Harry Bridges and the ILWU – Then and Now
By Peter Olney
A review of Robert Cherny’s “Harry Bridges Labor Radical, Labor Legend”, University of Illinois Press 2023
Soon after I finished writing my review for Social Policy magazine of the new Robert Cherny biography of Harry Bridges, I read in an October 1 memo to all International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members that the union had gone into court on September 30 and filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. A ten-day trial in Portland Oregon in 2019 determined that the ILWU had engaged in illegal tactics that operationally disrupted ICTSI and the Port of Portland. The jury awarded a Philippine owned stevedoring company, International Container Services Inc. (ICTSI), $93.6 million in damages. The union challenged that amount and in March of 2020, a judge determined the maximum amount owed by the union was just over $19 million. The ILWU was prepared to accept that amount but ICTSI rejected the ruling and a new trial was set in which the terminal operator was seeking between $48 million and $142 million in damages.
The dispute arose out of ICTSI’s refusal almost ten years earlier to bring two electrician jobs; plugging and unplugging refrigerated containers, under the ILWU master contract. For years the two jobs had been represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) with excellent wages and benefits.
As my review points out, there are thousands of non-union trucking, warehousing and information technology jobs in the maritime supply chain that need organization. Such organization will require the cooperation of multiple unions. Could financial bankruptcy lead to rethinking bankrupt strategy? As longshore workers like to ponder: “What would Harry Bridges say?”
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In 2005, I accompanied the International Officers of the ILWU to Teamster HQ in Washington DC. We were to meet with Teamster President James Hoffa Jr. to discuss issues of jurisdiction and cooperation in organizing. We were admitted into the “Marble Palace” of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and ushered into a stately board room that featured portraits of past IBT Presidents most of whom had been indicted and/or served time in jail for various and sundry corrupt activities. When Hoffa Jr. joined us, he immediately greeted our President Jim Spinosa and stated: “You know my father, James Hoffa Sr., and Harry Bridges were good friends. I remember as a young boy watching them on their hands and knees in our living room maneuvering Manhattan sized phone books around to indicate the links in the logistics supply chain between trucking, warehousing and dock work.” Not what I expected to hear from the son of the infamous Teamster leader. I thought at the time: Wow: A Red and a Racketeer, nevertheless they were both brilliant strategic thinkers pondering how to increase working class power!
Robert Cherny, a retired Professor from San Francisco State, has written a new detailed biography of the iconic ILWU leader. He starts with Bridges’ early formative years in Melbourne Australia, his time at sea, and then his arrival in San Francisco where he takes up working “Alongshore” and participates in leading the organizing over 10 years that leads up to the great West Coast maritime strike of 1934 and the San Francisco General Strike. All these were seminal events that led to the victory of West Coast dockworkers and the establishment of one of the most powerful and progressive unions in the United States and western Canada. Much of the book is taken up with the ceaseless efforts of the employers and their state agents in the FBI, Justice Department, and Immigration to deport Bridges, over his alleged membership in the Communist Party USA. Cherny, who had access in the nineties to Comintern records in Moscow, concludes that it was not clear that Bridges was a member of the Party, although his politics where often consonant with the CP.
The story of Bridges is the not uncommon tale in the annals of labor history of a labor leader of the left who remains beloved by the members regardless of his/her political leanings. The bottom line for the member is: “He may be a red, but he has steered my union in a good direction, and my living standards are proof of it.” The famous case of the United Electrical Workers (UE) District 8 leader William Sentner in Iowa is a similar story. Sentner was an open Communist who weathered vicious red baiting because of his leadership prowess and because he delivered for his members.[1]
Bridges is extolled in ILWU lore as a believer in the wisdom of the rank and file. “Bridges shared leadership with others, as well as sharing decision making with rank-and-file members through such institutions as the longshore caucus and frequent membership referenda.”[2] He is also credited with fighting to break down barriers to the entrance and equal standing of African Americans in the union. This was certainly true in the Bay Area and San Francisco based Local 10, his home local. Local 10 is a majority African American (A-A) local today and led by A-A officers. “He was most successful in his own local in San Francisco, less so with Local 8 – Portland and Local 13 – Los Angeles, where his commitment to racial justice ran up against his commitment to local autonomy.”[3] This history with respect to Los Angeles Local 13 is well documented in Jake A. Wilson’s powerful history, “Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California”[4]
But Bridges and his cohort who built the union were much more than principled ideological warriors who stood for racial unity and rank and file control. They were serious students of class forces, the industries they worked in and the concrete conditions that confronted them. In fact, this ability to make a concrete analysis of conditions and proceed to develop strategies to advance working class power is a key attribute of successful left labor actors. In other words, they needed to know the industry better than their class nemeses, their employers. And often times they were able to anticipate the class interests and needs of those employers better that the employers themselves! Being a practicing Marxist materialist means that you do the careful industry studies that Marx and particularly Engels engaged in. [5]
In an essay written in 1874, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche takes aim at “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” He criticizes those that would engage in monumental history: “Monumental history rejects the disappointments and pressures of the present by taking safe harbor in the imagined company of great figures of the past.”[6] Therefore, the important thing to search for in the Cherny biography is some clues as to how the ILWU can take on the challenges it faces today. What does Harry’s analysis and social practice have to guide us in dealing with the union’s mammoth challenge of automation and the integrated supply chain? Chapters 15 and 17 respectively of Cherny’s work sketch the approach of Bridges to the containerization of waterfront work and its impact on warehouse work off dock.
As Cherny points out by the late 1950’s the ILWU was facing the challenge of mechanization: “By then Bridges, other ILWU officers and many longshore workers were focused on a new, transformative, and potentially disruptive technology: containerization, the most important development in ocean shipping since the steam engine”[7] Previously cargo was loaded onto ships and stowed in pieces. Often loading a ship could take two weeks. Now the product was being stowed in containers for loading, the process of loading (or unloading) a ship was made much simpler and less labor intensive. Often a ship could be unloaded and loaded in a 24-hour period. Employment numbers changed dramatically up and down the West Coast. In 1960 at the advent of containers there were about 26,000 dockworkers in California, Oregon and Washington. In 1980, when containerization had been established as the dominant mode of ocean shipping, the employment number was about 11,000. By 2020 that number rose by 47% to about 15,000, but cargo volumes had increased by almost 700%! [8]
A longshore caucus, purposefully assembled to deal with looming mechanization, met for three days in October of 1957. It issued a special report that stated: “It is not a good public position, whether before an arbitrator or in a strike, to be fighting to retain what the employer will label ‘unnecessary men” and “featherbedding.” Further the report stated: “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerrilla warfare resistance or do we want to adopt a more flexible policy in order to buy specific benefits in return?” Cherny states that, “The report advocated for more flexibility.” [9]
Today’s technology challenge is the introduction of robots. In the 2008 negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the ILWU agreed to the introduction of robots on the terminals. And several terminals in Los Angeles Long Beach – COSCO and TraPac – have mechanized. When Maersk, the largest ocean carrier in the world announced in 2019 its intentions to robotize Pier 400 in Los Angeles, Local 13 ILWU mobilized thousands of its members to engage in militant street demonstrations targeting the LA Harbor Commission and the LA City Council in an attempt to block the regulatory approvals for the project. While ultimately unsuccessful, the protest did place the matter of automation front and center again in the recently concluded coastwise negotiations with the PMA for a new labor agreement. One outcome of the agreement is stiffer penalties for employers who do not assign maintenance and repair work to ILWU mechanics, and an agreement to build automation training centers in the three principal port zones: LA, Bay Area, and Seattle Puget Sound.
In a convention that preceded the aforementioned longshore caucus in 1957, Martin Callaghan from Local 10 commented, “I’d like to see them install all of this machinery and equipment to do the work, to make it easier for us guys around here. But let’s bear in mind this: let’s make these machines work for us guys, not for the employers.” Robert Rohatch also from Local 10 added, “Pensions and shorter working hours are the only answer to mechanization.”[10]Enhancing the pension means that more senior workers retire and clear the field for younger workers. Reducing the workday, but maintaining the same compensation, helps to deal with job attrition that inevitably follows the substitution of machines for human labor. But there is a larger question of the changing structure and character of the employers that requires the leadership and vision of union officers schooled in a materialist analysis of the industry.
Cherny’s Chapter 17 touches on the issue of Container Freight Stations and the supplement negotiated by the union to deal with the impact of containerization of cargo handling hours for ILWU members. The stuffing and stripping of containers was most efficiently done either at the point of production of the goods, or at the point of delivery. In the early days of containerization many containers had less than full loads (“shippers load”) and therefore multiple consignees. The work of loading (stuffing) and unloading (stripping) containers was considered by the union to be work traditionally done on or near dock. In 1969 the union negotiated a Container Freight Station Supplement (CFSS) in an attempt to capture this work, often in conflict with the Teamsters. [11] This CFSS language had a provision that specified that work within a 50-mile radius had to be done under the supplement’s conditions by ILWU labor. This was similar to language won by the International Longshore Association (ILA) on the East Coast. This attempt on both coasts to deal with the impact of technology on freight handling of maritime cargo ran afoul of both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Maritime Commission. Both bodies ruled that the language was unenforceable.
But there is a bigger problem. Cherny describes the problem by citing an engineer that he talked to: “one engineer described to me such an ideal situation: a container is filled with athletic shoes at a factory in Pakistan and unloaded in a big-box store in the Midwest. Such long-haul containers constituted more that 80 percent of all container shipping and were not at issue” In other words such “shippers load” were exempted from coverage under the CFSS. This is a critical issue for the future of the union and points to its mission as a maritime logistics chain union not an isolated dockworkers club. Today it is clearer than ever that 95% of goods flowing into the ports, bound for giant retailers like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target etc., are full-load containers being unstuffed by employees of those retailers, in their warehouses or in third party logistics providers, that they employ.[12]
The most stunning fact is that the giant ocean going carriers are all adapting their business models to the changing retail landscape and building or acquiring inland logistics capacity: In a fascinating 2019 Wall Street Journal article, Maersk reveals its plans to achieve a company makeover from 80% of their earnings coming from container shipping to “Hopefully a couple of years from now will be much closer to a 50-50 scenario between ocean and non-ocean services,” Chief Executive Soren Skou said.[13] Maersk already runs twenty warehousing and distribution centers in California, New Jersey, Texas, and Georgia. Five of them operate in the Southern California basin.
Maersk and other giant ocean carriers are all integrating their operations inland to respond to the specter of Amazon, the giant e-commerce retailer that is becoming a logistics powerhouse. Amazon employs 850,000 warehouse employees in the US alone. It has air hubs and owns a fleet of air cargo planes. Every major port on the West Coast has a dedicated container yard for Amazon imports. There is speculation that the company will soon buy a fleet of ships. It is already a Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC), chartering and brokering space on container ships.
Cherny’s Bridges bio pays homage to another great ILWU leader, long time Secretary Treasurer Louis Goldblatt who was part of the March Inland, organizing warehousing on the mainland and one of the architects of the union’s dramatic growth in Hawaii. While Bridges and Goldblatt often had a contentious relationship, Cherny cites Goldblatt’s genius in analyzing the Hawaii situation: “After studying the economic situation in Hawai’i, he (Goldblatt) realized that virtually all economic activity was directly or indirectly controlled by the Big Five (Sugar and Pineapple co.’s). Goldblatt concluded that the ILWU could not win in longshore” until the heart of economic power in those islands, namely the sugar industry had been organized.” [14]The ILWU proceeded to launch huge organizing drives on the sugar and pineapple plantations that made the union the largest and most powerful union on the islands. Consequently, for today’s ILWU, part of securing its future lies in working with other unions like the Teamsters to make sure that Amazon is organized, a mammoth task that requires the best hearts and minds of the whole labor movement.
No union is an island and there is no long-term solution in fortress unionism. The ILWU cannot continue to ensure the wages and benefits of its members without securing unionization for the growth areas in the logistics supply chain. The employment numbers on the West Coast tell this tale in stark relief. In the period between 1980 and 2019 here is the breakdown:
On Dock Employment:
Total employment for (a) registered ILWU members (including Class A/B longshore, clerks and foremen) was 10,245 in 1980. In 2019 the same group of registered employees numbered 15,044. [15] Combined, this is a 47% increase in registered ILWU members, and a 46% increase in working registered ILWU members.
Trends in Off Dock Transport Logistics Employment[16]:
The most dramatic increases in transport logistics have occurred in three off-dock sectors: Logistics Information Services/Freight Transport Arrangements (FTA), Warehousing and Trucking:
FTA – 1980: 12,816 to 2019: 58,276. This is 355% growth
Warehousing – 1980: 12,738 to 2019: 160,610. This is 1161% growth
Trucking[17] – 1980: 156,808 to 2019: 340,729. This is 117% growth [18]
The future for the ILWU does not lie in building a sand castle on the docks that is being eroded by the shift of cargo handling to work inland. The future lies in marching inland following the containers and using the power and leverage the union still has to organize a whole new group of workers, largely immigrants and people of color. These workers are the future of a new and reimagined ILWU, just as the super exploited workers “alongshore” who shaped up on the docks of San Francisco and the West Coast became the soldiers in the battle to transform labor relations on the docks and beyond. Ensuring a solid future requires working with other unions to secure the supply chain. The recently settled coastwise longshore agreement’s principal triumph was ensuring that maintenance and repair mechanic’s work is ILWU and not the jurisdiction of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). This will result in a few hundred jobs on the waterfront, but the vast unorganized workforce of warehouse workers, truckers and information technology workers remain unorganized, and no one union can organize this maritime logistics workforce alone. During the Cold War attacks on left-led labor unions, the ILWU convention of 1953 ratified “ten cardinal rules” that became the Ten Guiding Principles” of the ILWU.[19] Three of those principles stand in stark contrast with recent practice:
Labor unity is the key to successful economic advancement
Organize the Unorganized
Jurisdictional warfare and raiding must be outlawed by labor itself[20]
Would Harry have been up to the task? Hard to know, but longshore leaders could truly honor his name and memory by making new history and not doting on past glories. I hearken back to my visit to the Marble Palace in 2005. Wouldn’t it be in keeping with Harry’s legacy to have the President of the ILWU and the President of Teamsters and the President of the IAM get down on the boardroom floor and discuss the strategic linkages in the supply chain and plan a multi-union collaborative process in organizing Amazon and the vast logistics industry?
Time to follow the containers and march inland and organize! Time to build a multi-union organizing project. Read Cherny, Strategize and Organize!
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Footnotes:
[1] Celebrating Labor Day with the Sentner Papers
[2] Cherny Page 340
[3] Cherny Page 341
[4] Jake A. Wilson 2016 Lexington Books
[5] A neglected aspect of Friedrich Engels’s life: his work at his family’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Engels was a merchant and an intelligencer with a detailed, comprehensive understanding of products and the movements of goods, orders, and prices in the global cotton trade. The statistical insights Engels gleaned on matters such as machinery depreciation and reinvestment, his contextualization of capitalism within a unified world market, and his recognition of the tendencies toward overproduction that threatened economic crisis, all contributed to shaping key ideas and themes of Karl Marx’s Capital Volumes I and II, leaving a lasting imprint on Marxist political economy.
[6] Nietzsche’s Quarrel with History, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen The Hedgehog Review 24.2 (Summer 2002)
[7] Cherny Page 279
[8] . In 1980, 2.1 million loaded TEU’s were handled in the ports of the West Coast. In 2019, 16.5 million loaded units were handled. This is a 695% increase. Peter V. Hall Simon Fraser University 2023
[9] Cherny Page 281
[10] Cherny Page 280
[11] Cherny Page 316
[12] On the Waterfront and Beyond: Technology and the Changing Nature of Cargo-Related Employment on the West Coast University of California Institute for Labor and Employment Final Report to the ILWU Longshore Caucus 2004
[13] https://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-ceo-wants-half-its-earnings-to-come-from-inland-logistics-11561580963
[14] Cherny Page 217
[15] Some registered longshore workers do not work in a given year. In 2019, there were 14,012 “registered and working” longshore workers. “Registered and working” numbers are reported in Graph 3.
[16] Off dock (and non-ILWU Other Marine Cargo) employment numbers are from the County Business Patterns data series from the Census Bureau for the three West Coast States. Analysis of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the same trends.
[17] In order to create comparable data over 39 years, trucking includes local and long haul trucking, messenger/courier and waste collection.
[18] PV Hall Research 2023
[19] Cherny Page 261
[20] ibid.
Ceasefire: The First Step on the Journey to Justice
By Kurt Stand
“I am grieving for every Palestinian, Israeli, and American life lost to this violence, and my heart breaks for all those who will be forever traumatized because of it. War and retaliatory violence doesn’t achieve accountability or justice; it only leads to more death and human suffering,” said Congresswoman Cori Bush. “Today [October 25] I am introducing the Ceasefire Now Resolution, vital legislation that calls for de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Occupied Palestine, and for humanitarian assistance to urgently be delivered to the 2.2 million people under siege and trapped in Gaza. The United States bears a unique responsibility to exhaust every diplomatic tool at our disposal to prevent mass atrocities and save lives. We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom. With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.”
“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” Rep. Rasheda Tlaib wrote in a statement, a co-sponsor of the Ceasefire Now Resolution, adding “The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer. We cannot ignore the humanity in each other. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
In addition to Bush and Tlaib, the bill was co-sponsored by Representatives André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia C. Ramirez and joined by eight other members of Congress: Jamaal Bowman, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Jesús “Chuy” García, Jonathan Jackson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Nydia Velázquez (a list now grown larger).
If we wish to understand the sentiment that lies behind this resolution, we may want to listen to the lines of Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim who himself saw the inside of Israeli prisons on more than one occasion.
And destruction’s tide
rises higher still than the tide,
and the angel’s wing grows distant,
and the winds of devastation draw near,
and you sit atop the earth:
no moaning interferes,
no ark comes to save you,
no olive branch is here in the orbit,
and over death you wither
folding your shirt on the heart’s ordeal.
You fold and all,
Strange and sad –
sadder than water.
Like the struggle for peace everywhere, like the struggle for justice anywhere, the resolution seems fragile, a whisper against the rising tide of war. Yet a whisper can turn into a cry, a small step can be the path that leads out of the abyss. It is striking the fierce opposition this simple plea arouses. The line is drawn – war or peace, oppression or freedom, human empathy or destruction. It is up to us to choose.
Blaming the Victim
Despite law-and-order demagogues who proclaim violence as originating in “bad” individuals or cultures, violence does not spring from nowhere — it has root causes and those causes need to be understood, if the violence is to be overcome and resolved.
We should not forget that there is a violence that has defined the conditions of life in Gaza which the phrase “open air prison” begins to suggest. There is violence in the conditions of life in the West Bank in which apartheid-like barriers keep apart Israelis and occupied Palestinians, freedom of movement for the former based on denial of freedom of movement for the latter. And there is violence in treating some groups of citizens in society as having fewer rights than other groups of citizens as happens to Palestinians within the borders of Israel itself. Until Palestinians are able to live as free men and women, violence in all its forms will persist.
Noting this does not take away from responsibility of any who acts in wanton disregard for human life. When a child is killed, the reason behind it matters not at all – there is a lifeless body, there is grief. To talk about causes and reasons at that point seems itself to be a crime. But what does it mean when one child’s death matters and another child’s death doesn’t. For we need to recognize that Palestinian deaths – the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers – in the past year barely made a dent in the news, the names, the hopes of a life cut short, the anger and hurt of grieving parents, barely entered into the consciousness of our media, of our society. Acknowledging that does not relativize the pain experienced by those who lost loved ones in the Hamas attack on Israel, rather the reverse is true; it is an argument to organize for equality for hope in life, rather than the equality of grieving.
By failing to confront the use of force by those with power to suppress those without, we make inevitable the seemingly endless cycles of violence and counter violence. Many who are unable to see that connection are blinded by the racism which we know all too well from our own society. After all, the rhetoric of “super predators” used by politicians to justify enactment of the draconian laws that have led to the extraordinary rates of mass incarceration in the United States was designed to characterize some people as less than human, to deny social causes to individual behaviors. Militarized policing and tossing out the concept of “innocent before proven guilty” in turn normalized mass incarceration was the chosen means of addressing crime, rather than enact social policies to establish the equality promised in words into equality in life as experienced. Unfortunately, and tellingly, it has led to the practice of arresting and charging children as adults, giving decades long sentences even to children in their early teens. A racial blind spot allows that to happen; replaced by a field of vision that sees whole categories of people as irredeemable.
Moreover, that blind spot goes one step further – it enables the “neutral” observer from afar to blame the community for being responsible for its own oppression. Too many African Americans in prison, living in poverty, lacking education? – well it is “their” fault; we (one can insert whatever “we” one wants here) had to overcome challenges too. It is a logic that lies just below the surface of society – open racists and right-wingers make it explicit, yet far too many who otherwise perceive themselves as liberal minded, fall into the same mindset. Were it not so, the continued structural discrimination afflicting African Americans (or of Native Americans, or of Spanish-speaking immigrant heritage) would be viewed as intolerable – meaning it would not be tolerated and social policy and budgetary priorities would be so reordered to address those inequities. But, of course, it is tolerated, at an enormous cost to us as a society, at an enormous cost to all working people. Tolerated through a rationalization that blames the victims: i.e. blaming personal or familial or community disfunction, blaming bad leadership or bad decisions as the reason for lack of progress by those who have been and still are being held back.
Familiar refrains all and returns us to Palestine-Israel—and our failure to hold those who have power responsible, a refusal to look at the structure of society that creates such conflicts, an unwillingness to look at the systemic basis for oppression, an unwillingness to look for systemic solutions. Instead, we have violence, counter-violence, and the continuation of the unacceptable – alongside the easy answer of seeing conflict as reflecting ancient hatreds, irrational peoples, divisions rooted in history and blood, and other stereotypes that deny the humanity of those involved. It is that denial which links Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, seeing people as identities that denies humanity, as if solutions can be found apart from social justice, apart from peace.
Roots of War
Therein lies the determined opposition to the call for a cease fire. A cease fire, in and of itself, simply means stopping the killing, killing which those with the greater fire power are quite unready to stop. Yet without a cease fire, war continues, without a cease fire there is no basis for the release of the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza (or the reciprocal release of Palestinian political prisoners, many detained for years without charges).
But for those interested in maintaining the status quo – in the Middle East and in our own country – the demand for a cease fire is threatening, because it means negotiation, and negotiations might call the existing status quo into question. For Palestinians and Israelis solutions that end the reality of oppression experienced by millions and allow all to live a life of peace with justice, will require such negotiations, as happened in Ireland and South Africa. Ultimately, allowing equal political rights to all will enable divides over issues to be resolved through political means, through democratic struggle. How this will be achieved is for the people who live or are from the region to determine as a genuine democratic rights and equality is not what those in power in Israel want, however much it is needed.
While those of us abroad can have our opinions about one solution or another, no solution imposed from abroad will be lasting. What those of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians can do, however, is to end the interference by our government which has long supported Israeli violations of international law and of its denial of Palestinian human rights.
Far from being an honest broker, our government’s policy for years has been determined by the perceived need of our “power elite” – those corporate, military and political circles that conduct foreign policy as a means to maintain U.S. primacy in world affairs. The same sets of circles that call for “democracy,” after all, support Saudi Arabia, the same sets of circles that denounce wars of aggression, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (to name but the most recent examples). And the same sets of circles that talk of economic growth are those that have imposed structural adjustment policies around the world, devastating for local populations, while being quite a boon for global capital and profits. The military, far from being a vehicle for national defense, has become an instrument of domination, and a never ending cash cow for the parasitical arms industry. These same sets of policies have their domestic equivalent, in anti-unionism, in the outflow of jobs, in privatization, in mass incarceration, in police violence, and in the racism that is intensified by the insecurity of life these bring. For all those, today’s call for a ceasefire is a threat, for all others it ought to be a call to action.
Reminders from the past
Profits for some – hardship for many. It is no accident that Bush, Tlaib and the other DSA members and progressives on the House who initiated this call for a ceasefire are the same who support social justice and redistributive measures domestically. The demand for a ceasefire is a demand for justice for Palestinians, it is a demand for peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike, it is a part for a campaign to cut the U.S. military budget and to begin to spend funds for humanitarian needs abroad and for social programs at home. Peace and justice are intertwined here, abroad and everywhere. And in that spirit, these words from a novel by Fred Wander, written as a recollection of his childhood in the Buchenwald concentration camp, provide a fitting call to action:
“But when I return, Feinberg says that night in block sixteen, if I should live so long, and I return to the ground-floor apartment in Rue des Rosiers, I’ll stand and listen, the walls will talk: You lived here, the walls will say, you brought up your children here, where are they now, how have you watched over them? And I will answer: I believed, I trusted God. I was happy, I’ll say. Every day I was happy. Had worries, I argued with my loved ones, with my wife, with the kids, I cursed, committed sins of every kind, lied a thousand little lies, that was life, that was my life. And, still I was happy, they were my most beautiful years, with my children, with my wife, all together … But the walls will demand an accounting, they will ask: You sat here and wasted your time. You dreamed. You knew nothing. And what happened, where are they now? – I don’t know, I’ll say. And then I will cry. But the walls will be quite cold: Now you are crying because misfortune has descended upon you. Back then you didn’t cry? And yet the world was full of misery. You didn’t see it?”
.
This piece originally ran on the blog, Washington Socialist
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Three requests for you, Bernie Sanders
By Tom Gallagher
First – Join the call for a Gaza ceasefire.
This one actually should be easy; you’ve got the wording down already. On May 16, 2021, in response to an earlier outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, you posted this on what was then called Twitter:
“The devastation in Gaza is unconscionable. We must urge an immediate ceasefire. The killing of Palestinians and Israelis must end. We must also take a hard look at nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations.”
I’m not the first one asking and I’m not asking for the first time. I’ve already signed a petition of your past convention delegates asking you to do so, and I see that 400 of your former campaign staffers have drawn up one of their own. Speaking for myself, I’m puzzled. In your November 1, 2023 Guardian opinion piece, “Gaza needs a humanitarian pause. Then we need a vision of where we go from here,” you wrote that “A stop to the bombing is critical to save innocent lives and secure the safe return of the hostages.” This seemed an important statement on the war at that time, so it was a bit surprising to some of us when you distinguished your position from those calling for a ceasefire today. Further, four days later you told CNN that while Israel has the right to defend itself, “What Israel does not, in my view, have a right to do is to kill thousands of thousands of innocent men, women and children who had nothing to do with that attack.”
So it’s not clear to me what the hang-up is. The atrocities involved in Hamas’s attacks on civilians that precipitated Israel’s current devastating bombing campaign have understandably hardened attitudes of many Israelis as well as those who support Israel in various ways and to varying degrees. Yet your recent statements show that they haven’t blinded you to the need to find a long term solution that ends the ongoing conflict, nor caused you to lose hope that one will be found.
You’ve said that “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, a permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the State of Israel.” At the same time, you surely know as well as anyone that even if Israel should actually succeed in extirpating Hamas, each day of continued bombing of Gaza increases the numbers of Palestinians who will join whatever organization inevitably succeeds Hamas in taking up the fight against Israel. In fact, you also told CNN that in regard to a proposed aid package to Israel, “It’s terribly important that, as we debate that, to say to Israel, ‘You want this money, you got to change your military strategy.”
Nothing lasts forever, including ceasefires. Perhaps one will stick, perhaps it won’t. You have been a supporter of an independent Palestine for some time. It seems to me that you’re getting hung on wording at the expense of conveying the continuity and importance of your position. I’m suggesting that you need to find a way past this because we very much need your voice at this time.
Second – Speak out for seeking an alternative to endless war in Ukraine.
One of the major roadblocks to mustering a Ukraine peace effort in Congress is the argument that it’s not “our war.” So while the U.S. is the major funder and supplier of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s attack, it is up to Ukraine, and Ukraine only, to suggest any possibility of negotiations. And this argument is not necessarily just a dodge. In the end, there will be negotiations only if and when Ukraine (and Russia) agrees to them. But it is indeed a fact that the Ukrainian war effort is significantly and expensively dependent on American assistance, hence is ultimately dependent upon the support of the American people.
For better or worse, it has been obvious for some time now that both sides’ maximal goals are probably out of reach: Russia will not likely overrun Ukraine, and Ukraine will not likely regain Crimea by military means. And when Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in Chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, states that “Just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” and that there “will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” the American public will eventually ask whether and why we are simply funding World War I trench-style warfare with no end in sight.
There is also history here that needs to be considered but, in no small part due to Russia’s unprovoked invasion, is largely ignored. The November 1 New York Times touched upon it in an article entitled, “Some Ukrainians Helped the Russians. Their Neighbors Sought Revenge.” “In 2014,” the article read, “Russia was able to seize Crimea and back an insurgency in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in part because many Ukrainians in those places helped it do so. There is mounting evidence that something comparable took place last year in Kherson: Russian troops overran most of the region in just a few weeks.”
Many Russian and Ukrainians living today remember when they were part of one country. And within living memory, Crimea was even part of Soviet Russia, before it was part of Soviet Ukraine. So what may be treason to a Ukrainian loyalist may simply be a return to the good old days for a Russian loyalist.
I’m not suggesting you advocate simply pulling the plug on Ukraine, Bernie, but someone in Congress has got to raise the question of whether they might be something to talk about here as an alternative to endless grinding warfare.
Third – Run, Bernie, Run!
As we all know, the polls are lately treating our most recent ex-president very kindly and while we might consider the prospect of a second Trump administration even more absurd – and more dangerous than the first, we now know better than to dismiss it as impossible. As someone who has maintained his independent status, you know better than most that both of our major parties are quite capable of waxing anti-war – when they can hang the blame for the war on the other party – particularly if it isn’t going all that well.
Our concern should go deeper than garden variety opportunism, though, in that we need to stop and take a hard look at where we are. Do we really want to go into an election supporting two major foreign wars and asking American taxpayers to pay for them – indefinitely? A lot of people who were with you three and seven years ago are not going to stick around for a ride like that. A lot of people who were with Biden last time won’t either.
The world is burning up and we’re going to keep pouring money down the gullets of the armaments industries, without even suggesting an alternative? This is the hand we’re going to play in the 2024 election? I don’t like the reality, the message, or the odds. I know that you decided not to run again if Biden sought a second term. I know that it is ridiculously late in the game. But maybe not impossibly late. And, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure Joe Biden isn’t going to change between now and Election Day.
Bernie, if not you, who?
(Tom Gallagher was a 2016 Sanders delegate.)
This piece originally appeared on OpEdNews.com
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BETWEEN THE RIVERS
By Stewart Acuff
A U.S. Senate candidate for working-class West Virginians
While we walked knocking on doors in Ranson in a political campaign, Zach Shrewsbury and I talked about how politics can make life better for everyday people in West Virginia.
The conversation deepened as we worked together and with others to push Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) to support President Biden’s visionary Build Back Better with child tax credits, union jobs in new energy, environmental cleanup, infrastructure and new economic boosts to foster high wagesfrom the bottom up.
We couldn’t believe that Manchin, a Democratic senator from a poor and suffering state, would, or could, stop something his own voters needed so much.
Shrewsbury, 32, a Fayetteville resident, announced on October 15th that he is running against Manchin for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. On the 10th of November Senator Manchin announced he would not be seeking another, sparking speculation that he will mount a third party run for the presidency.
Shrewsbury announced his campaign in front of the old Jefferson County Courthouse in Charles Town surrounded by a modest crowd of supporters. Those supporters include Danielle Walker, a Democrat who represented Morgantown in the House of Delegates, and Pam Garrison, who is Fayette County Democrat of the Year. Those in the crowd included union organizers and leaders, religious and spiritual leaders, low-wage workers and everyday people.
Shrewsbury’s campaign announcement speech reflected the diversity and makeup of the people who came to support him. He accurately and plainly laid the blame for so many West Virginia problems at unchallenged corporate power and the corruption that always accompanies unchecked corporate power. He called for unity amongst working families strong enough to put everyday people above corporate greed.
The following morning Shrewsbury and his team walked a UAW picket line at the General Motors plant in Martinsburg. Afterwards on a bench in downtown Shepherdstown this is what Shrewsbury told me:
“I’m running to win and to show that working-class people can and need to run for office, even high office. We can’t be ruled by the wealthy elite who don’t understand everyday American life.”
“I think Joe Manchin [and his kind] has forgotten how everyday people live, especially in working-class poverty.”
When asked how his background prepared him for such a huge challenge, Shrewsbury answered, “I’m from small town America. I grew up on a farm.”
“I served America in the Marine Corps which allowed me to see much of the world.”
The grandson of a coal miner, Shrewsbury was born in Ripley, West Virginia, and graduated from James Monroe High School in Monroe County. After serving five years in the Marine Corps, he began working on political campaigns from Seattle to West Virginia. He has organized rallies and town halls to engage local communities that are often “forgotten” within both political parties.
Since 2020 he has worked as a community organizer for the needs of everyday West Virginians, promoting legislation to address climate change and veterans issues.
“My work in communities across West Virginia and Appalachia has shown me the multitude of issues and problems of people whose voices are never heard. I intend to remedy that and amplify those voices.”
“Nobody can represent the American people when you can’t hear their cries.”
Asked about his legislative priorities, Shrewsbury didn’t hesitate:
“I want to serve on the Senate Labor Committee to strengthen and energize the labor movement and workers rights, to organize unions and begin again to lift wages and working conditions.”
“I also want to serve on the Senate Committee for Veterans Affairs and the Armed Services Committee to get the defense contractors off the neck of the military and move funding for enlisted men. The enlisted military people are from working-class families. They must be respected, honored and prioritized.”
Shrewsbury’s overall legislative priority is “taking on corporate America and making sure working-class people have a voice. As senator, I will echo and amplify that voice. I will work for the people, not the bought bureaucrats of the oligarchy.”
As a proud, patriotic West Virginia veteran, Shrewsbury said the needs and priorities of veterans are close to his heart. He will work to address homelessness and mental health issues of veterans.
Shrewsbury supports transitioning the Affordable Care Act into universal health care because he said he believes health care is a right, not a privilege.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade Shrewsbury has spoken out and supported women’s rights to choose. Indeed, what does freedom mean if a person can’t control their own bodies?
In my view, Shrewsbury is a Democrat standing for democracy and freedom.
Here are Zachary’s links:
Facebook Instagram Twitter/x Tik-Tok ActBlue
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Palestine Solidarity and the Fight against MAGA
By Max Elbaum
Leaning into the urgent demand for a ceasefire and Palestine solidarity overall is the best route to stopping genocide in Gaza and beating back authoritarianism in the US.
It is not easy to function in an emergency and prepare for a long-haul fight at the same time. But right now, all of us committed to peace and justice in Israel-Palestine need to meet that challenge.
What’s more, all those concerned about the threat of racist authoritarianism in the US need to do the same. Staving off white Christian Nationalist rule in 2024 depends on expanding the ground pro-Palestinian forces have gained in electoral politics and shifting sentiment in the Democratic Party our way.
Yes, the Gaza crisis has centered the most fraught division within the coalition arrayed against MAGA at the ballot box. Pro-Palestinian organizing is under fierce assault, and beating MAGA is now more difficult. But all tendencies to retreat to strongholds on the margins of mainstream politics must be rejected. Instead, we need a bold program to defend all the electeds who support a ceasefire, expand their ranks, and press Biden to immediately reverse course or get out of the way.
Top priority: ceasefire and humanitarian aid
Civilians in Gaza are being killed every hour. Water, food, and fuel needed by two million Palestinians could run out any day. The demand that the US government insist on a ceasefire and massive humanitarian aid to Gaza is urgent. Domestic protest and global pressure (“The West Is Losing the Global South over Gaza”) have forced the Biden administration to express concern for Palestinian civilians and put forward the idea of “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s onslaught. But failure to combine words with any action—specifically saying aid to Israel will be cut off unless Israel changes course —doesn’t change anything on the ground.
The pressure must be upped—more demonstrations and direct action/civil disobedience, more calls and emails flooding congressional offices, more congressional staffers and other “insiders” dissenting in public, and more individuals who have “inside” connections calling in every marker they have.
The ceasefire demand also sets the context for extensive political education work. The action front demanding a ceasefire and humanitarian aid is (and must be) much broader than its anti-Zionist component. But both can be expanded and strengthened at a time when large numbers are open to hearing analyses of the Israel-Palestine conflict—and the US role—that they would have ignored or dismissed just a few weeks ago.
Opening for a truly mass strategy
Support for Palestinian rights and acknowledgement that Israel is an apartheid state has long been a “third rail” in US politics. But under the surface, substantial shifts in sentiment have taken place among younger generations—including younger Jews—and within the base of the Democratic Party.
In the wake of the Hamas assault and Israeli response, the expanded sympathy for Palestine has exploded into mass politics with the ceasefire demand. The huge turnout at the Nov. 4 demonstrations, polling results showing majority support for a ceasefire, and the rebellion among a substantial percentage of the Democratic National Committee staff are unprecedented manifestations of the changed landscape.
A dramatic escalation of McCarthyite attacks on students, professors, elected officials, trade unions, community groups, writers, artists, funders, and others who express pro-Palestine sentiments has been the inevitable result. Such attacks call up the worn canard that opposition to Zionism and Israel’s practice of apartheid is and can only be an expression of hatred of Jews, that is, anti-Semitism. Defense of all those targeted and smeared in this manner is an essential task going forward.
This defense takes place in a new context, however. While there are individuals who retreat or are intimidated by these assaults, they are outnumbered by the people who are finding their voice. And growing numbers say that even though they disagree with the pro-Palestine viewpoint or aspects of it, supporters of Palestine have the right to put their arguments forward. Courage can be contagious and taking the offensive can be effective—witness the outpouring of public protest by writers and 92NY staff after this prestigious cultural institution cancelled a program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
The bottom line is this: though we are still well behind our opponents in political clout, we are part of a movement that is growing—in fact growing rapidly—not retreating.
The Democratic Party is a key site of battle
A particularly important aspect of the current landscape is the beachhead progressives —and figures who are willing to speak up for Palestine in particular—have established in Congress. Twenty-two House members and one Senator are now on record supporting a ceasefire. In the immediate days ahead, increasing this number is a top priority. Longer term, it is essential to support every one of these (and others who join them) in beating back the primary challenges they will face in 2024 (which will be lavishly funded by AIPAC, foreign policy hawks, and the bloated “defense” industry). Especially if pro-Palestine champions like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush are re-elected, momentum to continue the shift among Democrats not only regarding Israel-Palestine but US foreign policy in general can be accelerated.
Deepening this shift is essential because of the current nature of the other major party. Captured by MAGA, the Republican Party is an open, no-apology-whatsoever advocate of Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians. As the political home of both the most die-hard Jewish Zionists and the millions of Christian Zionists who see Israeli domination as a prelude to their soul-saving “rapture,” there is not the slightest sympathy for Palestine in the GOP ranks. To the contrary, the plans of Trump supporters to weaponize the Justice Department under a second Trump presidency would translate into an all-out assault on any and every group advocating Palestinian rights as well as stepped-up repression against Arab American and Muslim communities within the US. Ron DeSantis’ current move to ban Students for Justice in Palestine from Florida institutions is just a glimpse of the McCarthyism-COINTELPRO combination that would anchor the policy of a MAGA-fied Justice Department.
Frustration with—indeed, anger directed toward—the Democratic “establishment” is more than justified. But breaking the bipartisan consensus on support for Israel—which means changing the Democratic Party—is simply a must if US policy toward Israel-Palestine is going to be radically changed.
Push Biden out of the way
Which brings us to Joe Biden. Already he was a weak candidate to top the anti-MAGA ticket in 2024, and his response to the Gaza crisis has been a political blunder as well as a moral catastrophe. With his over-the-top pro-Israel rhetoric and symbolic hug of Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has made himself the symbol of US backing for the massacre of Palestinian civilians. His current pleas to the Israelis to conduct their slaughter with “humanitarian pauses” (while at the same time sending them weapons) cannot erase that. If he is the Democratic nominee for President in 2024, he will be asking crucial constituencies to make a choice that is agonizing at best: vote for an individual who supported mass murder in order to beat MAGA, or sit out the electoral fight against Trump or some other Republican who advocates genocide but didn’t yet get the opportunity to join in the killing spree.
There is at least the potential for an alternative. We can learn something from a long-shot effort that took place in 1967, when opposition to the Vietnam War was rising but Lyndon Johnson was seemingly secure in his presidency after winning a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and playing an important role in delivering some of the most progressive legislation in US history (the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act). A little-known congressperson from New York, Allard Lowenstein, took up a one-man crusade to find another Democrat to challenge Johnson in the 1968 primaries. After being turned down by Robert Kennedy and numerous others, he finally convinced Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to throw his hat into the ring.
McCarthy’s effort tapped into the energy of thousands of young people who opposed the war, and his campaign proceeded in tandem with the growth of grassroots non-electoral protests. At the end of January 1968 came the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and though Johnson retained the support of virtually the entire Democratic establishment, McCarthy came close to beating the sitting president in the first Democratic primary (New Hampshire). With McCarthy having pushed open the door, RFK finally got the nerve to enter the race as an opponent of the war. Then, on March 31, 1968—an evening I remember as clearly as I remember last night—Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the 1968 Presidential race.
The conditions today are ripe for an attempt along those lines—for a candidate who gives Biden credit for beating Trump in 2020 and moving the Democratic Party’s domestic program to the left, but calls for a different approach to Israel-Palestine and foreign policy in general, and explains that this is the route to beating MAGA and starting a new progressive cycle in US politics. That candidate could energize those vital constituencies Biden has alienated—Arab and Muslim voters, young voters and especially young Black and Latinx voters, and peace advocates.
If enough momentum is gained, this kind of effort can widen the small but important cracks that are already visible in the foreign policy establishment regarding US blank-check backing for Israel. That some top officials are beginning to believe this stance harms US global interests is evident in the recent columns of the consummate ruling class mouthpiece Thomas Friedman. In parallel with that, a traction-gaining challenge to Biden could encourage Democratic high-ups to start saying forcefully in public what many of them already think—that Biden is a weak candidate and should consider stepping aside. David Axelrod, Obama’s shrewdest political adviser, just hinted as much in public.
Given the current balance of strength between the Democratic Party’s progressive and centrist wings, it is not likely that a progressive challenger who critiques Biden’s stance on Israel can become the Democratic nominee. But a robust progressive campaign could open the door for a centrist who is not as wedded to blank-check support for Israel and who would have a better chance of getting votes from every corner of the anti-MAGA coalition—including the grassroots communities who powered his 2020 win. And an insurgent candidacy that does decently in Democratic primaries gives progressives more leverage than we currently have.
There’s lot of time between now and the 2024 Democratic Convention in Chicago. And even more time between now and the 2024 election. Turmoil seethes and crises surround us. It would be foolish to try to predict exactly how things may go. But there are patterns in politics that reflect the way different class and social forces organize themselves and struggle to get hold of a piece of governing power.
There is a tide flowing for Palestinian rights. There is also a deep (but at this moment unenthusiastic) well of opposition to Trump and MAGA. The task of the Left is to find ways to mesh those two strands together in both the immediate days ahead and in the year remaining before the 2024 election. An insurgent primary challenge to Biden could be a way to do just that.
On the urgent front: Ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza now!
On keeping today’s momentum for the year ahead: Take Palestine solidarity and anti-MAGA into the mainstream.
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This piece first ran on Convergence, a great blog and source for progressives
“Get Up, Stand Up – Stand up for your right”*
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
“Stand Up” Strike Gives Autoworkers a Big Win
The “Hot Labor Summer” grew into an even “hotter” labor Autumn for the U.S. working class. The newly reformed United Auto Workers won historic contractual gains by selectively striking the “Big Three” domestic automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (a merger of Fiat, Chrysler, and Renault). On October 30, the union concluded tentative agreements with all three companies, pending membership ratification votes.
After decades of concessionary bargaining and “labor-management cooperation” that eventually led to financial corruption of top union leaders, the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAW-D) reform movement won union leadership through the direct election by the members. The one-member, one-vote process for choosing leaders the result of a court settlement on corruption charges against the union and a referendum vote by the membership. UAW leaders were previously chosen at a convention where delegates were often controlled by paid staff from the union’s Detroit headquarters.
The new leadership took charge last March. Upon assuming office, they immediately faced the challenge of bargaining new contracts with the big three auto companies. These negotiations united 150,000 members — mostly employed in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
With significant membership input, the new UAW leadership put forward dramatic demands for the new contracts:
- A 40% wage increase
- Four-day work week, with 40 hours pay
- Restore the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA)
- Abolition of tiers
- The right to strike over plant closures
- Union jobs in future electric-vehicle (EV) plants where over $100 billion is expected to be invested in EV production creating as many as one million new jobs.
The reform slate’s dynamic new president is Shawn Fain — an electrician from Stellantis’ Kokomo, Indiana factory. During the strike, Fain framed the UAW’s contract battle in class terms, pitting autoworkers against wealthy corporate executives who have seen their compensation grow by 40% since the last agreement.
Fain relentlessly posed the question, what is the worth of workers vs. their employers? After the New York Times mocked his strong class stance, the next day he appeared wearing an iconic T-shirt that said, “Eat the Rich”!
The union called its strategy a “Stand Up Strike” in homage to the iconic 1937 “sit down” strike that birthed the union at General Motors. Back then, autoworkers at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan sat down and occupied their plant, cutting off the supply of car bodies and paralyzing the General Motors production process.
On September 15, the union struck all three companies, but only at one of their key assembly plants – GM in Wentzville, Missouri; Ford in Wayne, Michigan; and Stellantis in Toledo, Ohio. Each factory was a “high profit center” for the respective company. These limited strikes allowed the union to conserve its $825 million strike fund which would only have lasted about 90 days if all members at the auto facilities were on strike. While at the same time leaving room for escalation or de-escalation based on the response of the individual companies at the bargaining table -the union conserved resources while keeping management off guard.
On September 22, the union escalated by striking 38 parts distribution centers in 20 states serving auto dealers for GM and Stellantis. The union’s strategy spared Ford because it had already conceded to demands that electrical vehicles be included under future national contracts and to the right to strike over factory closures. Expanding the strike to the parts warehouses broadened the exposure of the strike geographically, so that solidarity actions and media exposure could take place in far more states while also slowing the flow of parts to auto dealers.
On October 25, the UAW reached a tentative agreement with Ford. Three days later, it reached a tentative agreement with Stellantis, the parent company of the Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge Ram brands. The two deals contain the same or similar terms, including a 25 percent general wage increase for UAW members as well as cost-of-living wage adjustments if inflation flares.
“We have won a record-breaking contract,” the UAW’s Fain, said. “We truly believe we got every penny possible out of this company.”
Shortly after announcing the tentative agreement with Stellantis, the union expanded its strike against General Motors, calling on workers to walk off the job at the company’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. The plant makes highly profitable sport utility vehicles for G.M.’s Cadillac and GMC divisions.
The result at General Motors was predictable! The UAW boxed GM into a corner where, if it did not settle, its competitors would gain market share with their employees back on the job. Given that reality, GM settled on October 30 to terms substantially the same as Ford and Stellantis. The settlement includes the elimination of wage tiers at all three companies, so that some workers will see their wages double overnight. All joint venture battery plants will come under the master agreement. In a final brilliant touch, the UAW negotiated a May 1, 2028 expiration date. Announcing the agreement, Fain said, “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own,” — a not too subtle call for a 2028 general strike!
With its major sectoral contracts concluded, UAW must now meet an even bigger challenge: Over one million auto workers, largely working for foreign-owned companies, are still not united in a union. Workers at major auto assembly plants owned by BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen — and their part suppliers — are working for less pay and far fewer benefits than their union siblings. Most of these companies are located in Southeastern United States where union density and power is below 10 percent. (Read more in the Nation)
The UAW clearly has the not-yet-union companies in their sites: “One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain said. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with a Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six.”
Already, workers at Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Freemont California are forming a union organizing committee.
The UAW’s “stand up strike” demonstrated the strategic power of organized workers in key nodes of the economy. This revitalized autoworkers movement, along with this historic contract victory, gives us optimism that the difficult, but essential task of organizing more autoworkers is finally within reach.
*By Bob Marley and Peter Tosh
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The UAW Strike, As of October 9, 2023
By John Womack
The Stansbury Forum is proud to publish a brief analytical piece by John Womack on the ongoing UAW selective strikes against the Big Three domestic auto producers, Ford, GM and Stellantis (Chrysler Fiat)! PM Press recently published a book featuring interviews with Womack, entitled Labor Power and Strategy. John applies some of that analytical acumen in looking at the UAW actions. Since John penned his article on October 9 the UAW has extended the strike to the giant Ford Kentucky Plant that is the company’s most profitable operation. Peter Olney/Co-Editor of the Stansbury Forum and Labor Power and Strategy
Some 1,700,000 people now work in the automobile industry in the USA. About 150,000 are members of the UAW, mainly in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. The union has a strike fund of $825,000,000. If all the UAW workers went out on strike, it would exhaust the strike fund in about 90 days. When the strike began on September 15, Stellantis (Chrysler-Fiat-Peugeot) had 74 days of unsold inventory; Ford had 64 days of unsold inventory, and GM had 50 days.
The UAW had dramatic demands for a new contract: a 40% wage increase (which compounded would amount to 46% over the life of the contract, now reduced to 36%), a four-day work week with 40 hours pay, COLA, the abolition of tiers, union jobs in the electric-vehicle plants the companies are planning, over $100,000,000,000 to be invested in EVs, making 1,000,000 new jobs, about half in the still union-weak South.
The first three plants the UAW struck were GM’s at Wentzville, MO, near St. Louis, Ford’s plant at Wayne, MI, west of Detroit, and the Stellantis plant at Toledo. They were all assembly plants:
- Wentzville made GMC Canyon and GMC Colorado pickups, big money-makers
- Wayne made Bronco SUVs and Ranger pickups, again big money-makers
- Toledo made Jeep Wrangler, SUVs and Jeep Gladiator pickups, again big money-makers.
All told only about 13,000 workers were out, drawing strike pay from the union’s strike fund.
This shows the initial nature of the strike. First, it was a selective strike. It is therefore reminiscent of the Association of Flight Attendant’s intermittent strikes in 1993 against Alaska Airline, when only about a total of 25 workers in various cities over several days walked off one flight after another, causing the airline much trouble and big losses and soon giving the AFA a historic win. The UAW can’t do intermittent strikes. Once it strikes, it has to stay out to the end. But it can do the selective strikes it is doing. For example, if Wentzville, Wayne, and Toledo fail to win the battle, the union could call workers out at other big money-making plants, like GM’s Arlington Assembly Plant, which makes Cadillac Escalades; or Ford’s Kansas City or Dearborn plant, which makes F-150 pickups, or Stellantis’s Stirling Heights or Warren Truck Assembly, which make RAM 1500s.
Second, the choice of this initial strategy is in line with Tom Juravich’s concentration of striking profit centers, striking places where the company makes most of its money. That’s what they study and teach at his UMass Amherst Labor Studies Center, where Olivia Geho staffs a Strategic Corporate Research website.
This selective strategy is different from what Peter Olney, Glenn Perusek, and I argue in our new book, Labor, Power and Strategy. There I focus on what I call technically and industrially strategic positions in the division of labor at work, bottlenecks in the flow of production, choke points. I argue labor should try to hold these positions and use them to disrupt production and bring the boss to see the union’s reason–and power. It is the power workers hold over production and the good they can get from it.
Nowadays, I think I read in The Wall Street Journal, the average internal-combustion automobile has about 30,000 parts, all of which it needs for the average buyer to buy it. Some parts are absolutely essential, like transmissions. GM has five transmission plants of its own, at Bedford and Kokomo, IN, Romulus and Saginaw, MI, and Toledo. Stellantis has three such plants of its own, two in Kokomo and one in Tipton, IN. Ford has only two, one at Livonia, MI, and one at Sharonville, OH. These are technically highly strategic plants. If the UAW strikes them, that in effect closes all the plants that need the transmissions.
It seems to me the UAW at first decided to put their strike fund against Stellantis, Ford, and GM inventories, reasoning that if they did their selective strikes they could run down their strike fund more slowly and outlast the companies. The companies figured they could last longer than the union and did not surrender. But on Friday, September 22, the union expanded the strike to 38 more plants, none at Ford, which had made gone some way to meeting the union’s demands, but at 18 GM plants and 30 Stellantis plants, 38 places closed in 20 states, 8,000 more workers striking (and drawing strike pay). This was a significant expansion, not only because of the numbers, but because these were all distribution centers, basically warehouses that received parts from parts manufacturers and
distributed them to assembly plants. Not many workers were out, but these were all highly strategic plants, choke points in the flow of auto and truck production.
The UAW had indicated it might call out more workers at more plants [and now has extended the strike to the giant Ford Kentucky Plant, the company’s most profitable operation.]
We are now over three weeks into the UAW’s action. Over 25,000 members out of 146,000 are out on strike. The strike fund is still very strong. And the choke points are making the companies’ inventories ever tighter.
The rest of us, pulling for the union, can only wait and see who caves.
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To Live and Strike in Hollywood
By Gary Phillips
In the seminal book The Hollywood Writers’ Wars by Nancy Lynn Schwartz, completed by her mother Sheila Schwartz upon her daughter’s untimely death, the internal and external battles of Writers Guild of America, WGA, formed in 1933, were chronicled. The Schwartz’s note of this then bourgeois gig:
“It was a great time to be prosperous, young, and progressive in the movie kingdom. You could live better than nine-tenths of the nation yet remain, through political activity, intimately connected to the pulse of humanity.”
That connection would prove to not just be blue-collar lives put to paper and screen by a bunch of lefties and their hardcore red buddies. By the 1940s, writers were seeking to better their working conditions. Not surprisingly as in other labor struggles, they were met with resistance from the bosses. And it wasn’t just writers who found themselves on the front lines.
On October 5, 1945, Bloody Friday, striking set decorators attempting to stop scabs from entering the Warner’s lot were assaulted by police and private security wielding billy clubs, fire houses gushing pressurized water and tear gas. This strike and several other militant ones led to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, with Congress overriding a veto by President Harry Truman. Among its provisions, the Act outlawed so-called wildcat strikes.
The latest strike by the WGA was no wildcat action against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the AMPTP. Everyone from the Silicon Valley computer bros turned studio execs, the legacy bosses a la Disney/ABC/Fox and the related personnel like those who supply craft services saw it coming. For the most part the night sticks didn’t come out, though there were several incidents of cars entering the studio lots shaving the distance between it and a picketer. And if a scribe was scabbing, they could do so by zoom and their computer in privacy.
This strike was important in its long-term ramifications too. For the first time since 1960 when both unions walked out, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, SAG-AFTRA, went on strike. This occurred roughly a month and a half after the writers when the actors’ Minimum Basic Agreement, MBA, came due.
For the WGA there were several points of contention. The two main ones were the nature of how residuals were being calculated in the age of streaming, and the onrush of AI as writer. A residual is a percentage of your initial fee as the script writer when the show you wrote or co-wrote is rerun domestically or internationally. This is how it’s still figured for network shows. Heretofore the formula streamers used was a percentage of the earned licensing fee paid to the actors and writers. But only they knew the numbers of subscribers who’d decided to view your program – and therefore didn’t pay out on how many sets of eyes were watching.
During the strike, it was clear those halcyon days written about by the Schwartzes’ were long gone. Several articles penned by established Hollywood writers, those who had sold a show, ran a writers’ room, even wrote movies, still had to have side hustles, and sometimes go on welfare. In my neighborhood there’s the World Harvest Food Bank. It’s a market where for forty dollars patrons can fill up their basket with fresh produce. If you can’t pay, you can still get food as long as you did a volunteer stint. Many a striker still shops there.
Michael Schulman’s piece in The New Yorker, ““Orange Is the New Black” Signaled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy” is an example of how writers and actors were screwed by the streamers. The article told of the plight of various actors in the Netflix show like Kimiko Glenn and others who were recognized in the streets from their reoccurring roles. But Glenn received foreign residuals totaling less than thirty dollars. Imagine how pitiful the amounts earned by actors in far less hit shows like “Orange” got for streaming residuals. Even the showrunners of the show, not paid starvation wages to begin with, were stunned to find out some 105 million viewers had watched at least one episode of the show. They too did not receive residuals commensurate with those numbers. The MBA now calls for success-based bonuses.
As to AI, there are several; new guardrails in place such as the writer can use AI when performing writing services if the company consents, but the company can’t require the writer to use the likes of ChatGPT. But as many have observed, the digital genie is out of the virtual bottle. For certain there are already scripts and manuscripts being produced by an AI program with the writer giving the work a human rewrite. My short story “The Story Conference” from June on this site doesn’t seem too far off to me. Various outfits such as Meta continue to use AI to scrape, as the term goes, writers’ works — including several of my books, training the AI to replace the flesh and blood writer.
More immediately, the actors remain on strike. It seemed a slam dunk given the WGA’s progress, that as the actors’ talks began with the AMPTP an agreement was within reach. After five days the producers walked away from the bargaining table. They claimed SAG-AFTRA sought a one-dollar levy per year per subscriber to a streaming service. “A bridge too far,” co-CEO of Netflix Ted Sarandos stated. President of SAG-AFTRA Fran Dreschler stated the figure was exaggerated by some sixty percent.
The reality is actors have several distinct issues from the writers they need to have addressed. Be it the notion of self-taping for an audition and the use of AI to capture voice, face, and form. To see more of what SAG-AFTRA is demanding, check out their strike website.
While I’ve admittedly lessened my presence on the strike line in support of my brother and sister actors, I still get out to picket. And when I’m driving there, might be as I’ve seen more than once in the last few days, a driverless car on the roadway. What does it say about the growing presence of AI that these autonomous vehicles are no longer an unusual presence among us?
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Follow the link for Gary Phillips’ new book:
The Unvarnished Gary Phillips: A Mondo Pulp Collection
End Israeli Apartheid to Give Peace a Chance
By Max Elbaum
Only urgent action that targets roots causes can prevent more deaths, injuries, trauma, and grief. The violence can end only with an immediate ceasefire and rapid steps toward equal rights for all.
When I was a kid, every television station portrayed Native Americans as savages. Those who took their land using “guns, germs, and steel” were depicted as peace-loving bearers of civilization itself.
When I was a youth, I watched footage of General William Westmoreland, commander of the US military forces terrorizing Vietnam, saying with a straight face: “Orientals don’t place the same value on human life that we do.”
In the years since I’ve seen the same kind of dehumanization deployed against people resisting dispossession and structural violence from South Africa to South America and dozens of other places in between.
And always against Palestinians, when their existence was acknowledged at all.
Consolidated Core and Broader Support
Amid the explosion of violence over the last week, a host of voices cut through the racist blather typified by the latest from Israel’s Defense Minister: “We are fighting against human animals.” These clear voices explained what is really going on: the root of violence is oppression. Among them were Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Jewish Voice for Peace, The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, left-wing Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif, and co-founder of the Progressive International Yanis Varoufakis.
These statements and the numerous demonstrations across the US bringing their message into the streets indicate the gains made by the Palestine solidarity movement over the past several decades. The ranks of those who have cut through all the attempts to obscure the real history of Palestine to target Israeli settler colonialism, the Israeli apartheid system, and the ideology of Zionism that supports it have grown substantially.
Yet pro-Palestine activists have built support beyond this political core. A far broader layer of the population has been won to sympathize with the Palestinians as the oppressed underdog in the Israel-Palestine relationship even if they are not yet fully convinced of anti-Zionist politics. Exposure of the ever-more-blatant racism of successive Israeli governments—the current one is particularly nightmarish—and the settlers (that is, ethnic cleansers) on the West Bank has led to a surge of identification with the Palestinians among US people of color, especially African Americans. Sentiment among young people of all backgrounds has shifted: a slight plurality of millennials (42%) sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis (40%). Sentiment among Democrats shifted in 2021 – 23 for the first time to favor Palestinians over Israelis, 49% to 38%.
Champions of Palestinian rights like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush now sit in Congress. And a broader layer of congresspeople and other elected officials speak out to varying degrees against Israeli brutality and sponsor legislation on that issue in ways that were off the table even just a decade ago.
9/11 Moment: “With us or with the terrorists”
All of these gains have been made on the unfavorable terrain of US politics, where support for Israel has been promoted as a moral and political imperative by the guardians of imperial foreign policy, the powerful Israel lobby, and the fanatical, MAGA-linked Christian Zionist movement. But now the hard-won progress is being rolled back by attacks that will likely intensify in the coming weeks and months.
One establishment pundit after another has embraced the notion of “Israel’s 9/11.” So once again the “with us or with the terrorists” barrage is being deployed against anyone who criticizes US Middle East policy or supports Palestinian rights. Every public figure who does so—from media personalities to college professors, and from celebrities to elected officials—can expect to face charges of anti-Semitism and “siding with terrorism.” Attacks will intensify against frontline activist groups like AROC, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Students for Justice In Palestine, who have long been targeted with smears, sting operations, and phony legal campaigns.
Elected officials who don’t toe the pro-Israel line are already being targeted. In the last election cycle the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured millions of dollars into efforts to defeat not just strong Palestine supporters but even those who seemed inclined to move in that direction. AIPAC recognizes that shifting sentiment around Israel-Palestine in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing poses the threat of support for Israel losing its current status as a “bipartisan” principle, which would be a huge blow to US complicity in Israeli apartheid.
The upwelling of support for Israel in this moment poses serious political challenges for building Palestine solidarity, for defeating an authoritarian right that wants to use support for Israel as one of its battering rams to gain total power, and for contending with Biden’s terrible foreign policy. Republicans are Iran-baiting Biden and the Democrats; centrist Democrats are seizing another means of marginalizing progressives and Leftists; the progressive movement has long split over support for Palestinian rights. The fever of war is fueling religious nationalism at home and abroad.
Palestinians Will Bear the Brunt
Meanwhile the threat of even greater bloodletting looms, with more dead to mourn and wounded to care for on all sides, The Israeli government has already declared war, announced a total siege of Gaza, and is threatening massive military action. Palestinian civilians, who have borne the brunt of violence for more than 75 years, will once more be treated as either explicit targets or irrelevant collateral damage.
So this time for us in the US to stand firm and go broad. Sustain the momentum of street actions and full-spectrum media messaging that targets the underlying cause of the current crisis. Defend every group and individual that gets attacked for criticizing Israel’s brutality—continuing to remind people that outrage against that brutality is not the same as anti-Semitism. Stay in or get in every public space no matter how uncomfortable where a voice speaking against racist dehumanization can find even a toehold. Engage with those progressives who equivocate whether out of simple backwardness or fear of Zionist bullying while building on whatever positive impulses they display.
The immediate days ahead are likely to be very tough. The most strident Israel supporters claim to be moved by the death of civilians, but they reveal their true colors in declaring this a moment of “great opportunity“ to gain more power. But they have no program for the Israel-Palestine conflict except more killing and more subjugation.
The demands for an immediate ceasefire, for an end to US military aid and overall blank-check support for Israel, for equal rights for all to replace apartheid – these light the road to peace with justice. Many who are not ready to support those demands today can be convinced to change their minds tomorrow; just as many who support these views today did not do so five, ten or twenty years ago.
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This piece was first published by Convergence who have allowed the Stansbury Forum to republish.
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Crazy
By Eileen Hirst
I awoke to the excited buzzing of text messages from my sister who lives in New England, three hours ahead of my home in San Francisco. Family emergency? No, it was the happiest news a Boston Red Sox fan could imagine at the end of yet another dismal season. Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom had finally been fired, after three losing seasons, this last being a furious race to the bottom of the American League East against the New York Yankees, who had to settle for second worst team in the division.
I ran downstairs, grabbed my Red Sox flag, and hung it from our front balcony. On Opening Day, with all signs pointing to an epically painful season, I’d hung it upside down to signal a Red Sox Nation in distress and now, finally, there was reason to fly it right side up in hopeful celebration. I went across the street to take a picture of it. A man from the landscaping crew that keeps the house two doors up looking like a spread in Fine Gardening approached me. He spoke with a Mexican accent. “Very nice.”
“No kidding!” I said. “Three long years, we’ve had to watch Bloom destroy the team and now, at last, he’s been fired.”
He cocked his head to one side. “Your house, Señora. It looks very nice.”
He was talking about the paint job. I should have left it at that, but in the delirium of myopic joy, it did not occur to me that the entire world had not stopped to honor Bloom’s departure. “The Red Sox. See the logo on the flag? Terrible executive, three losing seasons. He got fired today.”
“Oh, okay.”
I can’t blame him for not sharing my happiness. There are many things not to understand about being a Red Sox fan, starting with why be a fan at all. This is a team whose history includes an 86-year drought in World Series championships, a condition believed to have been brought about by the so-called Curse of the Bambino, punishment to the team for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918. This is a team whose star pitcher, Pedro Martinez, during a bench-clearing brawl in 2003 grabbed the head of a 72-year-old Yankees coach and threw him to the ground. On national television. This is the team that has played Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline in the bottom of the eighth inning at every home game since 1997 because the best friend of the employee who chose game music that day had just given birth to a baby girl named Caroline. This is the team whose owners were so desperate to fill seats as this train wreck of a season ground to a halt that they designated a game in September as Barbie Night at Kenway – get it? Kenway? – and promised pink t-shirts to those in attendance. Even the team-paid on-air announcers were embarrassed.
It’s hard to explain. It’s like when you voice a deeply held religious belief to a friend and the friend turns to you, incredulous, and says, “You really believe that?”
One dreary February evening some years back, I was working late at my desk in San Francisco City Hall when the Jamaican custodian came in to empty the trash. He asked how my day was going. “Great,” I said, turning my computer screen around so he could see a photo of people standing knee-deep in snow waving at an 18-wheeler big rig. “It’s Truck Day!”
“What’s that?”
“Truck Day. The day the Red Sox equipment truck leaves Fenway Park in Boston to make the trip to spring training in Florida.”
“Oh, okay. It’s a holiday.”
“Well, in Boston it is. The fans stand on the street in front of the ballpark and wave good-bye to the truck.” I pointed to the photo as if that would make it all make sense.
It didn’t. “The players are in the truck?” he said.
“No, just the equipment. Bats and balls. Uniforms. Gloves. Sunflower seeds. That kind of stuff.”
“There’s nobody in the truck?”
“Well, the truck driver.”
His eyes narrowed. “But they wave to the truck?”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy.” This from a man whose tropical island country has an Olympic bobsled team. You want to talk about crazy? “Why do they do that?”
Why, indeed? Because sports fans do crazy things. You may as well ask why Green Bay Packers fans don hats made to look like giant wedges of cheese. Why Los Angeles Angels fans clutch stuffed toy monkeys at games. What about those squares of terry cloth that teams throughout professional sports distribute for fans to whip over their heads to show support, as if just paying the exorbitant price of a ticket isn’t enough?
And that’s where the real craziness lies, in how much we spend being fans of teams owned by billionaires in sports played by millionaires. Take me, for instance. Admittedly, I could save a lot if I just embraced the Giants, but even after living here for forty-some years, I have never figured out the West Coast style of fandom, which seems to involve supporting your team only when it is doing well and coming home from a game smelling like you rolled in raw garlic.
To fully participate as a Red Sox fan living on the West Coast, here’s how it nets out: I must subscribe to Directv (basic package $183.92 a month) because it is the only provider that offers a regional sports package (another $13.99 a month) that allows me to watch NESN, the Sox’s official broadcast partner. That gets me the pre- and post-game shows, but to see actual games, I also need the MLB package ($149.94 for the season). Then, there’s the digital subscription to the Boston Globe, so I can read the coverage of the disaster I have just watched unfold the night before ($12.00 a month).
Not counting the flag and the flagpole, that’s almost $2700 a year to watch Red Sox owners John Henry (net worth $5.1 billion), Tom Werner ($1.7 billion), and Sam Kennedy (a paltry $315 million) allow Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom to trade away beloved home-grown talent, like Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, while Chris Sale was paid $29 million and change to pitch eleven games in between injuries. $2700 a year to watch manager Alex Cora make the same post-defeat speech game after game. “Yeah, well, we were swinging the bats pretty well, but our pitching wasn’t where it needs to be.”
The day after the 2023 season mercifully ended with the Red Sox in last place for the second year in a row, the ownership announced it would be raising ticket prices, already the highest in Major League Baseball, for the fourth year in a row.
How can that be? Won’t the season ticket holders refuse to renew? Won’t single ticket buyers stay home? Ownership isn’t worried about fan loyalty. Why? Because their jewel of a ballpark is one of the most popular for baseball tourists and fans of opposing teams who want to be able to say they saw a game at Fenway. So what if the people who fill the seats are not Red Sox fans? In the craven collective mind of the ownership, it makes no difference who occupies a seat, be it a lifelong fan who has supported the team through thick and – mostly –thin, or a tourist. A ticket sold is a ticket sold.
Feeling as I do, have I cancelled Directv and gone with a provider whose latest promotion will save me over $100 a month? No. Have I cancelled auto-renew on the MLB package? No. Will I stuff the flag in the darkest corner of my darkest closet or cut it into dust cloths? Of course not. Somewhere around the first week of February 2024, I will need it to announce to my neighbors that it is Truck Day.
Crazy.
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