Labor Briefing
2016Bill Onasch 2016-11Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 3 →
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• “Without Their Brain and Muscle Not a Single Wheel Can Turn”—For six days, beginning on Nov. 1, over 4700 Philadelphia transit workers, members of Transport Workers Union Local 234, shut down bus, trolley, and subway lines normally carrying more than 900,000 passengers daily.
While more than a dozen items re mained unresolved at the strike dead line, it was no surprise the most con tentious were pensions and health insurance. The SEPTA employer was demanding more than $120 a month in additional worker contributions for a new inferior health plan.
Commuter railroad lines were gener ally allowed to run during the strike. However, on the first day of the walk out, the strikers picketed the train yards and were able to shut down several lines before management ob tained a court injunction to halt the action.
The union charged that SEPTA re fused to seriously negotiate, instead seeking a court injunction to break the strike on grounds that it might prevent some from voting in the Nov. 8 elec tion. With the anxious participation of several Democratic Party politicians in the negotiations, an agreement was
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(Left) Michelle and Barak Obama with Raul Castro at a Havana baseball game in March 2016.
Earlier in the process of normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, a Cuban diplomat speaking to U.S. audiences sympathetic to the revolu tion asked audience members concerned that increased trade with the U.S. would become a foothold for U.S. im perialism to trust Cuba to maintain their revolution. He said that Cuba would only trade for what benefited the country.
The attempt by Cleber, an Alabama-based farm equip ment company, to build tractors for small agriculture in the Mariel Special Development Zone illustrates U.S. attempts to tell Cuba what it needs, based on U.S. inter ests. After the U.S. approved the company’s permits, and before the Cuban government had even considered the company’s application, Obama began touting the com pany as a symbol of the new era of economic exchange and announced that for the first time a U.S. company would be building tractors in Cuba.
However, Cuba ultimately rejected the company’s ap plication. Ana Teresa Igarza, director general of the Mariel Special Development Zone, stated that the com pany’s “Oggún” tractor, which is based on 1940s-era technology, “is not the type of investment that we want to attract in the Zone,” which seeks to attract foreign