Posts tagged workers
Posted 1 year ago
Posted 1 year ago
Return of the Class Struggle
Thanks to the public employees of Wisconsin, thousands of whom have occupied the state capitol building for the past several days, the class struggle has returned to the United States. Of course, it never really left, but lately only one side has been fighting. Workers, their unions and liberals more generally have now rejoined the battle.
Posted 1 year ago
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Posted 1 year ago
Here’s How to Avoid Roses That Support Violent Labor Abuses This Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is coming up, and that means a spike in American flower sales. Unfortunately, despite their romantic connotations, a lot of flowers sold in America have ugly, cruel, and, occasionally, violent origins.
In Ecuador and Colombia, for instance, which furnish a large bulk of America’s flowers, many flower farm workers—most of them female—are subjected to sexual harassment, poor wages, and unsafe working conditions. One worker interviewed for a Frontline documentary about flower abuses said her employers used to fumigate greenhouses while she and her colleagues were still inside. They also refused to pay her when she became pregnant.
On Kenyan flower farms, workers have reported being forced to work 12-hour days for less than a dollar in wages. Others say they’ve been raped while on their dangerous, dark routes to work at five in the morning.
What makes these abuses particularly upsetting is that they needn’t exist. There are many fair-trade flower producers in business around the world, and they’re creating sustainable flowers while offering workers competitive wages, daycare programs, and safety. The problem is getting major flower distributors to sell them.
Currently, 1-800-Flowers offers not a single fair-trade stem, nor will the company tell activists where its wares originate. And a search of FTD’s website also returns nothing fair-trade certified.
This Valentine’s Day, if you want to make sure your token of affection doesn’t also support violence against women in the third world, try getting roses from one of these companies, which stamp all their flowers with the “fair-trade certified” seal: One World Flowers, World Flowers, Inbloom Group
Help spread the love.
photo (cc) via Flickr user Andrea Guerra
Posted 1 year ago
Marx does not advocate state ownership but some form of ownership vested in the collective laborer producing for the common good. How that form of ownership might come into being is established by turning Locke’s argument on the production of value against itself. Suppose, says Marx, a capitalist begins production with $1,000 in capital and in the first year manages to gain $200 surplus value from laborers mixing their labor with the land, and the capitalist then uses that surplus in personal consumption. Then, after five years, the $1,000 should belong to the collective laborers, since they are the ones who have mixed their labor with the land. The capitalist has consumed away all of his or her original capital. …the capitalists deserve to lose their rights, since they themselves have produced no value.
David Harvey, “The Future of the Commons,” Radical History Review, no.109, p. 105
Posted 1 year ago
… as early as its founding convention of 1866 the [National Labor Union] wrestled with the attempt to make black inclusion a reality, and by 1869 it had asked black delegates to form their own all-black organization. The result was the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU), whose 214 delegates gathered in Washing, choosing Isaac Myers as its president; Frederick Douglass headed the organization after 1872. ‘It is not without interest,’ historian Rayford W. Logan notes, ‘that the first large-scale exclusion of Negroes by private organizations in the postbellum period was the handiwork of organized labor.’
… The NLU’s solution of encouraging equality but not integration, urging the formation of separate black trade unions, ‘was a first halting note,’ according to W.E.B. Du Bois. ‘Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.’ The recommendation of a specially formed NLU Committee on Negro Labor reveals the hamstrung quality of the members’ deliberations: ‘While we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the form of competition in mechanical Negro labor,’ the committeemen concluded, ‘yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject.’ Du Bois cites the NLU’s failure to bridge the divide of race as a fatal misstep. Relegating the black worker to a role as a competitor and a prospective under-bidder’ and asking him, ‘when he appeared at conventions…to organize separately; that is, outside the real labor movement,’ was nothing less than ‘a contradiction of all sound labor policy.’
Philip Dray, There Is Power In A Union, pp. 81, 83-84 (via ziatroyano)
Posted 1 year ago
Spanish government uses martial law to force strikers back to work
…the response to this strike is ominous for all of us. For the government, determined to crush the strike, declared a state of emergency and imposed martial law. And under martial law, the strikers could be subject to prison sentences for up to six years for sedition if they didn’t return to work. Quelle surprise, the workers have felt compelled toreturn to work. In fact, just in case the threat of prison wasn’t sufficient, the workers were actually rounded up by military escorts and marched back to work at gunpoint. This is not the first time that fascist-era legislation has been used against airport workers. But employers across the continent will be looking on in admiration and anticipation. BA, you can bet your last penny, would love to have muscle like this at its disposal. And we have to be attentive to this, because there are people in this country in prominent positions who would like to ban the right to strike for some of those groups of workers who are most likely to be on strike in the coming years - tube workers, firefighters, teachers, nurses, others at a pinch. The employers’ offensive across Europe is being led by the state, and pushed through the state, and that gives it a potentially lethal edge. Don’t take your eye off this.
This is the central tension of the neoliberal state: while it purports to promote autonomy and freedom through the rollback of the state in business regulations, it must aggressively promote undemocratic and unaccountable agencies, as well as the use of force, in order to foist its agenda on people. The first example of it in Chile with Pinochet remains the paradigm, despite the claims that we’ve entered some kind of ‘post-neoliberal’ era with the bank bailouts.
Posted 1 year ago
Bonds of Steel
Can alliances with unions in Mexico and Europe return the United Steelworkers to its former strength at home?
From the 1930s through the 1980s, the United Steelworkers (USW) and its sister industrial union, the United Auto Workers, were the heart of organized labor in America. If the woman in the street or the legislator in D.C. had been asked to name the most powerful union in the country, the USW would have been at the top of the list. And deservedly so: With a membership topping 1 million, correspondingly vast coffers, immense political sway, and industry-wide bargaining power, it won the kinds of contracts and prominence that few other unions ever gained in America’s notoriously conservative political economy.
Everyone knows what happened next. With great power comes great complacency, and by the 1980s the American steel industry no longer maintained its once commanding grip on the international steel market. Coupled with an increasingly piratical global corporate culture, the industry suddenly and violently collapsed, scattering steel production to cheaper labor markets abroad.
In the 25 years since, conventional wisdom has pronounced the death of organized labor a thousand times, and attention has shifted from the industrial unions to the giants of the service and public sector — whose jobs cannot be so easily outsourced. But the USW isn’t dead. With an official membership of 850,000 active unionists, down from a peak of 1.3 million in 1975, the USW is the largest industrial union in America. (Much of this growth was achieved by absorbing other declining industrial unions, including the paper, rubber, and forestry workers.)
Despite these figures, the United Steelworkers is fighting on an international battlefield which its corporate opponents have commanded with impunity since the 1970s. The USW’s leadership tries to compensate for this crippling strategic disadvantage through a network of tactical partnerships on both the national and international scenes. Domestically, the union’s Blue Green Alliance with American environmentalists rightfully gained widespread attention, but it is the USW’s outreach to the international union movement that may point to a new path forward for labor in a worldwide economy.
Posted 1 year ago
do people exist to serve the economy, or should the economy exist to serve people? now it turns out that we’ve created a whole society with culture and institutions around the idea that people exist to serve the economy. and millions of people are waking up to the reality that that’s a misplaced priority.
David Korten (via azspot)
This blog has been retired.
