A luta continua
In the workplace, at the Fed, and in the streets
The Working-Class Fights Back!
For those of you whose high school history classes did not include much (or anything) about the history of the labor movement, I’d like to point out that the United Auto Workers (UAW) was at the forefront of the militant labor struggles in the 1930’s and 40’s. Is history repeating? Let’s hope so! A strong and militant labor movement is one of the two key components in advancing the interests of the working class; the other is a strong and unified political left.
UAW Wins Organizing Election at VW Tennessee Plant, From Portside, 4/19/24
The United Auto Workers achieved a historic organizing victory Friday night at a Volkswagen AG plant in Tennessee plant as workers voted overwhelmingly to join the union following a three-day election.
The vote count was 2,628-985, according to unofficial results released by the automaker, the union and a National Labor Relations Board tally posted on X.
"Volkswagen Chattanooga workers voted in favor of union representation in their workplace this week," the automaker said in a statement. "The vote was administered through a democratic, secret ballot vote overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. ... We will await certification of the results by the NLRB. Volkswagen thanks its Chattanooga workers for voting in this election."
The factory, employing more than 4,300 hourly workers who build the ID.4 electric vehicle and two versions of the Atlas SUV, is the first foreign-owned auto plant in the South to organize. In recent years, the UAW had narrowly failed to win approval at the same VW plant twice before, in 2019 and 2014, and also came up short in an election at a Mississippi Nissan plant in 2017.
But riding tailwinds from last fall’s strikes that garnered rich new contracts with the Detroit Three automakers — plus broad public support for unions generally of late — the union finally pulled off the win in a state that takes pride in a low unionization rate and its right-to-work law.
The UAW, in a statement announcing the victory, sent out several statements from VW workers who supported the organizing campaign.
“People in high places told us good things can’t happen here in Chattanooga," Kelcey Smith, a paint department worker, said in the union release. "They told us this isn’t the time to stand up, this isn’t the place. But we did stand up and we won. This is the time; this is the place. Southern workers are ready to stand up and win a better life.”
Added Doug Snyder, a body worker at Volkswagen: “This is a movement for every blue-collar worker in America. Our vote shows that workers everywhere want a better life on and off the job.
VW said it took a neutral position on the vote, issuing a statement prior to the election that “we respect our employees’ right to decide who represents them in the workplace.” The Chattanooga plant was the company’s only nonunion factory in the world.
Organizing the VW plant was the union’s first step in a larger $40 million push to convert other auto plants around the South operated by companies such as BMW AG, Tesla Inc., Toyota Motor Corp., and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.
A second UAW election, at a Mercedes-Benz Group facility outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is scheduled to run May 13-17, the NLRB said earlier this week. The union has also said it’s working on organizing a Hyundai plant near Montgomery, Alabama.
Fighting Inflation??? When the proposed solution is part of the problem
On the other side of the class lines, the Federal Reserve seems to be moving away from lowering its benchmark interest rate, currently at 8.5%. Their concern is that they haven’t gotten inflation under control. They want it to return to 2%, which is what it has been for most of the last 35+ years. What’s the problem here? Isn’t keeping the cost of living down a good thing for workers?
Yes and no. Mostly NO! Very low inflation primarily benefits those who have money – the rich, big corporations, bankers, hedge fund managers. When the rate of inflation goes up, the money they have is worth LESS. That’s why the bankers’ bank (the Federal Reserve) is adamant about keeping the rate of inflation low, very low.
One of their arguments is that very low inflation promotes economic growth and prosperity and that the “prosperity bandwagon” benefits everyone. That’s a lie – actually 2 lies in one. Looking at the last 40 years and at economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries, we find that economic growth is strongest when inflation rates are in the 4%-6% range, not when it is around 2%. And in case you didn’t notice, the extended period of low inflation in the US, from the late 1980s until now, has coincided with runaway inequality. The “prosperity bandwagon” definitely hasn’t reached down to the working-class in the US, but it certainly has benefited rich.
But don’t we need to keep the cost of living for working people down? Yes, but high interest rates turn out to be a major part of the problem, not the solution. Want to buy a house or a car? High interest rates drive up the cost. So the Fed’s “solution” to inflation and the rising cost of living is actually making inflation worse, for working Americans that is, but not of course for the banks and the rich.
How should we fight back against the rising cost of living? By working on the other end of the equation – workers’ incomes and benefits. There are a number of ways this can be done.
· Defending workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.
· Creating a real public housing program, on the model of some of the successful public housing programs in Europe (Vienna for example), to build up the stock of affordable housing (a little knock-off of supply-side economics that would actually benefit the working class).
· Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour right now, with escalators over the next few years; not only does that help those at the bottom of the wage scale, this rising tide will float all boats.
· Reinstating and expanding the child tax credit.
· Getting rid of Medicare (Dis)Advantage and expanding Medicare so that it covers all Americans for all their healthcare needs.
Where can the money to do these things can come from? The pockets of those who have benefitted so handsomely over the past 40+ years from runaway inequality.
All we need is a clear understanding of the problem and the political will to face it.
From the Financial Times, via Adam Tooze’s Chartbook
The great bet on rate cuts — and it was enormous — is dead. At the start of 2024, the expectation was for six, maybe seven, US rate cuts this year. That felt silly even then, but it is unravelling in humbling fashion. Today markets are penciling in one, maybe two. … How did everyone manage to get so carried away with the notion that rates were poised for an aggressive chop? The main reason is that we are trapped in old ways of thinking, convinced inflation will fall back to something that feels like a norm and that central banks will hurry to retreat to the warm waters of the low interest rates that dominated the post-crisis era until after war and pestilence arrived. The reality is clearly more complicated than that. … The reality is that this is what data dependency — the policymakers’ mantra — really looks like. Rate setters are less able to spoon-feed investors granular guidance on what will happen next, because they are as easily pushed around by economic data as the rest of us. They may never again achieve their mission to be boring in our lifetimes. As long as deglobalization, the green transition and heavier fiscal spending on the likes of defence persist, inflation will swing around and provoke abrupt changes of heart. We all have to learn to live with flip-flopping narratives and markets.
No, No, No!!! Maybe the Financial Times wants to learn how to live with this, but the working-class needs to fight back against it. We have “nothing to lose but our chains”.
Speaking of which, the last part of this post looks at how more chains are being forged.
The War on Protests and Protesters
From Portside, April 19, 2024 by Adam Federman
The sweeping nature of the Cop City arrests and charges may be novel, but the targeting of protesters and social movements is not. Since 2017 — the same year Georgia expanded its domestic terrorism law to include property destruction — 21 states have passed legislation to enhance penalties and fines for common protest-related crimes, such as trespassing or blocking highways.
“We’re in a really unique moment with the amount of legislation that we’re seeing, [with] this legal assault on protesters and the right to protest in the U.S.,” says Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tallied nearly 300 anti-protest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017, 41 of which passed.
Many of those laws seemed like direct responses to specific protest campaigns, says Nora Benavidez, senior counsel for the nonprofit group Free Press and lead author of the 2020 PEN America report, Arresting Dissent: Legislative Restrictions on the Right to Protest. “For every progressive movement — irrespective of its actual views — there’s so quickly a crackdown that occurs in language and narrative and law.”
The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law tallied nearly 300 anti-protest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017.
Among recently passed state laws, 19 enhance penalties for or make it a felony to engage in protest on or near energy infrastructure— a clear reaction to the mass protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. After 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, five states enacted laws — and nine others have pending legislation — that impose harsh penalties for individuals who block traffic or even sidewalks. Some states added laws granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters and extending liability for crimes committed during protests to any organizations that support them. This January, in response to growing opposition to the war in Gaza, Democrats in New York proposed a bill that would expand the definition of domestic terrorism to include blocking public roads or bridges.
But it’s not just state legislatures cracking down on protest. Republican senators have introduced federal legislation, also in response to protests over Gaza, to criminalize blocking public roads and highways. Another bill, introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and ostensibly responding to “pro-Hamas leftists,” would increase the prison sentence for participating in a “riot” — loosely defined as an act of violence committed by a group of three or more people — from five years to 10.
Accompanying these laws is increasingly harsh rhetoric from political figures to demonize protest movements, characterizing activists as rioters, mobs, violent extremists and terrorists. Protesters face other threats too: During the summer of racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Trump administration openly discussed deploying military force to clear demonstrations, and protesters in Portland, Ore., were snatched from the street by federal law enforcement officials in unmarked vehicles, a troubling episode still shrouded in mystery. More recently, pro-Palestinian activists say they’ve faced home visits from police and the FBI. This week, Cotton urged people who end up stuck in traffic due to protest actions to “take matters into your own hands” and “put an end to this nonsense.”
Courts have also struck at the right to protest. Just this Monday, the Supreme Court announced its refusal to hear a case involving DeRay Mckesson, a prominent leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. On two prior occasions, a lower court had ruled that protest organizers like Mckesson can be held liable for the actions of others, upending decades of legal precedent. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Mckesson’s appeal means that, at least for now, it is a huge risk to organize mass actions in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Taken together, says Charlie Hogle, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, these shifts will inevitably “have a chilling effect on the sort of important political speech we think the First Amendment is intended to protect.”
They say there is nothing new under the sun and this certainly applies here. In the 1960s, right here in North Carolina, the state legislature made blocking ingress and egress during civil rights or antiwar protests carry a maximum sentence of 2 years. I know this, since I was sentenced to 4 months in the county jail for a demonstration on the night of the 1968 election which blocked Franklin St. in Chapel Hill. Fortunately, my lawyer was able to get the conviction overturned, although I did end up serving 30 days for another charge from the same night. A little aside – my lawyer in 1968 is the father of the current NC State Attorney General and candidate for governor, Josh Stein.
The important takeaway from the history of this period was that it didn’t stop us from protesting. Restrictions of legal rights to protest are designed to intimidate us from demanding our rights and the only way to defeat that purpose is to keep demanding. Otherwise the chilling effect will succeed.
In all of this we need to remember that “we are the many, they are the few” and act accordingly.