-- Current Featured Articles --
Who are the Working Class?...
...In this society, in the culture of the United States, it is generally assumed that people qualify as middle class when they make a certain amount of money and have a certain status. We only use the term “working class” to talk about people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Even the dictionary definition bears out this assumption. The reality is, however, that the lines are not so clear.
Listening to all the purveyors of conventional wisdom, you might well think only a glacially slow approach on healthcare reform is possible.
The most comprehensive reform, HR 676, providing guaranteed healthcare as an expanded and improved Medicare for all, is not politically feasible, the pundits insist, so let's settle for what we can get. Lower the expectations and turn down the public heat, they advise. Turn out the lights on a lot of patients too, they ought to add.
The state of America's working class continues to challenge and anger the most dedicated and brilliant minds of the progressive movement. Throughout the history of our nation a ray of hope emerges periodically that gives life to our vision of a more equitable society.
Many of us could see it- feel it- evolving as the 2006 elections approached. As in previous times it progressed rapidly from issues within communities and families across the nation, escalating to fruition at the polls in November 2006. The escalating turmoil of Iraq and the horrendous tragedies of New Orleans, that stunned the nation, prompted many voters to express their anger at the polls.
We came here in droves to work in auto and its auxiliary plants. We came from people who had picked sugar beets, harvested the crops, cleaned the homes and took care of the children of the wealthy. When the Depression
hit, thousands of Mexican families were rounded up and deported or "repatriated" and exiled. My family is one of the thousands who returned because it was home. It has not been easy for those before us, nor us, to get to a place of dignity as working class people. We have worked hard to raise our standard of living for generations
[My] years in Durban were formative in every way. I was there at the height of Apartheid. The Nationalist government had come to power in 1948. I witnessed first-hand the world’s most racist society. Of course, it is easy to live in such a situation and (as a beneficiary of the system) not to notice it. Luckily, I was right away recruited into a Zionist Socialist youth movement named Habonim. I’m now embarrassed about the Zionist aspect, but the movement stood for a lot of other things as well. It taught us some Marxism
Reproduced with permission of the author and MRZine.com.
The latest news from the Big Three automakers (Chrysler, Ford, and GM) is bad. As of Valentine's Day--how appropriate for North American Workers to receive another shot to the heart--the permanent force reduction now exceeds 100,000.
by Steve Early - reprinted from Working USA: Journal of Labor & Society - March, 2007
From Monsignor Sweeney to Reverend Andy: Labor’s
“New” Agenda For America Hasn’t Improved With Age.
An Essay/Review on:
A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track, by Andy Stern, (New York: Free Press) 2006, 212 pp. $24. America Needs a Raise: Fighting For Economic Security and Social Justice, by John Sweeney (New York: Houghton Mifflin) 1996, 167 pp. $18.95. Editor's Note: Veteran Labor staffer and analyst Steve Early offers interesting insights into the leadership of the AFL-CIO's John Sweeney and SEIU President and Change-to-Win co-founder Andy Stern, by examining what they said in books they have written and their subsequent actions.
The recent action by Latino Immigrant H2-B workers in New Orleans demanding the arrest the contractor that took the visa from the workers, is a very important development for the struggle for democracy and a just Reconstruction in NOLA and the Gulf Coast.
The article is very good and makes the important connection and similarities between the US governments national oppression of African Americans and Latinos. It points out the role of the US government in facilitating the super exploitation of immigrant Latino workers/labor used by many "recovery" contractors in NOLA and throughout the Gulf Coast, and shows how this super-exploitation and denial of basic democratic rights to Latinos is being used as one of the ways of denying jobs to Black workers as part of the government and corporate strategy to deny the right of return of the Black majority.
by David Bacon -- reprinted from The Nation
Ten days before Christmas, the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville, California, fired Luz Dominguez and 20 other housekeepers. Managers announced they'd received a letter from Social Security, saying the numbers they'd given when they were originally hired didn't match government records. The 21 housekeepers have been making beds, washing toilets, and vacuuming carpets there for years. Dominguez recalls, "Before, they sometimes told us they'd received a notice about our numbers not matching. We never had to do anything about it."
What had changed?
The reappearance of Students for a Democratic Society, after 37 years, must be marked down as one of the most surprising events in American reform, along with the steady creep of isolationism in the wake of the failed Iraqi invasion. In fact, these events have a great deal in common. The domestic dialogue begins, as the Iowa-born historian of empire William Appleman Williams observed almost fifty years ago, when the elites fall out with each other and the imperial over-reach stands exposed. Class tensions so successfully submerged by bureaucratic operations re-emerge, sometimes with shocking suddenness. And sectors long seen as apathetic suddenly come to life. SDS membership, not surprisingly, is alive with the contradictions of the time.
There is no disputing that these are tough times for the working class and its allies (all those oppressed by capitalism). The working class lacks a political party; social services to assist us with the inevitable problems we face have been eroded; and even our few precious institutions, especially unions, seem overwhelmed by the relentless attacks.
Former Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's recent commentary on labor "The End of 'More'" (Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2006), albeit apologetically, confirms that liberal orthodoxy is on the side of telling U.S. workers and working-class communities to quit struggling against the tide of "a new competitive reality." But whose reality is it?
by Bill Fletcher/David Bacon
Bill Fletcher Says the Current Debate Over Labor's Future is Dominated by an Outdated Conservatism. Interview by David Bacon
Will a new balance of power in hotels make housekeepers and cooks the inheritors of the San Francisco's waterfront labor tradition, and lead to the kind of rise in the standard of living that longshoremen experienced decades ago?
What do flight attendants, auto workers, college professors, clerical workers, and public employees have in common? We – and most of our counterparts in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, indeed, all over the world – are under the gun, the gun of “neoliberalism.”
|
