Class Struggle

Joining Nationwide Teacher Rebellion, Tens Of Thousands Rally For Education In Oklahoma

April 3, 2018 By Julia Conley, Commondreams.org Resist! Class Struggle, Education, Oklahoma, Rebellion, Teachers, Unions

The $50 million in school funding that was included in a bill last week "will buy less than one textbook per student," said the head of the state teacher's union. A weeks-long mobilization in Oklahoma resulted in teachers striking across the state on Monday, with tens of thousands of educators and supporters rallying at the State Capitol in Oklahoma City to demand more funding for schools and higher wages for teachers. Organizers planned to speak with state lawmakers about how decades of funding cuts have affected their schools—and why a bill passed in the legislature last week that would raise taxes on oil and gas production to give teachers a $6,100 raise and allot $50 million for school funding was not enough to stop the protest. An NBC News aerial video of the scene at the demonstration showed an estimated crowd of 30,000 people gathered outside the Capitol.

Academic Black Shirts Brutally Assault Students In France

March 30, 2018 Gabriel Rockhill, Counterpunch.org Resist! Class Struggle, Fascism, France, Repression, Students

In scenes reminiscent of Mussolini’s black shirts, a dozen or so militants dressed in black, some wearing ski masks, brutally beat peaceful protesters who were participating in a general assembly while occupying the School of Law and Political Science in Montpellier, France. Armed with Tasers, cudgels with nails, and reinforced punching gloves, the assailants unleashed a bloody assault on the night of March 22, sending three students to the hospital and injuring many more. The security guards at the university stood idly by and watched the beatings, while the police and riot forces remained outside the university and did not enter to prevent the assailants’ attack.

‘The Gig Economy’ Is The New Term For Serfdom

March 28, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Class Struggle, Economics, Labor, Uber

A 65-year-old New York City cab driver from Queens, Nicanor Ochisor, hanged himself in his garage March 16, saying in a note he left behind that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft had made it impossible for him to make a living. It was the fourth suicide by a cab driver in New York in the last four months, including one Feb. 5 in which livery driver Douglas Schifter, 61, killed himself with a shotgun outside City Hall. “Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.

Tipped Workers Win With Spending Bill

March 28, 2018 By Negin Owliaei, Inequality.org Create! Class Struggle, Labor, Workers Rights and Jobs

President Trump signed a massive omnibus spending bill on Friday, ensuring that the lights will stay on in the federal government for another six months. But the bill does more than just allocate funds. Tucked 2,000 pages into the text is a provision that will protect tipped workers from getting their gratuities skimmed by their employers. The provision is a response to a proposed rule from the Department of Labor, which would have undone years of precedent that gave workers the tips they earned. The controversial proposal would have let employers take ownership of the tips paid to workers who made a full minimum wage (as opposed to the tipped minimum wage). Supporters said the rule was meant to allow for tip pooling to reduce inequality between restaurant workers in the line of service and those in the back of the house.

Getting Granular On America’s Income Distribution

March 27, 2018 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Educate! Class Struggle, Income inequality, New Economy

Back in the 1980s, the decade that saw researchers start detailing America’s increasing concentration of income and wealth, flacks for the emerging Reagan economic order disdainfully dismissed the significance of the alarming new data. The United States isn’t getting more unequal, the Reaganites pronounced, and the middle class isn’t shrinking. Those economists claiming otherwise, the conservative pushback went, weren’t taking government welfare programs into account. Add in safety-net benefits, conservatives continued, and the increased inequality would disappear. Over on Capitol Hill, researchers at the Congressional Budget Office would eventually put that conservative case to the test. They started producing periodic reports that took all sources of income into account, everything from wages and salaries to food stamps and unemployment benefits...

The Global Elite Is Insane Revisited

March 24, 2018 Robert J. Burrowes, Informationclearinghouse.info Educate! Class Struggle, Ruling Class

March 21, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - In 2014 I wrote an article titled ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. I want to elaborate what I explained in the earlier article so that people have a clearer sense of what we are up against in our struggle to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability. Of course, as I explained previously, it is not just the global elite that is insane. All those individuals – politicians, businesspeople, academics, corporate media editors and journalists, judges and lawyers, bureaucrats…. – who serve the elite, including by not exposing and resisting it, are also insane. And it is important to understand this if we are to develop and implement effective strategies to resist elite violence, exploitation and destruction but also avert the now-imminent human extinction driven by their insane desire for endless personal privilege...

Recipe For A Red-State Revolt

March 24, 2018 Eric Kerl, Socialistworker.org Resist! Class Struggle, Strikes, Teachers, West Virginia

A HAINT is stalkin' the mountains--the living memory of a century of class struggle in West Virginia. Some people might have been surprised when West Virginia workers staged one of the most militant labor struggles in decades. Mostly "white" and hailing from a region branded alternatively as "Trump Country" or "Coal Country," mountaineers are often depicted as poor, racist and reactionary. But the West Virginia wildcat strike has renewed interest in the mine wars and other high points of Appalachian workers' struggles. These rich traditions, both recent and historical, are one aspect of the militancy seen in the teachers' strike. Another is the deep social crisis, underway for decades in the region, that affects every aspect of mountaineers' lives. Ecological destruction, compounded by a catastrophic public health disaster, are two important components to include in the background to the teachers' strikes.

Florida Teachers On Edge As New Law Threatens Their Unions

March 23, 2018 Jeffrey S. Solock, Tampabay.com Educate! Class Struggle, Florida, Labor, Teachers, Unions

Life without union representation is not a distant fear for Russell Baggett. Until two years ago, the Calhoun County school district in northern Florida had no collective bargaining unit to support teachers. "We had no contract," said Baggett, president of the two-year-old Association of Calhoun Educators. "They would say, yes, there is money for a raise or, no, there isn’t. Whatever they decided, went." The passage of new collective bargaining rules into law this month has Baggett and teachers across Florida on edge, with fears that they could be headed back to the "bad old days" without a voice. At issue is a new law requiring local unions to prove they represent a majority of the teachers in their districts. The measuring stick: Having at least half of all employees eligible to be in the union paying dues.

French Civil Servants And Rail Workers Strike In Test For Macron

March 23, 2018 Staff, France24.com Resist! Class Struggle, France, Labor, Reform, Strikes, Transportation, Workers

Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in the streets of France on Thursday and strikes caused travel misery for millions in a showdown between trade unions and President Emmanuel Macron that could be decisive for his reform efforts. Seven unions representing staff in the public sector had called for strikes and protests on Thursday, while a third of railway workers walked out to join the demonstrations against 40-year-old Macron's bid to shake up the French state. The strikes meant that less than half of the country's high-speed TGV trains were running, while flights, schools, daycare centres, libraries and other public services such as garbage collection were disturbed to varying degrees. Police fired teargas and water cannon in central Paris during sporadic clashes between security forces and groups of students which appeared to have been infiltrated by far-left anarchists.

UE General Executive Board: “Workers Need An Industrial Policy Not Tariffs”

March 22, 2018 Staff, Ueunion.org Create! Class Struggle, New Economy, Tariffs, Workers

President Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to impose a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum is not a new or effective strategy for reviving American manufacturing. George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel in 2002 and quietly removed them after only 18 months. Protectionist measures in a capitalist economy of global “free” trade are not adequate tools for building a sustainable US infrastructure and improving the lives of workers. What American workers need is not partial half-measures, but a trade and industrial policy that is based on international cooperation, respect for workers’ rights, and environmental sustainability — one that raises living standards for workers across industries and across borders through investment in infrastructure, jobs and social programs.

Teacher’s Unions Intensify Efforts To Suppress Growing Class Struggle In The US

March 22, 2018 By Jerry White, Wsws.org Strategize! Class Struggle, Labor, Teachers, Unions

On Sunday night, the National Education Association (NEA) shut down the strike by 4,000 teachers and support staff in Jersey City, the second-largest school district in the state of New Jersey. The NEA ordered educators to return to their classrooms without providing any details on the tentative deal, let alone allowing workers to vote on it. Presuming that an agreement actually exists, it will do nothing to address teachers’ demands to end soaring health care costs. The one-day strike is the latest in a growing wave of protests and calls for strikes that have spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Tennessee, Colorado and other states, plus the US territory of Puerto Rico, where teachers struck against school privatization yesterday.

No CEO Should Earn 1,000 Times More Than A Regular Employee

March 20, 2018 Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, Theguardian.com Educate! Class Struggle, Income inequality, Inequality, New Economy, Wages

The CEO of Marathon Petroleum, Gary Heminger, took home an astonishing 935 times more pay than his typical employee in 2017. In other words, one of Marathon’s gas station workers would have to toil more than nine centuries to make as much as Heminger grabbed in just one year. Employees of at least five other US firms would have to work even longer – more than a millennium – to catch up with their top bosses. These companies include the auto parts maker Aptiv (CEO-worker pay ratio: 2,526 to 1), the temp agency Manpower (2,483 to 1), amusement park owner Six Flags (1,920 to 1), Del Monte Produce (1,465 to 1), and apparel maker VF (1,353 to 1). These revelations come thanks to a new federal regulation that requires publicly traded US corporations to disclose, for the first time ever, how much their chief executives are making compared with their median workers.

Radical Labor: Aligning Unions With The Streets

March 15, 2018 Gino Canella, Roarmag.org Resist! Class Struggle, Labor, SEIU, Unions

Since the 1970s organized labor in the United States has seen a steep decline in its membership and political influence due to capital flight, “right to work” laws in southern states, automation and technological innovation. But recently, millions of US workers have rallied behind organized labor campaigns demanding fairer working conditions and higher wages — often based in union membership — for employees. Radical Labor profiles a local chapter of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 105 to understand how the labor movement can collaborate with allied community activists, build a multi-racial coalition of working people for social justice, and realize more equitable workplaces and communities. SEIU Local 105’s organizing is grounded in what President Ron Ruggiero called “whole person unionism,” which is a fundamental understanding that workers “don’t just exist at work.”

Utah Seniors Form Co-op To Keep Housing Affordable

March 14, 2018 By Shirlene Stoven, Inequality.org Create! Affordable Housing, Class Struggle, New Economy, Utah

An affordable housing crisis is sweeping across the country, putting the squeeze on millions of people with modest incomes. I was one of the many older Americans whose retirement security was threatened by skyrocketing rents. But after a long, hard battle, my neighbors and I managed to beat back a redevelopment proposal that would’ve displaced our senior community. Our story might help others do the same. My community, Applewood Homeowners Cooperative, Inc., in Midvale, Utah, has long played an important role as an affordable housing option for many seniors on fixed incomes. Things started to change in 2013, when our community was purchased by a construction corporation called Ivory Homes.

Del Monte’s Pay Ratio Is Largest To Date At 1,465:1

March 13, 2018 By Brian Wakamo, Inequality.org Educate! Class Struggle, Exploitation, New Economy, Workers Rights and Jobs

Del Monte Produce, makers of the beloved fruit cups present in every elementary school, paid their CEO 1,465 times more than their typical employee last year. CEO Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh made $8.5 million, while their median employee, located in Costa Rica, made $5,833. Del Monte had to reveal this astounding information as the result of a new regulation requiring publicly held firms to report their CEO-worker pay gaps. Corporations fought tooth and nail for nearly eight years to squelch this regulation — to no avail. Now, the American public will finally know more about the companies that dominate their lives. We’ll now be able to know the gap between what top executives make, what their typical employees make, and, in some cases, more information on the location of their employees.

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