August 18, 2009
Contact: Linda Pinkow, (617) 447-2177, ext 204, linda@dollarsandsense.org
New Anthology Explores the State of Labor
Real World Labor
Edited by Immanuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective
In this time of rapid economic change, the power of organized labor seems to be in decline. But new organizing strategies are emerging to challenge corporate power and the globalization of capital. Real World Labor examines the most pressing issues facing workers today: fundamental changes in the nature of work and wages; new legal impediments to union organizing; the persistence of racial and gender discrimination; migrant workers’ struggle for dignity; militarism and its harmful effects on the working class; union responses to the global financial meltdown; and new forms of rank-and-file organizing and resistance.
Real World Labor provides up-to-date, accessible, and penetrating analysis of the most significant theoretical, historical, and practical issues confronting labor unions and workers on a national and global level. This collection includes 70 authoritative essays by leading writers and scholars of the labor movement, drawn from the pages of Dollars & Sense magazine, Working USA, and Labor Notes.
Real World Labor is an antidote to the misinformation, false arguments, and faulty analysis so common in the mainstream media and among orthodox economists. An excellent classroom resource.
— MICHAEL YATES
associate editor of Monthly Review,
author of Why Unions Matter
For any labor studies course, Real World Labor is the most comprehensive and accessible book available today. Written by authoritative scholars of the labor movement in the United States and worldwide, no book compares to this work in its breadth of coverage and scope of analysis. This is the only collection that provides an in-depth overview of labor issues in an accessible manner to anyone interested in understanding the most significant issues facing workers and the contemporary labor movement. I highly recommend this book to all!
— THOMAS J. KRIGER
Provost, National Labor College
Real World Labor, like decades of Dollars & Sense books, is bound to be a great guide to labor issues, with a wide range of perspectives for both union members and students.
— LARRY COHEN
President, Communications Workers of America
Order an exam copy (pdf’s as well as hard copies are available), and browse our catalog of economics books at www.dollarsandsense.org, or call (617) 447-2177.
Real World Labor
Edited by Immanuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective
ISBN: 978-1-878585-55-4
Publication date: August 2009
Pages: 330
Price: $34.95 Contributors include: David Bacon, Kim Bobo, Heather Bouchey, Roger Bybee, Aviva Chomsky, Steve Early, Bill Fletcher Jr., Staughton Lynd, Arthur MacEwan, John Miller, Immanuel Ness, Thomas Palley, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Pollin, Paddy Quick, Peter Rachleff, Alejandro Reuss, Jane Slaughter, Lucien Van Der Walt, and others.
Contents:
Chapter 1 – Labor Law, Policy, and Regulation
Chapter 2 – Wages and the Labor Market
Chapter 3 – Employment and Unemployment
Chapter 4 – International Labor Movements
Chapter 5 – Discrimination by Race and Gender
Chapter 6 – Immigration and Migration
Chapter 7 – Unions and Organizing Strategy
Chapter 8 – Competing Forms of Management
Chapter 9 – Labor, Globalization, and Trade
Chapter 10 – Labor and Economic Crisis
Chapter 11 – Labor and Militarism
Our election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America has been filling me with overwhelming emotions. As it has been doing for so many people.
It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.
I started this blog to write about my father’s history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I’ve made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.
It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President—in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America’s embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack’s two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House—is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.
This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades—but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don’t know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama’s candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.
One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I’ve gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women’s studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:
Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama
I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don’t know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don’t know if the numbers will allow us to call him “President Obama” but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.
I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:
Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.
I think Fanon’s words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.
With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it’s about US.
I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It’s not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits….
Let’s hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.
May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.
On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.
John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi—the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John’s wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.
My subject line to John was “Congratulations to us all.”
I’m thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.
John replied in a vein similar to Joyce’s blog post:
Like John Lewis—as Obama has said—my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.
Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.
And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying “I,” and Obama saying “You.”
So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. “To Come This Far.” Now it is your turn. So I agree—”Congratulations to us all.”
Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation’s woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 7, 2008 at 9:42 am
Bad government has been good business during the Bush administration. In 1999, nine companies had federal homeland security contracts. Today the total is over 33,000. “Much of what we’ve seen touted by vendors after 9/11,” says security consultant Doug Laird, “is nothing more than a sales force trying to use 9/11 as the hype to get poorly advised folks to buy their products.”
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government …
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm…
“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”
In other countries, for decades, cooperation between US industries and government has gone much further. In Argentina, for example, the Ford Falcon automobile is emblematic (PDF) of government terror. In the 1970s,
the Ford Falcon was the car of choice used by police, military and paramilitaries alike. Ford’s exclusive contracts with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, one that clearly still resonates today. “Whenever a Falcon drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder,” reflects renowned Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky in a recent article. “It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”
The terror has continued into the present:
At noon on March 4, 2005, a green Ford Falcon pulled up next to a woman in Centenario, a municipality of Neuquén, in southern Argentina. Three men and a woman forced her into the car and then spent the next several hours threatening, torturing and mutilating her. The victim, whose name has been kept secret, was the wife of an employee at the Cerámica Zanon tile factory, one of the flagship worker-controlled enterprises that have sprung up in Argentina since the 2001 crisis. While the Zanon workers have successfully resuscitated the plant, they have also faced growing intimidation, as exemplified by this attack. The victim’s abductors released her with the message: “This is for Zanon. Tell them that the union will run with blood…. You’re all going to have to move into the factory because we’re going to kill all of you.”
In Latin America it is clear that these partnerships are part of an explicit war on organized labor and the culture that grew from developmentalist economies (PDF) in the 1950s and 60s. And a further crackdown on US labor may also be the promise of InfraGard.
FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005…. “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”
Outside the US, American corporations are in many ways independent entities not bound by US laws or by the laws of the countries where they operate. Increasingly, there is a class of American citizens who enjoy similar status within the US boarders.
One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.
The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.
“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”
On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.
“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”
Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”
Worse, there are indications that this special class of citizens may be the enforcers of martial law, with permission to shoot to kill.
One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.
This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.
“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.
“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.
Rothschild has substantial confirmation of this report from two other sources, as well.
Often using unreliable informants and guilt by association, the mid-20th century US government placed large numbers of its citizens on the Security Index, which qualified them to lose their rights and be rounded up and jailed en masse, upon declaration of martial law. Even if the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index, it was nearly impossible to have one’s name removed from the lists of those to be imprisoned without charges—unless one agreed to inform on others.
The canceled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would be destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or “otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups.”
(Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)
The odd twist of InfraGard is to recruit informants through the promise of placing them above the law rather than through threatening them with a possible loss of their rights.
At least through the mid-1960s, predominantly working class Klansmen enjoyed relative impunity as they murdered, bombed, burned, raped, shot and beat Blacks and their allies to maintain a social and economic order that kept them—the violent whites—poor as well.
Today, it seems the mantle of violence with impunity is being handed to an owning class elite.
To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation….
Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”
I found Jerry Moncaco’s excellent Ghosts of Strikes Past: Class Struggle, Strike Breaking & Blacklisting In Hollywood interesting on a lot of levels. I had not known, for example, about Barbara Stanwyck’s right-leaning, collusion with the anti-communist witch hunters—especially intriguing to me, since my father always claimed his Trotskyite father, whom I’m named after, had an affair with Stanwyck.
But what I’m interested in right now are examples of bad social and political consequences of government maintaining vague and overbroad powers to monitor and collect data on its citizens. The blacklist and the loyalty boards, HUAC and other similar Congressional and state legislative committees all operated on the foundation of US government surveillance of its citizens.
Jerry’s important point about the blacklist is that it
was not primarily used against Communists but against union organizers and militants. Further, the blacklist was not primarily used against writers, actors, and directors, the people we usually read about, but against set-designers, carpenters, painters, lighting-designers, etc. It is convenient for us at this late date to think of Hollywood blacklisting as mainly an activity of the past, and an activity that occurred during a limited period of time during the height of the cold war. This is indeed the case when we talk about stars and other well-known creative talent. The best way to discipline “troublesome” creative talent was to accuse them of being a communist, a homosexual. or a drug addict. Essentially, this was a form of blackmail by the bosses. But carpenters … were not blackmailed in this way. If they were union militants of any type they were simply blacklisted. After the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 this kind of blacklisting of pro-union employees was illegal, but it was still maintained, and especially advocated by extreme right-wing bosses like those who ran Disney. The blacklist of Hollywood union militants began long before the well-known Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist and lasted for a long time after.
Furthermore, the US government and industrial powers actively supported corrupt, mob-infiltrated unions to undermine militant unions that pursued the legitimate interests of workers. If there are problems with corruption in organized labor, the US government has some responsibility to help fix it. A good start would be to pass new labor laws that reverse the attacks on organizing and enforcement that began long before George Bush came to power.
The historical lesson here is something that every unionist should know. In the post-war period government and management all opposed the threat of militant unions. At this time there were more militant unions than corrupt unions. One way that management opposed militant unions was by red-baiting them. In many cases the unionists who were being red-baited were not communist or even “leftists”. They were simply good union leaders. This was the case with the CSU [Conference of Studio Unions]. Another strategy that management used in opposing militant unions was to find unions that were friendly with management and to promote the interest of those unions over and above the militant unions. A related strategy, and one of the most important, was for management to call in the mobsters and the unions allied with the mobsters. In every case across the U.S. in the post-World War II years – among electrical workers opposing General Electric and Westinghouse, among dock-workers in the east, among Midwestern Teamsters – management and government promoted unions allied with mobsters in order to defeat unions that actually had the worker’s interest as part of their program. The story of Gerald Horne’s “Class Struggle in Hollywood” is the story of how this happened in Los Angeles.
At the end of Ghosts of Strikes Past, Jerry links to a blog post by a blogging acquaintance of mine, Rokhl Kafrissen, which I missed when she first published it, Mechanics of the Blacklist, Part 1. Similar to my discussion of how suspected civil rights activists were targeted for reprisals in Mississippi, Rokhl discusses how the information gathered by loyalty boards and HUAC, through FBI surveillance and unreliable informants, was then used by the American Legion and others to target suspected Communists outside the law.
In 1947, Harry Truman (facing a hostile Congress and other political factors) enacted a piece of legislation which would screen all Federal government employees for ‘loyalty’. One of the grounds for ‘disloyalty’ was membership in a subversive organization. Truman directed that the Attorney General, with the FBI, promulgate a list of subversive organizations for use by the Loyalty Review Board in their determinations. The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) came to have far wider import than just its effect on Federal employees….
Once a part of the public record, the AGLOSO was seized upon by groups who believed that the government was not aggressive enough in its efforts to protect the country from the ‘Red Menace’.
There is a vast area of subversive activity still within the law about which neither the FBI nor the Justice Department can do anything. Therefor it remains the civic and patriotic responsibility of individual Americans and their organizations to perform.
(Firing Line magazine, 1949)
Firing Line was a publication of the American Legion. It’s sole purpose was to inform readers about Communism, and one aspect of that mission was publishing the names and activities of people whom they believed to be Communists. One of the sources for their information was lists like the AGLOSO. Another source was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In addition to the Federal HUAC, 13 state legislatures had their own HUACS. Those, too, were combed for information to be published in Firing Line….
[T]he American Legion, and the hundreds of other members of the army of anti-communist vigilantes, had no use for our Constitutional due process protections.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 12, 2008 at 10:47 am
Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse. Now that’s hard work.
The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.
Those days are long gone. Most of us don’t use our bodies as a replacement for a machine — unless we’re paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting that we’re likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler.
Godin’s post is not really in the spirit of Labor Day: it’s an individualistic meditation on the meaning of “hard work” by a wealthy businessman. Godin uses the example of a worker injured on the job as a foil for his musings on how these days “hard work” is no longer risky manual labor but rather readiness of entrepreneurs to take risks that are shrewd and visionary.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.
You might be wondering why I am even reading this stuff. Back in 2004, when I was an underemployed PhD program dropout trying to parley my activism and my communication skills (blogging, academic research, poetry writing, English teaching) into some kind of professional life, I asked my friend Adina for some books to read that would help me understand trends in internet communications and online activism. One of the books Adina recommended was Seth Godin’s highly influential Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers. I learned a lot from the book—and I doubt I’ll ever read any other books in the marketing guru genre.
Anyway, there are two things I want to say to Godin’s notions of “hard work.”
The fate of the worker in Fast Food Nation is not a freakish anomaly in American worklife.
Godin should spend an hour or two reading the archives of Confined Space, Jordan Barab’s excellent, now sadly defunct blog on workplace safety. In his farewell post, Barab wrote:
More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.
And you’ll never learn from the evening news that we have more fish and wildlife inspectors than OSHA inspectors, or that the penalties from a chemical release that kills fish is higher than a chemical release that kills a worker. Not many are aware that workers are often afraid to complain about health and safety hazards or file a complaint with OSHA. Almost no one understands that OSHA inspections are so infrequent and penalties for endangering workers are so insignificant that there is almost no disincentive for employers to break the law. Employers are almost never criminally prosecuted for killing workers even when they knew they were violating OSHA standards.
The supposed evolution of work conditions from the turn of the century, when my great-grandfather organized his fellow shochetim (ritual slaughterers) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is a myth. Over the last few decades, the realms of dangerous, unregulated, “hard” work have been expanding.
While many people are familiar with the conditions faced by garment workers and construction day laborers, the tentacles of unregulated work stretch into many other sectors of the economy,
including workplaces as diverse as restaurants, grocery stores, security companies, nail salons, laundries, warehouses, manufacturers, building services firms, and home health care agencies.
We have documented considerable variety in how employers violate laws. They pay their workers less than minimum wage, fail to pay them overtime, refuse to pay them for all hours worked, or
simply don’t pay them at all. They disregard health and safety regulations by imposing unsafe conditions, forcing employees to work without providing necessary safety equipment, and failing to give training and information. The list of ways employers break the law goes on: they refuse to pay Unemployment Insurance or Workers’ Compensation; they discriminate against workers on the basis of race, gender and immigration status; they retaliate against attempts to organize; they refuse medical leaves. Such stories of substandard working conditions may sound familiar—they carry strong echoes of the experiences of workers at the beginning of the last century. At that time, the solution was to pass laws to create wage minimum standards, protect workers who speak up for their rights, and eventually, guarantee workplace safety and outlaw discrimination. That these very laws are now being so widely violated poses new challenges. While efforts to pass new laws
raising workplace standards are still critical, a new battle has emerged to ensure that existing laws are enforced.
What Explains Unregulated Work?
The rise of unregulated work is closely tied to many of the same factors that are thought to be responsible for declining wages and job security in key sectors of the economy. Over the last 30 years, for example, global economic competition has been extinguishing the prospects of workers in manufacturing. Local manufacturers struggle to drive down their costs in order to compete against firms located in Asian or Latin American countries where wages and safety standards are lower.
Yet unregulated work cannot be explained simply as a byproduct of globalization. It’s true that the competitive pressure felt in manufacturing may ripple through other parts of the economy, as wage floors are lowered and the power of labor against capital is diminished. But we found businesses that serve distinctly local markets—such as home cleaning companies, grocery stores, and nail salons—engaging in a range of illegal work practices, even though they are insulated from global competition.
Declining unionization rates since the 1970’s also contribute to the spread of unregulated labor. One effect has been a general rise in inequality accompanied by lower wages and workplace standards: a weaker labor movement has less influence on the labor market as a whole, and offers less protection for both unionized and non-union workers. More directly, union members are more likely to report workplace violations to the relevant government authority than nonunion workers, as a number of studies have shown. So it makes sense that employers are increasingly committing such violations in the wake of a long-term decline in the percentage of workers in unions.
But even the powerful one-two punch of globalization and de-unionization provides only a partial explanation. Government policy is also instrumental in shaping unregulated work—not only employment policies per se, but also immigration, criminal justice, and welfare “reform” policies that create pools of vulnerable workers. In this environment employers can use a variety of illegal and abusive cost-cutting strategies. Perhaps most significantly, they are deciding whether or not to break the law in an era of declining enforcement, when they are likely to face mild penalties or no penalties at all.
For some related reading, I also suggest another article from Dollars & Sense, “The Rise of Migrant Militancy,” by Immanuel Ness.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 4, 2007 at 1:44 am
I started to post Pete Seeger’s rendition of Malvina Reynolds’ “Mrs. Clara Sullivan’s Letter,” as a tribute to the twelve miners who died after the explosion that trapped them in the Sago Mine on Monday. But I stopped myself because I thought that it might be a stretch to apply the words of the song to this particular situation. This disaster was in West Viriginia; the Reynolds song is about Perry County, KY. This disaster is about safety violations and bad oversight; the Reynolds song is about other labor problems, like “goons on the picket line” who intimidate striking workers.
Turns out there was no reason to hesitate. In one of yesterday’s Portside mailings, Jack Radey wrote:
If you really like Dramamine, the NPR reporting on the Sago Disaster was truly charming. They prattled on and on about how the news media got the story wrong, how did this happen? How were the wrong headlines printed?How were people put on this emotional roller coaster?
Then they interviewed a local pastor about the importance of accepting all this and not getting angry. They, like the rest of the media, mentioned in passing that a fight broke out where the families were waiting when the news of the dead was announced. But why were people fighting? There was even mention in one broadcast that the local SWAT team was deployed around the corner from where the families waited, in case disorder broke out. Oh, mine safety violations? Why would that be news? No doubt the families were so angry at the misleading news. Maybe about the fact that 12 of their men were killed in a mine with triple the normal (bad enough) rate of safety violations?
That the local goon squad is there to protect the mine owner and his property from the wrath of the families of the men murdered for his greed?
Oh come now, would anyone suggest that would be news? Remember why our flag (not the one on the courthouse, where no doubt those $25 fine were handed out), our flag, is the color it is?
After the sale, six union operations previously owned by Horizon were shut down. The nonunion mines remained open.
Under the bankruptcy and reorganization plan, U.S. Federal Bankruptcy Judge William Howard in August agreed that Horizon should not be responsible for $800 million in health insurance contractual obligations to more than 3,000 active and retired United Mine Workers of America union members.
The judge threw out the contract and voided the collective bargaining agreement to make the sale of the mines more appealing to Ross and his partners.
As John Bennett, whose father James was killed in the Sago Mine, said to Matt Lauer on the Today Show (via American Rights At Work):
It’s not just the men that go down there every day that know the mines is [sic] unsafe…we have no protection for our workers. We need to get the United Mine Workers back in these coal mines, to protect [against] these safety violations, to protect these workers.
It’s the same old story:
Lauer then asked Bennett “You feel as if the miners speak out they are at risk of losing their jobs?” “Yeah” Bennett answered.
That spirit, though, was not present earlier this year when the Bush administration proposed cutting the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) by $7 million. The administration defended the 6-percent reduction by noting the number of coal mines has been decreasing. Yet coal mining fatalities have gone up for three years in a row. There were 42 mining fatalities in 2001, 29 in 1998. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, maintained the funding cut would cause a 25 percent reduction in the government’s mine-safety inspection workforce. As of March, 612 federal mine inspectors were responsible for enforcing safety regulations in 25 states, and there were signs the system has not been functioning well.
And finally, let’s take one more step back and take a look at the even bigger picture. This administration has been obsessed with one thing since it took office: tax cuts and favor for its friends. What that translates into is “Shrinking government…” — at least the part that provides protections for workers — “to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” as Bush Administration ideolouge Grover Norquist says.
Well “government” isn’t some abstract thing. Shrinking government means that agencies like OSHA and MSHA have less power to enforce the law and maintain safe working conditions. So, while drowning government in a bathtub, we’re also asphyxiating workers in a coal mine.
So, then, here’s Pete, in memory of the twelve men and in solidarity with the one survivor and with all of the affected families and friends. You can read the lyrics here.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 8, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Last month, I posted about Wade Rathke’s self-seving, racist attack on Curtis Muhammad, Community Labor United, and the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund. Though I posted Open Letter to the Labor Movement, an important response from a group of activists, I never got around to the further commentary I had promised. In the meantime, one of the signers of the Open Letter, Marsha Steinberg, has written a response of her own, much stronger than anything I could have done, in the wake of a supposed apology from Rathke to Muhammad. Immediately following Marsha’s comments is the “apology” from Rathke, to which she is responding.
Marsha Steinberg to Wade Rathke:
Your apology to Curtis Muhammad again badly misses the point!
It is not personal attacks that are the most relevant although I personally doubt your explanation of “being over the top” because Chalabi was a liar and a thief, facts which I am sure you knew when you wrote the piece. It is the attack on CLU and The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (“couldn’t organize a two car funeral”) that deserve an apology. I personally believe that the attack was done in a personal fit over the fact that a coalition of community based, African American led, groups without staff or union money had out organized you and you felt free, as a white male, to attack them without fear of rebuke. How could they have accomplished some thing that you hadn’t; specifically getting recognition in the national progressive movement here and in Europe as the legitimate voice of the poor backs of New Orleans which you think of as your personal turf. The arrogance and racism of the comments continue to send me “over the top”.
As a SEIU staffer I see the same syndrome every day. White, mostly male, leadership at the top, feel free to plan for the lives of the membership of a union that is overwhelmingly poor, mostly female, people of color. They remain convinced that in every situation they know better than the members themselves and the field staff, what the members need and should care about. Only they know how to plan and build for the future. Again, what racist crap!
At some point the continued top down approach of the ACORNS and SEIUs will either have to be abandoned and genuine leadership be allowed to emerge and be nurtured with real education, training and sharing of the members resources or this country will continue it’s descent into fascism and barbarism.
I call on all white progressive activists to see this approach for what it is and understand that we must be prepared to relinquish the privilege and the right to lead that has come to us from a racist and classist country built on the labor of those without power or privilege. We must ask ourselves: if we’re so smart and have all the answers, how come the movement is so small? We must accept the right of community-based groups to lead and speak for themselves. We must share our skills and resources generously. We must call racism when we see it. “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
Still today, white areas of New Orleans have electricity at least part of the day while the adjacent black areas have none. Whites are returning to the city while black males convicted of no crime are held hidden in jails throughout the South. Wade, why don’t you write an over the top piece about that?
I came to labor as a long time community organizer because with a dues base, that’s where all the money is. I was actually shocked to see the disregard for the members’ priorities and the ‘we know what’s best’ attitudes.
I call on organized labor to examine its practices openly and honestly and to share the resources with community folks and their organizations. Rhetorically we say that our members and the community are the same people. Let’s make that real. Let’s admit that labor does not have the right to pick the leadership of community based organizations or expect them to follow labor’s lead without true coalitions of equals. One start would be to post this message on your blog which I doubt you will do. Let’s have an open dialogue about the nature of our organizations and labor’s obligation to freely share resources and relinquish leadership.
In the meantime, I will send your “apology” around to my lists with my response.
When I wrote these comments a month ago, I was searching for a way to grieve for my city. It is amazing to find how few people really care about what happens to New Orleans on one hand and the level of opportunism from many folks who couldn’t find the city without a map. I still feel that way.
Nonetheless, there were 3-4 comments we received from people several weeks after the blog ran either posted to the blog or sent to me directly. All the ones to me I answered.
Their message was that the treatment of Curtis Muhammad was wrong. They took particular umbrage at the metaphorical comparison with Chalabi.
Chalabi after years in exile returned in hopes of running Iraq. Though that has not worked out exactly as he – and some of his supporters — dreamed, he has been a constant presence in the political life of the country since the occupation. He in fact is now a member of the ruling government with a significant position in the coalition arrangements and a base in various sides of the religious power blocs.
Feelings about Chalabi are obviously intense. My point was lost here and insult was taken, where observation and metaphor were meant. I am very sorry for all of that. My train was going one way and ended up on a side track. Reading the piece again one is reminded of how dangerous a form of communication these unfiltered, unedited blogs can be. There is a lesson for me to remember there, but my lesson should not have been at the expense of others, and I’m deeply sorry it occurred. I played with fire, and I got burned.
Curtis also contacted me directly by e-mail indicating his unhappiness with the piece. I sent him back an email offering to get together with him and straighten it out directly. I did not receive a reply.
I did see Curtis while I was visiting the October 29th rally in Baton Rouge on the capitol steps. I walked over to visit with him. He was still understandably not happy about all of this. He asked for a public apology.
I meant no harm to Curtis and in my ham handed and inarticulate way, I thought I had expressed that even in the piece. Obviously I failed, therefore I agree with Curtis that an apology is warranted, and here he has it, because I am sincerely sorry for any inadvertent insult I have given him and any offense he has felt. None was meant, but to the degree some was taken, that’s on me, and I hope over time perhaps he will come to accept my apology, because he certainly has it here, exactly where the offense was rendered.
This post-Katrina syndrome is real. There is no question that I am “over the top” these days, and more than one person has pointed it out to me. My boiling point is very low. My judgment is not as sound as it sometimes needs to be. I bet I am not the only one in the same situation. All of which makes this even more regrettable. Untoward comments, like mine, blurted out thoughtless to the full impact, are perhaps felt more deeply and taken more hurtfully than normal times would allow.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 13, 2005 at 2:04 pm
The crisis for the working class (whether employed or not, waged or not) continues to grow. Even as the nation, and especially the poor and Black working class of the Gulf states and New Orleans in particular, tries to pick up the pieces after Katrina’s (and Rita’s) devastation, the assault by capital and their partners in the government grows more intense — the suspension of Davis Bacon and OHSA safeguards, plans to defund the safety net to finance business interests in the reconstruction of the region, little thought to how those left behind will find a home in the reconstruction process and its outcome. The Democrats have failed to articulate a credible alternative to this plan or address this crisis in any significant way.
It is also true that the flip side of disaster is opportunity. For the trade unions the moment presents a unique opportunity, not open since the sit-downs of the 1930s, to bring dignity, voice, a living wage and benefits in the form of unions to the masses left behind in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, particularly the poor and African Americans. It is a well-established fact that Blacks are the most pro-union force in the U.S. They have proven time and time again to be this country’s most dedicated fighters of oppression. But the trade union movement may not be able to take advantage of this opportunity unless it addresses issues not yet confronted in any meaningful way by the debate and programs of the two new federations.
Now these issues have surfaced in the wake of Katrina, specifically in a piece by ACORN and SEIU leader Wade Rathke entitled “Chalabi and Katrina” (www.ChiefOrganizer.org, 3 October 2005) that disparages an organization, Community Labor United, and one of its principal organizers, Curtis Muhammad, with deep roots in the voter registration drives in Mississippi, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and for the last 20 years a part of the New Orleans community.
Days after the hurricane and while struggling with their own displacement, CLU folks began to pull together what has become the People’s Hurricane and Relief Fund. Since then they have held two national meetings, the first on September 10th with participation from 49 different organizations, and the second, September 30th-October 1st, with more than 100 participants from prisoners’ and women’s rights groups, predominantly black cultural, faith-based, and educational groups, non-union worker organizations, community groups, legal scholars, and the ACLU. A Coordinating Committee, representing the breadth and community organizations throughout the Gulf Region as well as CLU’s own base, was chosen by the survivors, and working subcommittees and 6 regional communications centers (organizing offices) have been established. There has been widespread support for the PHRF both nationally and internationally. (For more, see the PHRF website: www.communitylaborunited.net.)
With this background we want to examine the issues raised by “Chalabi and Katrina”:
1. Confront racism within our movement. White leaders, even those whose membership base is predominantly Black and Latino, should be careful about making pronouncements about who is genuine and who has the requisite skills. Confronting racism means understanding that our culture and economic and political system is build on racialized capital and we operate within that context. Diversity should not be confused with power. If we are serious about bringing unions to the south (all those red states and their right-to-work laws), then we need to cede power to those very folks we seek to organize. The job of unions is to help give these forces additional information and resources they might not currently have so that they can chart their own future.
2. This movement must be built democratically from the bottom up, engaging the base to develop tactics and strategies that speak to their constituencies’ own needs, culture, and history. The grassroots must control their own organization and movement. Remarks that belittle the work of grassroots activists of many years standing, organizing on a model based on experience among working-class and poor Blacks of the south that does not fit the union template, have no place in the labor movement. We have too much to learn from each other.
3. Fund and collaborate, and be prepared to take leadership from indigenous Black (and Latino, Asian, and Native American) forces on the ground. Many of these forces prior to the hurricane were not organized in ways that the unions are. They do not have a large paid staff, or offices with all the trappings. But that does not mean that organizations like CLU are “little bitty” or insignificant or cannot “handle money” or could not “organize a two car funeral” (as Rathke puts it in “Chalabi and Katrina”). This disrespect fails to acknowledge, on one hand, that the base of the labor movement (and with it dues dollars) and that of the CLU are the same, and on the other hand, the severe obstacles, principally racism and the legacy of slavery, that on-the-ground folks face in the south. Networking and informal ties have protected and nourished their organizing long after efforts like Operation Dixie or the Civil Rights Movement have moved on or declared victory. Organizations like CLU demand our respect and support.
4. Build a united front against the enemies of working people, employed or the unemployed poor. Our task is so huge that we can not afford to undercut each other with name-calling, patronizing statements, and inappropriate remarks. We must air differences in a principled way. Many of us work with ACORN in our cities and are on good terms with many organizers from that group. We cannot believe that such a provocative and destructive letter was circulated by Rathke to other ACORN leaders or reflects their views. We hope that people of good will in ACORN will give some signals to disassociate themselves from this divisive and chauvinist tactic. None of us has discovered the sure-fire way to organize or build a movement. Let’s not give our enemies more fire power than they already possess. The Cold War era purges of the labor movement should have taught us that.
We exist at what one might describe as a “Katrina moment.” It is a moment of both reflection and action. It is a moment to better understand and unpack the issues of race and class that have become so obvious through this disaster. It is also a moment to challenge the prevailing neo-liberal economic theories that were partially to blame for the scope of the disaster and seem to be central to the discussion of the nature of reconstruction. It is also a moment for a mass response to the disaster, which means that this is not the time for any one organization to hold itself up as the central core or the provider of franchises. To put it in other terms, this may be a moment to lay the foundations for a rebirth of a labor movement that is in synch with other social forces that share our opposition to the steady slide toward barbarism.
In solidarity,
(In alphabetical order)
Ajamu Baraka, Executive Director, US Human Rights Network
Gene Bruskin, co-convener of USLAW*
Kathy Engel, founding Executive Director MADRE, cultural and communications worker
Ray Eurquhart, retired UE 150 volunteer organizer
Bill Fletcher, Jr., President, TransAfrica Forum
Badili Jones, member, SEIU Local 1985
Elly Leary, Vice President and Chief Negotiator, UAW 2324 (retired)
Eric Mann, veteran of CORE, SDS, and UAW
Marsha Steinberg, Field Representative/Organizer SEIU Local 660
Makani Themba-Nixon, Executive Director, The Praxis Project
Jerry Tucker, former member, International Executive Board, UAW
Steve Williams, Executive Director, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)
* for identification purposes only
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 24, 2005 at 12:08 am
The most bizarre, and in some ways insulting, question I have been asked in the wake of Katrina is to identify groups to act as sponsor go betweens, just as if New Orleans was another foreign country like Iraq. It is insulting because whether we are talking about almost 10000 family members of ACORN in New Orleans or a couple of thousand members of Local 100 from the city – we have a base, it just doesn’t happen to be in New Orleans, since it is caught in the diaspora now.
A good example is something called Community Labor United (CLU). This is a little bitty thing of maybe a dozen or two activists that has convened meetings off and on for years mostly on Saturdays for a while at Dillard and last I heard at the Treme Community Center. Mainly it is not labor but it has a couple of well intentioned AFT teachers that are personally involved and Curtis Muhammad, who ran a small local union for UNITE for a couple of years before he retired, was often in attendance. Mostly I didn’t recognize the few other folks there, but some may have been students or whatever. Curtis is a good guy, but good love him, he wouldn’t be able to really move any thing in New Orleans, because he doesn’t have the base, the weight, the contacts, or the history god love him. To the best of my knowledge CLU was semi-defunct in recent years and certainly never had a paid staff or any capacity. Back 5-6 years ago when it was trying to first get started, we used to send folks to some of the Saturday meetings because they wanted to support our work and act as a bridge to other communities, but over the last couple of years that has also petered out. But now a wave of water moves through New Orleans and I actually get inquires about whether or not CLU can help in some way.
Huh? What? They are nice people and we count them as friends and allies, but are we talking about something real there? Of course not! Could they handle money? No reason to believe that. Do they have a base in New Orleans? No not whatsoever. Heck, I don’t know if they could organize a two car funeral if they were driving both cars. They have only convened forums in the past to talk about stuff. If that was needed, they could do that I suppose, but there are a lot of folks who can do that.
What is truly bizarre about this attack is that the passing reference to Iraq is actually part of an extended conceit, in which Rathke compares CLU and Curtis Muhammad to Ahmad Chalabi.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had a candidate to front for the Iraqi people – Dr. Ahmad Chalabi. He had been running the Iraqi National Congress for many years from the United Kingdom. He had a degree from the University of Chicago. He was connected. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was not as certain and neither was the Army. Each in turn had their own ex-pat Iraqi leaders who they hoped would get traction once repatriated to home soil.
Make no mistake though. When they were not in Iraqi, but working the world promoting schemes for liberation armies or business ventures or this or that, they had friends and sponsors based on the value that these men and their political formations served to their sponsors, not for the Iraqi people. They were tools in the hands of others.
Watching the embarrassment of the Bush Administration when it was trying harder to install provisional and puppet fronts for the invading force, I would have thought we might have all learned lessons about making sure as an a priori in these matters that one should be very, very careful not to anoint someone from afar, who can not operate on the ground. Now in the middle of the post-Katrina shakeout, I can see that this is not the case. Progressives seem not to want to learn what the conservatives have taught us. We want to make sure we learn the lessons the hard way with our own embarrassment.
In the wake of Katrina everyone and their brother seems to suddenly be interested in New Orleans and trying to figure out a way to insert themselves and their issues into the muck that remains of the city. Some of this is a good thing.
Where it gets hairy is when people try to create representatives for the people for the purposes of the sponsors and the donor community, just like we have seen in Iraq.
The obvious implication here is that CLU and Curtis Muhammad are not only corrupt, but pawns of the Bush administration. Complicating matters for Rathke is Naomi Klein, who has written positively of CLU in The Nation. Thus, in addition to his racist dismissal of Muhammad (“Curtis is a good guy, but good love him [sic], he wouldn’t be able to really move any thing in New Orleans”), Rathke takes a sexist swipe at Klein.
How do Calabi’s happen? Just this way! CLU was somehow mentioned by Naomi Klein in a piece in the Nation. I have no idea what she knows about New Orleans, but I imagine she was grabbing something out of the hat. The article gets reprinted some places, and all of a sudden Chalabi is out and about in New Orleans.
Naomi Klein isn’t from New Orleans, but she is a good investigative reporter, who went to New Orleans early in the disaster and did important work. The article Rathke alludes to certainly shows Klein to have done her homework about community organizations, political leaders, and business interests in NOLA. Further, organizers who support the interests of low-income people should be very interested in what Klein turned up about the housing situation in New Orleans.
More to the point, however, CLU did not simply ride the wave of the fifteen minutes of fame that Klein afforded them. From the first weeks following the disaster, there was a steadystream of pressreleases and mediaappearances that indicated a broad political vision and ambitious and determined political organizing, which I was also hearing about through my own contacts among the Civil Right Movement veterans community, of which Muhammad is a well-known part.
If Rathke has a legitimate argument with CLU about organizing tactics or a different political vision, that’s fine. He has not articulated anything concrete. Rather, he has engaged in the worst kind of baseless attack that plays on racial power dynamics and has the potential to be highly destructive to a grassroots people’s movement.
I have more to say about the racism involved in Rathke’s attack and in some of the responses to it and to Curtis Muhammad’s response. But first I will post an important response to Rathke from a coalition of activists (next up).
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 23, 2005 at 11:00 pm
People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Oversight Committee and Misssssippi Emergency Relief Committee
Welcome IFCO/Pastors For Peace Caravan With Aid Donation
16 September 2005, Jackson, Mississippi: Eighteen days after the worst storm in U.S. history ravaged the Gulf Coast, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Oversight Committee (PHRF, a coalition of more than 42 community organizations comprised of people displaced by the hurricane,) and the Mississippi Emergency Relief Committee, will receive seven truckloads of supplies from IFCO/Pastors For Peace.
PHRF, initiated by Community Labor United, a seven year old New Orleans based coalition dedicated to bringing together grassroots organizations to engage in dialogue, strategic planning and collective work, intends to build and maintain a network of community leaders, organizers and community based organizations to help meet the needs of people most affected by the hurricane, who are demanding that local, grassroots, black and progressive leadership oversee the relief, return and reconstruction process in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
“The poverty, the racism, the environmental hazards before Katrina were devastating. Now the open sores of this disregard, neglect and bias are bursting for the world to see the infection. It is absolutely imperative, urgent, for those most affected by this crisis to be in charge of all aspects of their own rebuilding,” according to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United and PHF. We have been moved by the enormous response from people throughout the country and the world, which helps us continue. We thank the Pastors for Peace from the depth of our hearts.”
The PHRF is setting up mechanisms to track and support evacuees, document their stories, work to reunite families who have been divided and dispersed, offer medical, legal, educational and other support and advocacy for those who have been displaced, oversee the testing of water, soil and air and direct the reconstruction of their homes, communities and lives. The new coalition is also appealing to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to investigate conditions before, during and after Katrina.
“We are the ones who’ve been treated without care, dignity or respect in our own place, our own country. We are the ones who will decide how to claim what we know as home. The officials have engaged in what we consider to be criminal neglect. We feel like war survivors. We are watching our own lives in disbelief and we call on the world community to listen and support us,” stated Mr. Muhammad.
IFCO/Pastors For Peace, a project of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), a New York ecumenical organization founded in 1967, has delivered humanitarian aid “friendship caravans” to Africa, Chiapas, Mexico, Central America and Cuba. The organization directs its donations towards victims of U.S. foreign policy and natural disasters. The seven trucks with supplies for Katrina survivors will go to Algiers/New Orleans, Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Columbia, Gloster and Jackson Mississippi where the main office of PHF is located.
Visiting volunteer, poet Suheir Hammad observed after going to New Orleans: “The presence of the military vehicles and the private security firms running the streets of New Orleans didn’t translate to a feeling of comfort and security for the evacuees in the shelters we visited. People want to go home. They want to be reunited with their families. Mrs. Brown, in her late 70s, said over and over, I never thought I’d be in a shelter. She has been in The River Center shelter for two weeks.”
According to Father Luis Barrios, Board of Directors member of IFCO/Pastors For Peace: “We are called in this moment to demonstrate not just charity but to demonstrate compassion for our sisters and brothers in this region who have been neglected by racist and classist institutions. We’re talking about a radical form of compassion in which we identify the problem and denounce the problem. Most importantly we help transform the problem by working for justice. Our commitment is for the long term.”
For more information on The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Oversight Committee contact Curtis Muhammad at 601 346-5995, 504 236-4703 or Malcolm Suber at 504 931-7614.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 20, 2005 at 9:39 am
The last three posts, which were announcements from The People’s Hurricane Fund / Community Labor United, came via Becky Belcore, who also said:
Hi Everyone,
First, we would like to thank everyone for your amazing work and energy around this project. Since we put out the first call for action a few weeks ago, we have been inundated with calls, emails, donations and offers of support. We have been overwhelmed by your commitment and generosity.
In light of proposals made at the meeting in Baton Rouge, Community Labor United (CLU) has been working to establish a structure with work committees. Based on the concept of a national campaign with local leadership, this committee structure will allow the work to be efficient and transparent. CLU members will finish reviewing the final draft of the committee structure by tomorrow morning and a call for volunteers for committees will be issued tomorrow afternoon.
Please let everyone know that tax-deductible donations should be earmarked for the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and checks made out to:
Vanguard Public Foundation
383 Rhode Island St., Ste 301
San Francisco, CA 94103
For more information about the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund & Reconstruction Project, please email bbelcore[at]hotmail[dot]com.
Website coming soon!
Below is some information about the work we have been doing. Thank you again for all of your help and support! We look forward to working together!
Sincerely,
Community Labor United
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 19, 2005 at 10:45 pm
In the wake of the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, intensified by catastrophic, criminal government neglect and racist repression, Community Labor United — a New Orleans based coalition dedicated to creating spaces for grassroots organizations to engage in dialogue, strategic planning and build collective work — has been facilitating the development of a People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Oversight Committee.
More than 42 organizations participated in the convening meeting of the People’s Hurricane Fund in Baton Rouge on Saturday September 10, 2005, to develop a People’s Oversight Committee with the purpose of overseeing all aspects of recovery and reconstruction for our people. The Committee is dedicated to building and maintaining a coordinated network of community leaders, organizers and community based organizations with the capacity and organizational infrastructure to help meet the needs of people most affected by Katrina, and to facilitate an organizing process that will demand local, grassroots black and progressive leadership in the relief, return and reconstruction process in New Orleans.
The evacuees from Hurricane Katrina call on the world community to support our demands for determining our own future. The population of New Orleans is 67% black, 40% illiterate, with more than 30 % living below the poverty line. The abandonment, neglect and militarization by the government have led community leaders and evacuees to determine that we will take the necessary, comprehensive steps to redevelop our communities, our homes, our lives, attend to our well being. The official entities — federal and local government agencies — have criminally failed the black survivors of Katrina, and are engaged in the militarization of our city, constituting a form of ethnic cleansing, what we believe to be a gross violation of civil and international human rights. We believe ourselves to be operating without a government, and like ravaged and attacked communities throughout the world, we call upon conscious and compassionate people throughout this nation and the world to support us in our claim to determine our destinies.
We are committed to creating space to engage all those who want to work in support of our recovery and reconstruction, within the United States and throughout the world community.
We are developing working committees and will call for volunteers to begin to sign up for committees on Tuesday, September 20, 2005. Some examples of the work that needs volunteers is:
documentation of all evacuees, their whereabouts and condition
community organizing
meeting the health care needs of evacuees
legal advocacy, exploration of human rights and civil rights abuses, wrongful deaths, and other legal issues
teachers and educators to work with our displaced children
assist in support for all those still in shelters, monitoring of the conditions, publicizing the abuses and advocating on behalf of evacuees
help in collecting the stories of displaced New Orleanians, including our vision of the new New Orleans
publicize all aspects of our work
experts to test the air, water and soil in preparation for reconstruction
engineers, architects and solar experts to advise and participate in reconstruction.
International Call We will be presenting a petition on behalf of New Orleans and Gulf Coast Region Survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to investigate the conditions that brought about the worst disaster in U.S. history and to help ensure social justice for the Survivors, their rights to return to their communities, economic redress for their losses, and a speedy reconstruction of new communities with affordable housing for all and repaired levees and other protections against preventable tragedies.
We call on international human rights communities to join in the demand to keep the spotlight on the actions of the U.S. government, to hold it accountable for its actions, and to support the self determination of Katrina survivors.
We call on international human rights monitors to come to New Orleans to show the world the disgraceful actions perpetrated against the people in our communities.
Principles: Community Labor United
CLU devoted its first three months to developing the following Principles of Unity:
We are community leaders, labor leaders, and cultural workers committed to ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples everywhere.
We believe that all people have the right and responsibility to determine their destiny.
Our organizations and unions are committed to building a society where the realities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation are not barriers to human progress.
We are committed to building a society where the bottom line interests of corporations and the rich are not balanced on the backs of workers and the poor.
We are committed to building local, regional, national, and world economies that are democratic, just, ecological, and do not exploit labor, culture, and natural resources.
We are committed to building an organization of organizations and individuals, focused on educating, organizing, and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and communities from the bottom up. We believe in the prospect of multiracial and trans-generational efforts to develop our communities.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 19, 2005 at 10:33 pm
The U.S. government, which has failed to rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina and provide adequately for many survivors, has recently announced that it will spend more than $50 billion to reconstruct New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
On Saturday September 8, a group of New Orleans activists and supporters from around the country met in Baton Rouge, LA, to plan a people’s response to the crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina. This meeting was called by Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition of progressive community based organization in New Orleans. The purpose was to ensure that every displaced person be allowed to return to his or her homes, participate in the reconstruction process and call for transparency of the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for relief and reconstruction.
U.S. government officials have deliberately and effectively scattered our people throughout the United States. Thousands of families have been broken up- children from their mothers; husbands from their wives; brothers and sisters from each other.
The attendees came to the general conclusion that the most fundamental demand must be the right of the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to return to their homes and their communities and participate in reconstruction. This encompasses the following:
First, the government must provide funds for all families to be reunited. The databases of FEMA and other organizations must be made public.
Second, the more than $50 billion belongs to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. We demand a Victims Compensation Fund as was done after 9/11 for the people in the World Trade Center in New York City.
Third, the People’s Committee demands representation on all boards that are making decisions on spending public dollars for relief and reconstruction. We also demand that those most affected by Hurricane Katrina be part of the planning process.
Fourth, we demand public work jobs for the displaced workers and residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We must take a lead in the rebuilding of our communities. The jobs must be at union wages so that our population is no longer characterized by extreme poverty.
Lastly, we demand transparency in the entire reconstruction process. Citizens must know where all the monies are being spent and with whom they are being spent.
We must be guaranteed the right to plan our future free from the dictates of the politicians in Washington D.C., Baton Rouge, LA, and at the local level. We must work to ensure that those most affected and displaced by Hurricane Katrina play an integral role in rebuilding our communities.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 19, 2005 at 10:23 pm
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
In this time of rapid economic change, the power of organized labor seems to be in decline. But new organizing strategies are emerging to challenge corporate power and the globalization of capital. Real World Labor examines the most pressing issues facing workers today: fundamental changes in the nature of work and wages; new legal impediments to union organizing; the persistence of racial and gender discrimination; migrant workers’ struggle for dignity; militarism and its harmful effects on the working class; union responses to the global financial meltdown; and new forms of rank-and-file organizing and resistance.
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