'We Are America Coalition' Opposes May 1st General Strike

We can now see that after the initial euphoria generated by the original mobilization of the outpouring of energy among immigrant workers and their families, this 'immigrant civil rights movement' is now having to grapple with hard political realities. The masses of Hispanic immigrants originally 'took to the streets' proudly flying the Mexican flag, but the immediate and huge backlash this produced caused them to adjust their tactics, and movement organizers are now calling on these immigrants, most of whom are very naturally nationalistic toward their native Mexico, to fly the American flag and proclaim, "we just want to be Americans". And in the most recent development, as a Homeland Security 'crackdown' against both undocumented immigrant workers, and the individual managers at companies that employ them, has been dramatically announced, the organizers of the 'immigration movement' are beginning to split into factions.

Many of these organizers have now become aware that their primary 'position' in opposition to various 'immigration reform bills' is very problematic, in that it has completely ignored the fact that there are laws already on the books that could adequately enforce the nation's borders if there was any political will to do so. And now, as these laws are being suddenly and very selectively enforced in a dramatic public display, the organizers of this 'new civil rights movement' are being caught up short in some considerable tactical confusion.

In this confusion, the 'immigration movement' is now splitting into these major factions, with some, like the 'We Are America' Coalition, which includes the Catholic Church, (which provided a major degree of the organizing 'chops' that produced the original marches), now recognizing that the upcoming May 1st 'general strike' could have the unintended consequence of providing the clear identification of illegal workers in the workplace, and could well lead to more firings, or even worse, deportations.

How will employers who are knowingly employing illegal immigrants respond? It's hard to say. On the one hand they might be inclined to allow strike participation by their illegal workers, out of fear that any retribution against strikers will bring Homeland Security down on their own heads for employing the illegal workers. On the other hand, it might make them inclined to be more forceful themselves in threatening their workers with retribution, such as by reporting them preemptively as 'illegals', (and claiming they 'just discovered' that their social security numbers on their I-9 forms are false), to avoid being arrested themselves, as the managers of companies employing illegal workers so recently (and publicly) were.

I have been trying to point out for some time that we don't need new laws to close our borders to illegal immigration. We already HAVE adequate laws that are NOT being enforced. I am as cynical as anyone in witnessing the recent 'crackdown' on illegal immigrants in the workplace and on the jobsite. This is very obviously where the border could be enforced, if there was any real political will to do so. Illegal immigrants are NOT hard to find. Everybody knows where they are. We already have laws that provide for severe penalties for employers who employ illegal immigrants. But these laws have not been enforced because the Corporate Elite that controls our nation does not WANT them enforced. I am as cynical as anyone now because I think the Corporate Elite is playing all sides against each other, making every side hop and dance on their always-clever strings. These Corporate Capitalist Puppeteers clearly see the advantage to be gained by 'playing' the semi-hysterical knee-jerk Left, which is (incredibly, not to mention stupidly) arguing loudly for open borders, (in full support of the policy of the Corporate Capitalist Elite, in one of the most bizarre political alignments we have ever seen). The Left is stupidly falling directly into the Corporate Capitalist 'trap' by railing hysterically against any enforcement of immigration laws at ALL.

So.......taking full advantage of this bizarre position so firmly and loudly staked out by the Left, the Corporate Capitalists can now just put on a big 'show' of a few grandstanding 'crackdown' efforts, (which they are doing even now), while conveniently failing to follow through with consistent and effective enforcement. They will then 'blame' the Left in the Political Arena with their own propaganda, that will blare loudly (and VERY effectively) through every media bullhorn, (which they of course completely control), that "We tried to enforce our immigration laws, but the latte-sipping 'liberal elite' wouldn't let us".

This will be VERY effective in winning even MORE support from the American working class, who, despite all the disingenuous Left-wing propaganda claiming that immigration is GOOD for America, and GOOD for the working class, can see with their own eyes that immigrants are taking their jobs and causing a dramatic slashing of wages in ALL jobs. And, (sadly.... no…..much more than that…tragically), the end result of all this, (which the Left either does not see, or else does not, for some bizarre reason, care), will be that a majority of the American working class will continue to vote against its own interests, and will continue to vote to keep the Corporate Elite in power. The bizarre and misguided position being so proudly proclaimed by a severely confused American Left, is only serving to drive the American working class more firmly into the confused and completely bamboozled support of its own oppressors.

According to a story from yesterday's LA Times:

"…Nativo Lopez, a boycott supporter and president of the Mexican American Political Assn., said a more confrontational approach in the model of Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was needed to shake up the nation's power structure and demonstrate the indispensable role that illegal immigrants play in the economy. He questioned why organizations that celebrate the civil rights leaders through Masses and annual memorial events balk at following their tactics.

"Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King were extremely militant advocates of Gandhian principles of civil disobedience, and they lived by those principles," Lopez said in an interview. "So what's the ruckus about a boycott? We need to put the focus of power with the worker and immigrants, not in the hierarchies, to resolve the immigration reform debate."

It is very interesting to watch as we see the memory of Cesar Chavez now being brought to bear in support of illegal immigration. Cesar Chavez, whatever his faults might have been in his later career, (many say his insistence on keeping power undemocratically centralized in his own hands eventually led to the demise of everything he accomplished), was a brilliant and inspirational leader, who did indeed believe in taking militant action, (such as civil disobedience), when it was called for. But these organizers now invoking the memory of Chavez to inspire a movement whose goal is to prevent enforcement of immigration laws, and prevent us from controlling our own borders, are conveniently ignoring the fact that Chavez was VEHEMENTLY opposed to illegal immigration, and even as he set his energies to organize farm workers, he also lobbied tirelessly for enforcement of immigration laws, including criminalization of employers for employing illegal workers. He knew instinctively what should be obvious to all of us, (but obviously is not for some reason I do not understand), that farm workers could not gain power through organizing workers into a union, to support collective bargaining through collective action, (strikes, etc), if growers had a constant supply of desperate new workers immediately at hand.

A well known Labor activist recently asked me what my 'strategy' would be to organize illegal immigrant workers into unions. Unfortunately, this activist cannot see the contradiction contained within this question itself. It's very hard to imagine how 'illegal' workers can be organized at ALL. Oh sure, we can call them 'out into the streets', of course, but as some organizers are now realizing, this can have serious unintended consequences. As some factions among the organizers, such as the We Are America Coalition, now realize, when these undocumented workers 'strike', they are only going to help identify themselves to authorities, and since they are 'illegal', they can be picked up and deported, (which is already happening).

And what organizers MUST realize, (and what they could learn from Cesar Chavez), is that even if undocumented immigrants already in America are granted some form of 'amnesty', by being given a legal path to earn citizenship, they will have NO success in organizing effective unions, (the key word here being 'effective'), until or unless the border is closed.

As long as a million or more desperate workers are pouring into this country each year, all of Organized Labor, and ALL of the American working class, INCLUDING the newly 'naturalized' workers, will continue to experience a precipitous decline, no mater how much organizing effort we exert, or how much 'success' we might enjoy in getting people to sign union cards. All that Labor will accomplish by 'organizing' these workers into unions, (with the border continuing to be as porous as it is now), is to provide a windfall bonanza of new dues revenue for Andy Stern's SEIU, and Wilhelm and Raynor's UNITE-HERE, and other unions who will herd these hordes of new workers into dues paying membership, but will have little (if any) effective power to improve their wages or working conditions, as long as new hordes of desperate workers continue to pour across the border.

A ready supply of desperate 'scabs' has always been the 'Achilles heel' of any effort to organize workers into EFFECTIVE unions. One would think this most basic 'tenet' would be on page ONE of the 'Organizing 101' manual, and that all Labor activists would clearly understand it. Unfortunately, all too many activists on the Left do NOT, and are instead claiming that this sudden and massive wave of illegal immigration is somehow good for the American working class.

Cesar Chavez, who, (whatever his faults), was one of Labor's most brilliant organizing geniuses, understood this 'Basic Tenet' of Labor organizing very well, and he was VEHEMENTLY opposed to illegal immigration. But this does not stop the propagandists on the Left, whose bizarre purpose, in their bizarre alignment with the Corporate Capitalist Elite, is to fight AGAINST any effort to control illegal immigration, from now disingenuously invoking the memory of Chavez to help them advance their cause, a cause that is very clearly GREATLY damaging to the interests of the American working class.

Zwarich