Here is the link to an interview with David Harvey about the capitalist crisis http://www.isreview.org/issues/73/int-harvey.shtml

ALL OUT FOR OCTOBER 2 TO DEMAND JOBS FOR ALL!

Organized labor is on the move, and here is its rallying cry:

“Working people can make a difference when we rely on ourselves and act collectively. We are America. And together we can make our voices heard.”

With this summons to the workers of America, the AFL-CIO just announced that it is joining and building the October 2, 2010 Washington, D.C. demonstration, initiated by SEIU 1199 and the NAACP, to demand — above all — jobs. Thus far, 170 progressive organizations have come together to form a coalition, called One Nation, to promote this event.

Introducing this One Nation coalition, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO offered this description:

“ONE NATION is a multi-racial, civil and human rights movement whose mission is to reorder our nation’s priorities to invest in our nation’s most valuable resource — our people. The organizations that have come together to form ONE NATION believe that our goal should be a future of shared prosperity, not stubborn unemployment and a lost generation. Workers should be able to share in the wealth they create, and everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve the American Dream — a secure job; the chance for our children to get a great public education and the opportunity to make their own way in the world; and laws that protect us, not oppress us.

“ONE NATION is a long-term effort to reverse the dangerous economic course of our country over the past four decades. It brings together organizations from across the progressive spectrum — labor, civil rights, environmental, faith and many others — recognizing that none of us alone have been able to achieve our priorities, whether they are large-scale job creation, labor law reform, immigration reform, investing in public education or other concerns, and that we will not realize change until these priorities belong to all of us.”

The significance of the AFL-CIO adopting the strategic approach underlying its rallying cry, “Working people can make a difference when we rely on ourselves and act collectively,” cannot be emphasized enough. This approach points in the direction of organizing massive demonstrations in the streets, not simply sending working people to voting booths once every several years to vote for politicians who fail to keep most of their campaign promises.

While some in the labor movement routinely turn to electing Democrats to office as the purported panacea for the plight of working people, this approach is fundamentally flawed. The corporations and Wall Street have funneled billions of dollars into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party. The oil giant, BP, gave more money to Obama than to any other politician. But these businesses have a keen eye on what they call “the bottom line.” They do not make investments unless they believe their efforts will be handsomely rewarded.

And while every politician has sworn that these campaign contributions have no bearing on their votes and that it is merely coincidental that their policy decisions concur with corporate interests, it is inconceivable that corporations would continue their campaign contributions if these investments did not yield a substantial “return.” Corporate interests are behind the stalling and diluting of the Employee Free Choice Act, the maintenance of a low minimum wage, second-class rights for undocumented workers, the reduction of Social Security benefits, lax environmental regulations, reckless gambling on Wall Street, predatory loan rates, no mercy for workers threatened with home foreclosures, and the list goes on. All these policies have prevailed in Congress, despite the Democratic Party majority.

In California, the Democratic Party recently unveiled its tax reform program. It proposed increasing personal income taxes on everyone except “the wealthiest Californians” (San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2010) and instead of repealing corporate tax breaks it merely opted to slightly delay them. The Democratic Party consistently gives Wall Street, the corporations, and the rich what they want. Then it throws the few remaining crumbs to working people.

If the October 2 demonstration is used as an opportunity simply to elect Democrats, workers will stay home. And if the demands of the October 2 demonstration are restricted to what is acceptable to the Democratic Party, they will inspire no one. There was much fanfare over the recent U.S. Senate approval of a state aid package. But when one reads the fine print and discovers that the total package amounts to $26 billion for the entire country, it becomes apparent that this amounts to a drop in the bucket for cash-starved states. California alone is currently faced with a $19 billion deficit.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, trumpeted that the bill “keeps hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, policemen and other civil employees from being fired or laid off” (The New York Times, August 4, 2010), but he failed to mention the bill leaves over a million working people across the country stranded with no hope while they are being threatened with layoffs because of massive state budget deficits.

We urge our readers to help build the October 2 demonstration in Washington, D.C., but we also want to present compelling arguments to the labor movement organizing this demonstration to embrace a set of demands that truly respond to the needs of working people, not to the needs of the corporations or what the Democratic Party decides is acceptable.

These demands should include:

A MASSIVE JOB-CREATION PROGRAM
NO CUTS TO SOCIAL SECURITY

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently argued (February 19, 2010): “The best way to reduce the growing federal deficit is to create 10 million jobs now – the number of jobs needed to close our jobs deficit – not to cut vital programs such as Social Security and Medicare” (). This number should be increased to at least 14.5 million to accommodate all unemployed workers.

TAX THE RICH

As Trumka noted in his address to Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission (), making Wall Street and the rich pay for a jobs program reflects a basic sense of fairness: “We believe it is only fitting to ask Wall Street to pay to rebuild the economy it helped destroy.” As for the rich, he observed: “It would also be fitting to ask the wealthiest Americans who benefited most from the failed economic policies of the past 30 years to pay their fair share for rebuilding the 21st century economy and stabilizing the national debt.” He called for a raise in their tax rate, pointing out that “effective tax rates applicable to high-income taxpayers (earning over $250,000 in 2009 dollars) reached their lowest level in at least half a century in 2008.” He argued that these measures are especially urgent, given the growing inequality in wealth that was in part responsible for the current economic crisis.

A NATIONWIDE MORATORIUM ON HOME FORECLOSURES AND EVICTIONS

Losing a job is often followed by a second disaster: home foreclosure and eviction. Given that working people had no part in creating the Great Recession with its massive destruction of jobs, we should not be required to suffer its disastrous consequences while those who caused it are awarded generous bailouts at our expense. The federal government should institute a moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions.

LEGALIZATION FOR UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS NOW

As President Richard Trumka has argued (June 18, 2010; (): “The failures of our relationship with Mexico represent a failed economic strategy. They cannot be solved with guns and soldiers and fences. They must be addressed through an economic strategy for shared prosperity based on rising wages in both countries.” This means that the solution to the immigration problem is not to militarize the borders or to criminalize undocumented immigrants.

And he added as a part of his analysis of the problem: “Instead, at the heart of the failure of our immigration policy is an unpleasant fact, one that you almost never hear talked about openly: Too many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration system–a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented–afraid and available.” In other words, employers prefer undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-wages or not pay them at all, which happens routinely, since undocumented workers have no legal recourse to redress injustices.

Trumka proceeded to reject “the return of the outdated guest worker programs that give immigrants no security, no future here in the United States, no rights and no hope of being part of the American Dream.”

Finally, correctly noting that undocumented workers are “the people doing the hardest work for the least money” and that “we are for ending our two-tiered workforce and our two-tiered society … because an underclass of disenfranchised workers ends up hurting all workers,” Trumka concluded that “we stand for the American Dream for all who work in our country,” meaning that undocumented workers should be granted “a fair path towards legalization.”

We should make this demand stronger. Undocumented workers should be granted immediate legalization, since a “path” can take years to traverse, which would mean that none of our problems would be solved except in an unspecified, far distant future.

At its recent convention, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), the Latino wing of the AFL-CIO, passed a resolution on August 6 that included the following provision: “Our labor movement has called for basic reform of our immigration laws, and adopted a position at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in 1999 that demands the repeal of employer sanctions, immediate amnesty for all undocumented workers, protection of the right to organize for all workers, the strengthening of family reunification as the basis of immigration policy, and opposition to guest worker programs.”

Now is not the time to back-peddle on these important principles.

PEACE

MONEY FOR JOBS, NOT PRISONS AND WARS

The United Auto Workers and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition have joined forces and are organizing a demonstration on August 28 in Detroit on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. At the top of the list of their demands are jobs.

But they have also included enforcement of workers’ rights and civil rights in addition to “ending the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saving lives and redirecting the war budget to rebuilding America.” And the NAACP has emphasized the importance of creating jobs, not prisons. These points should be included in the list of demands.

With a set of demands that responds directly and fully to the needs of most workers and with the conviction that “working people can make a difference when we rely on ourselves and act collectively,” the call for October 2 has the potential to strike a deep chord and inspire hundreds of thousands of working people to join the demonstration. SEIU Local 1199 President George Gresham has predicted that this demonstration will be a “massive — and we believe historic — march.”

If the demonstration has the right demands, the right orientation, and is preceded by plenty of organizing, his prediction should prove true.

In solidarity,
Bill Leumer and Alan Benjamin,
Co-Conveners,
Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign

By James Thompson, via People’s World

HOUSTON — The Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center assembled a group of 30 labor activists to ride the Justice Bus here to bring attention to wage theft. The Houston action was one of 30 taking place around the country as part of Nov. 19 national day of action to stop wage theft. Wage theft is a national crime wave that takes billions of dollars out of the pockets of millions of workers every year.

The group was ethnically diverse, included men and women representing a number of organizations to include HIWJ, SEIU, Justice for Janitors, United Steelworkers, United Auto Workers, Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Houston Mennonite Church, CRECEN, and AFL-CIO of Harris County.

The first stop was at Sugar Branch Condominiums in Southwest Houston. HIWJ has been trying since September to recover $2,500 in unpaid wages owed three landscaping workers. They have not been paid since April. The workers were pressured to return to work after they stopped working when they were not paid. They returned to work, but still were not paid and were given repeated promises that they would be paid “tomorrow.” Today a delegation met with the president of the Homeowners’ Association and requested that the workers be paid. She denied responsibility and was very upset and shut the door on the delegation. She told the delegation to contact the association’s attorneys.

It seemed ironic that the people in management at these condominiums would rather pay an attorney than the workers that had provided a needed service, the Justice Bus riders commented. “It would probably be cheaper to pay the workers than the attorneys,” said one activist.

Some people said that when workers are not paid, there is cascading effect on the worker, their family and the community. Unpaid workers go hungry, their self esteem is devastated and their families can become hungry and desperate. When they are unpaid, they are left with limited choices to help their families. Some may resort to crime and their family members may also engage in criminal activity so they do not starve. When businesses do not compensate their employees, they are contributing to the deterioration of the community.

All of the stops had a spirited rally outside the business. Participants had plastic water bottles with some popcorn kernels inside, which became loud noisemakers when shaken. Chants accompanied the percussive sounds of the bottles and included, “No more wage theft. Pay the workers. The workers united will never be defeated,” in English and Spanish.

The second stop was at the Honduras Restaurant in Northwest Houston. Here a female employee was paid $4.55 an hour which was two dollars under the minimum wage. Previous efforts by HIWJ to talk with the owner met with physical intimidation, yelling and threats to call the police and INS. Today HIWJ returned with 30 people, but the owner was not available. However, the owner of the strip center came out and when told the situation said he could not tolerate the bad publicity that this action generated.
The third scheduled stop was canceled because the owner, a minister himself, paid the workers on the previous evening in an effort to stop bad publicity and damage to his reputation among his peers in the faith community.

Over lunch, a male worker, Johnny, cried as he told his story to the group of activists. His boss at Supernova Furniture store allegedly owes him $16,000 in back pay. He talked about how he felt isolated and was glad to have the support of other people. As a result of the action, he said he did not feel he was the only one. Olga, a janitor, also cried as she told how her employer, Pritchard Southwest, made her work an extra hour without pay and when she refused to do this, they threatened to fire her. She is owed $697.50 in unpaid labor.

The fourth stop was at the Supernova Furniture store in South Houston. Johnny and a delegation of supporters met with the owners and they agreed to set a meeting with him and HIWJ to try to negotiate an acceptable agreement.

The fifth stop was at Prichard Southwest in the Heritage Plaza in downtown Houston. There the justice bus was met by about 300 janitors, community leaders and their supporters. Pritchard is the only company in Houston that refuses to negotiate a contract with SEIU Local 1 Justice for Janitors. The group loudly demanded that the company sit down with SEIU and bargain in good faith.
Some participants made cell phone calls to companies across the country that contract with Pritchard asking them to tell Pritchard to negotiate with their workers.

A report on wage theft by the Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center concludes that worker abuse is widespread in the greater Houston metropolitan area and nationally. One thousand nineteen workers have reported to the Workers Center here and appealed for help in resolving their grievances. The report also notes that wage theft is encouraged by the lack of government enforcement by agencies whose mandate is to protect and defend workers. The report calls for more enforcement of the laws against wage theft by government agencies and the formation of special task forces to address these wrongs.