Labor mov't holds key to solving NYC budget crisis

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BURY THE AMERICAN DREA Sw.ents, Save Our Schole By CHRIS Perhaps no place better than New York captures the state of capitalism in the world today. Side by side with the most fantastic concentration of wealth, you can see poverty, homelessness, and a destitution more commonly associated with that of a Third World country.

Parts of Harlem have higher infant mortality rates than Bangla Desh, according to a study printed in the New England Journal of Medicine. The drop-out rate for minority youth in the school system is 60 percent.

In any rational economic system, top priority in allotting society's energy, money, and talent would be given to ending these conditions forever. But capitalism created these hideous conditions at the same time that it created the rich in their office towers.

In the latest chapter of New York City's unfolding budget crisis, on May 8, Mayor David Dinkins presented his proposed budget cuts for the 1991-1992 fiscal year. The announcement was presaged by months of propaganda by the big business media. This included numerous orchestrated reports by supposedly independent "citizens commissions" on the need for "leaner city services" in the 1990s.

Dinkins proposed a staggering cut of over $1.5 billion in city services to alleviate a looming $3.5 billion deficit. These include chopping educational programs for disadvantaged youth, the abolishment of drug treatment and infant mortality programs, and butchering libraries, park maintenance, women's health clinics.

Dinkins also called for layoffs of 22,000 full-time city employees, including 3000 teachers. Many labor activists believe these layoffs, if approved, will take place during summer vacations in August—in an effort to forestall a united labor-community response.

Couching his budget proposal in the rhetoric of "sacrifice" and "fiscal responsibility," Dinkins appealed to the "family of New York" to tighten their belts.

But despite the mayor's appeals for "sacrifice," some areas were strikingly exempt. One was the addition of 4000 new police to the city payroll to fight "violence, lawlessness, and drugs." Also exempted was a whopping increase of $800 million in debt service to the banks for the coming year.

Working people should not be fooled. The additional cops have nothing to do with any serious "war on drugs." How could they possibly, since in the same speech Dinkins After all, the decision was made long before, in the boardrooms of Wall Street. Given the powerful forces behind the cutbacks, supporters of this or that program demonstrating at the budget hearings are relatively powerless if they remain isolated.

But there is a power that can stop the cutbacks, especially if it unites with the anti-cutback movement. It was present in force when 60,000 trade-unionists marched in Manhattan on April 30 to demand no cutbacks and no layoffs.

The April 30 labor march Marching down Broadway, one could feel the potential power of the labor movement-however lacking it is at this time in leadership and direction. Black, white, Latino, Asian-the labor movement on April 30 was as interracial and multinational as the city itself.

A large spirited contingent from the Public Employees Federation marched. They stand to lose 50 percent of their members if Cuomo's proposed 100,000 layoffs of state workers are enacted. "Tax the rich!" they chanted.

AFSCME District Council 37 members Californians added their voices as well. They had a giveback contract foisted upon them in January—only to have that same contract held up by the Dinkins administration in an effort to get even more givebacks.

Particularly significant was a contingent from Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union (TWU), who have been working without a contract since April 31. TWU President Sonny Hall has stated that there will be strike action if his union does not get a decent contract and improved health and safety conditions on the job. This reflects pressures from the membership.

"I've got a weapon," said Hall. "We always have a weapon. The one thing we won't do is allow transit workers to be taken advantage of. Way before we will let that happen, we will forget about whatever the Taylor Law says." (Newsday, May 12.)

The Taylor Law prohibits strikes by city and state employees. It has long been used by City Hall and Wall Street to keep the union movement weak and divided. But as a labor leader once said, "the only illegal strike is a losing one."

And how about taxing the rich to pay for the budget crisis? The slogan "Tax the rich!" can be a springboard for workers to begin to discuss all the other institutions through which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

In the May 7 Village Voice, Doug Henwood revealed that the dominant elements in the labor bureaucracy opposed the demand of "Tax the rich!" as the main slogan of the April 30 demonstration. Instead, it adopted the watered-down call, "For a fair tax system!"

According to Henwood, Barry Feinstein of Local 237 of the Teamsters Union argued that "labor can never support a tax-the-rich platform." Sandra Feldman, president of the United Federation of Teachers, fought it on the ground that "Tax the rich!" would not be an "effective" slogan for the rally's "real audience." Feldman thought that this "real audience" was the mayor and the governor.

Behind this decision lies the same strategy of business trade-unionism that led to the defeat of the anti-cutback movement in 1975.

The labor tops' strategy is to get on the "good side" of management and Democratic Party politicians behind closed doors, rather than to build alliances with other unions, the poor, and the oppressed minorities.

Labor must not be fooled. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about this crisis. Nor is there anything inevitable about working people having to take these cuts. It is we who create the wealth of this city every day, in the garment shops, in the transit barns, in the offices and factories.

If we create the wealth in this country, we also have the power to shut it down.

Joseph Ryan/Socialist Action

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