New evidence of need for a turnaround in the unions

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Organized labor started off 2010 not with a bang but with a whimper. In mid-January, top labor officials knuckled under to Obama’s insistence that they accept taxes on workers’ health plans—only to see the prospects of the whole health-care “reform” package for which they’d made this sacrifice of workers’ income go into a tailspin. Soon after, new statistics revealed an unprecedented decline in unionization rates, which starkly captures the need for a drastic turnaround in labor policy and practice.

Scott Brown, a state legislator who initially agreed to be the Republican sacrificial lamb in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, ended up being elected as the forty-first Republican Senator—denying Democrats their already shaky super-majority needed to hold off GOP filibusters against health-care “reform” bills.

Giddy Republicans proclaimed this a referendum against “government-run health care.” But the Obama health-care “reform” was no more “government run” than the Massachusetts state reform established on a Republican governor’s watch. Yet there’s no doubt that working-class voters were not pleased with the Obama plan. The last straw was the tax on benefits insisted upon by the president—after swearing during the election campaign he would never agree to such a tax.

Despite last-minute campaigning by prominent national Democratic and union leaders, more unionists voted for Brown than his opponent. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka claimed this was an indicator of an apparently previously undetected “working-class revolt,” and warned the Democrats to get back on the track leading to jobs, jobs, jobs.

But for Democrats there is only one track—and it doesn’t lead to jobs. While one party is always shunted off to a siding, both their trains are competing to deliver the rest of us to the same destination—the place described by Canadian labor party (NDP) leader Tommy Douglas as Mouseland, where the Fat Cats rule.

And the inevitable consequences of being stuck like Casey Jones on this runaway train were seen once again in labor’s dual capitulation on health care. Not only did labor officials fail to lift a finger for the only immediate solution that would benefit the entire class—single-payer—but in the end it cried “Uncle” when Obama insisted it accept taxes on its members’ “Cadillac” plans. And the bone Obama threw them in return—that their members could pay the taxes later than the rest of the working class—will only leave unorganized workers prey to right-wing rhetoric about labor being a self-centered “special interest.”

The so-called “Cadillac” plans are not, in fact, expensive boondoggles full of needed frills. Under our irrational and wasteful health-care financing system, they are the kind of plan a typical working-class family needs to have adequate coverage without ending up bankrupt when a medical emergency strikes.

But under the deal with the White House, a 40 percent tax would be imposed starting in 2013 on the 4 Socialist Action FEBRuary 2010 amount by which premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage exceeds specified thresholds. This arrangement was counterposed to calls by labor to instead raise revenue for health-care changes through higher income taxes on earnings above $1 million a year for couples.

The agreement exempts unionized workers and state and local government employees from such taxes for five years. This supposedly allows unions time to negotiate new contracts to gain wage hikes to make up for the cuts in health benefits that will inevitably follow the new taxes. Needless to say, bosses will resist any such demands for pay hikes. And when labor looks for allies against such resistance, it will find many unorganized workers saying, “Where were you when they imposed the tax on my health-care plan?” Shrinking membership rolls This failure of labor tops to fight for the entire class on health-care issues is symptomatic of unions’ increasing isolation at a time when it should be gathering around it millions of new workers looking to resist the fallout from the deepening economic crisis.

Union density in the private sector now stands at 7.2%, down from 7.6% last year, and is the lowest since at least 1900. Unions lost 10% of their members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years. The broader drop in U.S. employment and a small gain by public-sector unions helped keep the total share of union membership flat at 12.3% in 2009. In the early 1980s, unions represented 20% of workers.

The U.S. public sector has long had greater union density than the private. Now, for the first time, government unionists actually outnumber those in the market economy. This shocking statistic doesn’t represent growth in public unions. Layoffs and contracting out by state and local governments and quasi-public transit agencies are common and growing. And in ler—are gone for good. And any regained jobs will come with much lower wages, benefits, and stability— and more often than not without union protection. Where will new jobs & union members come from?

How does this fit in to the above-cited refrain of Trumka calling for Democrats to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”? The efforts of one union located at the intersection of jobs and climate struggles offers some lessons.

UAW Local 879 in St Paul recently held a press conference urging Ford to build plug-in electric or hybrid cars at their plant currently producing Ranger pickups—and scheduled for closure by the end of next year. They are calling for a government subsidy to Ford to keep this product line.

Nearly all government jobs plans revolve around subsidies and tax breaks to private employers as an incentive to hire or keep workers. The track record of such schemes is not good. In this particular case, Ford is building its popular hybrid in Mexico, where labor costs are about 20% of St Paul’s. There’s no way either the workers or government incentives can compete with that.

Previously, the local had, in collaboration with environmental and community groups, campaigned for public ownership of the plant and conversion to new products. They nearly landed production of new clean buses ordered by the local transit agency. But the local establishment put the kibosh on those logical plans, leading to the latest last-ditch effort to keep Ford.

Local 879’s original strategy was sound. But it’s hard for one isolated group of workers to implement even the best of ideas in the face of hostility from the bosses and their politicians. We need a national jobs policy that replaces trying to bribe employers with nationalizing the key industries needed for a healthy economy. A whole new public sector—including finance, energy, transportation, and auto for starters—could lead the way in putting everyone to work in decent paying jobs and in rebuilding an economy to tackle the threat of climate change and other urgent needs.

A labor movement with such a bold and broad strategy would also find itself picking up members in existing industries—as well as the new ones—as newlyinspired workers began fighting to organize. Coming attack on public workers One place to start gathering the forces for the fight for those new public jobs is in defense of existing ones. Conservative think-tank pundits seized on the new data on unionization rates as proof that the time had come to wipe out unions from the public sector as well.

Fred Siegel of the conservative Manhattan Institute told The New York Times: “At the same time the country is being squeezed, public-sector unions are a rising political force in the Democratic Party. They depend on extra money for the public sector. In four big states—New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California—the public-sector unions have largely been untouched by the economic downturn. In those states, you have an impeding clash between unions and the public at large.”

The attack on public sector workers comes simultaneously with new attacks on the most popular and needed portion of public services. Both parties in Congress are preparing to permanently gut Social Security and Medicare in order to “save” them from their supposedly inevitably looming bankruptcy.

For months, the media has been predicting that budget woes from declining revenues at the state and municipal level must lead to massive jobs and services (continued on page 5)

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... Adventure in Iraq torn by scandals Socialist Action february 2010 5 (continued from page 1: “Obama Humanitarian aid for Haiti — Not troops and occupation!”)

Spanish-American war, when more U.S. soldiers were killed by defective supplies than by enemy bullets. In those days, the profiteers were only suppliers, not private armed forces as they are now.

However, the older form of corrupt war profiteering has apparently also flourished in the occupation of Iraq. The British Independent reported Jan. 23: “Hundreds of people have been killed in horrific bombings in Iraq after a British company supplied ‘bogus’ equipment which failed to detect explosive devices.

“The head of the company, which has made tens of millions of pounds from the sale of the detectors, has now been arrested and the British Government has announced a ban on their export to Iraq.”

The article continued: “... questions were being raised last night about why action had not been taken sooner on the supply of the detectors which leading weapons specialists had condemned months ago as ‘useless and dangerous.’ The equipment—which operates on a ‘dousing’ principle and has no electronic components—was also sold to Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan, all countries suffering deaths and injuries through terrorist bomb attacks.”

Questions may have been raised but it is unlikely that there will be any answers, because the firm in question, like the war profiteers in general, undoubtedly had powerful political connections who will continue to protect themselves if they are unable any longer to defend their protégés. The people who suffered from this corruption are raising a huge outcry.

“Iraqi families who have suffered in the blasts last night condemned their own government as well as the British authorities for allowing the extraordinary security failure. Among the attacks that the detectors, it is claimed, had failed to prevent were suicide bombings in October last year which killed 155 people and blasts two months later which resulted in 120 more deaths.”

The business of “security” has been a bonanza for capitalist profiteers. About 15 percent of all construction contacts given to U.S. firms in Iraq, for example, have gone to “security,” usually benefiting mercenary outfits like Blackwater and DynCorps. The corrupt construction and “security” companies have so far been the major beneficiaries of a U.S. war effort expected to cost more than a trillion dollars, and which has cost more than 4000 American lives.

The U.S. war on Iraq was motivated by the hope of getting control of Iraqi oil, as top U.S. officials have admitted. But the hatred that the brutal war has engendered in the Iraqi people has put in ... Trade unions (continued from page 4) cuts. The beginning of such cuts has already led to massive actions in defense of jobs and services in California and on a smaller scale elsewhere.

Yet while unions and students in California prepare for a day of mass action March 4, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced even more cuts. His latest budget plan would privatize and deunionize prisons, curtail seniority protections for teachers, and reduce the number of sick, disabled and elderly cared for by the state’s In-Home Supportive Services program (staffed by union workers) while cutting what their caregivers are paid.

The dire need for more public services—and the connection to the jobs crisis—was cruelly highlighted in a recent Washington Post profile of parents quitting jobs because child-care costs are more than they get in wages!

Meanwhile, teachers and health-care workers have been fighting against schemes like No Child Left Behind that penalize them for what the irrational systems in their “industries” do to students and patients respectively. What’s needed instead of victimization of doubt any material or political gain for the U.S. Even the government that arose in the shadow of the occupation cannot ignore the feelings of the overwhelming majority of the people over which it aspires to rule.

The Washington Post reported Dec. 13: “Chinese, Russian and European companies won the right this weekend to develop major oil fields in Iraq, while U.S. firms made a paltry showing at auctions that represent the first major incursion of foreign oil companies into Iraq in four decades. The companies that secured 10 contracts in auctions held over the weekend and in June stand to profit handsomely, but they are taking a significant gamble.

“Iraq has the third-largest proven crude reserves in the world, but the country remains perilous; it suffers from chronic corruption and acrimonious politics that have prevented the passing of new laws to regulate the sector.

“Of the seven U.S. companies that registered for the auctions, only one emerged as the leading partner in a consortium that won a contract. Another U.S. company has a minority stake in a contract. China’s state-owned oil company has a Pat Sullivan / AP major stake in two contracts. Russian firms are parties in two others. European firms made a strong showing. Royal Dutch Shell, Italy’s Eni, British Petroleum and Norway’s Statoil got deals. Companies from Malaysia and Angola were parties to five winning bids. “Oil analysts say the outcome was surprising, considering that U.S. oil companies have long yearned to work in Iraq.”

In fact, the contracts held by foreign competitors of U.S. oil companies were abrogated by the U.S. occupation in its initial period. But sabotage and bombings by insurgents reduced the production of Iraqi oil fields to a trickle for many years.

The Washington Post noted that it was probably this experience that dissuaded the U.S. companies from bidding: “Security concerns, underscored by coordinated bombings Tuesday, and the threat of political instability as the U.S. military withdraws probably gave American oil executives pause, analysts said.”

Even the U.S. client Iraqi government obviously fears to be seen giving away Iraqi oil to foreign companies. It is offering only service contracts to the oil companies, not ownership of the oil. And the service contracts awarded have included a per barrel price that is only about half what the oil companies wanted.

Furthermore, as the U.S. hold on their country weakens, the ruling Shiite theocratic politicians are steadily edging closer to Iran. The U.S. needs Sunni politicians as a barrier to a reconciliation between majority Shiite Iraq and Shiite Iran. But recently a large number of Sunni candidates for the upcoming parliamentary elections have been disqualified under the accusation that they were accomplices of the Saddam Hussein regime.

The Jan. 28 issue of the British Economist reported that the banning of the Sunni candidates was the result of an initiative by Ahmed Chalabi, who was a protégé of the CIA when he led an exile organization opposed to Saddam Hussein. He spent most of his adult life as an exile. After he returned to the country he quickly became discredited. And he lost his credibility also with U.S. officials, since the intelligence he offered proved false. But once spurned by the U.S., Chalabi turned to the Iranian regime for support. The Economist speculated that the banning of the Sunni caneducation and health-care workers for alleged performance problems are many more education and healthcare workers (with more control over their working conditions)—as well as more child-care, home-care, and library workers, etc. And a fight for such jobs would lead to a discussion in labor about a class-wide approach to real education and health-care reform.

The productivity of the U.S. economy long ago passed the point where we could churn out the same amount of goods with a far shorter workweek. The hours saved could easily go toward immediately creating tens of millions of new jobs like the ones described above.

And doing so is now also a matter of life or death for the planet and all its inhabitants. Shifting work from emission-spewing industries that make goods toward life-preserving and enhancing services is now essential for our livelihoods, our health, our sanity, our very survival.

Need for a political reversal These new jobs programs, and the necessary associated restructuring of the economy, haven’t a snowball’s chance in an overheated Earth if the labor movement remains tied to the Democrats.

While the working class is not yet in full revolt, anger is building. There were high expectations that this administration, now celebrating its first anniversary Essam al-Sudani / AFP / Getty Images (Above) U.S. soldier guards Basrah airport following withdrawal of British troops from the area last year. (Left) Houston offices of KBR, the major U.S. maintenance contractor in Iraq. Hundreds of soldiers were injured by faulty KBR electric wiring.

didates got “a wink” from the Iranians.

Overall, the United States seems to have won no reliable allies in Iraq, except perhaps for the Kurdish nationalists, who were threatened with extermination by Saddam Hussein. U.S. oil companies have gotten juicy contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan (netting a top U.S. diplomat a payoff of $100 million, by the way), but this area is a landlocked northern enclave. The oil fields in southern Iraq, near the Gulf port of Basrah, are the richest.

Thus, the greatest U.S. imperialist adventure since World War II has ended in massive losses for the United States. And the politicians that rule the U.S. for the corporations (who themselves have profited, at the expense of the U.S. economy) refuse to extricate the country from the entanglements they and their like have gotten it into. Only direct pressure from the American people through mobilization independent of the corporations’ twin parties can stop the drain on the country resulting from such imperialist adventures and forestall even greater losses in the future. n in power, would move quickly to address job loss, stagnant wages, foreclosures and evictions, and, yes, the health-care crisis. Instead, the situation has gotten worse and the “middle class” that every politician hails is an endangered species. A common expression has spread to many diverse victims of the Great Recession: “If we were a bank we’d be fixed by now.”

The American political system is designed to accommodate Massachusetts-style revolts by directing voter discontent with those in power to the column of the only recognized opposition. If you don’t like the party that pretends to be labor’s friend, you can instead vote for the traditional party identified with Big Business.

As the multiple crises we face deepen, growing numbers will become dissatisfied with this shell game. Our nation’s real rulers try to prepare for this by offering extra-electoral far-right backup–the Tea Party, Minutemen, Operation Rescue, and the like. This is a danger we cannot take lightly.

Our only mass organizations, our unions, should be embracing a workers’ revolt. It is up to the labor movement to provide a credible working-class alternative to the twin parties of capital and their subcontracted right-wing thugs. That means a party of our own to lead this revolt in the workplace, the streets, and on the ballot. n

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... Humanitarian aid, not troops, for Haiti!

(continued from page 1: “Obama Humanitarian aid for Haiti — Not troops and occupation!”) and looting over supplies, without much evidence. The endlessly repeated racist image of Haitian culture as somehow responsible for the poverty in Haiti—most live on less than $2 a day—ignores reality. Haiti is undergoing its fourth U.S. occupation in the last century. The capitalist media ignores decades of U.S. support for Haiti’s dictators and the imposition of U.S.-dominated World Bank policies based on slavelabor assembly sweatshops.

The U.S. puppet regime of Haitian President Rene Preval and the U.S. surrogate forces of the United Nations were exposed as incompetent and criminally negligent, despite having experienced four deadly hurricanes in 2008. Under U.S. pressure, Preval signed an agreement relinquishing control of Haiti’s badly managed airport to the United States. Once in charge, the U.S. quickly gave landing priority to military transport. Jarry Emanuel, the air logistics officer for the World Food Program, complained, “There are 200 flights going in and out every day. … But most of those flights are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the country.”

Obama has ordered some 16,000 U.S. troops to Haiti with de facto control of the entire “relief” effort. The despised occupation forces of the United Nation’s Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), which had taken over for U.S. imperialism when Washington needed more troops for its slaughter in Iraq, announced it was adding 3500 troops to its 9000 total, and 1500 more cops to its 2100 international force.

As Dan Beeton writes in NACLA, a left-of-center magazine on Latin America and the Caribbean, “The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Coast Guard cutters surround Haiti to intercept Haitians attempting to reach South Florida. The prison at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, originally scheduled by President Obama to close on Jan. 11 over human-rights abuses, was fitted with 1000 cots for Haitians captured at sea.

In a victory for immigrant-rights advocates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Jan. 15 that some 30,000 Haitians would receive Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for those in the U.S. who face deportation. TPS, which has been granted immigrants who face natural disasters at home, will give Haitians an 18-month reprieve on deportation, with the right to seek work permits. Napolitano warned Haitians that those caught seeking refuge in the U.S. after the Jan. 12 earthquake will immediately be sent back to Haiti. “New Orleans all over again”?

And what of getting food, water and medical care to Haiti’s earthquake victims? Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush-era holdover in the Obama administration, said, “Without having any structure on the 6 Socialist Action FEBRuary 2010 Gerald Herbert / AP ground in terms of distribution … an airdrop is simply going to lead to riots.”

Six days after the quake, the Miami Herald reported, “Thousands of Haitians living in tent cities around the capital and awaiting medical aid outside hospitals show little sign of having received any international aid. An eight hour drive through the capital on Monday produced three sightings of water trucks but no widespread aid distribution.”

In a report filed on Jan. 21, the legal director of Doctors Without Borders, Francoise Saulnier, said a plane carrying over 12 tons of aid was turned back from Port-au-Prince airport three times that week. “Now everything has been mixed together, and the urgent and vital attention to the people have been delayed, while military logistic—which is useful, but not on day three, not on day four, but maybe on day eight—this military logistic has really jammed the airport and led to this mismanagement, real mismanagement of vital issues,” said Saulnier. Their plane was diverted to the Dominican Republic, delaying the medical aid three days. In addition, teams of Cuban, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, Mexican, and French doctors and aid workers, and a delegation from the Caribbean member-nations of CARICOM were also turned back at the airport.

A searing opinion piece, authored by three surgeons at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City, appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 26, which highlighted the gun-crazy priorities of U.S. imperialism. The three assembled a medical team the day after the earthquake in cooperation with the U.S. State Department and the Boston-based Partners in Health.

“We wanted to reach the local hospitals in Haiti immediately—but were only allowed by the U.S. military controlling the local airport to land in Port au Prince Saturday night. We were among the first groups there.”

“This delay proved tragic. Upon our arrival at the Haiti Community hospital we found scores of patients with pus dripping out of open fractures and crush injuries. Some wounds were already infested with maggots. Approximately one-third of the victims were children.”

“Our operation received virtually no support from (Left) A girl cries out after seeing the feet of her dead brother underneath the rubble of his school.

Many branch of the U.S. government. … As we were leaving Haiti we were appalled to see warehouse-sized quantities of unused medicines, food and other supplies at the airport, surrounded by hundreds of U.S. and international soldiers. … For all the outcry about Katrina, our nation has fared no better in this latest disaster.”

CNN’s Karl Penhaul reported on Jan. 20 from Port-au-Prince General Hospital, where U.S. paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division had just taken up positions. Doctors there said that there was no security problem at the hospital— until troops arrived. Penhaul wondered aloud, “Will this be New Orleans all over again?” The reporter interviewed a Haitian woman trying to visit her daughter who had been told that she couldn’t enter the hospital by a U.S. soldier. “What are you white people in here for? What are you white people coming in and occupying Haiti for?” she told the reporter.

Penhaul said he spoke with other Haitians who accepted the intervention but others who definitely did not. “They say the last thing we need right now is guys with guns; we need medicine, we need food, we need water, and fewer guys with guns.”

Already on the ground and without guns were some 400 Cuban doctors who are part of a permanent mission in Haiti. The Cubans reopened three hospitals in Port-au-Prince and set up field hospitals. Cuban-operated clinics, according to Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health and the present administrator of the General Hospital in the capital, have already served 40,000-50,000 quake victims. In addition, Cuba has trained 400 Haitian doctors at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine. The young Haitian doctors are in Haiti responding to the crisis.

The Palestinians in occupied Gaza also showed their solidarity with Haiti by collecting funds. The Gazans themselves were victims of an Israeli bombing campaign that claimed the lives of 1400 civilians in December 2008. Said Jamal Al-Khudary of the Committee to Break the Siege, “We are here today supporting the victims of Haiti. … We feel for them the most because we were exposed to our own earthquake during Israel’s war on Gaza.”

Three amigos: Obama-Bush-Clinton President Obama selected former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush to work jointly to coordinate relief efforts for Haiti, symbolizing the continuity of imperialist policy toward Haiti.

The bitter irony for many Haitians was George Bush’s support for a brutal CIA-backed coup in 2004, which ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from his second presidency with the aid of paramilitary thugs, often called “Tonton Macoutes,” as the death-squad backers of the former Duvalier family dictatorships (19571986) are known. Aristide and the Democratic Party’s Black Congressional Caucus begged for international help, that is intervention. Bush obligingly sent in the Marines, who exiled Aristide aboard a U.S. Air Force plane.

Aristide, now living in South Africa, says he wants to return to Haiti. Previously, the U.S. has cited security concerns over the still popular president’s return.

Today, Bill Clinton is defending the criminally slow pace of the U.S. relief effort. In the past, President Clinton intensified a racist naval blockade around Haiti designed to seize and return Haiti’s “Black boat people” back into the clutches of a CIA-backed military regime (1991-1994). Clinton’s “interdiction” policy violated U.S. and international asylum law. As a candidate, Clinton had condemned as “racist” the same policy when campaigning against George Bush I.

In 1994, in exchange for agreeing to a U.S.-led U.S./ UN military occupation that would restore Aristide to the presidency, Clinton persuaded Aristide to sign the Governor’s Island Accords, which included adherence to World Bank economic reforms in Haiti, including “free-trade zones” for the slave-wage international assembly industry and “reconciliation” with CIA-backed killers behind the 1991 coup.

Said Christian, a Haitian activist living in New York City, “One of the legacies of Aristide’s capitulation to imperialist interests is the legalization of the framework of ‘humanitarian intervention.’ It set a precedent for the use of UN and other multilateral efforts in (continued on page 7, in “The Cubans opened three hospitals in Port-au-Prince”)

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Marty Goodman / Socialist Action Jean Philippe Ksiazek / AFP / Getty Images

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Obama has ordered some 16,000 troops to Haiti with de facto control of the entire relief effort. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard surrounds Haiti to reach Florida.