April 10, 2010 D.C. JOBS PROTEST

[Communist]

http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/a10.gif

Joblessness is as bad today as it was during the 1930s -- It's time to take the fight to D.C.

On April 8, 1935, Congress passed the legislation creating the largest public works program in history. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) created 8.5 million jobs during the depression of the 1930s.

Let's mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the WPA by telling the government that today's jobless crisis is as bad today as it was back then and that we need the same kind of bold, sweeping jobs program that the people demanded in the 1930s -- Now!

Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated the final months of his life to starting a movement for the right of all to a job or a guaranteed income -- we need that movement now more than ever.

It's time to say no: to a jobless recovery - to an economy based on permanent high unemployment and low wages - to trillions of $ for Wall St., and trillions of $ for war but nothing but joblessness, foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, low wages, union busting, hunger and homelessness for workers and the poor.

There are more than 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the country today. We need a real WPA-type program that is big enough to insure that those who need work get work -- work that is socially useful that pays union wages and benefits.

Call issued by
the Bail Out the People Movement

To endorse this call (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/apr1010endorse.shtml)
go to http://www.bailoutpeople.org/apr1010endorse.shtml

To volunteer or organize transportation from your area (http://bailoutpeople.org/apr1010volorgcent.shtml)
go to http://www.bailoutpeople.org/apr1010volorgcent.shtml



http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/rev-ovr-pic.gif

http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/7sept20-bs.jpg
(1000 people march for jobs
before the Pittsburgh
G-20 Summit)

Bail Out the People Movement
Solidarity Center
55 W. 17th St. #5C
New York, NY 10011
212.633.6646
www.BailOutPeople.org (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

[Kassad]

I'm slightly amused at the wildly sectarian declaration of this event, which was announced after ANSWER and dozens of other organizations planned a march on Washington to demand an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to fund human needs. It's likely that the International Action Center, BailOutThePeople and the other organizers of this event will not endorse the march on Washington that was planned before theirs and this will divide the attendance counts of both rallies because of this. This is just plain stupid.

[Communist]

As has been noted here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/nyc-march-wall-t128170/index.html?p=1668648#post1668648) and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=801), all endorsements have been sent and received.
All hoping for the greatest success. :thumbup1:

[Communist]

--------------------------
President Obama — one year later (http://www.workers.org/2010/us/president_obama_0218/)

By Larry Holmes
Published Feb 10, 2010 7:12 PM

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/larry_holmes_nov17.jpg

The following excerpts are from a talk providing a Marxist analysis on President Barack Obama’s first year in office by Larry Holmes, a Secretariat member of Workers World Party, at a Black History Month forum in New York City on Feb. 6. Other speakers included Dolores Cox, an International Action Center volunteer, on the struggle to free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal; and LeiLani Dowell, a Fight Imperialism, Stand Together organizer, on the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education. Go to workers.tv to hear these talks in their entirety.

It is kind of a bitter Black History Month 2010. Maybe some people are still celebrating the first year of the first African-American president. A lot of people are thinking about the suffering of the Haitian people. This is not just a contemporary feeling. The Haitian people play a role in the history of Africa. They are the symbol, the beacon, of the African peoples’ struggle against slavery.

Of course, last November when Obama was inaugurated it felt like an earthquake. Because for some of us, we thought it would take some kind of earthquake for this country to elect an African-American president.

It was kind of an earthquake that paved the way for Obama’s election — it was about six weeks before the election and was located on Wall Street and the capitals of other capitalist countries. That was the near collapse of the worldwide capitalist financial system.

A year ago when we were watching him being inaugurated, the crisis might have been obscured by the shock and elation over the inauguration of the first African-American president. Well, the shock and awe are gone and now people are focused on the crisis.

That crisis can be briefly defined in a couple of processes. One of those processes is the decline of U.S. imperialist domination worldwide. This is the reason why Obama campaigned on talking to enemies. It wasn’t enlightenment. It is this domination — U.S. imperialist domination of the world for 70 or 80 years that has allowed it to afford a certain higher standard of living for enough of a section of the working class who up until recently considered themselves middle class.

But that is not the only process. It is the deepening of imperialist globalization, which only speeds up the inherent crisis of capitalist overproduction. That intensifies the war on the working class. This is the political crisis that Obama has been asked to sit on, and to do something about. The attacks are such and what is coming is such that many people consider it a tipping point in the world capitalist crisis. And what do we mean by that? Because of these changes, U.S. imperialism is beginning to lose that which is most valuable and important to them. What is it? Political stability.

Filling the vacuum

Political stability is defined as doing what is necessary to keep a certain section of the working class — enough of the working class — in a state where they do not rise up, where their leaders are loyal to the system, where there is no opposition. That game is coming to an end. That political stability is beginning to show signs of cracking up and they are worried about what the future may bring: class struggle, class struggle.

Obama has been given the thankless job — and some people consider it a setup — of presiding over this political period, this instability, this crisis, this new situation where you have permanent high unemployment and underemployment.

We don’t even want to get into the unemployment rate for Black and Latino/a workers, especially for youth, because it is five and 10 times the official unemployment rate. This is what Obama is supposed to keep the lid on.

This is one of the reasons he opened up his administration with so-called health care reform. We are all for the uninsured getting health insurance and people not being disqualified because of pre-existing conditions, but that got lost in the concessions being given to the big insurance companies. So it began to get weaker and weaker and people got less and less excited about it and it was easier and easier for the insurance companies to fund a big right-wing insurrection.

The so-called health care reform legislation in reality was a surrogate for not talking about jobs, which is the real crisis. Not that health care isn’t important, but underneath everything the big platform is jobs. Because he didn’t have a program for jobs, he gave it over to the right. Not that they have a jobs program either.

There is a big vacuum where there should be angry, mass mobilized, class struggle. In the absence there is a lot of noxious poisonous trash that is filling that vacuum.

Never in our lifetime, certainly not in mine, have people been angrier at Wall Street, angrier at the banks. The banks are the symbol of capitalism.

Everybody hates the banks. They want to go and attack the banks. It opens up an opportunity for a huge movement that is so anti-capitalist. But instead, what do we get? The Tea Party Movement, paid for by the insurance companies and a couple of other millionaires and billionaires. They are the ones charging into town hall meetings and bullying people. This is not a populist movement. It’s dirty, racist, reactionary, pro-war, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, everything anti-socialist.

The labor leadership has been let off the hook too long. Pressure has got to be put on them. They need to be dragged out of politicians’ offices where they spend too much time and too much money. They need to pay attention, not only to their members but also to all workers, whether they are undocumented, unemployed or underemployed — whether they have nothing to do with the industry their union is organizing.

Our view of unions is that they are organizing centers for the entire working class and the oppressed. They welcome the unemployed and Black and Latino/a youth. They welcome the poorest even if they don’t have any dues. They mobilize them and champion all political and social issues. At this stage of imperialist globalization and the crisis that we are facing, unions better become more and more like the revolutionary view that Marx and other revolutionaries had of unions, or they will not survive.

We are going to Washington on the 75th Anniversary of the WPA. That is the Works Progress Administration. We are going to bring the unemployed and our union allies, our community allies and whoever else we can get to go with us. We want a real public works program that employs millions and millions of people — not strikebreaking scab jobs to bust unions, not workfare, but real jobs that pay a living wage. That is what Martin Luther King said — a job or a living income.


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[Communist]

_________________________________

Bosses’ doubletalk can’t hide the crisis

Mobilize to demand government give jobs (http://www.workers.org/2010/us/jobs_0218/)

By Fred Goldstein
Published Feb 11, 2010

The big business media and the Obama administration trumpeted the message of hope and recovery last week when the government announced a drop in the official unemployment rate.

The Bail Out the People Movement, however, is not waiting around for a job recovery. Instead it is building a broad-based coalition to go to Washington on April 10, the 75th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration. It will demand a massive government jobs program to give every worker a job at a living wage or a guaranteed income. Eight million workers got jobs under the Roosevelt administration’s WPA during the Depression of the 1930s.

This mobilization will be an answer to the smoke and mirrors coming from the government about the job situation and job creation.

Official government reports declared that the unemployment rate dropped from 10 percent to 9.7 percent in January. In the same government report, however, came the baffling announcement of a net loss of 20,000 jobs in the same month. This number is inexplicable. Various attempts to fathom this contradiction have been made by citing “seasonal” adjustments, recalculations of the workforce, etc.

But it all adds up to government statisticians manipulating numbers in order to give the working class false hope for a meaningful economic recovery. The aim is to keep the workers and the communities quiet so they will leave everything to the government, the bosses, the bankers, and the capitalist parties and politicians instead of mobilizing to fight back.

‘Productivity’ and overproduction

What the workers are facing now is a massive, historic crisis of capitalist overproduction. The capitalists are always claiming that what is needed in the economy is more “productivity.” Productivity means getting more production out of workers in less time. The capitalists all aim to produce more and capture a larger share of the market in order to make more profits.

In their competition for markets and profits, the capitalists produce way beyond what the workers can afford to buy with their wages. Then there is a crisis of overproduction. Factories and stores shut down. Workers are laid off. But then they have even less money with which to buy.

The crisis of overproduction gets worse over time as the bosses create new machinery and more and more ways to speed up workers. This time it has reached a new level. Now the bosses are trying to restore their profits and operations by laying off more workers.

Most big companies, like Ford, General Motors, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Oracle, IBM and on down the line, have laid off workers permanently. This is the way they fight their profit/market crisis — by creating a crisis of unemployment for the working class. The contradictions that fly in the face of official optimism demand a broad response.

The Labor Department has now revised previous data and admitted that things are much worse than Washington has been saying all along. The economy contained 1.36 million fewer jobs in December than originally thought, a downward adjustment of roughly 1 percent. Using this reduced number forced an overall annual adjustment, which showed that 8.4 million workers have lost jobs since the downturn began in 2007 — more than a million above the previous estimate. The revisions showed the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December, far more than the 85,000 initially reported. (New York Times, Feb. 6)

Those out of work for six months or longer swelled to 6.3 million in January, from 6.1 million in December — the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948. While the number of workers forced to work part time was reduced, there were still three-quarters of a million who dropped out of the workforce because they gave up looking for jobs.

The unemployment rate reached 16.5 percent among African Americans, 12.6 percent among Latinos/as, and 26.4 percent among teenagers. Some 11.8 percent of immigrant workers were unemployed in January, compared to 10.3 percent of U.S.-born workers, the Labor Department said on Feb 5. (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6) The decline in construction has devastated the immigrant community, especially the undocumented.

Juan Ralda, 23 years old, told the Journal that he is an expert in masonry who worked for a contractor in Santa Monica, Calif., until bank financing dried up residential projects.

“I haven’t had steady work for a year,” said Ralda, a Guatemalan immigrant. He used to send home $300 a month to help support his mother and three younger siblings. “Now, I barely earn enough money to eat and pay the rent.”

Budget cuts on top of layoffs

Making the need for a mobilization of the unions, the unemployed, the communities and the working class in general more pressing, states like California, Michigan, New York, Florida, Nevada and many others are cutting their budgets while funneling billions of dollars in interest to the banks. They are making the workers and communities suffer the crisis while the likes of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America rake in record profits and bonuses.

Food pantries are running out of food because of the rise in the number of hungry people. The homeless population is growing under the impact of foreclosures and evictions. Hospitals are closing; public schools are starved for funds; college students are forced to drop out of school because of tuition increases. Yet the vaults of the banks are filled with untold sums of money given them by the government in the form of interest payments and just plain handouts.

Those interest payments coming from the government treasuries are taken from workers’ wages, in the form of either payroll taxes or sales taxes. Wages that workers sweated for are being taken from social services and redirected into the treasuries of the rich.

The same is true of the Pentagon, which got $700 billion this year alone — taken from the working class and the middle class. The military uses that money to kill and destroy — to make the world safe for the giant corporations that want to control the oil in the Persian Gulf and the region around Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the working class at home goes without jobs.

APRIL 10: Give workers jobs!

The message that the Bail Out the People Movement will take to Washington on the April 10 march is that all that money should be used to give workers jobs. The government should take the trillions of dollars that were given to the banks, to insurance companies like AIG, to corporations like GM and Chrysler, and as subsidies to agribusiness — and all the other government handouts that go in one way or another to the capitalist class — and create a fund to give workers jobs or income.

The money should be used for many other things, too — for a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, especially for the unemployed; for an end to budget cuts; to guarantee education and food security, to name just a few.

But the basic demand for a massive government jobs program on the scale of the WPA must be the starting point for dealing with the crisis of the working class and the massive unemployment brought about by the capitalist profit system.

President Franklin Roosevelt first inaugurated the Civilian Conservation Corps. in 1933 and the WPA in 1935 under the pressure of a mass movement of the unemployed. The masses demonstrated, fought the police, defied sheriffs and marshals, and put evicted families back into their homes by the hundreds of thousands. This movement was threatening the very social foundation of U.S. capitalism.

The WPA at that time was a concession, meant to head off a wider social rebellion and possibly a revolution. The legislation creating the WPA came at the initiative of Washington as a matter of protecting capitalism.

In today’s circumstances, in the absence of a mass movement, Washington and the ruling class are going in the opposite direction from that of the Roosevelt administration — they are funneling tax cuts to businesses. Some $100 billion to $150 billion in so-called stimulus money will go to the bosses in the hope that they will create jobs.

But with at least 15 million officially unemployed, millions more who have dropped out and are not counted, and millions working part time who cannot live on their wages, the government plan is a drop in the bucket that mainly benefits the bosses.

The demand for a WPA-style program, where the government is obliged to directly give a job or an income to everyone who needs it, is not meant to save capitalism but to start an urgently needed struggle against the capitalist class. The aim is to relieve the crisis of the working class, organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed, documented and undocumented, the communities, the students and youth, women and men of all races and nationalities. In a word, it is to open up a struggle against the capitalist crisis and ultimately against the capitalist profit system itself.



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Verbatim copying and distribution of entire
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[Communist]

.
Jobs program needed

30 million seek work (http://www.workers.org/2010/us/jobless_0311/)

Gallup Poll shows gov’t hides real figures

By Fred Goldstein
Mar 3, 2010

A Gallup Poll released on Feb. 23 revealed that in January 30 million workers in the U.S. were either on forced part-time or out of work altogether. This number, based on a poll of over 20,000 adults over the age of 18 and conducted from Jan. 2 to Jan. 31, amounts to 20 percent of the workforce.

Conducted by one of the most prestigious and conservative polling institutions in the capitalist world, the poll used samples taken from all regions of the country and all age groups.
People ages 18 to 29 have the highest level of underemployment, officially at 31 percent.No wonder this poll was barely mentioned in the big-business press. It shows that the government is undercounting millions of workers who suffer from the unemployment/underemployment crisis. It documents, at a minimum, that the statisticians in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Bureau of Economic Research have been dishonest about the true level of unemployment.

This Gallup Poll also shows the racist disparities that have been made worse by the economic crisis. It reveals African-American and Latino/a underemployment to be 27 percent and 29 percent respectively, compared to white underemployment at 17 percent. There was nothing revealed about immigrant workers, but other studies have shown a drastic increase in underemployment among undocumented workers in particular, especially those in the construction industry.

According to government agencies, the level of what is called “total unemployment,” a measurement called U-6, is only 16.5 percent, not the 20 percent revealed in the Gallup Poll.

To make things worse, it is important to know that the official government number for “total unemployment” includes not only workers who are unemployed plus those who are forced to work part time when they need a full-time job, but also those who have dropped out of the workforce because they have given up looking.
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/chartsm_0311.jpg (http://www.workers.org/2010/us/chart_0311.jpg)According to AOL News online, “What’s striking about the Gallup numbers is that the polls didn’t even include people out of work so long they are no longer counted in the workforce.” In the month of January, according to the government, 1.1 million workers were officially classified as “discouraged workers.”

Thus the Gallup Poll itself is an undercount if the official government number of 1.1 million workers who have given up looking for a job is added to the 30 million compiled by Gallup.

4.4 million workers drop out

Yet the government coverup is even wider than would appear from the Gallup Poll. The Economic Policy Institute, whose former head, Jared Bernstein, is the chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, says: “Since the recession started in December 2007, the labor force — people who are either working or seeking work — has declined by 700,000 workers, even though the working-age population has increased by 3.7 million. The shrinking labor force is largely a reflection of discouragement with the labor market; as jobs have become scarce, many job seekers have given up looking for work.”

Thus, according to the EPI, almost 4.5 million workers have dropped out of the work force, not the 1.1 million counted by the government. And among those who have dropped out, a drastically high proportion are youth. The labor force participation rate for workers age 16-24 has decreased from 59.1 percent to 54.7 percent in the 25 months since the recession started, representing a loss of 1.3 million young workers. In the Gallup Poll, people ages 18 to 29 had the highest level of underemployment, at 31 percent.

On the other end of the age scale, people over 55 have increased their workforce participation because they cannot afford to retire. In their senior years they wind up working, often forced to compete with youth for low-paying jobs.

Under “normal” conditions of capitalist exploitation — i.e., in between boom-and-bust crises, when jobs are more available — youth, and especially Black, Latino/a, Asian and Native youth, have the highest unemployment and the lowest wages. Now that there is a capitalist crisis, the crisis for youth has become massive.

The talk of “recovery” for workers of all ages is a myth. The only recovery is for the bosses, and for the biggest and richest ones at that.

The talk of a decline in layoffs was contradicted at the end of February by the announcement of a rise in first-time claims for unemployment insurance.

Unemployment claims rise, home sales drop

In its report on jobless claims on Feb. 25, the Labor Department said first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 496,000. Wall Street analysts had expected a drop to 455,000.

The four-week average of jobless claims rose 6,000 to 473,750. The average had fallen sharply over the summer and fall from its peak last spring of about 650,000. This year, the improvement has stalled. The four-week average has risen about 30,000 in the past month. It’s now well above the 425,000 level that many economists said would signal net hiring. It is a commentary on U.S. capitalism that the layoff of 425,000 workers in one week would be considered a “positive” signal of net hiring.

Furthermore, new-home sales dropped 11.2 percent in January, the largest drop in more than 50 years. A drop in new home sales spells further layoffs for construction workers.

One of the causes for the drop is the massive number of foreclosures as speculators and even some individual home buyers try to get bargain-basement prices by picking from the millions of foreclosed homes. But even with that, existing home sales dropped 7.2 percent in January.

More foreclosures are coming by the hundreds of thousands as unemployed workers cannot afford to keep up their mortgages, and even those who are employed are “underwater” — i.e., they owe far more than their homes are worth on the market.

The banks and lenders will not adjust loans, will not suspend payments for the unemployed, and are ruthlessly trying to squeeze every last nickel out of homeowners. Millions more foreclosures are in the offing unless the masses of people unite and demand an end to foreclosures and evictions.

To the 30-million-plus workers with no jobs or part-time jobs, with no health care plan, no pensions, no benefits, no vacations and the unbearable economic pressure of trying to stay afloat, the very idea that the economy has been “recovering” for six months must sound like a cruel joke.

Who will buy the goods?

One question that needs to be asked is what prompted the Gallup organization to undertake such an extensive poll? The contradictory numbers coming out of government offices and from the Obama administration have probably made sections of the ruling class nervous.

Investment advisers, corporate economic forecasters, even economic policy advisers, have a large stake in getting reliable information about the economy. The ruling class cannot rely on the government agencies alone, which are bound to understate the seriousness of the situation for political reasons.

One of the few details made public in the recent Gallup Poll was how much less money was being spent in the market by underemployed workers, compared to those employed. The discrepancy between a supposed spending average of $75 a day for the employed compared to $48 a day for the underemployed, even if exaggerated, is a hard fact for those authorities to contemplate when considering the prospects for a capitalist “recovery.”

The public heard little of the poll and most of the information gathered was kept private, undoubtedly for the eyes of the ruling class and their advisers.

But the ruling class is teetering between recovery and renewed capitalist crisis. Everyone knows that the stabilization of the capitalist economy, the temporary halt to the downward spiral of the economic and financial crisis, was predicated upon the massive bailout of the banks and the stimulus to the economy.

The conventional calculations are that anywhere between 1.5 million and 2 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus package of $787 billion.

The stimulus money is supposed to run out in the middle of 2010. Credit for first-time home buyers has now been extended to those who have previously purchased homes.

The government and bosses and bankers are waiting to see what happens when the stimulus money and the incentives run their course. Everyone is holding their breath hoping that the limited capitalist expansion now underway will keep going.

But the ruling class has a fundamental contradiction in the present crisis. It is making a profit recovery based on layoffs and intensifying the exploitation of the remaining workers. No recovery can be sustained on that basis. Only renewed crisis can be the outcome of this course.

The working class, the oppressed, the communities, the students and youth, and all who are being victimized by this capitalist crisis must not hold their breath and wait for salvation to come from an economic recovery.

The only way out of this crisis for them is to organize and struggle with a fighting program. At the top of the agenda must be a demand for a government program that guarantees a job at a living wage with full benefits and the unhampered right to union representation for every worker who needs one.

The trillions of dollars being given to the banks, the corporations and the military can support such a program as well as guarantee a free quality education for all youth, from grade school to college.


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©1995-2010 Workers (http://www.workers.org/) World (http://www.workersworld.net/). (http://wwppitt.weebly.com/)
Verbatim copying & distribution
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[Communist]

.
A job is a right

Lessons from Pittsburgh (http://www.workers.org/2009/us/sb_1203/)

Excerpts from a talk by Sharon Black at the WWP National Conference, Nov. 14.


A job is a right! We’re going to fight, fight, fight!

This is more than just a demand.

It is a concept based on the fact that we, the working class, produce everything. There isn’t a single thing in this auditorium that wasn’t made or built by workers. It is our social, collective labor that gives everything its value.

It’s on this basis that a job is a property right.

It is the contradiction between this socialized labor and the privately owned means of production by a parasitic class—for profit only—that is at the very root of the present economic crisis.

We have a right to seize and occupy the plants and the workplaces!

We have a right to stay in our homes rather than let the banks foreclose them!

In 1937, Frances Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Labor secretary, recognized that workers had a property right to their job. She was responding towards the latter part of the sit-down strikes and plant occupations of that period. She proclaimed this under the hot breath of the mass struggle.

There was a complex political strategy involved that called for opening up and facilitating the involvement and leadership of the Black community itself.

Reviving Dr. King’s legacy for full employment gave those in the Black community who wanted to struggle around jobs an avenue to do so during a period when the historic election of the first Black president weighs heavily in people’s consciousness.

That was one aspect of the question. The other was about challenging the movement—particularly the anti-war and anti-globalization forces. Initially the challenge was to take on the struggle for jobs—but ultimately it was about “Who would come to the Hill and stand in solidarity with the community?”

In essence the jobs march was not only about jobs—it was also an anti-racist march.

Challenging the movement, whether mild in manner or bold, turned out to be the right thing and it should be noted that even if their numbers were small, the very best of the movement did come, including many white youth who were attracted on the basis of what we stood for.

Understanding the national question and the fight against racism will become even more important as the capitalist crisis deepens in this country and virulent racism and anti-immigrant sentiments are whipped up by the ultraright.

What the Tent City highlighted is that the best way of conducting the class struggle is to be aggressive in fighting racism and promoting the leadership of the most oppressed.

It’s as Comrade Sam Marcy said a long time ago, “If white revolutionaries fight hardest against racism and in support of the national question, it will afford the oppressed comrades the opportunity to push the class struggle harder.”

This same formulation can be equally extended to the masses.

The Jobs March and Tent City brought together poor white Southern workers, who were newly jobless and homeless, with Black workers. This was probably the first time in their lives that the whites had marched under a Dr. King banner. It was in the crucible of the struggle that unity was forged.

We cannot leave the white workers to the racists and the ultraright!

The fact is that the entire working class is deeply indebted to the most oppressed, whether it is the immigrant workers who revived May Day along with the militant tactic of sitting in and occupying the Republic Windows and Doors factory, or the revolutionary Black workers who forged the fight in the auto plants and so much more.

In the book, “Solidarity Divided,” there is a story about an exchange between a Service Employees International Union staff member and a representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions. To the question of what is the role of the unions, the SEIU delegate exclaimed, “To represent the interest of its members.” The COSATU member diplomatically corrected him, “The role of the union is to represent the entire working class.”

Workers can no longer afford to fight alone industry by industry, region by region, or even country by country in an era of capitalism that has gone global.

The unions must fight for the entire working class.


A job is a right!
__________

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[Communist]

.
10 years after victory
Dockworkers gather to honor Charleston 5 (http://www.workers.org/2010/us/charleston_5_0311/)

By Dante Strobino
Charleston, S.C.
Mar 5, 2010


More than 100 dockworkers, joined by close to another 100 unionists and community activists, gathered in Charleston on Feb. 27-28 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Charleston 5 victory. The dockworkers, four Black and one white, all members of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422, had been attacked by police riding on horses, in armored cars and in helicopters while picketing a non-union ship. They were jailed on “riot” charges but later freed after a long struggle.

http://www.workers.org/2010/us/charleston_0311.jpg
WW photo: Dante Strobino Janie Campbell, Charleston sanitation worker and acting president of AFSCME Local 1199, speaks about their efforts to win union recognition. Standing, right, is President Ken Riley of ILA Local 1422, one of the Charleston 5. Sitting, right, is Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO.

The activity brought together dockworkers from around the world — including South Africa, Argentina and Liverpool, England — and ILA members from ports up and down the East Coast, plus members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 on the West Coast.

Charleston sanitation workers, who are currently in a struggle to unionize, also participated.

Ken Riley, president of ILA Local 1422, chaired most of the event. Speaking on the significance of the Charleston 5 victory, he said it’s important not to forget the union’s struggles and to embrace the support of union members from elsewhere, especially as South Carolina is a “right-to-work” state that continues its assault on the right of workers to form unions.

South Carolina’s anti-worker politicians are currently proposing a state constitutional amendment, HR 3305, that would prevent unions from being able to use card-check neutrality, stated Donna Dewitt, president of the state AFL-CIO. This is one of the major aspects of the Employee Free Choice Act that workers are currently fighting to get passed by Congress.

South Carolina is also taking measures to undermine the independence of the Employment Security Commission by folding it into the governor’s office — a move that would further erode workers’ likelihood of receiving decent unemployment insurance.

While workers and their organizations are under attack all over the country, they are especially hard hit in the South. In North Carolina, many of the few remaining tobacco plants are scheduled to close soon. Public sector workers in North Carolina and Virginia are still in a long battle to overturn Jim Crow laws that ban collective bargaining.

This situation, in large part, goes back to the inability of trade unions to properly address racism. “The starting point of building unions in the South isn’t building unions necessarily — it is addressing the actual conditions faced by workers, like discrimination,” stated Saladin Muhammad, long-time union organizer in the South and a member of Black Workers for Justice.

“In all 12 Southern states, there are fewer union members combined than there are in the state of New York alone,” he continued. Muhammad then called for independent organizing of workers outside the trade union movement. “During the Great Depression of the 1930s, workers didn’t first build unions, they often just built committees,” claimed Muhammad. “We must build a Southern alliance to organize the South.”

AFL-CIO launches campaign for jobs

The national AFL-CIO took advantage of this important gathering and placed it in the current context of mass unemployment. It hosted a Town Hall meeting in Charleston to announce its Jobs with Rights Now campaign.

Simultaneous Town Hall jobs meetings were held in four other U.S. cities. Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, was the keynote speaker at the Charleston event. Speaking of the jobless crisis, she said that “9.7 percent unemployment doesn’t even begin to tell the truth. ... The real numbers are astronomical.”

Holt Baker commented on the paltry jobs bill recently passed by Congress.

“We applaud that,” she said, but it is “not big enough and bold enough to put millions of workers back to work.” She continued, “We got to be bold. ... We must even be willing to go to the streets and go to jail” to win jobs.

The only path to true economic recovery is if workers and communities continue to unite and challenge the direction of the U.S. government, which will bail out the banks and fund the wars while more than 27 million people remain unemployed and underemployed.

Unless a broad fightback grows, the state budgets will continue to get slashed, creating the justification for continued attacks on social services and the right of workers to organize unions.

The struggle must continue to demand a federally funded public jobs program that includes workers’ power and living wages on the scale of the Works Progress Administration that workers and the unemployed won in the 1930s.
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©1995-2010 Workers World (http://www.anonym.to/?http://wwppitt.weebly.com/).
Verbatim copying of article is
permitted without royalty
if this notice is preserved.

[Communist]

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ON Sat., APRIL 10



The 75th Anniversary of the WPA



FIGHT for a PUBLIC JOBS PROGRAM!





Rising unemployment is as much of an emergency crisis today as it was during the depression of the 1930s. On the 75th anniversary of the Works Projects Administration (WPA), Come to Wash. DC to demand jobs - not some time in the future - now!




JOIN in a NATIONAL MARCH FOR JOBS in WASHINGTON, DC



At the height of the Great Depression of the 1930’s President Roosevelt created the Works Project Administration (WPA) on April 8, 1935. The WPA put over 8 million unemployed people directly to work. In Philadelphia alone over 47,000 people found jobs through the WPA doing work that also helped rebuild communities.

Today, with tens of millions of workers – especially youth – unemployed, we need a real, public jobs program, NOW! We can’t wait for some imaginary future jobs from the banks and corporations who have already been bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars.

The government can and must open hiring halls in every neighborhood and get people back to work. In the 1930’s the WPA helped build the Philadelphia International Airport, constructed recreation facilities at public high schools, repaired failing infrastructures and completed hundreds of other projects. There is plenty that needs doing immediately in Philadelphia – repairing roads and bridges, cleaning parks, fixing and building homes, revitalizing neighborhoods – the list is endless.

The Full Employment Act makes it the government’s duty to put everyone to work – it’s the law! Let’s organize and tell the politicians – A REAL, PUBLIC JOBS PROGRAM NOW!




Help get people to Washington on April 10th! Attend a local organizing meeting



7pm on Monday, March 15 at Calvary Church, 48th & Baltimore in W. Philadelphia to learn more about the Fight for a Public Jobs Program and how you can help.



For more information email: PhillyIAC(AT)peoplesmail.net ([email protected]) or call 215-724-1618.



Sponsored by the Philadelphia Bail Out the People Movement and the International Action Center

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[Communist]

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Why can't Congress do more to help create jobs? (http://www.truthout.org/why-cant-congress-do-more-help-create-jobs57425)

David Lightman
March 05, 2010

WASHINGTON — Despite reports of relentless job losses, including Friday’s news that payrolls shed 36,000 more positions last month, Congress is having trouble approving significant legislation to create jobs.

"I am frustrated. We are not moving quickly enough to deal with the source of chronic unemployment," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo. Many Republicans feel the same way.

The gridlock is the product of several struggles: Disputes over the best policy to create jobs. Concerns about increasing the already huge federal deficit. The lack of bipartisan cooperation. Tension between Democrats in the Senate and those in the House of Representatives. A reluctance even among Democrats to consider a big new stimulus package only a year after approving one that cost $862 billion.

Since Congress began its 2010 session, leaders of both parties have said that job growth is their top priority, but so far, they’ve done nothing significant to address it.

Initially, there was hope for quick action. Unemployment had reached 10 percent last fall, and the House passed a $154 billion jobs package in December that included highway projects and aid to states.

The Senate gave it a cool reception, however. Two and a half months later, senators are slowly working their way through their own $150 billion jobs package. It would provide a long list of tax breaks and aid to states and would extend through the year several expiring government programs, including extra jobless benefits and help for the unemployed with their health insurance. The Senate will be back at it next week.

The lone bright spot on the jobs-bill front was supposed to be a modest $17.5 billion package of tax breaks for small businesses that hire new employees.

Democrats had hoped that it would pass easily and that President Barack Obama could sign it Friday _ the day February’s unemployment numbers were released _ but a House-Senate disagreement stalled the bill. Now the Senate hopes to finish work on it next week.

Even if it becomes law, the bill won’t make much difference; $17.5 billion isn’t much in a $14 trillion economy.

”I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact,” said Bill Rys, tax counsel at the National Federation of Independent Business, the small-business lobby.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported Friday that 14.9 million people were unemployed last month, virtually unchanged from January and up from 12.7 million a year earlier.

Small business is supposed to be the bill’s big beneficiary, but the National Federation of Independent Business and other business groups want more emphasis on boosting consumption, arguing that job-creating incentives are of little value if consumer demand is down. Poor sales have ranked as the top problem in the federation's monthly member surveys for the past year.

The difficulty in getting even the small jobs bill passed illustrates the trouble that other employment bills face.

Republicans and Democrats are increasingly unable to work together, a big problem in the Senate, where Democrats control 59 of the 100 seats, one vote short of the number needed to cut off filibusters. Members of the House and Senate also distrust the methods and motives that prevail in their rival chamber.

“Leadership in the House and the White House is not the enemy. The enemy is the Senate,” Cleaver said.

“It’s like sending a message to outer space: You send things there and nothing comes back,” added Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn.

The House and Senate don't plan votes again until at least Tuesday.

Back home this weekend, lawmakers will fall back on a familiar message: “We have to do things around here incrementally,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “We’ll tell people something is better than nothing.”

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FIGHT FOR JOBS APRIL 10
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