February 19 Week In Review

Week In Review

February 19 2013

by Bill Onasch

At the OK Corral With A Pocket Knife

That’s how the 9,000 New York City school bus drivers and matrons represented by ATU Local 1181 must have felt during their five-week strike. They not only had to contend with private bus company bosses looking to slash labor costs during a new competitive bidding process for city contracts. City Hall also condemned the strike and even supported an unsuccessful effort to get the NLRB to rule it an unfair labor practice. And then there was the mass media with its daily barrage against what they characterized as a futile, if not illegal work stoppage bringing great hardship to special needs kids and their parents. When thousands of strikers and supporters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge as the city was still digging out from a major storm the New York Times judged this to be news unfit to print.

There’s a lot of malarkey these days about putting kids first. But this example of austerity targets those entrusted with the safe, caring transportation of kids who can’t walk to school or use the regular mass transit. These experienced, dedicated workers are now subject to the same business model that prevails in fast food. The shared goal of the City and private employers is to reduce wages to about a third of present levels–currently 42,500 a year for bus drivers, 26,000 for matrons. These are hardly princely sums in New York City. Slashing these to the 17,000 -25,000 range would push the ATU workers in to the ranks of the working poor.

Late last week the union accepted a request jointly signed by the five candidates in the Democrat primary for the next Mayor, scheduled later this year. They asked the union to unconditionally suspend the strike. In return, they promised to revisit the issue after one of them is elected to replace Bloomberg. It was clearly intended to be no more than a face-saving way for the union to wrap it up.

There’s no honest way to sugar-coat this outcome. Joshua Freeman, a CUNY professor I highly respect as both a transit labor expert and historian, told the Daily News,

“Clearly, the union lost. For workers who used to know that they would have a job a year or two from now, it’s a big loss to have that uncertainty in front of them.”

There will undoubtedly be a lot of critical debate about how this strike was handled, which is fair enough. I was only able to follow it from afar and am always reluctant to second-guess those who fought it out on the front lines.

I think this is another example that even well executed conventional bargaining tactics are often no longer sufficient to protect even present wages, benefits, and working conditions. Class struggle has a political dimension as well as economic. In this strike the Bloomberg administration made that palpable. There’s no reason to think a Democrat successor will be much different.

Some unions, such as the Chicago Teachers and National Nurses United, have enlisted allies from the community and the rest of the labor movement to better hold their own in political struggle and the fight for public opinion.

Joshua Freeman documented in his excellent book, In Transit, how the other transit union in town, the TWU, succeeded in organizing and bringing union conditions to most of what became the New York City Transit Authority. An important component at key stages was political activity, organized through the American Labor Party. TWU leader Mike Quill was elected to the City Council on the ALP ticket.

Labor can fight City Hall–and win. Militant strikes, such as the one by ATU1181, are still relevant. But they need to be complemented by a political strategy to overcome the boss monopoly in that arena of battle. Most of all, we need a party of our own..

Sorry We Missed You

At least 35,000 showed up at the White House Sunday but nobody was home. The President was down in Florida, a guest at a compound belonging to the owner of the Houston Astros. While there POTUS was able to get out on the links of a very private club with Tiger Woods. He did not, as President Kennedy once did for a ban-the-bomb protest, leave instructions to send out urns of coffee and hot chocolate to the marchers.

The thousands back in blustery DC were there to deliver a two-part message to the President that most had supported for reelection–kill the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that would deliver a particularly dirty hydrocarbon from the Alberta tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries; and go forward with other actions on climate change hinted in his State of the Union Address.

It was the biggest and broadest U.S. demonstration around environmental issues since the Seventies. I’m sorry I couldn’t personally make it and I hope there will be more and bigger ones to come.

As efforts continue to forge a mass movement around the single most important issue facing humanity today there are two major challenges that must be resolved:

* the illusion among climate activists that the President really, really wants to act on climate but is hamstrung by Republican and labor opposition. The administration’s record in both international negotiations and EPA enforcement speaks just the opposite. The White House is at the center of the problem, not the solution and can’t be granted any more free passes. And, while the building trades, miners, and most rail unions continue to be in lock-step with their climate-wrecking employers, the ATU, TWU, and NNU have joined the movement against K-XL.

* the boss fraud that fossil fuel creates good jobs while environmental measures kill them. The energy industries create few new long term jobs. The expansion of fracking has taken jobs away from coal. Jobs building pipelines last only months. Restructuring our economy for effective climate action would ensure full employment for generations. To move climate forward, that is the message we must take to the working class majority.

In Brief...

¶ Robert Pear opens a story in the New York Times, “Federal and state officials and consumer advocates have grown worried that companies with relatively young, healthy employees may opt out of the regular health insurance market to avoid the minimum coverage standards in President Obama’s sweeping law, a move that could drive up costs for workers at other companies.”

¶ McClatchy writer Chris Adams, “Processing time for disability claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs worsened in a majority of its regional offices last year, and the VA has struggled with its much-anticipated plan to correct those problems....Between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2012, the time it took to complete the average claim rose from 188 days to 262 days, according to the VA.”

¶ Michael A. Fletcher in the Washington Post, “For the first time since the New Deal, a majority of Americans are headed toward a retirement in which they will be financially worse off than their parents, jeopardizing a long era of improved living standards for the nation’s elderly, according to a growing consensus of new research.”

¶ From the NYT, “The scandal over horse meat in the European food chain widened Thursday from a case of mislabeling to one of food safety as public health authorities in Britain said that a powerful equine painkiller, potentially harmful to human health, ‘may have entered the food chain’ in France.“

¶ A lawsuit filed by environmentalists around the scrapping of the infamous tanker Exxon Valdez revealed workers, as always, are the first victims of environmental crime. Der Spiegel reported, “In Pakistan, more than 20 shipyard workers died and more than 150 were injured in 2011. And in Alang [India] alone, 173 workers have died in more than 170 shipyards since 2001, killed by falling steel parts or burned to death in explosions. Workers are sometimes barefoot as they climb over the ships, and toxic waste is often incinerated on the beach.”

¶ South Asia is not the only area where governments ignore deadly risks to workers. Richard Trumka wrote on the AFL-CIO Blog, “Every year, silica dust takes hundreds of American lives and makes thousands more, mostly construction workers, sick. But it doesn't have to be that way. Two years ago...OSHA submitted a draft proposed rule to reduce exposure to life-threatening silica dust to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. The review was supposed to take 90 days—but two years later, the draft rule is still there, languishing in regulatory limbo while workers continue to be exposed to the deadly dust.”

¶ The Taoiseach of the Irish Republic was in Britain last week doing damage control on fresh exposures about the Magdalene Laundries. Between 1922 and 1996 some 10,000 women and girls were made to work unpaid in laundries run by Roman Catholic nuns. Some were unwed mothers, others unwanted children from broken homes. Once released, most left Ireland never to return. Enda Kenny met with a group of them in England and is expected to issue some kind of formal apology on behalf of the government.

¶ NYT business writer Annie Lowrey tells us, “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data. The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4 percent.”

LPA Meeting Sunday

The next scheduled meeting of Kansas City Labor Party Advocates will be this coming Sunday, February 24, 1PM, at the North Kansas City Library, 23 & Howell, NKC. For more information call 816-753-1672.

That’s all for this week.