Labor Briefing

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4 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2016 The Other Election—There was never any doubt that the working class would lose the election of a new POTUS. That one was a contest between lesser or maximum evils. Heads they win, tails we lose.

But while that face-off domi­ nated the press and airwaves ad nauseam, little attention was given to the election of the top leadership of one of North America’s most impor­ tant unions—the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

To be sure, that wasn’t a battle for control of the government. But a defeat of the incumbent Hoffa-led bureaucracy by the opposition Teamsters United Slate would not only have advanced mili­ tant, adversarial unionism, new orga­ nizing campaigns, and union democ­ racy in the IBT; it would have also (Above) Teamsters presidential candidate Fred Zuckerman speaks with a supporter.

inspired similar struggles in other unions.

It was a cliff-hanger at the top of the ticket. Challenger Fred Zuckerman, a militant out of the car-haulers sector, won the Midwest and South regions ly held on to the East and West. But Hoffa piled up a lopsided win in the Canadi­ an locals, and that made the difference: Hoffa-51.5 per­ cent, Zuckerman-48.5.

The Journal of Commerce reports that “employers that have dealt with Hoffa” are “relieved” by Hoffa’s elec­ tion win because of his re­ cord for negotiating “deals involving wage and benefit concessions.”

The forces that built Team­ sters United will not go dormant until the next elec­ tion. Their strength ensures there will be battles ahead against the bosses and bu­ reaucrats on many fronts.

Will There Be a Walk in the Park?—Earlier this year, General Electric sold its sprawling Louisville GE Appliance Park complex to Qingdao Haier of China for $5 billion. The new employer demanded a new agreement to replace the IUE-GE contract cover­ ing 4000 blue-collar Park employees. mands was long and brutal, includ­ ing an end of the eight-hour day; a reduced sub-tier wage of $12 for new hires; elimination of seniority bump­ ing rights; and a complicated restruc­ turing of company contributions to a 401(k) retirement plan.

All workers would get $5500 in cash spread out over four years—but no hourly wage increase. And they de­ manded a new health-care plan based on Health Savings Accounts. Seventy-two percent of 3700 members of IUECWA Local 761 voted to reject. As we go to press no new talks have been scheduled.

In the Cards—Service Employees International Union Local 26 has won a “card check” recognition to bargain for 600 Air Serv workers at the Min­ neapolis-St. Paul airport. Air Serv is a Delta Airline subcontractor employing baggage handlers, cabin cleaners, cart drivers, wheelchair agents, unaccom­ panied minor escorts, lavatory work­ ers, and water-service fillers. n If you have a labor story appropriate for this column please contact billon­ [email protected]

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(continued from page 1: “Trump promises more perks for big business”)

mize corporate profits and curry favor from corporate CEOs, bankers, Wall Street investors, and hedge-fund managers. Working people will pay, one way or the other.

Trump’s cabinet appointments make this all too clear. The Nov. 30 New York Times reports that these appointments are “the most power­ ful signal yet that Mr. Trump plans to emphasize policies friendly to Wall Street, like tax cuts and a relaxation of regulation, in the early days of his administration. … That approach has been cheered by investors (the stocks of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have been on a tear since the election).”

The measures that Mnuchin and Ross have said will be on the table under their administration include significant tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. This, they promise, will “cre­ ate more jobs,” a reprise of the “trickle-down” theory of the Reagan years. A recent study by the Tax Policy Center found that under the tax policies advocated by Trump, the country’s richest 1 percent would receive a 13.5% tax reduction, while the “middle class” as a whole would receive only a 2% reduction and some would get a tax increase. Infrastructure projects and job creation In the last week of the campaign, Trump’s promotion of a massive, job-creating infrastructure improvement program helped attract the “rust-belt” working-class voters he needed to put him over the top in the Elec­ toral College. Trump pledged $1 trillion to a national program of infrastructure construction and repairs. Since the election, Bernie Sanders and other Demo­ cratic Party leaders offered to work with Trump on this effort.

Recently, more has been revealed on what Trump supporters in Congress and Wall Street are envision­ ing. The Nov. 29 New York Times reported that Trump’s infrastructure plan was key to Wall Street exuberance following the Trump victory: “Stock traders celebrat­ ing Donald Trump’s election have been bidding up equity prices on a risky bet. … The hope, reflected in financial firms’ postelection tip sheets for investors, is for a robust program of tax cuts and new spending, especially for infrastructure projects.”

The Times said that while a growing section of Wall Street and economists have changed their view and now believe greater government spending is needed to stimulate the economy, Trump’s Republican fol­ lowers in Congress had something different in mind, envisioning a plan laden with massive corporate tax breaks but short on government stimulus spending.

A noted Goldman Sacks economist “suggested to clients that ‘a modest infrastructure package’ is more likely. But even that probably would not come as soon [as] 2017.” If an infrastructure program is developed, it will most certainly be temporary in nature, and un­ able to reach a scale necessary to address the pressing need.

Only a massive and sustained public works program can address society’s most urgent needs: repairing and constructing housing, roads, and bridges; add­ ing, modernizing, and refurbishing schools and pub­ lic transportation systems; preserving farmland and forests; and initiating a crash program to upgrade the power grid and transition toward 100 percent renew­ able energy sources.

Health care and Medicare Trump appointed Republican Congressman Tom Price as Health and Human Services Director, respon­ sible for implementing changes in health care. Price is notorious as an adversary of women’s reproductive rights, having cosponsored legislation in the House to assign “personhood” to a fetus.

Price is also a staunch opponent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare). He wants to replace it with one that also bolsters the insurance industry, and the rest of the bourgeoning multi-billion-dollar health-care industry. The Republican goal is a plan that provides significantly fewer obstacles to profit generation than Obamacare.

Price’s vision is contained in what the Nov. 30 New York Times calls a “detailed and comprehensive” plan, entitled the Empowering Patients First Act of 2015, which is still under discussion in Congress.

This is an insurance-based plan without Obama­ care’s markets and with severely reduced federal subsidies. Instead, it would provide “age-adjusted tax credits” for the purchase of individual and family health-insurance policies and would promote “health savings accounts” through Wall Street investment houses. The objective would be to “encourage” indi­ viduals and families to bear the full brunt of insur­ ance cost, while at the same time raking in hundreds of millions in new profits via account fees and service charges for the investments houses.

The Republican plan, like ACA, centers on generating profits for doctors, hospitals, and insurance and phar­ maceutical companies. But it would more drastically slash regulations that stand in the way and greatly curtail subsidies for the poor. The Times says that the bill “would, among other things, roll back the feder­ ally financed expansion of Medicaid in 31 states and the District of Columbia, taking coverage away from 14 million poor people.”

While Trump promises not to touch Medicare, mak­ ing fundamental changes to this program enjoys sig­ nificant bipartisan support in Congress. The Times reports: “A plan backed by Mr. Price and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, would turn Medicare … into a pro­ gram in which people would buy private insurance through what is known as premium support. The idea is to turn Medicare into a voucher program, designed to limit federal spending while forcing seniors to bear more of the cost.”

While we must vigorously oppose any steps toward rollback of Medicare and Medicaid, and elimination of insurance subsides and other positive features of ACA like coverage for pre-exiting conditions, the solutions offered by the capitalist parties don’t come close to addressing the urgent need for accessible and com­ prehensive health-care services.

Despite the fact that earlier this year a Gallup poll revealed that 58 percent of Americans support re­ placing the ACA with a federally funded health-care system, the two capitalist parties continue to pursue only plans that promote profits for the powerful bigbusiness interests.

The only truly effective solution is one that takes in­ surance companies and profits out of the picture en­ tirely. Neither has anything to do with providing qual­ ity health care. We need a single-payer system as a step toward a universal, government-funded national program in which health care is provided to all as a basic right.

The Trump victory and the road ahead Once the dust settled after Trump’s victory, the “Never Trump” Republicans began to recognize the changed reality and rally around their newly anointed president-elect. The Democrats were slower, some in deep shock; but the “first family” took the lead, with the president demonstrating unity in a friendly ad­ vice-sharing meeting with Donald Trump, and with a separate exchange of pleasantries between Michelle Obama and Milania Trump.

Obama pleaded with his reluctant followers to rec­ ognize the essential truth of the two-party system: “We’re actually all on one team.” The Wall Street back­ ers of Hillary—bankers, traders, speculators, and hedge-fund market manipulators—were all quick to recognize that nothing truly important had been lost, as the stock market rose to record-level highs.

Despite the virulent expressions of racism and sex­ ism displayed by Trump during the campaign—which gave a swift boost to the ultra-right fringe—and the steady stream of insults, rants, and repulsive behavior, millions responded to his populist-sounding message. These voters viewed Trump as an agent of change— someone capable of shaking things up, who in a dis­ torted way embodied their distrust and hatred of a political system and a news media that ridicules, be­ littles, and ignores them.

Trump made significant inroads among the working class and the rural poor. The Clinton team had largely (Above) Donald Trump is mobbed by admirers. But many will find that his populist campaign rhetoric against the big corporations and the “global power structure” was nothing but a sham.

abdicated the field of battle for these votes.

It was the brutal reality that working people experi­ enced during eight painful Obama years that resulted in the lack of interest and participation in the election by millions. They remembered Obama’s first major act as president in 2008, quickly heeding the pleas of the ruling rich that a massive “bailout” of the banks and hedge funds to the tune of well over $7 trillion was so urgently needed that the economy would be hurled into oblivion without it. Remaining in their memory also was the reality of their rapidly vanishing jobs, unions, and pensions.

Despite Obama’s relative popularity among Blacks, and high turnout in past elections, sizable numbers of working-class and poor Blacks, whose conditions worsened over the last eight years, chose to stay away from the polls on Election Day. They also remembered how Hillary Clinton had labeled Black inner-city youth “superpredators” and the Clintons’ role in mass incarceration, promotion of “crime bills,” and the war against Black women and children in the long-fought campaign to “end welfare as we know it.”

All this heightened a sense of alienation and fed Trump’s argument that to Hillary and the Democrats, working people, Blacks, and other minorities are merely heads to be counted every few years when elections come rolling around.

As it turned out, only 44 percent of eligible voters made it to the polls. More Blacks and Latinos voted for Trump than voted for Republican presidential candi­ date Mitt Romney in 2012.

While truly deplorable racism expressed itself among white working-class voters in this election, it has not just now appeared on the scene. It was bred, fostered, and taught for years by Democratic Party politicians (some with long histories of close associa­ tion with the KKK).

Trump won a hearing from white workers on the racist, anti-immigrant message of “saving American jobs” at the expense of the jobs of immigrant work­ ers. This jingoist “America first” nationalist ideology is fully integrated in the propaganda of the reactionary labor union bureaucracy, which they have taught in union meetings and union leadership “training” semi­ nars for years.

Most of the labor fakers responsible for promoting this racist message call themselves progressive Demo­ crats. This ideology is reactionary to the core, as it pits U.S. workers against Mexican workers and those of other countries, and is now fully integrated as a core principal within the Democratic Party.

Essentially, the rise of Trump and his electoral victo­ ry is a result of a vacuum in political leadership within the U.S. working class and the oppressed. Despite the modest efforts of our Socialist Action presidential campaign and the campaigns of other small socialist parties, U.S. workers never had a horse in the race.

A mass political party of labor, organized through its unions and fully independent of capitalist parties, could have filled this void and presented a political program advancing the demands of the working class, opposing all forms of racism and sexism while cham­ pioning the struggles and issues of all those oppressed under capitalism.

This is a fighting program, rejecting collaboration with our oppressors, and relying solely on our capac­ ity to organize independently in mass struggle to de­ fend our interests. n SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2016 5