The below is a statement written by day-laborers and members of the No Raids Committee of Queens in response to the harassment of day-laborers by the NYPD. Feel free to show support and send messages of solidarity to Noraidsqueens@gmail.com! We are planning a community forum to address the tensions that exist in the community as well as illustrating the lives of immigrant workers during an economic crisis.
To Whom It May Concern:
On Tuesday, October 20th 2008, around 11AM 10 day labors were arrested on 37th avenue and 69th street while huddled together in hopes of finding construction work. Usually, local immigrant workers congregate daily at the intersection because many of them live in Woodside. For instance, the construction workers’ children play in the same park as other kids from the community while others attend classes with other local kids. In other words, many of the people who were gathered on the morning of the arrest are your neighbors struggling as you to raise a family, give their children a better life—achieve the American dream. According to police reports, people from the neighborhood had filed multiple complaints against the day labors for gathering on the intersection and blocking the sidewalk. Like many of you probably know, there is a dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment throughout much of the United States that forces many immigrant families to recede from public life because of a constant fear of deportation. In many cases, immigrant parents have no choice but to withdrawal their children from school because of this paralyzing fear. When raids are “successful,” families are separated: dreams are shattered; survival becomes precarious. For example, that day after the police descended on the intersection like a pack of wolves and taken 10 immigrant workers into custody. A mother and wife, Olivia, with tears streaming down her smooth cheeks came to the site of the arrest asking about her husband who was arrested with the other workers, “He’s the one who works.” She said in between pants and sobs, to the New York Times reporter. “Who’s going to support the four children now?” Often in the midst of the political talk about deportation, the human element behind the immigration issue is lost. When we talk about workers gathering to work to support a family, we forget the reason and simply just notice the annoying site of a group of men standing on a corner covered in layers of clothing. But if we were to substitute the men for the women, the men for the children who they are working to support, would our perception change? This attack against the day labors of Woodside is not an attack solely against immigrant families but rather an attack against the community as whole. Because when a member of a community loses his or her rights, the community loses the capacity to develop as a collective. Whether or not the persons who congregate look differently from us, family, work, honesty, these are the values that transcend every ethnic and racial category and become the universal template for humanity. As a community, let’s have a conversation. Let’s not resort to animosity because there is much Hispanic immigrants can learn from other immigrant groups.
NO RAIDS COMMITTEE OF QUEENS in conjunction with Day-laborers present during the raid.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Obama: How Much Different?
This year’s presidential election is to go down in history as the first time a black man is elected. After eight years of George Bush, all we are use to is saber rattling towards sovereign countries, scapegoating of immigrants, racism towards Arabs and Muslims, and now an economic crisis. It is no wonder that both candidates are trying to represent themselves as different then the current administration. Whether it be by calling yourself a “maverick” like John McCain or a fighter for “change” and “hope” like Barack Obama, neither candidate wants to be associated with Bush’s policies. The presidential race has been exciting and reenergizing for a large segment of the population for this very reason. Compared to election 2004, between current president Bush and John “ready for war” Kerry, this election might seem like a breath of fresh air. After all, there is a clear difference between this year’s candidates, one man is white, and the other is black. However, if one looks below the surface and the rhetoric that both Obama and McCain use, one will realize that they agree on some of the key issues we are facing. Although they’re minor differences, particularly in the way to resolve the financial collapse, both candidates share the same vision and understanding on healthcare, immigration, and the War on Terror.
The national immigration debate hasn’t resurfaced since the collapse of the McCain-Kennedy Bill. The bill intended to implement a guess-worker program, and allowed a minimal process of legalization while simultaneously funding the militarization of the border. Although this bill cause hysteria from conservation forces who hailed it as amnesty, John McCain saw it as a must for today’s economy. In the same vein, Senator Barack Obama approached the bill on the basis that it both secured our border and allowed flexibility in today’s labor force. However, neither of the candidates attempted to address the second-class status of immigrants or to take up the argument that “illegal workers hurt our economy”. Furthermore, neither has addressed the notion that immigrants must pay large fines in order to get papers. You would think risking your life by hitchhiking through deserts and than working for below minimum wage would be enough: well, not for McCain and Obama.
Similarly, the healthcare system in the U.S. is in a major crisis. Millions of Americans are uninsured, and 50% of personal bankruptcies occur because of healthcare-related issues. This is an issue you would think that Obama and McCain would debate on a national level. However, on this issue both candidates agree more than they disagree. John McCain believes the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, due to the fact that it is a privatized, for-profit system. Similarily, Obama believes people should be forced to sign on to a healthcare plan, and in turn make some plans more affordable. Again, neither candidate tries to locate the real source of the problem, and that’s the fact that our healthcare system is motivated by profit, not taking care of people. This has resulted in the health and pharmaceutical industries being on of the most profitable, while millions of Americans remain uninsured, and those that have insurance still have to fight to get their coverage rights.
The war on Iraq has, on the one hand, produced some differences between Obama and McCain, albeit, minor and tactical differences. According to McCain, the Iraq war is the central focus in the fight against terrorism. Thus, McCain is for keeping the number of troops in Iraq high and perhaps to stay for decades to come. Obama has criticized this aspect of McCain’s policy. According to Obama, the Iraq war was the wrong war to fight, and it is distracting us from the real fronts in the war on terror, i.e. Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama even said that we should bomb Pakistan if they continue to not aggressively pursue Al-Queda. Once again both candidates refuse to disagree with the logic of the War on Terror, which says that the U.S. must be on the offensive to fight groups and countries who do not believe in “American values”. But is bombing a continent really going to help the U.S. eliminate terrorism? Or is it creating the conditions for more and more people to stand up to U.S. aggression at home and an abroad?
The fact that this year’s presidential election will make history is correct. However, if one looks beneath the surface of the rhetoric that both candidates use, we see that they’re in agreement in the fundamentals of many of the key issues today. This desperately poses the question of what kind of political alternative do we need. First, it must be said that in order for a candidate to go outside of the boundaries of “politics as usual” in Washington, they must remain independent of the two main business parties that exist today, Democrats and Republicans. Secondly, the candidate will need to directly address the concerns of working people and offer concrete proposals, like taxing the rich, money for jobs and education not for war and occupation, and free healthcare for all. More fundamentally, the candidate will have an understanding that the voting process isn’t the only way to get change, but building grass-root activism on your campus, workplace and communities is the real way we have ever seen change happen in this country.
The national immigration debate hasn’t resurfaced since the collapse of the McCain-Kennedy Bill. The bill intended to implement a guess-worker program, and allowed a minimal process of legalization while simultaneously funding the militarization of the border. Although this bill cause hysteria from conservation forces who hailed it as amnesty, John McCain saw it as a must for today’s economy. In the same vein, Senator Barack Obama approached the bill on the basis that it both secured our border and allowed flexibility in today’s labor force. However, neither of the candidates attempted to address the second-class status of immigrants or to take up the argument that “illegal workers hurt our economy”. Furthermore, neither has addressed the notion that immigrants must pay large fines in order to get papers. You would think risking your life by hitchhiking through deserts and than working for below minimum wage would be enough: well, not for McCain and Obama.
Similarly, the healthcare system in the U.S. is in a major crisis. Millions of Americans are uninsured, and 50% of personal bankruptcies occur because of healthcare-related issues. This is an issue you would think that Obama and McCain would debate on a national level. However, on this issue both candidates agree more than they disagree. John McCain believes the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, due to the fact that it is a privatized, for-profit system. Similarily, Obama believes people should be forced to sign on to a healthcare plan, and in turn make some plans more affordable. Again, neither candidate tries to locate the real source of the problem, and that’s the fact that our healthcare system is motivated by profit, not taking care of people. This has resulted in the health and pharmaceutical industries being on of the most profitable, while millions of Americans remain uninsured, and those that have insurance still have to fight to get their coverage rights.
The war on Iraq has, on the one hand, produced some differences between Obama and McCain, albeit, minor and tactical differences. According to McCain, the Iraq war is the central focus in the fight against terrorism. Thus, McCain is for keeping the number of troops in Iraq high and perhaps to stay for decades to come. Obama has criticized this aspect of McCain’s policy. According to Obama, the Iraq war was the wrong war to fight, and it is distracting us from the real fronts in the war on terror, i.e. Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama even said that we should bomb Pakistan if they continue to not aggressively pursue Al-Queda. Once again both candidates refuse to disagree with the logic of the War on Terror, which says that the U.S. must be on the offensive to fight groups and countries who do not believe in “American values”. But is bombing a continent really going to help the U.S. eliminate terrorism? Or is it creating the conditions for more and more people to stand up to U.S. aggression at home and an abroad?
The fact that this year’s presidential election will make history is correct. However, if one looks beneath the surface of the rhetoric that both candidates use, we see that they’re in agreement in the fundamentals of many of the key issues today. This desperately poses the question of what kind of political alternative do we need. First, it must be said that in order for a candidate to go outside of the boundaries of “politics as usual” in Washington, they must remain independent of the two main business parties that exist today, Democrats and Republicans. Secondly, the candidate will need to directly address the concerns of working people and offer concrete proposals, like taxing the rich, money for jobs and education not for war and occupation, and free healthcare for all. More fundamentally, the candidate will have an understanding that the voting process isn’t the only way to get change, but building grass-root activism on your campus, workplace and communities is the real way we have ever seen change happen in this country.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Generation Debt- Students Under Neoliberalism
The following is a talk given at the CUNY Social Forum at City College, NY and at a public meeting organized by the International Socialist Organization at Hunter College, NY.
The idea that one generation after another will prosper and will climb the latter of opportunity and wealth, an idea that has been a reality for past generations, is a blatant lie today. Today’s generation of students and young workers have grown up in a world where all we know is low wages, massive debt, and an overall attack on our living standards. The media and the people who run our society like to paint a picture of young workers as being lazy, self-concerned, and only caring about the latest Jordan’s or new Sidekick. However, nothing has been farther from the truth. Today’s debt generation—roughly speaking students and young workers from the age 18 to 34, are possibly one of the most economically vulnerable sections of the U.S. working class. Not only are we the generation that is to be expected to pay and fight for the $1 trillion war in Iraq, and not only are we the generation that is newly coming into the workforce after three decades of an employer’s offensive against working people’s living standards, but we are now the generation that is to face one of the largest financial crisis ever experienced since the Great Depression. According to Washington, the first step to take in the financial crisis is by bailing out the same banks that created this mess. The idea that maybe we should refinance mortgages or immediately stop foreclosures, or bailout a whole generation of people whose accumulation of debt is based on survival as opposed to greed, isn’t being voiced by any mainstream politician. Young workers and students desperately need a bailout. I will use myself as an example; in September I began to experience sharp pain in my back. I was worried because I’m a part-time nursing student at BMCC and therefore I’m not eligible to receive healthcare coverage by my parent’s union plan. My employer also does not offer health insurance. When the pain become unbearable I went straight from work to the ER of Bellevue hospital where I was than attended to. It turned out I had a very bad infection, which required of me to make two more visits to the hospital. After all was taken care of, today I find myself in over $4,000 debt to Bellevue hospital. In top of this I live on my own and pay for my own tuition. My story is the story of millions of Americans. In the U.S. 50% of personal bankruptcy come from healthcare related issues. This is one part of the squeeze that a whole generation and including people in this room are facing.
In light of the financial crisis, this squeeze is to become much tighter. This requires of us to deal with important questions surrounding our generation, particularly what role do students and young workers play in today’s economy? Why are they so vulnerable? How did we get into this catastrophic position, and is people’s personal responsibility to blame? Based on the economic experience facing young workers, what are the political and economic ideas being formed? Moreover, how can we match sentiment and the reality facing millions of young workers and students with actual struggle and movements for reforms?
II. Young Workers in Today’s Economy:
For young workers today all we have known is a $7.50 /hr wage, increasing cost of basic things like food and transportation and a general assault on our living standards. Today some 26% of U.S. workers receive poverty wages, which means ¼ of everybody in this room makes poverty wages. The lack of good paying jobs has contributed to this rise. According to U.S. government statistic and recent findings 17.7% of the population are in poverty. On the healthcare end, the number of workers covered by employer provided insurance has declined from 69% in 1979 to just 55% in 2006. In terms of actual wages, as measured in today’s value of the dollar, from 1979 to 2007, a total of 28 years, wages have only increased by 54 cents, this means that while there was rapid economic growth in the 90’s this amounted to virtually nothing for ordinary people. It is sufficient to say that these attacks wouldn’t be possible without attacks on our unions and the labor movement overall. Today unions represent 12.1% of workers, down from 35% in the 1950’s. There are two main reasons why this has occurred; the first has been the unwillingness of employers to allow their workers to be represented by a union. That is, they will go at any length to prevent their workers from organizing. Secondly, because of the restructuring of the U.S. economy in the 1970’s there has been an expansion in the service sector while the traditional unionized manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or destroyed. This expansion of the service sector has been met with the labor movement’s inability to rise to the occasion an organize workers in non-traditional industries like retail and restaurants, converting service jobs into mostly non-unionized bad paying jobs, like the workers of Wal-Mart or Target who with their low wages pay for the “everyday low prices”. Workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement have wages that are 14.1% higher than nonunion workers. Belonging to a union and having the ability to collectively bargain with an employer is essential in maintaining a decent living standard for working people, which is why union representation and the labor movement has been in retreat for two decades. Now, at the other end of our society the richest 1% has seen it share of annual earnings almost double from 7.3% in 1979 to 13.6% in 2006. Even more astounding, the top 0.1% of society has seen their annual earnings increase by 324% from 1979 to 2006. So when people say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we should say: the rich get richer because the poor are getting poorer. All of this means that class inequality in the U.S. has never been more evident than today. Even more so because of the rise of basic commodities like food and fuel, class inequality is likely to become even starker. According to a study titled: State of Working America: “about 60% of families that start in the bottom fifth in the income scale are still there a decade later”. The idea the American’s who come from modest and poor backgrounds can work hard and achieve upward mobility has proven itself today to be false.
The idea that young workers can work hard in order to get ahead of their parents is still very much prevalent. In today’s “new global economy” young workers are encouraged to go to school and “invest in their future”, but while this occurs, more and more of these same workers are ending up without a bachelors degree and instead, find themselves in a massive pool of debt. Debt and today’s young adults are inextricably linked. Because of the three-decade long push on workers wages and living standards, the only way that ordinary people could provide for themselves is through depending on credit cards and debt. This process for many people first begins with student loan debt, which affects both community college and 4-year college students. As free public education has been destroyed under the idea that anything publicly funded by the government is bad, and as tuitions have outpaced family income, more students are taking out private loans to fill the gap. Today 2/3 of students borrow money to go to college, up from half in 1993. In 2004-2005 students borrowed $14 billion in private loans, which is a 734% increase from a decade earlier. This is an example of the government shifting what should be a social responsibility to educate people, to a personal responsibility. Basically, if you want higher education, than you are on your own. The consequence of this are that the average student debt after graduation is more than $19,000, which also means if your are lucky to find a decent job after graduation, you will be paying student loans for half the year on the job. Dependence on debt doesn’t end with school, but on the contrary is essential for today’s young workers in order to cover basic living expenses like housing costs, health care costs and food. Contrary to an argument voiced by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg when in response to the financial crisis he had the audacity to say “we have all been living well beyond our means”. In reality, the average family of four is actually spending 21% less today on clothing than a similar family spent in the early 1970s. Families are also spending 22% less on food and 44% less on major appliances. The reality is that in order for working people to compensate for their low wages, and still be able to afford food, fuel and clothing, debt is necessary for survival. We have been living beyond our means because it has been forced upon us and is our only way for survival.
Debt is also a political tool that can be used against young workers, making a new layer of workers that are much more vulnerable and desperate to take any work. The influx of young workers into higher education is a direct result of the decline of good paying jobs. If we compare the median annual earnings of young male workers today to young male workers in 1975 we see that there is an $8,000 a year difference. Also, if we compare the wage differences between workers whose highest education level is a High School diploma in 1975 to today we see that there is a $12,000 difference. Seeking a college education was not a precondition for having a good paying job in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. In New York City, for example, we had the garment industry, in Chicago they had the Meatpacking industry, and in Detroit the auto industry. These industry’s offered a decent paying jobs and good living standards for working people. But neoliberalism, and the employer’s offensive have changed that reality. The only way today one can aspire to land a decent job is through seeking a higher education, however the reality is that although more and more people are going to college, the graduation rates haven’t changed significantly. Here at Hunter College, only 15% of students graduate in 4 years, and 39% in 8 years or more, and the graduation rates have stayed virtually the same while the number of freshmen’s has continued to rise throughout the 90’s. Essentially, what this means is that young workers can’t afford to finish school. The ruling class argues that college education is integral in this new “global economy”, but the reality is that the people who run this country benefit from having a large pool of younger workers that are in debt and desperate to work. It is what they call having a “flexible workforce”, that is, the ability to hire and fire people at will and too strip away protection on the job. More importantly, a college education gives young workers the idea of upward mobility, nonetheless graduation rates nationally and here at Hunter don’t match that rhetoric.
III. The American Dream and The Employer’s Offensive:
I want to now focus on the question: how did our generation could to this point? The economic struggles that young worker’s face today are not happening because of personal choices, or because students “aren’t good with money”, on the contrary it is occurring because it is a part of a larger strategy that the ruling class pursues. When a refer to the ruling class, I’m talking about bankers, employer’s and in general the people who make the day to day decisions the effects our lives greatly. This strategy and economic doctrine that the ruling class pursues, also known as neoliberalism, was made to shift wealth from workers--to the elites of the world. Life for working people after the Second World War and before the Reagan Revolution, which is known as the onset of neoliberalism in the U.S., was much different than it is for young workers today. It was during this time that the American Dream was in fact a reality for ordinary people. After World War Two the U.S. gained the status of economic and military superpower, which allowed for capital and business to experience an unprecedented economic boom. This also allowed for workers wages to rise throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. During this time the average weekly earnings for manufacturing workers rose by 84%. Also, millions of working class people and veterans were able to afford a home for the first time because of tax breaks and veterans’ programs, something that is unconceivable today. During this time 70% of whites were able to afford their own homes. It is here where the slogan “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” and the idea of the American Dream began to take shape. What is important to understand about this ideology and economic advancement for sections of the working class is that the employers were not motivated by their generosity: but by there desire to maximize their profits. In order to achieve this, it required bosses to seek a way to prevent workers and their unions from participating in work stoppages. This is an important point. It wasn’t the generosity of bosses that led to workers increase in living standards, but on the contrary it was both tied to the long economic boom of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and the organizational strength and militancy of workers and their unions. The ideology of the American Dream was in reality a means to blunt any further friction between workers and bosses. This led to Fortune magazine in 1951 to congratulate U.S. capital for finding a uniquely “American” solution to “problems of class struggle and proletarian consciousness”. Nonetheless, not all was good for U.S. workers. Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, due to racism, the median income of Black Americans was still at 55% of Whites. Wages for workers who did not belong to a union rose much slower. And even in 1959 more than 1 in 5 of people lived below the official poverty line.
The overall trend of working class people belonging to a union, having healthcare, and in general having a good standard of living, came under attack during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Understanding why and how this took place helps us understand the current economic and political situation facing our generation. And it also reinforces the argument that the reasons why millions of people are in debt today and have a far lower living standards than past generations is because of a conscious effort from the people who run our society. By the late 1960’s the U.S. was falling behind competition from Japan and Europe. The boom that the U.S. had been riding since the end of World War II came to an end, and as result, there was a crisis in the ability of the system to continue making profit. In the face of this, the U.S. rulers desperately needed a new strategy. This strategy contained three key elements: the first part involved the move for less government control—stripping back laws and regulation to allow money to flow more freely across borders and internally. Secondly, it involved the transfer of wealth from workers to the bosses, by cutting the standard of living for working people. Thirdly, there was internal corporate structuring. All together, this strategy created what is known as neoliberalism, that is the restructuring of the for profit system based on a management offensive on an international level. This is the way Business Week in 1974 summarized the crises for world capitalism:
It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. It will be particularly hard to swallow because it is quite obvious that if big business and big banks are the most visible victims of what ails the debt economy, they are also in large measure the cause of it…Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.
This new reality means an attack on worker’s rights on the job and de-unionization. The new reality also means massive cuts on social spending; increasing tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing of good paying jobs, and free trade. This is the essence of neoliberalism and neoliberal policy. The result, the average earnings for workers in 1973 was $331 per week; in 2007 it was $279 per week. Another result is that working class people have been forced into a debt crisis. The use of credit cards has been the only way students and young workers have been able to get by, especially in expensive cities like New York City, where everything from the price of milk to the cost of our monthly metro cards has been increasing.
Workers aren’t the only one in this debt crisis: the bankers internationally find themselves in a similar situation. There is one fundamental difference, our crisis has been forced upon us and has actually paid for the riches massive gains. The bankers on the other hand, created the current financial meltdown by practicing predatory lending. And since capitalism involves no rational planning, bankers put all their investments into the section of the economy which is currently creating the most money, and that was the housing boom. However, the result is that there is now an overproduction of houses, resulting in prices decreasing dramatically. This has now forced banks to admit that many of their packaged mortgages are overvalued, resulting in the collapse of banks like Washington Mutual. This has also resulted in the near collapse of the banking system itself. Since no bank wants to admit how much of their money was invested in overvalued package mortgages, banks have stopped lending to one another. The proposal for a $700 billion bailout, paid by us, in order to save the bankers, is just another example of how the government gets out of economic crisis, on the back of working people.
IV Young Worker’s Progressive Views:
Because of these enormous economic challenges facing young workers, in a world where all we have known is give backs, unemployment, war and occupation, declining living standards, and the increasing cost of food, more and more young workers are drawing conclusions, which no mainstream politician is willing to articulate. So for example in the healthcare end, 57% of younger workers say that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan. 87% of young workers think that the government should spend more money on healthcare even if a tax increase is required to pay for it. On the education front, an overwhelming 95% of young workers think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it. 61% think that the government should provide more services. In terms of other issues like racial tolerance and views on unions, and overwhelming majority of young workers would vote for a black president, and large majority would like to have union representation. All of these stats are at its highest level of support in its 20-year history. These polls signify that there is a general understanding amongst young workers and students that they have been getting screwed over. These polls are also a huge shift away from the neoliberal doctrine that says “government is the problem, and the free market the solution”, and idea that is being broken down today with the financial meltdown and the nationalizations of key banking institutions like AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some of these shifts have forced politicians to begin to question, although be it rhetorically, neoliberalism. An example of this was Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama calling out John McCain in the first presidential debate, for being a pioneer in deregulating the banking system and calling out McCain for his belief in “trickle down economics”, the idea that says: give the rich the conditions they need to make more money like tax cuts, and this will somehow trickle down to ordinary people.
The shift against neoliberalism in students and young workers has created an ideological crisis for this economic doctrine. You cannot continue to easily implement neoliberal policies if the majority of the people are against it. Moreover, there is also a material crisis for neoliberalism exemplified by today’s current financial mess, which is a direct result of the deregulation of the banking system. These two simultaneous processes, that is, growing discontent with the way our society is being run and the internal crisis of the system itself presents our generation with a unique opportunity. On the one hand you have the insanity of this system that has been squeezing working people tighter and tighter, and has created a new class of super, super rich, resulting in deep class anger and frustrations with the way our society is being run. And on the other hand, the system itself isn’t working because of its internal contradictions. This gives us the opportunity to put forward a different, more humane set of priorities in our society. The question that now arises is: how do we put forward our demands?
IV. Turning Sentiment into Action: How can we build struggles for reforms?
While there has been a significant shift to the left in the ideas of students and young workers, this has not translated into action. This is no surprise, our side has been unorganized and in retreat since that late 1970’s. There are several reasons for this. The most important one is that many people have chosen a personal strategy to respond to their individual crisis. In my case: in which I have no healthcare, choosing solely a personal strategy would mean applying for Medicaid or going to Bellevue hospital to negotiate a means to pay my debt. Obviously, I need to respond to my immediate dilemma, but I also understand that the only way to truly get rid of my problem, which millions of people face, would mean to have a collective strategy for fighting for true healthcare reform. Another example would be the fight for public education. On a personal level, one could just rack up student loans, which is what has been occurring, but a collective strategy would mean students organizing together to demand and end to tuition hikes and an increase in government scholarships. At Hunter College, the Campus Anti-war Network has begun a petition directed towards the presidential candidates, which demands of them to cut one half of the military budget and direct it towards public education. This is a concrete example of students figuring out what are some of the problems they face and than deciding concretely on how to challenge it.
Young workers and students collective organization is the only way to fight-back. We have the history and lessons of the 1930’s labor movement and various social movements of the 1960’s as examples of successful collective organization. However, today’s main challenge is turning leftwing ideas and matching it on the ground. This process of turning sentiment into action occurs in two different forms. The first form is that people are going to be forced to fight back because of the contradictions in the system. Meaning that they can no longer take being squeezed and that the only way to survive is to defend your current economic status. The second, and less spontaneous form of fight-back is that of long-term patient building of struggles around us. Part of this requires a certain degree of understanding of why, for example, CUNY budgets are being cut. If you understand this, than you know that it’s Governor Patterson’s solution to a recession. This then helps us figure out a strategy of how we can take on these attacks. So for example, we would put forward that the city not cut money from CUNY but instead enact government work programs to rebuild the city’s infrastructure as way of creating more jobs and taking on rising unemployment or we could simply demand tax the rich of New York City. That’s the way one should respond during a crisis, not go after one of the cities most vulnerable members, CUNY students. Building struggle, however small, allows us to win over other segments of the population that haven’t reached the same conclusions that we have. It is this process that allows us to develop from a small, perhaps local struggle into much more broader mass social movement. This is sorely missing in today’s economic crisis. In the absence of class struggle and any leftwing force that can truly take the side of working people, our demands are not being heard. So today, the main debate was: should we bailout the bankers or not? However, if we had a movement on the ground of young workers organizing at their workplaces and students organizing on their campus and demanded a bailout for the generation debt: we might have a third side to this national debate. This does not come out of nowhere. It requires the active participation of everyone in this room in figuring how can we set ourselves up to best deal with problems like military recruiters on campus, or dealing with the fact that cafeteria prices at Hunter rose over 30%, as well as dealing with the larger social issues like putting an end to the war on Iraq and fighting the scapegoating of immigrant workers. Only by our generation having an understanding why and how we have been forced into debt, and more importantly, having an understanding that through collective struggle we can transform ourselves from a small struggle to a large social movement that can actually fight for true reforms, will our generation be remembered not as, generation debt, but as a generation of militant students and young workers who stood up to the status-quo and fought for a better future.
The idea that one generation after another will prosper and will climb the latter of opportunity and wealth, an idea that has been a reality for past generations, is a blatant lie today. Today’s generation of students and young workers have grown up in a world where all we know is low wages, massive debt, and an overall attack on our living standards. The media and the people who run our society like to paint a picture of young workers as being lazy, self-concerned, and only caring about the latest Jordan’s or new Sidekick. However, nothing has been farther from the truth. Today’s debt generation—roughly speaking students and young workers from the age 18 to 34, are possibly one of the most economically vulnerable sections of the U.S. working class. Not only are we the generation that is to be expected to pay and fight for the $1 trillion war in Iraq, and not only are we the generation that is newly coming into the workforce after three decades of an employer’s offensive against working people’s living standards, but we are now the generation that is to face one of the largest financial crisis ever experienced since the Great Depression. According to Washington, the first step to take in the financial crisis is by bailing out the same banks that created this mess. The idea that maybe we should refinance mortgages or immediately stop foreclosures, or bailout a whole generation of people whose accumulation of debt is based on survival as opposed to greed, isn’t being voiced by any mainstream politician. Young workers and students desperately need a bailout. I will use myself as an example; in September I began to experience sharp pain in my back. I was worried because I’m a part-time nursing student at BMCC and therefore I’m not eligible to receive healthcare coverage by my parent’s union plan. My employer also does not offer health insurance. When the pain become unbearable I went straight from work to the ER of Bellevue hospital where I was than attended to. It turned out I had a very bad infection, which required of me to make two more visits to the hospital. After all was taken care of, today I find myself in over $4,000 debt to Bellevue hospital. In top of this I live on my own and pay for my own tuition. My story is the story of millions of Americans. In the U.S. 50% of personal bankruptcy come from healthcare related issues. This is one part of the squeeze that a whole generation and including people in this room are facing.
In light of the financial crisis, this squeeze is to become much tighter. This requires of us to deal with important questions surrounding our generation, particularly what role do students and young workers play in today’s economy? Why are they so vulnerable? How did we get into this catastrophic position, and is people’s personal responsibility to blame? Based on the economic experience facing young workers, what are the political and economic ideas being formed? Moreover, how can we match sentiment and the reality facing millions of young workers and students with actual struggle and movements for reforms?
II. Young Workers in Today’s Economy:
For young workers today all we have known is a $7.50 /hr wage, increasing cost of basic things like food and transportation and a general assault on our living standards. Today some 26% of U.S. workers receive poverty wages, which means ¼ of everybody in this room makes poverty wages. The lack of good paying jobs has contributed to this rise. According to U.S. government statistic and recent findings 17.7% of the population are in poverty. On the healthcare end, the number of workers covered by employer provided insurance has declined from 69% in 1979 to just 55% in 2006. In terms of actual wages, as measured in today’s value of the dollar, from 1979 to 2007, a total of 28 years, wages have only increased by 54 cents, this means that while there was rapid economic growth in the 90’s this amounted to virtually nothing for ordinary people. It is sufficient to say that these attacks wouldn’t be possible without attacks on our unions and the labor movement overall. Today unions represent 12.1% of workers, down from 35% in the 1950’s. There are two main reasons why this has occurred; the first has been the unwillingness of employers to allow their workers to be represented by a union. That is, they will go at any length to prevent their workers from organizing. Secondly, because of the restructuring of the U.S. economy in the 1970’s there has been an expansion in the service sector while the traditional unionized manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or destroyed. This expansion of the service sector has been met with the labor movement’s inability to rise to the occasion an organize workers in non-traditional industries like retail and restaurants, converting service jobs into mostly non-unionized bad paying jobs, like the workers of Wal-Mart or Target who with their low wages pay for the “everyday low prices”. Workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement have wages that are 14.1% higher than nonunion workers. Belonging to a union and having the ability to collectively bargain with an employer is essential in maintaining a decent living standard for working people, which is why union representation and the labor movement has been in retreat for two decades. Now, at the other end of our society the richest 1% has seen it share of annual earnings almost double from 7.3% in 1979 to 13.6% in 2006. Even more astounding, the top 0.1% of society has seen their annual earnings increase by 324% from 1979 to 2006. So when people say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we should say: the rich get richer because the poor are getting poorer. All of this means that class inequality in the U.S. has never been more evident than today. Even more so because of the rise of basic commodities like food and fuel, class inequality is likely to become even starker. According to a study titled: State of Working America: “about 60% of families that start in the bottom fifth in the income scale are still there a decade later”. The idea the American’s who come from modest and poor backgrounds can work hard and achieve upward mobility has proven itself today to be false.
The idea that young workers can work hard in order to get ahead of their parents is still very much prevalent. In today’s “new global economy” young workers are encouraged to go to school and “invest in their future”, but while this occurs, more and more of these same workers are ending up without a bachelors degree and instead, find themselves in a massive pool of debt. Debt and today’s young adults are inextricably linked. Because of the three-decade long push on workers wages and living standards, the only way that ordinary people could provide for themselves is through depending on credit cards and debt. This process for many people first begins with student loan debt, which affects both community college and 4-year college students. As free public education has been destroyed under the idea that anything publicly funded by the government is bad, and as tuitions have outpaced family income, more students are taking out private loans to fill the gap. Today 2/3 of students borrow money to go to college, up from half in 1993. In 2004-2005 students borrowed $14 billion in private loans, which is a 734% increase from a decade earlier. This is an example of the government shifting what should be a social responsibility to educate people, to a personal responsibility. Basically, if you want higher education, than you are on your own. The consequence of this are that the average student debt after graduation is more than $19,000, which also means if your are lucky to find a decent job after graduation, you will be paying student loans for half the year on the job. Dependence on debt doesn’t end with school, but on the contrary is essential for today’s young workers in order to cover basic living expenses like housing costs, health care costs and food. Contrary to an argument voiced by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg when in response to the financial crisis he had the audacity to say “we have all been living well beyond our means”. In reality, the average family of four is actually spending 21% less today on clothing than a similar family spent in the early 1970s. Families are also spending 22% less on food and 44% less on major appliances. The reality is that in order for working people to compensate for their low wages, and still be able to afford food, fuel and clothing, debt is necessary for survival. We have been living beyond our means because it has been forced upon us and is our only way for survival.
Debt is also a political tool that can be used against young workers, making a new layer of workers that are much more vulnerable and desperate to take any work. The influx of young workers into higher education is a direct result of the decline of good paying jobs. If we compare the median annual earnings of young male workers today to young male workers in 1975 we see that there is an $8,000 a year difference. Also, if we compare the wage differences between workers whose highest education level is a High School diploma in 1975 to today we see that there is a $12,000 difference. Seeking a college education was not a precondition for having a good paying job in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. In New York City, for example, we had the garment industry, in Chicago they had the Meatpacking industry, and in Detroit the auto industry. These industry’s offered a decent paying jobs and good living standards for working people. But neoliberalism, and the employer’s offensive have changed that reality. The only way today one can aspire to land a decent job is through seeking a higher education, however the reality is that although more and more people are going to college, the graduation rates haven’t changed significantly. Here at Hunter College, only 15% of students graduate in 4 years, and 39% in 8 years or more, and the graduation rates have stayed virtually the same while the number of freshmen’s has continued to rise throughout the 90’s. Essentially, what this means is that young workers can’t afford to finish school. The ruling class argues that college education is integral in this new “global economy”, but the reality is that the people who run this country benefit from having a large pool of younger workers that are in debt and desperate to work. It is what they call having a “flexible workforce”, that is, the ability to hire and fire people at will and too strip away protection on the job. More importantly, a college education gives young workers the idea of upward mobility, nonetheless graduation rates nationally and here at Hunter don’t match that rhetoric.
III. The American Dream and The Employer’s Offensive:
I want to now focus on the question: how did our generation could to this point? The economic struggles that young worker’s face today are not happening because of personal choices, or because students “aren’t good with money”, on the contrary it is occurring because it is a part of a larger strategy that the ruling class pursues. When a refer to the ruling class, I’m talking about bankers, employer’s and in general the people who make the day to day decisions the effects our lives greatly. This strategy and economic doctrine that the ruling class pursues, also known as neoliberalism, was made to shift wealth from workers--to the elites of the world. Life for working people after the Second World War and before the Reagan Revolution, which is known as the onset of neoliberalism in the U.S., was much different than it is for young workers today. It was during this time that the American Dream was in fact a reality for ordinary people. After World War Two the U.S. gained the status of economic and military superpower, which allowed for capital and business to experience an unprecedented economic boom. This also allowed for workers wages to rise throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. During this time the average weekly earnings for manufacturing workers rose by 84%. Also, millions of working class people and veterans were able to afford a home for the first time because of tax breaks and veterans’ programs, something that is unconceivable today. During this time 70% of whites were able to afford their own homes. It is here where the slogan “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” and the idea of the American Dream began to take shape. What is important to understand about this ideology and economic advancement for sections of the working class is that the employers were not motivated by their generosity: but by there desire to maximize their profits. In order to achieve this, it required bosses to seek a way to prevent workers and their unions from participating in work stoppages. This is an important point. It wasn’t the generosity of bosses that led to workers increase in living standards, but on the contrary it was both tied to the long economic boom of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and the organizational strength and militancy of workers and their unions. The ideology of the American Dream was in reality a means to blunt any further friction between workers and bosses. This led to Fortune magazine in 1951 to congratulate U.S. capital for finding a uniquely “American” solution to “problems of class struggle and proletarian consciousness”. Nonetheless, not all was good for U.S. workers. Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, due to racism, the median income of Black Americans was still at 55% of Whites. Wages for workers who did not belong to a union rose much slower. And even in 1959 more than 1 in 5 of people lived below the official poverty line.
The overall trend of working class people belonging to a union, having healthcare, and in general having a good standard of living, came under attack during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Understanding why and how this took place helps us understand the current economic and political situation facing our generation. And it also reinforces the argument that the reasons why millions of people are in debt today and have a far lower living standards than past generations is because of a conscious effort from the people who run our society. By the late 1960’s the U.S. was falling behind competition from Japan and Europe. The boom that the U.S. had been riding since the end of World War II came to an end, and as result, there was a crisis in the ability of the system to continue making profit. In the face of this, the U.S. rulers desperately needed a new strategy. This strategy contained three key elements: the first part involved the move for less government control—stripping back laws and regulation to allow money to flow more freely across borders and internally. Secondly, it involved the transfer of wealth from workers to the bosses, by cutting the standard of living for working people. Thirdly, there was internal corporate structuring. All together, this strategy created what is known as neoliberalism, that is the restructuring of the for profit system based on a management offensive on an international level. This is the way Business Week in 1974 summarized the crises for world capitalism:
It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. It will be particularly hard to swallow because it is quite obvious that if big business and big banks are the most visible victims of what ails the debt economy, they are also in large measure the cause of it…Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.
This new reality means an attack on worker’s rights on the job and de-unionization. The new reality also means massive cuts on social spending; increasing tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing of good paying jobs, and free trade. This is the essence of neoliberalism and neoliberal policy. The result, the average earnings for workers in 1973 was $331 per week; in 2007 it was $279 per week. Another result is that working class people have been forced into a debt crisis. The use of credit cards has been the only way students and young workers have been able to get by, especially in expensive cities like New York City, where everything from the price of milk to the cost of our monthly metro cards has been increasing.
Workers aren’t the only one in this debt crisis: the bankers internationally find themselves in a similar situation. There is one fundamental difference, our crisis has been forced upon us and has actually paid for the riches massive gains. The bankers on the other hand, created the current financial meltdown by practicing predatory lending. And since capitalism involves no rational planning, bankers put all their investments into the section of the economy which is currently creating the most money, and that was the housing boom. However, the result is that there is now an overproduction of houses, resulting in prices decreasing dramatically. This has now forced banks to admit that many of their packaged mortgages are overvalued, resulting in the collapse of banks like Washington Mutual. This has also resulted in the near collapse of the banking system itself. Since no bank wants to admit how much of their money was invested in overvalued package mortgages, banks have stopped lending to one another. The proposal for a $700 billion bailout, paid by us, in order to save the bankers, is just another example of how the government gets out of economic crisis, on the back of working people.
IV Young Worker’s Progressive Views:
Because of these enormous economic challenges facing young workers, in a world where all we have known is give backs, unemployment, war and occupation, declining living standards, and the increasing cost of food, more and more young workers are drawing conclusions, which no mainstream politician is willing to articulate. So for example in the healthcare end, 57% of younger workers say that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan. 87% of young workers think that the government should spend more money on healthcare even if a tax increase is required to pay for it. On the education front, an overwhelming 95% of young workers think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it. 61% think that the government should provide more services. In terms of other issues like racial tolerance and views on unions, and overwhelming majority of young workers would vote for a black president, and large majority would like to have union representation. All of these stats are at its highest level of support in its 20-year history. These polls signify that there is a general understanding amongst young workers and students that they have been getting screwed over. These polls are also a huge shift away from the neoliberal doctrine that says “government is the problem, and the free market the solution”, and idea that is being broken down today with the financial meltdown and the nationalizations of key banking institutions like AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some of these shifts have forced politicians to begin to question, although be it rhetorically, neoliberalism. An example of this was Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama calling out John McCain in the first presidential debate, for being a pioneer in deregulating the banking system and calling out McCain for his belief in “trickle down economics”, the idea that says: give the rich the conditions they need to make more money like tax cuts, and this will somehow trickle down to ordinary people.
The shift against neoliberalism in students and young workers has created an ideological crisis for this economic doctrine. You cannot continue to easily implement neoliberal policies if the majority of the people are against it. Moreover, there is also a material crisis for neoliberalism exemplified by today’s current financial mess, which is a direct result of the deregulation of the banking system. These two simultaneous processes, that is, growing discontent with the way our society is being run and the internal crisis of the system itself presents our generation with a unique opportunity. On the one hand you have the insanity of this system that has been squeezing working people tighter and tighter, and has created a new class of super, super rich, resulting in deep class anger and frustrations with the way our society is being run. And on the other hand, the system itself isn’t working because of its internal contradictions. This gives us the opportunity to put forward a different, more humane set of priorities in our society. The question that now arises is: how do we put forward our demands?
IV. Turning Sentiment into Action: How can we build struggles for reforms?
While there has been a significant shift to the left in the ideas of students and young workers, this has not translated into action. This is no surprise, our side has been unorganized and in retreat since that late 1970’s. There are several reasons for this. The most important one is that many people have chosen a personal strategy to respond to their individual crisis. In my case: in which I have no healthcare, choosing solely a personal strategy would mean applying for Medicaid or going to Bellevue hospital to negotiate a means to pay my debt. Obviously, I need to respond to my immediate dilemma, but I also understand that the only way to truly get rid of my problem, which millions of people face, would mean to have a collective strategy for fighting for true healthcare reform. Another example would be the fight for public education. On a personal level, one could just rack up student loans, which is what has been occurring, but a collective strategy would mean students organizing together to demand and end to tuition hikes and an increase in government scholarships. At Hunter College, the Campus Anti-war Network has begun a petition directed towards the presidential candidates, which demands of them to cut one half of the military budget and direct it towards public education. This is a concrete example of students figuring out what are some of the problems they face and than deciding concretely on how to challenge it.
Young workers and students collective organization is the only way to fight-back. We have the history and lessons of the 1930’s labor movement and various social movements of the 1960’s as examples of successful collective organization. However, today’s main challenge is turning leftwing ideas and matching it on the ground. This process of turning sentiment into action occurs in two different forms. The first form is that people are going to be forced to fight back because of the contradictions in the system. Meaning that they can no longer take being squeezed and that the only way to survive is to defend your current economic status. The second, and less spontaneous form of fight-back is that of long-term patient building of struggles around us. Part of this requires a certain degree of understanding of why, for example, CUNY budgets are being cut. If you understand this, than you know that it’s Governor Patterson’s solution to a recession. This then helps us figure out a strategy of how we can take on these attacks. So for example, we would put forward that the city not cut money from CUNY but instead enact government work programs to rebuild the city’s infrastructure as way of creating more jobs and taking on rising unemployment or we could simply demand tax the rich of New York City. That’s the way one should respond during a crisis, not go after one of the cities most vulnerable members, CUNY students. Building struggle, however small, allows us to win over other segments of the population that haven’t reached the same conclusions that we have. It is this process that allows us to develop from a small, perhaps local struggle into much more broader mass social movement. This is sorely missing in today’s economic crisis. In the absence of class struggle and any leftwing force that can truly take the side of working people, our demands are not being heard. So today, the main debate was: should we bailout the bankers or not? However, if we had a movement on the ground of young workers organizing at their workplaces and students organizing on their campus and demanded a bailout for the generation debt: we might have a third side to this national debate. This does not come out of nowhere. It requires the active participation of everyone in this room in figuring how can we set ourselves up to best deal with problems like military recruiters on campus, or dealing with the fact that cafeteria prices at Hunter rose over 30%, as well as dealing with the larger social issues like putting an end to the war on Iraq and fighting the scapegoating of immigrant workers. Only by our generation having an understanding why and how we have been forced into debt, and more importantly, having an understanding that through collective struggle we can transform ourselves from a small struggle to a large social movement that can actually fight for true reforms, will our generation be remembered not as, generation debt, but as a generation of militant students and young workers who stood up to the status-quo and fought for a better future.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Wall Street Journal and Washing Post say "We are Winning in Iraq"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121270725304950289.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
Along with the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal argues that the U.S. is on the verge of victory in Iraq. Seems like the ruling class is trying to shift the debate in the general election from "out when" to "how to achieve complete victory". I think we can expect to see a shift to the right in Obama's foreign policy rhetoric soon, specifically around Iraq. (See his speech to AIPAC). The main arguments being made for why the U.S. is winning in Iraq are the following:
1) The building and "political maturation" of the Iraqi Army, which has won key battles in Basra and Sadr City.
2) Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has broad support from different ethnic groups.
3) The support and collaboration of the Awakening Councils (Sunni militias) with the U.S. military on the ground.
4) Finally, the political and military weakness of Al-Sadr and his militia, which after the Sadr City attack has retreated back to Iran, under a misnamed "truce".
The main problem that the U.S. rulers face is that ordinary Iraqis do not like to be occupied. Which destabilizes all of the four points mentioned above. But I will try to take on the four points below:
1) Iraqi Army: It is true that the Iraqi army has been able to build itself almost to the point where it can begin fighting "it's own battles". After all, Maliki's push to take the port city, Basra, away from small militias and Sadr's forces was a political gamble, that tested the competence of his army. But it is also true, that the stability and strength of the Iraqi army is directly tied to the U.S. military, who financially and military supports the army. This is where the importance of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq falls in.
2) Broad Support for Maliki: The broad ethnic support for Maliki is very complicated to understand. Both Washington Post and Wall Street Journal assert this. First thing that can be said, is that it is true that Sunni militias have began to engage in activity in the Iraqi parliament, in which they had boycotted nine months ago. But does this mean that they support Maliki? Or that they support his latest offensive against the Mahdi Army led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr? I think not!
3) Sunni-U.S. army alliance: The U.S. has been adding Sunni militias to its payroll, to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in what amounts to a united front against a common enemy. Nonetheless, this unity is built on false foundations. There is only so much money the U.S. can give to these militias. Secondly, these same Sunni militias still have an opposition to Prime Minister Maliki and to an ongoing occupation by the U.S. military, albeit in principle not strategy.
4) Weakening of Mahdi Army: It is true that the political strategy opted by Muqtada has been very difficult to understand. At times he is denouncing U.S. imperialism and the puppet government in Iraq, at other times he argues for a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. army and working with the Maliki government. But we should also remember that Muqtada is not just a politician but a commander and chief of the Mahdi Army. So what might look like a political retreat can really end up being a military retreat in which consolidating, planning, and building moral is crucial to any army. As the Time's magazine argued recently: "Sadr-Maliki conflict may cast Iraq into a deeper and more lasting crisis." http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1735034,00.html
P.S. Goodbye Hillary!
Along with the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal argues that the U.S. is on the verge of victory in Iraq. Seems like the ruling class is trying to shift the debate in the general election from "out when" to "how to achieve complete victory". I think we can expect to see a shift to the right in Obama's foreign policy rhetoric soon, specifically around Iraq. (See his speech to AIPAC). The main arguments being made for why the U.S. is winning in Iraq are the following:
1) The building and "political maturation" of the Iraqi Army, which has won key battles in Basra and Sadr City.
2) Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has broad support from different ethnic groups.
3) The support and collaboration of the Awakening Councils (Sunni militias) with the U.S. military on the ground.
4) Finally, the political and military weakness of Al-Sadr and his militia, which after the Sadr City attack has retreated back to Iran, under a misnamed "truce".
The main problem that the U.S. rulers face is that ordinary Iraqis do not like to be occupied. Which destabilizes all of the four points mentioned above. But I will try to take on the four points below:
1) Iraqi Army: It is true that the Iraqi army has been able to build itself almost to the point where it can begin fighting "it's own battles". After all, Maliki's push to take the port city, Basra, away from small militias and Sadr's forces was a political gamble, that tested the competence of his army. But it is also true, that the stability and strength of the Iraqi army is directly tied to the U.S. military, who financially and military supports the army. This is where the importance of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq falls in.
2) Broad Support for Maliki: The broad ethnic support for Maliki is very complicated to understand. Both Washington Post and Wall Street Journal assert this. First thing that can be said, is that it is true that Sunni militias have began to engage in activity in the Iraqi parliament, in which they had boycotted nine months ago. But does this mean that they support Maliki? Or that they support his latest offensive against the Mahdi Army led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr? I think not!
3) Sunni-U.S. army alliance: The U.S. has been adding Sunni militias to its payroll, to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in what amounts to a united front against a common enemy. Nonetheless, this unity is built on false foundations. There is only so much money the U.S. can give to these militias. Secondly, these same Sunni militias still have an opposition to Prime Minister Maliki and to an ongoing occupation by the U.S. military, albeit in principle not strategy.
4) Weakening of Mahdi Army: It is true that the political strategy opted by Muqtada has been very difficult to understand. At times he is denouncing U.S. imperialism and the puppet government in Iraq, at other times he argues for a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. army and working with the Maliki government. But we should also remember that Muqtada is not just a politician but a commander and chief of the Mahdi Army. So what might look like a political retreat can really end up being a military retreat in which consolidating, planning, and building moral is crucial to any army. As the Time's magazine argued recently: "Sadr-Maliki conflict may cast Iraq into a deeper and more lasting crisis." http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1735034,00.html
P.S. Goodbye Hillary!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
ICE on the Offensive Again
After a couple of months of low activity ICE is back on its racist agenda, attacking immigrant workers. Headlines in the New York Times in the last couple of weeks read like this: "Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?scp=3&sq=immigration&st=nyt ) and "270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?scp=25&sq=immigration&st=nyt)
The latter article details the outcome of the largest raid in U.S. history at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Iowa. Over 389 workers were detained for working with false papers. This raid is unique from others because until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
It is important to keep in mind under what political context this new offensive is coming: 1) an election year, which has divided sections of the immigrant's rights movement.
2) ICE has been up until now on the defensive, with the well publicized mistreatment of detained immigrants by the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News.
3) U.S. economy is heading towards a recession, which means that the Mexican economy shall soon be in a deeper one. (Ruling class also need a scapegoat--immigrant workers)
4) The ruling class in this country is looking for a restructuring of the immigration system in this country, fast.
Fight Back:
The response of immigrant rights activists both in Postville, Iowa and all around California, particularly in the Bay area and San Diego, has been remarkable. Some good coverage can be found at http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/26/san-diego-protest-against-ice. In New York City, the No Raids Committee of Queens along with The Humanist Center, Polo Democratico and other community groups will be marching to demand the right of immigrants to vote in local elections and to show the community that we will not let the Iowa Raids intimidate us. Also, activists in the No Raids Committee are preparing a petition in support of the 270 workers in federal prison, the demands are: to drop the charges of document fraud and to release workers immediately. I will post petition shortly.
Struggle continues:
In spite of the largest ruling class offensive against immigrants in decades activists and family members have been committed to fight for worker's rights. Although this layer of people nationally is small, the dynamics of social movements, i.e. its retreats and victories, will prove to be an invaluable lesson for all of us .
The latter article details the outcome of the largest raid in U.S. history at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Iowa. Over 389 workers were detained for working with false papers. This raid is unique from others because until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
It is important to keep in mind under what political context this new offensive is coming: 1) an election year, which has divided sections of the immigrant's rights movement.
2) ICE has been up until now on the defensive, with the well publicized mistreatment of detained immigrants by the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News.
3) U.S. economy is heading towards a recession, which means that the Mexican economy shall soon be in a deeper one. (Ruling class also need a scapegoat--immigrant workers)
4) The ruling class in this country is looking for a restructuring of the immigration system in this country, fast.
Fight Back:
The response of immigrant rights activists both in Postville, Iowa and all around California, particularly in the Bay area and San Diego, has been remarkable. Some good coverage can be found at http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/26/san-diego-protest-against-ice. In New York City, the No Raids Committee of Queens along with The Humanist Center, Polo Democratico and other community groups will be marching to demand the right of immigrants to vote in local elections and to show the community that we will not let the Iowa Raids intimidate us. Also, activists in the No Raids Committee are preparing a petition in support of the 270 workers in federal prison, the demands are: to drop the charges of document fraud and to release workers immediately. I will post petition shortly.
Struggle continues:
In spite of the largest ruling class offensive against immigrants in decades activists and family members have been committed to fight for worker's rights. Although this layer of people nationally is small, the dynamics of social movements, i.e. its retreats and victories, will prove to be an invaluable lesson for all of us .
Friday, May 2, 2008
Chile's Road to Socialism: Lessons of 1973
The essay below is from a talk given at the annual Northeast Socialist Conference organized by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. (CERSC, November 2007).
On September 11 of 1973, a dramatic revolutionary situation was destroyed and crushed. As tanks roared passed the city streets of Santiago bombs rained down on the presidential palace La Moneda, where the president Salvador Allende now lay dead. This was the tragic scene of a coup conducted by General Agustin Pinochet and the Chilean ruling class with assistance by the C.I.A. In the aftermath of the coup, 3.000 leftists, Allende supports, trade unionists and revolutionary workers were killed. Not only were they killed some were tortured and made examples of for future generations. Victor Jara the famous folk musician--The Bob Dylan of Chile--was beaten, burned in the hands and then forced to play his guitar before being gun down in the Chilean National Stadium where thousands of others were brutally murdered. It has become a ritual on every September 11 for Chileans to protest the Pinochet dictatorship and to fight for the state to recognize the real numbers of those killed by it. What is important for us is not to mourn those killed, but to learn. The best tribute we can pay to thousands of radicals who lost their lives is to draw the lessons from the mistakes they paid for with their lives. It is for this reason why I will not focus on the role of the C.I.A. and U.S. imperialism but instead on the mistakes made by the Chilean left in order to learn from it.
Today I believe that the lessons of the Chilean Road to Socialism have never been more relevant for us to come to terms with. There has been a reawakening of the Latin American working class, from the factory takeovers of Argentinean workers in 2001, the heroic Venezuelan workers defense of Chavez during the attempted coup in 2002, to the uprising in Oaxaca Mexico, there has been a sharpening in class struggle. If we look closer at these struggles against the ruthless free market, we find the movement dealing with key questions: Is there a need for the explicit building of a revolutionary organization? Can the existing state be used for the purpose of the movement? Is the working class capable of leading a revolution? Can we reform capitalism? The Chilean revolutionary process and its rich history I believe gives us answers to those questions and teaches us important lessons that are indispensable in struggles that lay ahead. Primarily lessons for the potential of working class struggle from below.
Promises of the Unidad Popular and the dominance of the Right:
Salvador Allende’s rise to presidency took place at a time when the Chilean working class began to grow much more confident and class-consciousness was rising. Allende assumed the presidency in November of 1970 through the coalition of leftist parties called Popular Unity. The UP was composed of six parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party. Both parties had a mass base in the industrial working class of Chile that had been forged in the early parts of the century with the upheaval of the Nitrate workers. Both political parties had highly become focused on popular front strategies since the 1930’s, even electing as president in 1938 member of the Radical Party, Aguirre Cerda, effectively putting the Popular Front in power for the first time. The popular front strategy was nothing new. This tactic of class collaboration was born out of the necessity for Stalin in the 1930’s to seek allies against a war with Hitler. In practice, this meant that socialists were to be uncritical of reformists, the middle class and bourgeois parties and seek to work together. So by the time Allende was elected president in 1970 it was his sixth appearance as a candidate for a broad coalition like the UP and his third time as president.
It is important to understand the period before Allende’s presidency because it helps explain what were the expectations and visions of the organized left that became his supporter. Popular Unity was different from other Popular Fronts strategy due to three key elements, the failure of the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei, to live up to its promises of reform and the crises of his government, which set in motion the second element: an increasingly combative working class movement. The Frei government had promised agrarian reform in the countryside to ease rural tensions. However, the land owning oligarchy was not going to hear it, a class that Frei’s government did not dare confront. This caused many peasants who had voted for Frei into open revolt. Frei’s government also promised industrial growth in the cities that attracted thousands of unemployed rural workers into working class areas and cities, who at once in the city began to demand free housing and basic services like clean water and food. What did all this mean concretely?: for one the strikes in this period increased and so did the workers involved: from 230.725 in 1969 to 316.280 a year later. Factory occupations also rose from five in 1968 to 24 in 1969; they then jumped to 339 occupations in 1971. It also led to the third central element that led to the rise of Allende, which was the reorganization of the left during the crises of Frei’s government. The Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR), which was a group who formed in 1965 and with a deep admiration towards Che Guevara, began to play a key role in the student movement for educational reform. In addition, sections of Frei’s party began to split forming the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, all of whom joined UP, with a vision that Allende will conduct the agrarian reform that Frei did not pass. Allende rise to presidency rode the waves of working class and peasant struggles, which will be reflected in its program.
The program of the UP tried to unite conflicting class interests, for which its survival in the electoral arena depended on. If you take a look at UP’s platform and their “Forty Measures” they promised honest government or “Popular Government”, an end to corruption and the abuse of power, more extensive and cheaper social benefits. The UP’s electoral program promised a number of strategic economic measures, including the nationalization of Chile’s U.S. owned copper mines, private banks and insurance companies. Allende proposed to establish a “social property sector” whose goal was to protect important industrial monopolies and certain parts of the service sector, which were important for social and economic development. Allende’s economic policy, according to socialist Mike Gonzalez in his article Chile: the Workers United: “was an orthodox Keynesian plan for reactivating the economy. It contained no challenge to the dominance of private capital; on the contrary, it gave the industrial bourgeoisie a range of guarantees and provided land- owners with generous compensation”. An example of this was the Agrarian Reform Act that Frei did not dare pass; unlike Frei, however, Allende promised landowners possession of the most productive acres and the best farm machinery, thus preventing a confrontation with the landowning class.
This is what Peter Winn author of Weavers of Revolution has to say about UP’s electoral program:
The UP’s program reflected its political strategy an alliance of the middle and lower classes, blue and white-collar workers, intellectuals and peasants. It contained something for almost everybody and particular assurances to the non-Marxist middle class that a Popular Unity victory would benefit them and hurt only "monopolists" and "imperialists". (Winn 65).
Further on, I will argue that this strategy was untenable and consequently led Allende to be more alienated to the interests of the working class.
Within Allende’s Socialist Party there existed a strong current that believed socialism had to be achieved through a revolution and if you read the party’s literature and paper Chile Hoy, that was put forward. However, Salvador Allende, who I believe represented the conservative wing of the Socialist Party, had a fundamentally different understanding of Chile’s road towards socialism:
In the transition to socialism, the legal norms will respond to the necessity of the peoples will to build a new society...On the realism of the Congress, it depends, to a great extent that the capitalist legality transitions to the socialist legality, according to the socio-economic transformations that we are implanting, without a violent fracture, which we responsibly want to avoid. (Textos Escogidos 119, emphasis added.)
This was Salvador Allende’s May 22 1971 message to a congress made up of the Chilean right wing and parties of the ruling class, titled The Road to Socialism. Allende’s strategy was to enact reforms that was possible to carry out under existing legislation and could win approval of the congress. Consequently, allowing the right to determine the pace of change. In fact, the congress believed having him in power would actually help restrain and control working class self-activity, which was growing.
On the contrary to some bosses’ fears, we see that Allende does not want to confront the Chilean bourgeoisie. Even before he was able to assume the presidency as the worlds first ever “Marxist elected president” Allende had to agree to terms that would keep the existing political establishment together, make sure that the legal system would not be touched, and most importantly that the armed forces would remain free to “guarantee democracy”. This behind the scenes agreement with the ruling class i.e. bosses, bankers, owners of the press etc, is known as the “Statute of Guarantees”. What is interesting about the passing of this agreement is that it was never discussed and voted on with rank-file members of the UP. On another level, this agreement proved that Allende had a fundamentally different vision of socialism. For Allende socialism meant turning the existing state apparatus with its laws, courts and armed forces into a pro-worker state. However, what Allende failed to understand is that the ruling class does not take this lying down. I will try to demonstrate in later events that developed in Chile that proved this reformist view wrong.
Cracks in the Coalition – Advanzar o Consolidar:
The first year of Allende’s presidency was relatively peaceful. Nonetheless, there were some stirrings in the countryside in where land seizures began to rise; partially due to UP’s commitment to agrarian reform and the rise of confidence in peasants. Overall, in 1970 the Chilean working class experienced a rise in wages, which was soon to be cut short. We can say that this was the calm before the storm. The ruling class at this moment was looking for the correct moment to launch its first challenge, and the moment was November 1971 with leader of the Cuban Revolution--Fidel Castro visiting Chile. The march, which is known as the “March of the Empty Pots”, was organized by the right wing parties, in which hundreds of middle class women came out with their saucepans (and house cleaners) in a symbol of the shortages (and class status). Although this might seem like a joke, it was actually a warning sign by the Chilean ruling class of battles to come and a concrete effort to begin mobilizing the middle class. So in this light Allende began his second year in office, and it was here where a debate within the UP began to form.
The debate in the UP and its conclusion further highlight its political character. The dispute focused around the questions: should the UP support the workers in their struggle to defend their living standards? Moreover, if the workers decided to fight back what political strategy should it be carried out with? These debates, took place in two UP conferences at La Arrayan and Lo Curro in February and June 1972, and were centered on the label advance or consolidate. The right wing of the Popular Unity argued to stop the process of reforms and to seek wider electoral support before advancing, while the left wing argued for the quickening pace of the reforms and the continuing enforcement of the working class, which had begun to prove it can struggle forward. However, the left wing’s arguments were not substantial enough to lead to a decisive break with the Popular Unity’s framework. Nor did it lead to question the relationship between the state and the ruling class, nor the control and direction of the economy and the role of the working class in that process. In the end, the left of the UP, which consisted of elements of the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU), the leftwing of the Socialist Party, and the Christian Left were poorly organized to amount a serious challenge in the political direction of the UP. So it was at the Lo Curro conference where the rightwing secured a majority. In this context, the boom of 1971 had receded and the Chilean ruling class was reassured that Allende and Popular Unity were more interested in compromise. Chile under Allende was about to experience some of the harshest class battles the world has seen, but yet the organized left and more importantly the mass socialist and communist parties in the UP were only to be witnesses at the brave creativity of the Chilean working class to confront the bourgeoisie’s offensive.
The Rise of Los Cordones and the betrayal of the UP:
The independent organization of the Chilean working class and poor peasants was a process in which peoples expectations were raised and their living standards attacked while the right wing of the UP sat back and watched and even at times attacked them. It was also a process of confusion. One of the UP’s famous slogans was “popular power”. For UP officials this meant unconditional support for their government, while for workers this actually meant create socialism right here right now. The first of these and one of the most important organizations to appear in the political scene in Chile was the Cordon Cerrillos-Maipu, a cordon meaning industrial belts, which were workers councils setup across Chile in response to the attacks on the working class. The town Cerrillos is an industrial suburb of Chile’s capital and had the largest concentration of industries in Chile with over 45.000 workers and 250 factories. Maipu is a farming area that borders Cerrillos. The forming of this cordon like others arose due to concrete problems. In Maipu 44 peasant leaders were arrested for taking over a farm that was soon to be expropriated. The Judge in this case ruled against the peasants and used government policy to back himself. This led to large demonstrations against the judge and an increase in land seizures as well. Meanwhile, Cerrillos was going through several waves of strikes and factory occupations, in particular in a factory owned by textile monopolists Yarur Inc. This factory, which was not due to be expropriated under the governments list, was taken over by the workers in an attempt to push the government’s policy further to the left and in a concrete effort to raise their living standards. In an inspiring meeting with the Yarur workers and union officials, the workers decided to “socialize” the textile plant. This is an account of one of Allende’s representatives Jorge Varas who was present at the meeting:
I have never in my life seen anything like this... When the union officerd told them that the company didn't want to receive them and had denied all their petitions, the people stopped them and began to cry 'Socialization! Socialization!' It was incredible. It was revolution! Two-thousand workers standing and shouting: 'We want Socialization' And the women calling out: 'No more exploitation!' They were in a state of euphoria. (Winn 174, original emphasis)
What is interesting about what occurred afterwards was that the Yarur workers demanded that Jorge Varas speak in behalf of Allende, this is what he had to say (note on his language):
"Comrades! You have decided that this enterprise should pass to the social property area. My duty is to demand this of the government." There was a round of applause; then an old-timer banged his fist on the table and cried: 'And right now, comrades! We are going on strike and we won't go back with those octopuses inside!' Jorge Varas decided that he had no choice except to follow their lead. "Well, comrades if you resolve to go on strike immediately, we have to see what is the best way to do it..." 'By seizing the industry!" one old-timer shouted out from below. "No comrade! We are not discussing a factory seizure. Yes, we will take the industry, but from outside. You have to guard the strategic spots of the enterprise...while we propose this to the president of the Republic. And I know that he will have to accept your position." (Winn 175, original emphasis).
This was a primary example of how workers were ready to go on the offensive against an increasingly paranoid ruling class, however, Allende and the UP and their revolution from above, acted as a brake in this process because they sought to work jointly with the legal system.
Because of these joint struggles, Cerrillos and Maipu both joined forces with an aim of denouncing the vacillations of the so-called “Peoples Government” and demanding it take action in behalf of the workers. The Cordon Cerrillos put forward a political program, which was far in advance than anything the organized left was arguing for:
1. Support President Allende’s government in so far as it interprets the struggles and mobilizations of the workers.
Clearly, this strategy was fundamentally different from the UP’s: a revolutionary alliance between the working class and other oppressed groups, and not with the middle class, under the program of: workers’ control. It was also a testament to the revolutionary consciousness of the Chilean working class. Despite this, the program of the cordon contained two key weaknesses, one was president Allende and the second was the problem of what to do with the bourgeois state. The problem with supporting Allende is that it hid the real political situation, which the working class found themselves in. The working class was directly challenging the control of the ruling class on the shop floor, this in turn was setting the stage for the bourgeoisie to strike back. Allende was not interested in protecting the concrete gains the working class militants had achieved. While the workers were struggling with how to go forward, Allende called their acts “crass irresponsibility”. This was so because “the government already represented the interests of the working class”, so they had no reason to struggle. Instead, during this time the UP was trying to convince workers of the participatory role of the armed forces in Chile’s Road to Socialism. Once again, the temperature of the class struggle was about to rise, and so was the power of the cordones with the Transportation Bosses’ lockout that began on October 11 1972.
Bosses on the Offensive and the response of the cordones:
The bosses in Chile had several strategies to counter the revolutionary process in Chile. What occurred on September 11 was the last brutal option. Before that, the ruling class relied on its economic position as owners of the means of productions and its role in the flow of capital to bring the country to its knees. The impact of the transportation bosses’ lockout was to be devastating. The absence of road transport, which Chile heavily relies on, would have stopped the transportation of spare parts, raw materials and most importantly the distribution of food for the working class. The strategy of the bosses was to use their economic leverage to bring the country to the brink of chaos and blame the policies of Allende. Their goal: was for Allende to resign or to win effective control of congress in the upcoming congressional elections of March 73 in order to impeach Allende. Once again, the Chilean working class rose to the occasion. All across Chile workers began to form comandos. These were community-based councils that sought to continue the distribution of food and to continue to run hospitals, which had been abandoned by doctors who supported the lockout. In factories across Chile where bosses tried to stop production in support of the lockout, workers took over the factory in order to keep supplies moving and industries running. New cordones sprang up in every major industrial town of Santiago with the simple task of seizing control of the factories; protect truck drivers who were still working from fascist violence, and to maintain production. The class character of the October Bosses’ strike made it possible for the Chilean working class to organize itself in opposition.
Allende’s response to the lockout was to immediately please the bourgeoisie. After failed negotiations with the transportation bosses Allende reshuffled his cabinet, adding three heads of the armed forces and declared a “State of Emergency” using the army to “restore order” and to return factories taken over by workers to the bosses, for workers this was not a moment for negotiations. These are the words from a young woman worker in Fabrilana after hearing Allende’s response:
I think comrade Allende has been very soft; he says it’s because he wants to avoid violence, but I think we should respond with more force, scare them to death. They’re trying to take away what we’ve won. (Gonzalez 58)
Without a doubt if it were not for the heroic efforts of the workers, Chile would have collapsed. Not only did workers defeat the ruling class offensive but they did this in spite of the vacillations of the leadership in the left. In the process of taking over production, workers experienced a glimpse of what it means to run society. This was the time when Chilean-working class was at its most active and most militant and yet the UP and Allende acted as an obstacle to the political development of the working class movement. Yet no organization in the left argued for an independent break from the UP. Instead, the leftwing of the Socialist Party who were playing an important in the cordones, continued to provide Allende with a leftwing cover to his continuing rightward shift, by not breaking from him.
The congressional elections of March 1973 that the ruling class had prepared so much for had strengthen the UP who received 44% of the votes. The increase vote for the UP was clearly a demand of action by the masses. The goal of the ruling class of undermining UP’s electoral support with the bosses’ lockout failed miserably. Now, the ruling class realized that in order to do away with Allende it would have to be through forcible means. At the same time, the elections of March were made top priorities in all main leftist parties and Chile’s national trade union (CUT), which worked closely with the cordones. The channeling of working class militancy into and election campaign led to the cordones becoming demobilized and losing its momentum after the October bosses’ strike in where the immediate goal was to occupy factories and resist and it now became large demonstrations for Allende and the UP with banners declaring “Workers Firmly behind its Government”. Peter Winn rightly captures this shift at the worker run Yarur factory:
Ex-Yarur was no longer in the vanguard of the revolution from below, but rather a bastion of worker support for Allende's more cautious reform from above. It was a shift symbolized by Salvador Allende's decision to celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration at the Yarur mill, where he thanked the cheering workers for their support and appealed to them to channel "the commitment demonstrated during the October strike" into the election campaign. (241)
The second setback for the working class movement came with the El Teniente Copper Miner’s Strike that lasted from April 1973 until June, approximately two months before the coup. The workers went on strike here because Allende failed to deliver a promise to raise wages for them. This strike is important for several reasons. El Teniente at the time was the world’s largest copper mine, secondly miners in Chile have historically played a leading role in the labor movement, but as of yet had not been active in revolutionary process of Chile. Thirdly, the strike represented a direct challenge to Allende’s role as negotiator between the price of labor and capital. Nonetheless, the weakness of the left was the order of the day. The CP denounced the miners as a “labor aristocracy”, while the UP called the leader of the miners strike a “Nazi”. Other sections of the left were less harsh; the Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR) characterized the struggle of the miners as pure “economism”. The reality is that an increase in wages for the miners would have a come out of the pockets of the bourgeoisie, as the price of copper in the world market was declining. The miners strike also brought to light a key weakness of the cordones in Chile. The traditional best-organized sectors of the Chilean working class were absent from the cordones national network. Two months before the coup, the miners strike was defeated but there was still patches of resistance in the working class movement particularly in Entre Lagos where workers occupied a sawmill factory, and Constitucion a coastal town which was under direct control of the masses. However, by this time the working class movement had reached a point of no return.
On June 29, Colonel Robert Souper declared a coup and rolled his tanks into the streets of Santiago. The workers responded by taking over factories, reorganizing the distribution of goods and arming themselves against the threat of the bourgeoisie. Souper’s attempted coup was very similar to the bosses’ strike of October 1972. However, there were some distinct factors: by this time, the Chilean workers had experienced several months of self-organization and secondly, the military factor was now posed as the central question: in whose interest did the state and its armed forces with its guns, tanks and helicopters represent? The ingredients for a social revolution were here: the means of production and distribution and workers defense and social services were in the hands of the cordones and the comandos. At the same time the ruling class was deeply divided, some considered Souper’s attempted coup to be to premature. Chile’s economy was paralyzed with the ruling class ceasing to invest and with bosses’ threatening to strike again. After the failure of Souper’s coup, Allende declared his second “State of Emergency” and passed the Arms Control Law whose purpose were not to disrupt those preparing to overthrow him but as a way of attacking and disarming the cordones and the working class. It was his last way of showing sections of the ruling class that he was determined to control and restrain working class militancy. The army was sent into various comandos and to major cordones like Cordon Cerrillo to occupy the factories. At the same time, Allende promoted General Augusto Pinochet to Commander in Chief, exactly 19 days before the coup. To Unidad Popular the self-activity of the working class was the main enemy.
The role of the Revolutionary Party and the State:
Clearly, workers in Chile were ready to struggle against the bourgeoisies order. The cordones and comandos in Chile legitimately represented the embryo of a socialist society. Yet to the very end, every organization in the Chilean left directed its forces, energy and political outlook towards the Popular Unity. What was missing was a national political leadership of revolutionary workers, independent of Allende, whose vision was the arm conquest of power by the cordones, comandos and workers. Organized into a truly revolutionary party could have provided clear leadership and an alternative strategy from the debates in the UP and could have called out Allende for what he really was. Without this the working class became demoralized and it was in this moment that with the sense of “we struggled but got nothing” that the ruling class decided to launch its decisive blow.
The need for the organization of a party that is rooted in the working class and which can struggle hand in hand with workers cannot be overstated. Workers are not blank slates. If they are not won to the need for a fundamental transformation of society, they will continue to accept the old ideas that justify the existing society. It is also true that there is unevenness in class-consciousness in the working class, some being more conservative than others are. However, the role of a party would be to organize the most militant sections of the working class into a single organization that could then strategize on the next steps and assess political developments. In Chile, this was sorely missing. So instead of a clear left-wing case for the need of the cordones to defend the cause of the striking miners, you had the left turn their backs on them. And instead of a concise left wing case for why the workers should not use their energies for the reelection of the UP and instead focus on retaining the power on the shop floor, workers began to demobilize for UP’s congressional campaign. The various leftist parties did not provide the working class to learn and generalize from there struggles but this does not arise out of nowhere, it requires the conscious intervention of those truly seeking to build a new society.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution wrote in State and Revolution:
Every great revolution raises practically, palpably, and on a mass scale of action, namely, the question of the relation between special bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population”. (State-Rev- 11)
This was true in 1973 where you had dual power between the cordones and the military. What was also true is that the nature of the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the working class was not taken up by anybody. The State apparatus with all its courts, armed forces, and police exist to hold the current system together, as Chilean workers realized the hard way. The state cannot be replaced by socialist politicians but needs to be smashed and in its place has to be workers councils.
Reform or Revolution?
The ultimate lesson to draw from the rich history of Chile’s revolutionary process is that during revolutionary situations reformism can prove deadly. It is not that Salvador Allende envisioned a great “Chilean Road to Socialism” or had more pragmatic goal of workers emancipation but he had a different agenda and a fundamentally different understanding of how to build a socialist society. What Allende tried to do is impossible: a strategy of cross class alliance and socialism through legal reforms. Rosa Luxemburg the German socialist, argued over a century ago against this in her pamphlet: Reform or Revolution:
He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same game goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for the surface modifications of the old order... not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism, not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself... (157, original emphasis)
What is required is the organization of the working class from below and a revolutionary workers party to overthrow capitalism, and in its place a truly democratic society where workers control and human need is the order of the day. This I believe was possible in Chile, and it would be a tragedy if we did not learn from it.
On September 11 of 1973, a dramatic revolutionary situation was destroyed and crushed. As tanks roared passed the city streets of Santiago bombs rained down on the presidential palace La Moneda, where the president Salvador Allende now lay dead. This was the tragic scene of a coup conducted by General Agustin Pinochet and the Chilean ruling class with assistance by the C.I.A. In the aftermath of the coup, 3.000 leftists, Allende supports, trade unionists and revolutionary workers were killed. Not only were they killed some were tortured and made examples of for future generations. Victor Jara the famous folk musician--The Bob Dylan of Chile--was beaten, burned in the hands and then forced to play his guitar before being gun down in the Chilean National Stadium where thousands of others were brutally murdered. It has become a ritual on every September 11 for Chileans to protest the Pinochet dictatorship and to fight for the state to recognize the real numbers of those killed by it. What is important for us is not to mourn those killed, but to learn. The best tribute we can pay to thousands of radicals who lost their lives is to draw the lessons from the mistakes they paid for with their lives. It is for this reason why I will not focus on the role of the C.I.A. and U.S. imperialism but instead on the mistakes made by the Chilean left in order to learn from it.
Today I believe that the lessons of the Chilean Road to Socialism have never been more relevant for us to come to terms with. There has been a reawakening of the Latin American working class, from the factory takeovers of Argentinean workers in 2001, the heroic Venezuelan workers defense of Chavez during the attempted coup in 2002, to the uprising in Oaxaca Mexico, there has been a sharpening in class struggle. If we look closer at these struggles against the ruthless free market, we find the movement dealing with key questions: Is there a need for the explicit building of a revolutionary organization? Can the existing state be used for the purpose of the movement? Is the working class capable of leading a revolution? Can we reform capitalism? The Chilean revolutionary process and its rich history I believe gives us answers to those questions and teaches us important lessons that are indispensable in struggles that lay ahead. Primarily lessons for the potential of working class struggle from below.
Promises of the Unidad Popular and the dominance of the Right:
Salvador Allende’s rise to presidency took place at a time when the Chilean working class began to grow much more confident and class-consciousness was rising. Allende assumed the presidency in November of 1970 through the coalition of leftist parties called Popular Unity. The UP was composed of six parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party. Both parties had a mass base in the industrial working class of Chile that had been forged in the early parts of the century with the upheaval of the Nitrate workers. Both political parties had highly become focused on popular front strategies since the 1930’s, even electing as president in 1938 member of the Radical Party, Aguirre Cerda, effectively putting the Popular Front in power for the first time. The popular front strategy was nothing new. This tactic of class collaboration was born out of the necessity for Stalin in the 1930’s to seek allies against a war with Hitler. In practice, this meant that socialists were to be uncritical of reformists, the middle class and bourgeois parties and seek to work together. So by the time Allende was elected president in 1970 it was his sixth appearance as a candidate for a broad coalition like the UP and his third time as president.
It is important to understand the period before Allende’s presidency because it helps explain what were the expectations and visions of the organized left that became his supporter. Popular Unity was different from other Popular Fronts strategy due to three key elements, the failure of the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei, to live up to its promises of reform and the crises of his government, which set in motion the second element: an increasingly combative working class movement. The Frei government had promised agrarian reform in the countryside to ease rural tensions. However, the land owning oligarchy was not going to hear it, a class that Frei’s government did not dare confront. This caused many peasants who had voted for Frei into open revolt. Frei’s government also promised industrial growth in the cities that attracted thousands of unemployed rural workers into working class areas and cities, who at once in the city began to demand free housing and basic services like clean water and food. What did all this mean concretely?: for one the strikes in this period increased and so did the workers involved: from 230.725 in 1969 to 316.280 a year later. Factory occupations also rose from five in 1968 to 24 in 1969; they then jumped to 339 occupations in 1971. It also led to the third central element that led to the rise of Allende, which was the reorganization of the left during the crises of Frei’s government. The Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR), which was a group who formed in 1965 and with a deep admiration towards Che Guevara, began to play a key role in the student movement for educational reform. In addition, sections of Frei’s party began to split forming the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, all of whom joined UP, with a vision that Allende will conduct the agrarian reform that Frei did not pass. Allende rise to presidency rode the waves of working class and peasant struggles, which will be reflected in its program.
The program of the UP tried to unite conflicting class interests, for which its survival in the electoral arena depended on. If you take a look at UP’s platform and their “Forty Measures” they promised honest government or “Popular Government”, an end to corruption and the abuse of power, more extensive and cheaper social benefits. The UP’s electoral program promised a number of strategic economic measures, including the nationalization of Chile’s U.S. owned copper mines, private banks and insurance companies. Allende proposed to establish a “social property sector” whose goal was to protect important industrial monopolies and certain parts of the service sector, which were important for social and economic development. Allende’s economic policy, according to socialist Mike Gonzalez in his article Chile: the Workers United: “was an orthodox Keynesian plan for reactivating the economy. It contained no challenge to the dominance of private capital; on the contrary, it gave the industrial bourgeoisie a range of guarantees and provided land- owners with generous compensation”. An example of this was the Agrarian Reform Act that Frei did not dare pass; unlike Frei, however, Allende promised landowners possession of the most productive acres and the best farm machinery, thus preventing a confrontation with the landowning class.
This is what Peter Winn author of Weavers of Revolution has to say about UP’s electoral program:
The UP’s program reflected its political strategy an alliance of the middle and lower classes, blue and white-collar workers, intellectuals and peasants. It contained something for almost everybody and particular assurances to the non-Marxist middle class that a Popular Unity victory would benefit them and hurt only "monopolists" and "imperialists". (Winn 65).
Further on, I will argue that this strategy was untenable and consequently led Allende to be more alienated to the interests of the working class.
Within Allende’s Socialist Party there existed a strong current that believed socialism had to be achieved through a revolution and if you read the party’s literature and paper Chile Hoy, that was put forward. However, Salvador Allende, who I believe represented the conservative wing of the Socialist Party, had a fundamentally different understanding of Chile’s road towards socialism:
In the transition to socialism, the legal norms will respond to the necessity of the peoples will to build a new society...On the realism of the Congress, it depends, to a great extent that the capitalist legality transitions to the socialist legality, according to the socio-economic transformations that we are implanting, without a violent fracture, which we responsibly want to avoid. (Textos Escogidos 119, emphasis added.)
This was Salvador Allende’s May 22 1971 message to a congress made up of the Chilean right wing and parties of the ruling class, titled The Road to Socialism. Allende’s strategy was to enact reforms that was possible to carry out under existing legislation and could win approval of the congress. Consequently, allowing the right to determine the pace of change. In fact, the congress believed having him in power would actually help restrain and control working class self-activity, which was growing.
On the contrary to some bosses’ fears, we see that Allende does not want to confront the Chilean bourgeoisie. Even before he was able to assume the presidency as the worlds first ever “Marxist elected president” Allende had to agree to terms that would keep the existing political establishment together, make sure that the legal system would not be touched, and most importantly that the armed forces would remain free to “guarantee democracy”. This behind the scenes agreement with the ruling class i.e. bosses, bankers, owners of the press etc, is known as the “Statute of Guarantees”. What is interesting about the passing of this agreement is that it was never discussed and voted on with rank-file members of the UP. On another level, this agreement proved that Allende had a fundamentally different vision of socialism. For Allende socialism meant turning the existing state apparatus with its laws, courts and armed forces into a pro-worker state. However, what Allende failed to understand is that the ruling class does not take this lying down. I will try to demonstrate in later events that developed in Chile that proved this reformist view wrong.
Cracks in the Coalition – Advanzar o Consolidar:
The first year of Allende’s presidency was relatively peaceful. Nonetheless, there were some stirrings in the countryside in where land seizures began to rise; partially due to UP’s commitment to agrarian reform and the rise of confidence in peasants. Overall, in 1970 the Chilean working class experienced a rise in wages, which was soon to be cut short. We can say that this was the calm before the storm. The ruling class at this moment was looking for the correct moment to launch its first challenge, and the moment was November 1971 with leader of the Cuban Revolution--Fidel Castro visiting Chile. The march, which is known as the “March of the Empty Pots”, was organized by the right wing parties, in which hundreds of middle class women came out with their saucepans (and house cleaners) in a symbol of the shortages (and class status). Although this might seem like a joke, it was actually a warning sign by the Chilean ruling class of battles to come and a concrete effort to begin mobilizing the middle class. So in this light Allende began his second year in office, and it was here where a debate within the UP began to form.
The debate in the UP and its conclusion further highlight its political character. The dispute focused around the questions: should the UP support the workers in their struggle to defend their living standards? Moreover, if the workers decided to fight back what political strategy should it be carried out with? These debates, took place in two UP conferences at La Arrayan and Lo Curro in February and June 1972, and were centered on the label advance or consolidate. The right wing of the Popular Unity argued to stop the process of reforms and to seek wider electoral support before advancing, while the left wing argued for the quickening pace of the reforms and the continuing enforcement of the working class, which had begun to prove it can struggle forward. However, the left wing’s arguments were not substantial enough to lead to a decisive break with the Popular Unity’s framework. Nor did it lead to question the relationship between the state and the ruling class, nor the control and direction of the economy and the role of the working class in that process. In the end, the left of the UP, which consisted of elements of the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU), the leftwing of the Socialist Party, and the Christian Left were poorly organized to amount a serious challenge in the political direction of the UP. So it was at the Lo Curro conference where the rightwing secured a majority. In this context, the boom of 1971 had receded and the Chilean ruling class was reassured that Allende and Popular Unity were more interested in compromise. Chile under Allende was about to experience some of the harshest class battles the world has seen, but yet the organized left and more importantly the mass socialist and communist parties in the UP were only to be witnesses at the brave creativity of the Chilean working class to confront the bourgeoisie’s offensive.
The Rise of Los Cordones and the betrayal of the UP:
The independent organization of the Chilean working class and poor peasants was a process in which peoples expectations were raised and their living standards attacked while the right wing of the UP sat back and watched and even at times attacked them. It was also a process of confusion. One of the UP’s famous slogans was “popular power”. For UP officials this meant unconditional support for their government, while for workers this actually meant create socialism right here right now. The first of these and one of the most important organizations to appear in the political scene in Chile was the Cordon Cerrillos-Maipu, a cordon meaning industrial belts, which were workers councils setup across Chile in response to the attacks on the working class. The town Cerrillos is an industrial suburb of Chile’s capital and had the largest concentration of industries in Chile with over 45.000 workers and 250 factories. Maipu is a farming area that borders Cerrillos. The forming of this cordon like others arose due to concrete problems. In Maipu 44 peasant leaders were arrested for taking over a farm that was soon to be expropriated. The Judge in this case ruled against the peasants and used government policy to back himself. This led to large demonstrations against the judge and an increase in land seizures as well. Meanwhile, Cerrillos was going through several waves of strikes and factory occupations, in particular in a factory owned by textile monopolists Yarur Inc. This factory, which was not due to be expropriated under the governments list, was taken over by the workers in an attempt to push the government’s policy further to the left and in a concrete effort to raise their living standards. In an inspiring meeting with the Yarur workers and union officials, the workers decided to “socialize” the textile plant. This is an account of one of Allende’s representatives Jorge Varas who was present at the meeting:
I have never in my life seen anything like this... When the union officerd told them that the company didn't want to receive them and had denied all their petitions, the people stopped them and began to cry 'Socialization! Socialization!' It was incredible. It was revolution! Two-thousand workers standing and shouting: 'We want Socialization' And the women calling out: 'No more exploitation!' They were in a state of euphoria. (Winn 174, original emphasis)
What is interesting about what occurred afterwards was that the Yarur workers demanded that Jorge Varas speak in behalf of Allende, this is what he had to say (note on his language):
"Comrades! You have decided that this enterprise should pass to the social property area. My duty is to demand this of the government." There was a round of applause; then an old-timer banged his fist on the table and cried: 'And right now, comrades! We are going on strike and we won't go back with those octopuses inside!' Jorge Varas decided that he had no choice except to follow their lead. "Well, comrades if you resolve to go on strike immediately, we have to see what is the best way to do it..." 'By seizing the industry!" one old-timer shouted out from below. "No comrade! We are not discussing a factory seizure. Yes, we will take the industry, but from outside. You have to guard the strategic spots of the enterprise...while we propose this to the president of the Republic. And I know that he will have to accept your position." (Winn 175, original emphasis).
This was a primary example of how workers were ready to go on the offensive against an increasingly paranoid ruling class, however, Allende and the UP and their revolution from above, acted as a brake in this process because they sought to work jointly with the legal system.
Because of these joint struggles, Cerrillos and Maipu both joined forces with an aim of denouncing the vacillations of the so-called “Peoples Government” and demanding it take action in behalf of the workers. The Cordon Cerrillos put forward a political program, which was far in advance than anything the organized left was arguing for:
1. Support President Allende’s government in so far as it interprets the struggles and mobilizations of the workers.
2. Expropriate all monopoly firms and those with more than 14 million escudos capital, as well as all industries which are in any way strategic, all those which belong to foreign capital, and all those which boycott production or do not fulfill their commitments to their workers.
3. Workers’ control over production in all industries, farms, mines and so on, through delegates’ councils, delegates being recallable by the base...
4. Set up the Popular Assembly to replace the bourgeois parliament. (Roxbourough 170).Clearly, this strategy was fundamentally different from the UP’s: a revolutionary alliance between the working class and other oppressed groups, and not with the middle class, under the program of: workers’ control. It was also a testament to the revolutionary consciousness of the Chilean working class. Despite this, the program of the cordon contained two key weaknesses, one was president Allende and the second was the problem of what to do with the bourgeois state. The problem with supporting Allende is that it hid the real political situation, which the working class found themselves in. The working class was directly challenging the control of the ruling class on the shop floor, this in turn was setting the stage for the bourgeoisie to strike back. Allende was not interested in protecting the concrete gains the working class militants had achieved. While the workers were struggling with how to go forward, Allende called their acts “crass irresponsibility”. This was so because “the government already represented the interests of the working class”, so they had no reason to struggle. Instead, during this time the UP was trying to convince workers of the participatory role of the armed forces in Chile’s Road to Socialism. Once again, the temperature of the class struggle was about to rise, and so was the power of the cordones with the Transportation Bosses’ lockout that began on October 11 1972.
Bosses on the Offensive and the response of the cordones:
The bosses in Chile had several strategies to counter the revolutionary process in Chile. What occurred on September 11 was the last brutal option. Before that, the ruling class relied on its economic position as owners of the means of productions and its role in the flow of capital to bring the country to its knees. The impact of the transportation bosses’ lockout was to be devastating. The absence of road transport, which Chile heavily relies on, would have stopped the transportation of spare parts, raw materials and most importantly the distribution of food for the working class. The strategy of the bosses was to use their economic leverage to bring the country to the brink of chaos and blame the policies of Allende. Their goal: was for Allende to resign or to win effective control of congress in the upcoming congressional elections of March 73 in order to impeach Allende. Once again, the Chilean working class rose to the occasion. All across Chile workers began to form comandos. These were community-based councils that sought to continue the distribution of food and to continue to run hospitals, which had been abandoned by doctors who supported the lockout. In factories across Chile where bosses tried to stop production in support of the lockout, workers took over the factory in order to keep supplies moving and industries running. New cordones sprang up in every major industrial town of Santiago with the simple task of seizing control of the factories; protect truck drivers who were still working from fascist violence, and to maintain production. The class character of the October Bosses’ strike made it possible for the Chilean working class to organize itself in opposition.
Allende’s response to the lockout was to immediately please the bourgeoisie. After failed negotiations with the transportation bosses Allende reshuffled his cabinet, adding three heads of the armed forces and declared a “State of Emergency” using the army to “restore order” and to return factories taken over by workers to the bosses, for workers this was not a moment for negotiations. These are the words from a young woman worker in Fabrilana after hearing Allende’s response:
I think comrade Allende has been very soft; he says it’s because he wants to avoid violence, but I think we should respond with more force, scare them to death. They’re trying to take away what we’ve won. (Gonzalez 58)
Without a doubt if it were not for the heroic efforts of the workers, Chile would have collapsed. Not only did workers defeat the ruling class offensive but they did this in spite of the vacillations of the leadership in the left. In the process of taking over production, workers experienced a glimpse of what it means to run society. This was the time when Chilean-working class was at its most active and most militant and yet the UP and Allende acted as an obstacle to the political development of the working class movement. Yet no organization in the left argued for an independent break from the UP. Instead, the leftwing of the Socialist Party who were playing an important in the cordones, continued to provide Allende with a leftwing cover to his continuing rightward shift, by not breaking from him.
The congressional elections of March 1973 that the ruling class had prepared so much for had strengthen the UP who received 44% of the votes. The increase vote for the UP was clearly a demand of action by the masses. The goal of the ruling class of undermining UP’s electoral support with the bosses’ lockout failed miserably. Now, the ruling class realized that in order to do away with Allende it would have to be through forcible means. At the same time, the elections of March were made top priorities in all main leftist parties and Chile’s national trade union (CUT), which worked closely with the cordones. The channeling of working class militancy into and election campaign led to the cordones becoming demobilized and losing its momentum after the October bosses’ strike in where the immediate goal was to occupy factories and resist and it now became large demonstrations for Allende and the UP with banners declaring “Workers Firmly behind its Government”. Peter Winn rightly captures this shift at the worker run Yarur factory:
Ex-Yarur was no longer in the vanguard of the revolution from below, but rather a bastion of worker support for Allende's more cautious reform from above. It was a shift symbolized by Salvador Allende's decision to celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration at the Yarur mill, where he thanked the cheering workers for their support and appealed to them to channel "the commitment demonstrated during the October strike" into the election campaign. (241)
The second setback for the working class movement came with the El Teniente Copper Miner’s Strike that lasted from April 1973 until June, approximately two months before the coup. The workers went on strike here because Allende failed to deliver a promise to raise wages for them. This strike is important for several reasons. El Teniente at the time was the world’s largest copper mine, secondly miners in Chile have historically played a leading role in the labor movement, but as of yet had not been active in revolutionary process of Chile. Thirdly, the strike represented a direct challenge to Allende’s role as negotiator between the price of labor and capital. Nonetheless, the weakness of the left was the order of the day. The CP denounced the miners as a “labor aristocracy”, while the UP called the leader of the miners strike a “Nazi”. Other sections of the left were less harsh; the Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR) characterized the struggle of the miners as pure “economism”. The reality is that an increase in wages for the miners would have a come out of the pockets of the bourgeoisie, as the price of copper in the world market was declining. The miners strike also brought to light a key weakness of the cordones in Chile. The traditional best-organized sectors of the Chilean working class were absent from the cordones national network. Two months before the coup, the miners strike was defeated but there was still patches of resistance in the working class movement particularly in Entre Lagos where workers occupied a sawmill factory, and Constitucion a coastal town which was under direct control of the masses. However, by this time the working class movement had reached a point of no return.
On June 29, Colonel Robert Souper declared a coup and rolled his tanks into the streets of Santiago. The workers responded by taking over factories, reorganizing the distribution of goods and arming themselves against the threat of the bourgeoisie. Souper’s attempted coup was very similar to the bosses’ strike of October 1972. However, there were some distinct factors: by this time, the Chilean workers had experienced several months of self-organization and secondly, the military factor was now posed as the central question: in whose interest did the state and its armed forces with its guns, tanks and helicopters represent? The ingredients for a social revolution were here: the means of production and distribution and workers defense and social services were in the hands of the cordones and the comandos. At the same time the ruling class was deeply divided, some considered Souper’s attempted coup to be to premature. Chile’s economy was paralyzed with the ruling class ceasing to invest and with bosses’ threatening to strike again. After the failure of Souper’s coup, Allende declared his second “State of Emergency” and passed the Arms Control Law whose purpose were not to disrupt those preparing to overthrow him but as a way of attacking and disarming the cordones and the working class. It was his last way of showing sections of the ruling class that he was determined to control and restrain working class militancy. The army was sent into various comandos and to major cordones like Cordon Cerrillo to occupy the factories. At the same time, Allende promoted General Augusto Pinochet to Commander in Chief, exactly 19 days before the coup. To Unidad Popular the self-activity of the working class was the main enemy.
The role of the Revolutionary Party and the State:
Clearly, workers in Chile were ready to struggle against the bourgeoisies order. The cordones and comandos in Chile legitimately represented the embryo of a socialist society. Yet to the very end, every organization in the Chilean left directed its forces, energy and political outlook towards the Popular Unity. What was missing was a national political leadership of revolutionary workers, independent of Allende, whose vision was the arm conquest of power by the cordones, comandos and workers. Organized into a truly revolutionary party could have provided clear leadership and an alternative strategy from the debates in the UP and could have called out Allende for what he really was. Without this the working class became demoralized and it was in this moment that with the sense of “we struggled but got nothing” that the ruling class decided to launch its decisive blow.
The need for the organization of a party that is rooted in the working class and which can struggle hand in hand with workers cannot be overstated. Workers are not blank slates. If they are not won to the need for a fundamental transformation of society, they will continue to accept the old ideas that justify the existing society. It is also true that there is unevenness in class-consciousness in the working class, some being more conservative than others are. However, the role of a party would be to organize the most militant sections of the working class into a single organization that could then strategize on the next steps and assess political developments. In Chile, this was sorely missing. So instead of a clear left-wing case for the need of the cordones to defend the cause of the striking miners, you had the left turn their backs on them. And instead of a concise left wing case for why the workers should not use their energies for the reelection of the UP and instead focus on retaining the power on the shop floor, workers began to demobilize for UP’s congressional campaign. The various leftist parties did not provide the working class to learn and generalize from there struggles but this does not arise out of nowhere, it requires the conscious intervention of those truly seeking to build a new society.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution wrote in State and Revolution:
Every great revolution raises practically, palpably, and on a mass scale of action, namely, the question of the relation between special bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population”. (State-Rev- 11)
This was true in 1973 where you had dual power between the cordones and the military. What was also true is that the nature of the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the working class was not taken up by anybody. The State apparatus with all its courts, armed forces, and police exist to hold the current system together, as Chilean workers realized the hard way. The state cannot be replaced by socialist politicians but needs to be smashed and in its place has to be workers councils.
Reform or Revolution?
The ultimate lesson to draw from the rich history of Chile’s revolutionary process is that during revolutionary situations reformism can prove deadly. It is not that Salvador Allende envisioned a great “Chilean Road to Socialism” or had more pragmatic goal of workers emancipation but he had a different agenda and a fundamentally different understanding of how to build a socialist society. What Allende tried to do is impossible: a strategy of cross class alliance and socialism through legal reforms. Rosa Luxemburg the German socialist, argued over a century ago against this in her pamphlet: Reform or Revolution:
He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same game goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for the surface modifications of the old order... not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism, not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself... (157, original emphasis)
What is required is the organization of the working class from below and a revolutionary workers party to overthrow capitalism, and in its place a truly democratic society where workers control and human need is the order of the day. This I believe was possible in Chile, and it would be a tragedy if we did not learn from it.
Monday, April 7, 2008
The Struggle at Smithfield and Beyond- An Essay on today's Labor Movement
In 1906, U.S. author Uptown Sinclair exposed to the world the horrors immigrant workers faced in the meatpacking plants of Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. The public outcry following Sinclair’s expose led to inspection of the industry and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was meant to protect the integrity of U.S. meatpacking in the eyes of millions. However, it was the 1930’s surge of industrial unionism and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the sharp class battles during that period that meatpacking workers actually experienced a significant rise in living standards and the right to join or form a union.
Today’s labor movement is a different story. The U.S. labor movement has been in a full-scale retreat since the late 1970’s. Union membership is at an all time low: just 12.5 percent of public wage and salary workers belong to one (Smith x). This has to do with several factors, the growing bureaucratization of U.S. unions, the unwillingness of labor leaders to adapt to the structural changes in the world economy, and the union leaders overall strategy of business partnership.
To argue what it will take to rebuild the labor movement in this country is a task well beyond the scope of this essay. However, by focusing on a struggle-taking place at the largest pork processing plant in the world, Smithfield Foods Tar Heel plant, I want to show what is at stake and what are the challenges facing the entire U.S. labor movement. The struggle for unionization and workers’ solidarity at the Tar Heel plant has been occurring for over a decade. It is important to understand what is taking place here because it highlights several important factors that the labor movement can learn from. First, Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is located in the south (North Carolina) where historically, the labor movement has failed to organize workers. Secondly, the racial composition of workers at the Tar Heel plant are white, Black and Latinos. This has historically made it harder for workers to organize since employers have used racism as a key way to pit workers against each other. Thirdly, many of the Latino workers are also undocumented, which makes the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights key to this struggle. Lastly, the meatpacking industry has never been more central to the U.S. economy, they are “responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains” all across the United States (Schlosser 149). The battle that is occurring in Smithfield, i.e. the struggle of white, Black and immigrant workers to form a union and, resist “no match” immigration firings will be crucial to rebuilding a strong labor movement.
Since the 1960’s the meatpacking industry has experienced a massive expansion and growth, while simultaneously there has been a decline of unions and workers wages, this is no coincidence. (Horowitz 245). Traditionally, being a meatpacker was considered a well paying blue-collar job, which provided a stable income and a union. In fact, meatpackers after World War II exceeded the national average for workers in manufacturing (Schlosser 153). However, the meatpacking industry was about to experience a massive structural adjustment starting from the shop floor. In 1961, Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) opened up its first slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, in what was to be known as the “IBP revolution.” This is important for several key reasons. First, the plant was situated in a location outside the traditional union bastions, like New York, Chicago or Minnesota. The bosses understood that in order to compete with other industry giants, their plant needed to remain union free. Secondly, IBP eliminated the need for “skilled” workers in the process of meat production. This is how Eric Schlosser, in his muckraking work Fast Food Nation, describes the plant:
The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again…The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. (156)
Using cheap labor on an assembly line to turn sides of beef into ready-to-sell cuts, the company simultaneously de-skilled meatpacking, ran the unions out, and made skilled union butchers who worked in grocery stores obsolete. The “IBP revolution” was going to have a huge impact to the rest of the industry. In fact, it set the standards for the next decades. An example of the impact of the “IBP revolution” was the labor struggles in 1979 between Monfort executives and Greeley workers. Monfort wanted to follow the path of IBP by slashing wages and applying tougher policy on labor unions. Greeley workers who were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) understood what was underway, and decided to strike. Monfort began to hire scabs and hire thugs to beat up and intimidate striking workers, while president Ken Monfort decide to purchase a new slaughterhouse in Nebraska, from Swift & Company (Schlosser 157). The outcome of this struggle was disastrous for workers. After Greeley workers decided to work without a contract, Monfort closed the plant and fired all workers and in his new plant began to hire undocumented workers. This move allowed him to pay low wages, have access to large numbers of workers, and to prevent unions from organizing the workers. Today the basic pay is $9.25 an hour, if this adjusted by inflation, today’s wages is more than a third lower than when the plant opened forty years ago (Schlosser 160).
These attacks on unions however, did not go down without a fight. The Hormel meatpackers’ strike, which lasted for fourteen months, fought against bosses attempt to slash wages and to create the now fashionable two-tier wage system that offers new hires much lower wages than current workers. When the 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the UFCW voted to strike, the national union was not happy about it. In fact, the national leaders did all they could do to undermine the strike and workers’ solidarity by calling the P-9 strikes a “plague” and arguing that Local P-9 “sought a better deal for Austin alone” (Smith 250). So much for an injury to one being an injury to all. The conflict at Hormel revealed the rank-and-file anger among packinghouse workers at the assault on their living standards. It also revealed the catastrophic role that the national leadership of UFCW played. This was also true for the whole labor movement in the 1980’s and onward. Instead of union leaders representing the mass anger that existed below, they discouraged working class militancy and workers’ solidarity across industry lines. The question that was at stake then and desperately more so today, is how do we combat the employers’ offensive and the overall shift of power from labor to capital. In the end, the national union took over Local P-9 and negotiated a new contract with the scabs that stole the jobs of the strikers, ending the strike in a blistering defeat.
The decline of unions and assault on workers allowed for the meatpacking industry to expand in huge proportions. Therefore, it was by 1983, the number of workers under master agreements in the industry had fallen to thirty-thousand, effectively leaving each slaughterhouse to fight for themselves (Horowitz 275). The effects of the decline in unionism in meatpacking were the increase in the pace of work and consequently a higher rate of injury. This is how Roger Horowitz in his excellent work “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” details the decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking:
Towns that lured packinghouses in hope of prosperity have found that the low wage levels have failed to provide a spur to the local economy; instead the poorly paid workers bring crime and increased demands on local services…The decline of industrial unionism reflected incessant pressure by capital for lower labor costs and more control over the work process. Companies that emerged victorious from the competitive scramble were those that most successfully increased the rate of exploitation of today’s makers of meat (279).
The increase of the rate of exploitation, the creation of “middle America” ghettos, the decline of job safety, the increasing number of debt in working class families, and decline of wages: all form part of the employer’s offensive and shift of class forces in the U.S. The quarter-century old retreat has left a trail of declining living and working standards for union and non-union workers alike. Unions as institutions, with some exceptions, have failed their members and proved unable to recruit new ones in sufficient numbers to slow down a deteriorating balance of class forces in American society that has created a capitalist class of super rich individuals whose wealth has never been greater in history (Moody 2). The result is a generation of workers that only know defeats. However, the systematic attack on workers living standards provides the recipe for acts of rebellions and resistance, which the labor movement sorely needs to organize.
The struggle at Smithfield is part of the acts of rebellion from below that will be crucial to increasing the confidence of other meatpacking workers and rebuilding the labor movement through clashes with bosses. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize Smithfield workers since 1994. The battle has featured two attempts, in 1994 and 1997, for workers to vote for whether or not they want to be represented by a union. However, workers have often testified that the company continually harasses and interrogates workers who show signs of being pro-union (Colson 8). In the 1997 campaign, management beat up, maced, handcuffed and arrested union activist and supporters in an effort to send a message to all of Smithfield workers. (Human Rights Watch 85). Smithfield executives fear the organization of their workers into a union, after all Smithfield generated over $172 million in profits in 2006 alone (Colson 8). These profits are coming straight from the backs of workers, who work for low wages in horrible conditions, brutal long hours, few benefits, and face anti-union harassment. The Tar Heel plant primarily runs off the labor of immigrant workers and African Americans, and small number of whites. New York Times Reporter Charlie LeDuff writes in his article: “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race” how bosses use racism as a way to divide workers:
Whites, Black, American Indians and Mexicans they all have their separate stations…the few whites on the pay role tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors, others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, it leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs in the factory.
This is one of the challenges workers face—how to build a multi-racial struggle that’s build on a class basis. In order to win in Smithfield, workers will need to organize across racial barriers and understand that what they all have in common are the horrible working conditions that benefit the bosses.
Another challenge facing Tar Heel workers has been the assault on undocumented workers. In November 2006, 1,000 workers walked out of the Tar Heel plant in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of 75 workers whose social security number did not match the federal government’s data. The strike settlement was able to rehire the 75 workers and secure no penalties for striking. A 2003 study by the Center for Economic Development explains the role that these “no-match” letters have been having, “many workers identified in the letters have quit their jobs out of concern the immigration authorities might raid their workplace…evidence indicates that many employers have used the letters to undermine workers’ right to organize” (Harkin 10). The Smithfield wildcat strike is a model for how workers can respond to “no-match” letters. The aim of the ruling class in this country is to create a guest-worker program that will create a two-tier system of workers in this country that directly undermines worker’s solidarity. As a result, it will be easier to squeeze workers wages and it would effectively prevent immigrant workers from seeking roots into this country. This is why it is important for the labor movement and union leaders to fight against politicians so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Historically, workers of different races or nationalities have advanced together, or they have sunk together. That is why all workers and their unions should not only welcome immigrants into the labor movement, but they should support a real reform that legalizes millions of undocumented workers, without forcing them to accept the second-class category of “guest worker.”
The battle at the Tar Heel plant will prove to be challenging for workers. However, its success depends on the ability of the UFCW and Smithfield workers to take up the issues that are at the heart of this struggle, i.e. racism on the shop floor, immigrant’s rights and the ruthlessness of the meatpacking industries drive for profit. All of these issues need to be confronted on an industrial wide basis, workers at Tyson, which is the world’s largest meat producer, should know what their brothers and sisters are facing in North Carolina. The 1,100 workers at the six Swift and Co. meatpacking plants that were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year should not be left to fight their struggles alone. Workers’ solidarity across the meatpacking industry will be key to fighting their greedy bosses and Smithfield is just one piece of that struggle.
Works Cited
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Human Rights Watch. New York City: Human Rights Report, 2005.
Colson, Nicole. "Smithfield Food's Rotten Record." Socialist Worker 16 Dec. 2006, 613 ed.: 8-9.
Harkin, Shaun, and Nicole Colson. "Walkout At Tar Heel." International Socialist Review 1 (January-February 2007): 9-11.
Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and Whote, Unite and Fight!" a Social Histroy of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 1997.
Leduff, Charlie. "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race." New York Times 16 June 2000. < res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63" res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63">.
Moody, Kim. U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: the Failure of Reform From Below and the Promise of Revival From Below. New York City: Verso, 2007.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark side of the All-American Meal. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: History of Working Class Radicalism in the U.S. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Today’s labor movement is a different story. The U.S. labor movement has been in a full-scale retreat since the late 1970’s. Union membership is at an all time low: just 12.5 percent of public wage and salary workers belong to one (Smith x). This has to do with several factors, the growing bureaucratization of U.S. unions, the unwillingness of labor leaders to adapt to the structural changes in the world economy, and the union leaders overall strategy of business partnership.
To argue what it will take to rebuild the labor movement in this country is a task well beyond the scope of this essay. However, by focusing on a struggle-taking place at the largest pork processing plant in the world, Smithfield Foods Tar Heel plant, I want to show what is at stake and what are the challenges facing the entire U.S. labor movement. The struggle for unionization and workers’ solidarity at the Tar Heel plant has been occurring for over a decade. It is important to understand what is taking place here because it highlights several important factors that the labor movement can learn from. First, Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant is located in the south (North Carolina) where historically, the labor movement has failed to organize workers. Secondly, the racial composition of workers at the Tar Heel plant are white, Black and Latinos. This has historically made it harder for workers to organize since employers have used racism as a key way to pit workers against each other. Thirdly, many of the Latino workers are also undocumented, which makes the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights key to this struggle. Lastly, the meatpacking industry has never been more central to the U.S. economy, they are “responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains” all across the United States (Schlosser 149). The battle that is occurring in Smithfield, i.e. the struggle of white, Black and immigrant workers to form a union and, resist “no match” immigration firings will be crucial to rebuilding a strong labor movement.
Since the 1960’s the meatpacking industry has experienced a massive expansion and growth, while simultaneously there has been a decline of unions and workers wages, this is no coincidence. (Horowitz 245). Traditionally, being a meatpacker was considered a well paying blue-collar job, which provided a stable income and a union. In fact, meatpackers after World War II exceeded the national average for workers in manufacturing (Schlosser 153). However, the meatpacking industry was about to experience a massive structural adjustment starting from the shop floor. In 1961, Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) opened up its first slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, in what was to be known as the “IBP revolution.” This is important for several key reasons. First, the plant was situated in a location outside the traditional union bastions, like New York, Chicago or Minnesota. The bosses understood that in order to compete with other industry giants, their plant needed to remain union free. Secondly, IBP eliminated the need for “skilled” workers in the process of meat production. This is how Eric Schlosser, in his muckraking work Fast Food Nation, describes the plant:
The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again…The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. (156)
Using cheap labor on an assembly line to turn sides of beef into ready-to-sell cuts, the company simultaneously de-skilled meatpacking, ran the unions out, and made skilled union butchers who worked in grocery stores obsolete. The “IBP revolution” was going to have a huge impact to the rest of the industry. In fact, it set the standards for the next decades. An example of the impact of the “IBP revolution” was the labor struggles in 1979 between Monfort executives and Greeley workers. Monfort wanted to follow the path of IBP by slashing wages and applying tougher policy on labor unions. Greeley workers who were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) understood what was underway, and decided to strike. Monfort began to hire scabs and hire thugs to beat up and intimidate striking workers, while president Ken Monfort decide to purchase a new slaughterhouse in Nebraska, from Swift & Company (Schlosser 157). The outcome of this struggle was disastrous for workers. After Greeley workers decided to work without a contract, Monfort closed the plant and fired all workers and in his new plant began to hire undocumented workers. This move allowed him to pay low wages, have access to large numbers of workers, and to prevent unions from organizing the workers. Today the basic pay is $9.25 an hour, if this adjusted by inflation, today’s wages is more than a third lower than when the plant opened forty years ago (Schlosser 160).
These attacks on unions however, did not go down without a fight. The Hormel meatpackers’ strike, which lasted for fourteen months, fought against bosses attempt to slash wages and to create the now fashionable two-tier wage system that offers new hires much lower wages than current workers. When the 1,500 members of Local P-9 of the UFCW voted to strike, the national union was not happy about it. In fact, the national leaders did all they could do to undermine the strike and workers’ solidarity by calling the P-9 strikes a “plague” and arguing that Local P-9 “sought a better deal for Austin alone” (Smith 250). So much for an injury to one being an injury to all. The conflict at Hormel revealed the rank-and-file anger among packinghouse workers at the assault on their living standards. It also revealed the catastrophic role that the national leadership of UFCW played. This was also true for the whole labor movement in the 1980’s and onward. Instead of union leaders representing the mass anger that existed below, they discouraged working class militancy and workers’ solidarity across industry lines. The question that was at stake then and desperately more so today, is how do we combat the employers’ offensive and the overall shift of power from labor to capital. In the end, the national union took over Local P-9 and negotiated a new contract with the scabs that stole the jobs of the strikers, ending the strike in a blistering defeat.
The decline of unions and assault on workers allowed for the meatpacking industry to expand in huge proportions. Therefore, it was by 1983, the number of workers under master agreements in the industry had fallen to thirty-thousand, effectively leaving each slaughterhouse to fight for themselves (Horowitz 275). The effects of the decline in unionism in meatpacking were the increase in the pace of work and consequently a higher rate of injury. This is how Roger Horowitz in his excellent work “Negro and White, Unite and Fight” details the decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking:
Towns that lured packinghouses in hope of prosperity have found that the low wage levels have failed to provide a spur to the local economy; instead the poorly paid workers bring crime and increased demands on local services…The decline of industrial unionism reflected incessant pressure by capital for lower labor costs and more control over the work process. Companies that emerged victorious from the competitive scramble were those that most successfully increased the rate of exploitation of today’s makers of meat (279).
The increase of the rate of exploitation, the creation of “middle America” ghettos, the decline of job safety, the increasing number of debt in working class families, and decline of wages: all form part of the employer’s offensive and shift of class forces in the U.S. The quarter-century old retreat has left a trail of declining living and working standards for union and non-union workers alike. Unions as institutions, with some exceptions, have failed their members and proved unable to recruit new ones in sufficient numbers to slow down a deteriorating balance of class forces in American society that has created a capitalist class of super rich individuals whose wealth has never been greater in history (Moody 2). The result is a generation of workers that only know defeats. However, the systematic attack on workers living standards provides the recipe for acts of rebellions and resistance, which the labor movement sorely needs to organize.
The struggle at Smithfield is part of the acts of rebellion from below that will be crucial to increasing the confidence of other meatpacking workers and rebuilding the labor movement through clashes with bosses. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has been trying to unionize Smithfield workers since 1994. The battle has featured two attempts, in 1994 and 1997, for workers to vote for whether or not they want to be represented by a union. However, workers have often testified that the company continually harasses and interrogates workers who show signs of being pro-union (Colson 8). In the 1997 campaign, management beat up, maced, handcuffed and arrested union activist and supporters in an effort to send a message to all of Smithfield workers. (Human Rights Watch 85). Smithfield executives fear the organization of their workers into a union, after all Smithfield generated over $172 million in profits in 2006 alone (Colson 8). These profits are coming straight from the backs of workers, who work for low wages in horrible conditions, brutal long hours, few benefits, and face anti-union harassment. The Tar Heel plant primarily runs off the labor of immigrant workers and African Americans, and small number of whites. New York Times Reporter Charlie LeDuff writes in his article: “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race” how bosses use racism as a way to divide workers:
Whites, Black, American Indians and Mexicans they all have their separate stations…the few whites on the pay role tend to be mechanics or supervisors. As for the Indians, a handful are supervisors, others tend to get clean menial jobs like warehouse work. With few exceptions, it leaves the Blacks and Mexicans with the dirty jobs in the factory.
This is one of the challenges workers face—how to build a multi-racial struggle that’s build on a class basis. In order to win in Smithfield, workers will need to organize across racial barriers and understand that what they all have in common are the horrible working conditions that benefit the bosses.
Another challenge facing Tar Heel workers has been the assault on undocumented workers. In November 2006, 1,000 workers walked out of the Tar Heel plant in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of 75 workers whose social security number did not match the federal government’s data. The strike settlement was able to rehire the 75 workers and secure no penalties for striking. A 2003 study by the Center for Economic Development explains the role that these “no-match” letters have been having, “many workers identified in the letters have quit their jobs out of concern the immigration authorities might raid their workplace…evidence indicates that many employers have used the letters to undermine workers’ right to organize” (Harkin 10). The Smithfield wildcat strike is a model for how workers can respond to “no-match” letters. The aim of the ruling class in this country is to create a guest-worker program that will create a two-tier system of workers in this country that directly undermines worker’s solidarity. As a result, it will be easier to squeeze workers wages and it would effectively prevent immigrant workers from seeking roots into this country. This is why it is important for the labor movement and union leaders to fight against politicians so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Historically, workers of different races or nationalities have advanced together, or they have sunk together. That is why all workers and their unions should not only welcome immigrants into the labor movement, but they should support a real reform that legalizes millions of undocumented workers, without forcing them to accept the second-class category of “guest worker.”
The battle at the Tar Heel plant will prove to be challenging for workers. However, its success depends on the ability of the UFCW and Smithfield workers to take up the issues that are at the heart of this struggle, i.e. racism on the shop floor, immigrant’s rights and the ruthlessness of the meatpacking industries drive for profit. All of these issues need to be confronted on an industrial wide basis, workers at Tyson, which is the world’s largest meat producer, should know what their brothers and sisters are facing in North Carolina. The 1,100 workers at the six Swift and Co. meatpacking plants that were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year should not be left to fight their struggles alone. Workers’ solidarity across the meatpacking industry will be key to fighting their greedy bosses and Smithfield is just one piece of that struggle.
Works Cited
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. Human Rights Watch. New York City: Human Rights Report, 2005.
Colson, Nicole. "Smithfield Food's Rotten Record." Socialist Worker 16 Dec. 2006, 613 ed.: 8-9.
Harkin, Shaun, and Nicole Colson. "Walkout At Tar Heel." International Socialist Review 1 (January-February 2007): 9-11.
Horowitz, Roger. "Negro and Whote, Unite and Fight!" a Social Histroy of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 1997.
Leduff, Charlie. "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race." New York Times 16 June 2000. < res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63" res="9E07E7DF1E3EF935A25755C0A9669C8B63">.
Moody, Kim. U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: the Failure of Reform From Below and the Promise of Revival From Below. New York City: Verso, 2007.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark side of the All-American Meal. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: History of Working Class Radicalism in the U.S. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
HYPERLINK "http://www.easybib.com/products/mbp_parens.php"
On the Picket Line: Fresh Direct
The online grocery store Fresh Direct has joined countless other companies using the racist backlash against immigrants to thwart attempts of workers to organize.
Fresh Direct, a company that made $240 million in profits in 2006, has been battling both the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters Local 805 since 2006.
With a scheduled union ratification vote December 22-23, Fresh Direct told workers at their plant in Long Island City, Queens, that federal officials planned to check their immigration status and demanded that workers bring their documentation to work.
This led to undocumented workers walking off the job out of fear of being reported to immigration authorities. More than 250 workers didn't show up to work the next day, creating a state of fear and panic in a plant of 900 workers.
Javier Guzman, a former worker in the plant, who is now an organizer for UFCW Local 348-S, told me that “workers inside the plant are scared; management has told workers that it is the union's fault that the firings occurred.”
Some plant workers have drawn the conclusion that the union is to blame. This was evident during a community rally on December 20 in front of the plant. Dozens of workers watched the rally wearing “Vote No” pins, and jeered at the mention of the union.
Conditions inside the plant are staggeringly bad. Warehouse employees at the company often work 13-hour shifts in 30-degree temperatures for $7.50-9.75 per hour, while most unionized warehouse workers in New York City earn $10-20 an hour. Guzman also reported how management has been able to pit workers against each other by their race--putting Black supervisors to look after a section of the plant with Latino workers, while white supervisors oversee a section of the plant with Black workers.
In the end, with 500 plant workers participating in the election, 426 voted against unionization, with 73 in favor. The pro-union votes were split between Teamsters Local 805 and UFCW Local 348-S.
The UFCW has been trying to organize the plant since November 2006. José Merced, Local 348-S organizer, said that the struggle at Fresh Direct has just begun. “There can only be fair elections once Fresh Direct stops its anti-immigrant tactic of dividing workers and intimidating pro-union workers” he said.
Fresh Direct, a company that made $240 million in profits in 2006, has been battling both the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters Local 805 since 2006.
With a scheduled union ratification vote December 22-23, Fresh Direct told workers at their plant in Long Island City, Queens, that federal officials planned to check their immigration status and demanded that workers bring their documentation to work.
This led to undocumented workers walking off the job out of fear of being reported to immigration authorities. More than 250 workers didn't show up to work the next day, creating a state of fear and panic in a plant of 900 workers.
Javier Guzman, a former worker in the plant, who is now an organizer for UFCW Local 348-S, told me that “workers inside the plant are scared; management has told workers that it is the union's fault that the firings occurred.”
Some plant workers have drawn the conclusion that the union is to blame. This was evident during a community rally on December 20 in front of the plant. Dozens of workers watched the rally wearing “Vote No” pins, and jeered at the mention of the union.
Conditions inside the plant are staggeringly bad. Warehouse employees at the company often work 13-hour shifts in 30-degree temperatures for $7.50-9.75 per hour, while most unionized warehouse workers in New York City earn $10-20 an hour. Guzman also reported how management has been able to pit workers against each other by their race--putting Black supervisors to look after a section of the plant with Latino workers, while white supervisors oversee a section of the plant with Black workers.
In the end, with 500 plant workers participating in the election, 426 voted against unionization, with 73 in favor. The pro-union votes were split between Teamsters Local 805 and UFCW Local 348-S.
The UFCW has been trying to organize the plant since November 2006. José Merced, Local 348-S organizer, said that the struggle at Fresh Direct has just begun. “There can only be fair elections once Fresh Direct stops its anti-immigrant tactic of dividing workers and intimidating pro-union workers” he said.
Showing day laborers have the power to fight
An organizer on workers taking a stand for their rights
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to ALVARO LOPEZ about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.
CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.
CARLOS CANALES is the day labor organizer of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. Carlos fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and became a well-known organizer in New York. He talked to ALVARO LOPEZ about the conditions that immigrant day laborers face and how they have organized.
CAN YOU talk about what conditions were like for day laborers before there was a workers’ center?
IT HASN’T changed too much. We can say that for day laborers who are on the official side, there are some differences. The most important difference is that contractors tend to respect day laborers more when they’re in a workplace center we’ve organized than when they pick them up on the street.
The majority of the nonpayment of workers that we see here every week--I’d say 99 percent of it--is workers who are on the streets. They’re not coming from our workers’ centers.
That would be the most concrete difference. But there are other differences. For instance, workers in the workers’ center are more organized. They participate in the process of improving their condition or quality of life.
There’s only one rule that you hear me repeat over and over again every day when I go visiting: “You do not have to obey rules that are coming from outside the trailer. You have to disobey any rules that are imposed on you.”
You have to create your own rules--you have to create your own government here. Whatever’s happening at this trailer, you have to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to participate, that’s okay, but you have to ask whoever the coordinator or organizer is. Nothing that’s happening can be secret. It must be open.
HOW DO you organize workers’ centers?
MOST OF the time, workers call the workers’ center. We usually go to visit the place and we start a long process, visiting every day to establish relationships with the majority of people, because it may have been two or three who called on behalf of the others.
They’ll have a big meeting, and we’ll elect a board of workers. They are five or six workers, representing the rest. So after that, we train the new ones about what to say to the press, what not to say to the press, how we are going to face the issues, what the issues are.
Once they’re trained, in many cases, they realize they don’t have the power by themselves to change what they want to change. Politicians know that they don’t vote. So how will the gringo listen to us?
Sometimes they say that we’re immigrants, and they won’t pay attention to us. Then we go look for support before we go to negotiations with local authorities. We visit churches, identify people who’ll be in support of the workers, and then we organize a group of supporters to support the day laborers and a workers’ center.
The day laborers begin a steady process of negotiations, asking local authorities to assign an official place where they can stand and wait for contractors. So that the media and the authorities know that they have a place to stay, and the police from now on won’t come to bother them.
Also in the workers’ center, there are other complementary benefits, like English as a Second Language, computers to use, workshops on basic labor rights, heath information about things like TB, immigration courses, and any other workshop that people want.
Every Friday, we have general assemblies with workers, because the maximum authority is with the workers. They have to do the deciding in an open meeting. So they can debate and everybody can give opinions and vote.
HOW DID the contractors respond? Have you had run-ins with the Minutemen?
IT DEPENDS. Here in Long Island, in Nassau County, the most difficult place that we’ve found to organize labor is Farmingdale. In Suffolk County, it’s Farmingville. In Farmingville, it has been impossible to organize a working center because there are a lot of people who are anti-immigrant.
In Farmingville, you have Sachem Quality of Life, a group of local residents who are organizing, and their only purpose is to target day laborers. They were protesting at a 7-11 to stop contractors from picking up day laborers. They told the contractors to go to the Department of Labor.
They’ve done a lot of other things, like passing legislation that will prohibit contractors from picking up day laborers on the street. The last thing they did was lobby Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, and made him order the police to arrest any day laborers standing at that 7-11 for more than 30 minutes.
IS SACHEM Quality of Life part of the Minutemen?
THEY ARE the Minutemen.
THERE HAVE been some counter-protests against the Minutement, right?
THERE WAS a counter-protest against Sachem last December, when they came to Massapequa.
Last year, the Minutemen targeted the border with Mexico. Then, by December, they changed their target and said the new target would be day labor. So they came to New York State.
By last summer, they came to Massapequa to recruit people, supposedly to patrol the border with Canada. But then in December, they came to protest day labor sites. They were just 6 or 7, and we got about 50 or 60 local residents.
WHAT ROLE would you like to see day laborers play in the immigrant rights movement?
A LOT of day laborers in the future will make a transition to more permanent jobs. So after some five or 10 years, they stop being day laborers.
They participate in the immigrant rights movements--in the rallies. If a good law is passed, which is improbable, maybe they will be assimilated into the community, build families and stay here. A lot of them want to stay here and live here.
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