Class Struggle

Teen Voices In The Fight To Raise The Minimum Wage In Massachusetts

May 24, 2018 By Jessicah Pierre, Inequality.org Organize! Class Struggle, Labor, Minimum Wage, Workers Rights and Jobs

Norma Meza is an 18-year-old student at Charlestown High School in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Growing up, she watched her mother battle health issues such as kidney failure, lupus, and ulcers. Despite working full-time, her mother struggled financially to keep the family afloat. Norma knew as early as 14 years old that she would have to get a job to help her mother pay the bills and put food on the table. Since then she’s worked a number of jobs to help contribute to her family’s income while gaining important work skills. “I’ve worked as an office assistant and learned in the process how to answer phone calls, assisting families who spoke Spanish,” said Norma. “After that I worked as a camp counselor for 2 years where I learned leadership, communication skills, and how to be a role model.”

Sarbanand: A “Dirty Dozen” Corporation Contesting Being Fined In District Court For Working A Farmworker To Death In Whatcom County

May 23, 2018 Edgar Franks, Foodjustice.org Resist! Class Struggle, Exploitation, Farmworkers, Labor

On Wednesday May 23rd at 9:00am Sarbanand Farms is scheduled to appear in the Whatcom County District Court to appeal a fine that was imposed on them by the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries after the death of a worker on August 6, 2017. This is happening in a courtroom that normally handles driving citations. This is the level of disrespect we are receiving for a farmworker’s death in Whatcom County. We believe the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries has given permission to agricultural corporations and the courts to normalize the deaths of farmworkers by exploitation. This past February, Sarbanand was fined over $150,000 for not allowing workers to take their rest breaks and lunches.

Years Of Civil Society Protest Bring Change To Iraq

May 23, 2018 Staff, Uslaboragainstwar.org Resist! Class Struggle, Iraq

Forming a government, following the recent parliamentary elections in Iraq, will take time, but there is now hope for significant change and reform. The strong showing of the Saeroun Lil-Islah (“Marching for Reform”) alliance, which won 55 seats in the parliament, was a clear endorsement for ending government corruption by the appointment of qualified technocrats to head government agencies and refusing to award ministries on the basis of sectarian quotas. The alliance, whose optimistic slogan is “To Build a Civil State, a State of Citizenship and Social Justice,”brought together communists, business leaders, and religious community activists under the leadership of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Supreme Court Rules Against Workers In Arbitration Case

May 22, 2018 Nitasha Tiku, Wired.com Educate! Class Struggle, Labor, Repression, State Violence, Supreme Court, Workers

ON MONDAY, THE Supreme Court slowed recent momentum to give workers—including many in the tech sector—the right to a day in court. The Supreme Court case centered around clauses in employment contracts that require employees to resolve disputes through arbitration, and preclude them from joining with others to file class-action lawsuits. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled that those clauses are enforceable under federal law, which means companies can prohibit employees from banding together both privately or in court. Such binding-arbitration clauses are widely used at technology companies, and critics say they helped allow sexual harassment to flourish by hiding complaints. More recently, some firms have taken steps to limit the practice. Uber last week said it would eliminate arbitration agreements for employees, riders, and drivers with sexual misconduct claims.

20,000 North Carolina Teachers Walk Out, Demanding More Resources And Better Pay

May 19, 2018 Ilana Novick, Truthdig.com Resist! Class Struggle, Education, North Carolina, Teachers

Twenty thousand teachers staged a school walkout in North Carolina on Wednesday, demanding better salaries and more money for education. Forty school districts canceled classes in what The New York Times reports is the first walkout for teachers in that state. North Carolina, as The Guardian reports, “stood 39th nationwide in terms of public school teacher pay in 2017 and teachers’ wages have fallen by 9.4% in real terms over the last decade. Over the same period, spending on public schools here has dropped by 8%.” Both the low pay and the lack of resources have taken a toll on teachers’ morale. “I have to work other jobs,” Kaitlyn Davis, 26, a fourth-grade teacher, told The Guardian. “And it’s not fair because it takes away from the energy that I have to put into teaching.”

University Of California Workers Start 3-Day Strike Over Pay

May 14, 2018 Olga R. Rodriguez, Apnews.com Resist! Class Struggle, Strikes, University of California, Workers Rights and Jobs

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Thousands of custodians, security guards, gardeners and other service workers at University of California campuses started a three-day strike Monday to address pay inequalities and demand higher wages. Strikers gathered at sunrise on the 10 campuses throughout the state, wearing green T-shirts and carrying signs that call for “equality, fairness, respect.” The strike was called last week by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, which represents 25,000 service workers, after the union and the university could not agree on a new contract and mediation efforts failed. Another 29,000 nurses, pharmacists, radiologists and other medical workers heeded the service workers’ call for a sympathy strike and will join the walkouts Tuesday and Wednesday, which is expected to disrupt thousands of surgeries and other appointments.

Academic Alienation: Freeing Cognitive Labor From The Grip Of Capitalism

May 11, 2018 Maresi Starzmann, Roarmag.org Create! Academia, Capitalism, Class Struggle, Labor

Sitting in a coffee shop in a typical American college town, I overhear a conversation between two twenty-somethings. They lament, in educated and self-critical fashion, the failure of the academic system. Reflecting on their dedication and work ethic, they keep returning to the same question: What’s the point of four years of rigorous studying, of amassing student loans, of backbreaking night and weekend jobs, if there are almost zero job prospects out there? And, worse, what is their money going toward if not the kind of quality education they have been promised? With most classes no longer being taught by professors but by graduate students or adjunct teachers, they find the US educational system to be a scam. The experiences of these college students speak to a contradiction at the heart of the neoliberal economy.

We Are Living Through A Golden Age Of Protest

May 10, 2018 LA Kauffman, Theguardian.com Resist! Class Struggle, Protests

We are in an extraordinary era of protest. Over the course of the first 15 months of the 45th presidency, more people have joined demonstrations than at any other time in American history. Take a minute and digest that: never before have as many Americans taken to the streets for political causes as are marching and rallying now. Protest numbers are always difficult to pin down, but thanks to researchers from the Crowd Counting Consortium and CountLove, we have very solid data on demonstrations since Donald Trump took office, and the numbers are huge. The overall turnout for marches, rallies, vigils and other protests since the 2017 presidential inauguration falls somewhere between 10 and 15 million. (Not all of these events have been anti-Trump, but almost 90% have.) That is certainly more people in absolute terms than have ever protested before in the US.

Let’s Not Negotiate Against Ourselves: Demand Medicare For All

May 9, 2018 Staff, Laborforsinglepayer.org Strategize! Class Struggle, Health Care, Medicare

Like Medicare and Social Security, the proposals in the House (HR 676) and Senate (S 1804) for Expanded and Improved Medicare for All are social insurance programs. All Americans would receive comprehensive cradle to grave coverage. Healthcare would be equitably financed through taxes with no significant financial barriers to care. Choose Medicare, on the other hand, would create a “Medicare Part E” plan that would effectively be a private insurance product purchased in the marketplace. Access would be limited to those who choose to buy it (and can afford to do so) or whose employer deigns to offer it as a benefit. Except for those currently eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, its costs would be fully paid for by premiums–with, as in the ACA, some income-based subsidies– not public financing.

A Labor Movement For The New Guilded Age

May 9, 2018 By John McNamara, Workersparadise.org Create! Class Struggle, Labor Movement, New Economy

When Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987, he not only invoked the rising supremacy of the United States by demanding “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, he ushered in a new era of individualism focused on the “freedom”(Bruner, 1989) that was libertarian in nature and encouraged the material success of the US economic model. This beginning of a new “Gilded Age” focused on the creation of individual wealth and individual prosperity. Roy H. Williams sees this moment as the zenith of the “Me Generation” (Williams, 2016), in which the relative strengths of individual achievement turn back on themselves. In this continuum between the “we” and the “me”, observers can understand the general debate over labor between the collective nature of the Republic and the desire for individualism.

The Real Driver Of Rising Inequality

May 8, 2018 Lance Taylor, Ineteconomics.org Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle, Inequality, New Economy, Wages

Income distribution and employment are crucial macroeconomic indicators. Profits are key to distribution. Ther share in the value of output has risen steadily since around 1980. Households near the top of the size distribution of income receive business profits through various channels including interest, dividends, capital gains, proprietors’ incomes, and even labor compensation—which in US statistics includes profit-related items such as bonuses and stock options. Rising household inequality can be traced directly to higher profits fed by slower growth of real wages than of productivity (Taylor and Ömer, 2018).

An Ode To Eugene V. Debs And The End Of Capitalism

May 7, 2018 Jordan Riefe, Truthdig.com Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle

Once upon a time, the word “socialist” wasn’t considered a dirty word. In fact, in 1912, roughly a million people (6 percent of the popular vote), voted for a socialist for president. He is the subject of filmmaker Yale Strom’s new documentary, “American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs,” in limited release in New York from April 27 through May 3 and in Los Angeles from May 4 through May 10. A straight chronology using archival photos and footage, Strom’s movie tells the story of the pioneering union leader and founding member of International Workers of the World (IWW). Early in his career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party with a focus on union issues and workers’ rights. He co-founded the American Railway Union (ARU), which galvanized a wildcat strike over pay cuts into a nationwide Pullman Strike that landed him six months in prison.

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