8
WW News Service Digest #218
1) Low-paid workers fuel union growth
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2) Seattle newspaper workers feel new strength
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3) Californai: Profit grab behind energy crisis
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 25, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
AS HUNGER SPREADS:
LOW-PAID WORKERS FUEL UNION GROWTH
By Milt Neidenberg
They are the backbone of the unprecedented economic
expansion of the last decade. They are low-paid, women,
multinational--and they are a majority of today's work
force.
Mainly unorganized but pro-union, they are found primarily
in the service industries--food processing and service,
department stores, grocery chains, hotels, hospitals,
transportation, as well as in industries that are part of
the so-called New Economy.
They are an intricate part of the technological revolution
and, along with industrial workers, they have created the
wealth that feeds the new robber barons of Wall Street and
Corporate America. Hundreds of billionaires and many
thousands of millionaires are the beneficiaries of their
intense exploitation.
They are low-paid workers.
The Labor Department reported several months ago that a
sharp, rapid increase in hourly output of each worker was
the underpinning of the record economic expansion.
With workers receiving extremely low wages and benefits, the
bosses' super-profits are assured. Low-paid workers
increasingly live under the stresses and strains of poverty,
producing more goods and services and working longer hours.
HUNGER GROWS AMONG WORKING POOR
The Second Harvest Food Bank, the biggest hunger relief
organization in the United States, showed this in human
terms. The group reported in November: "In 39 percent of
households receiving emergency food, there is at least one
working adult. Half of them work at least 40 hours.
"Children from these working families suffer the most. Eight
million children of 21 million working poor need emergency
food and the poverty rate of these families has risen nearly
50 percent.
"The food crisis is compounded by the lack of health care
coverage. Of the 43 million people who have no health
insurance, almost half of them are parents in working poor
families."
The report concluded: "People are working full-time and have
to make choices they shouldn't have to make--a doctor or a
meal, a prescription or a meal, housing or a meal. They're
not looking like the hungry we expect. They're working."
These workers live at the low end of the pay scale while
prices for food, fuel, rent, health care and other
necessities have exploded. This has intensified the rate of
exploitation of the work force that is more Black, Latino,
Native, Asian and Arab, and includes other oppressed groups
such as immigrants, undocumented workers,
lesbian/gay/bi/trans people and prisoners.
Women compose the majority of these low-paid workers. The
AFL-CIO Working Women's Department points out that "more
women are working than ever before. But as the pressures
grow in trying to juggle work and family, make ends meet,
and find respect and opportunity on the job, women are
looking for solutions to their problems on the job. ... 99
of every 100 women work for pay at some time in their
lives."
Meanwhile, "the family income for the bottom three-fifths
has fallen since 1979."
The result of this oppression has been a rise in class
consciousness. Despite the employers' vicious intransigence
and the many obstacles the government puts in the workers'
way, low-paid workers have won major victories in their
efforts to join unions.
Their eagerness has motivated the AFL-CIO and its affiliates
to provide more organizers and resources. Unfortunately, the
labor movement's all-out effort to elect Al Gore last year
seriously diverted the organizing campaign. There is every
indication that the current AFL-CIO leaders have not learned
from that experience and will continue to support capitalist
politicians they view as allies.
We can expect the Bush administration, spurred by an
oncoming economic crisis, to intensify the class struggle.
Bush's cabinet nominees--a clique of racist, sexist anti-
environmentalist militarists--show this.
Bush set the tone when he and Vice President-select Dick
Cheney commented on how they would combat a recession. Their
solution? A whopping increase in tax relief for the wealthy,
more welfare for the military and cuts in social spending.
The major concern for Bush and his corporate and Wall Street
allies is to protect super-profits with the hope that
Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan can somehow stave off a
full-blown economic crisis.
President Bill Clinton, whose 1996 "welfare to work"
legislation stripped government entitlements from the most
impoverished workers, has now chimed in on the economic
debate. His Council of Economic Advisors has challenged the
gloom and doomers with the optimistic claim that there will
be no recession now or in the near future.
But in fact, the party is over. Buried in the business pages
of the major daily newspapers is the realization by
capitalist economic experts that a recession is already
under way.
The crisis of overproduction, decline in the stock market,
profit losses of the Fortune 500, consumer pessimism, the
weakening of the dollar, and the alarming, highly leveraged
corporate debt--as well as the developing crisis in the
global markets--have coalesced.
Bankruptcy looms over many businesses. The intense
competition to survive in the capitalist cycle of boom and
bust will inevitably lead to a falling out among these
imperialist bankers and corporate thieves at home and
abroad.
Their solution to the crisis will be plant closings and
layoffs and many more hardships for the millionfold,
multinational work force.
But repression will breed resistance. The prospects for the
growth of a class-wide movement that unites with other
progressive forces to fight back are excellent.
These forces include those struggling against imperialist
tools like the World Trade Organization, International
Monetary Fund and World Bank. And they also include
environmentalists, as well as those struggling against the
racist death penalty and the U.S. corporate globalization
that fosters sweatshops.
As Bush pushes his right-wing, racist and anti-worker brand
of "compassionate conservatism," the potential exists for
these formidable movements to embrace and develop new,
creative forms of struggle that will lead to higher class
consciousness.
In his book "High Tech, Low Pay," written over 15 years ago,
Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: "These
workers can be welded together into a genuine anti-
capitalist and progressive struggle, a struggle both for
democratic rights and socialism. The change in social
composition, due to the technological revolution, toward
lower-paid workers is more than a numerical change.
"From a class point of view, it is truly one of the most
profound, socially significant trends to emerge... it is of
a thoroughgoing multinational character. It has yet to be
fully assessed. The objective basis is laid for political
leadership to be assumed by the more numerous segment of our
class."
That assessment is becoming a reality.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 25, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
SEATTLE TIMES STRIKE:
NEWSPAPER WORKERS FEEL NEW STRENGTH
By Charles (Kaz) Susat
Asst. Chapel Chair
Graphic Communications
Local 767-M
Seattle
After 49 days on the picket line, on Jan. 8 Northwest
Newspaper Guild members at the Seattle Times ratified a six-
year contract by a 359-116 vote. Composing-room workers
represented by the Communications Workers union also
ratified a contract by 45-17.
Three members of the Office Employees and Professionals
union were still on strike as of Jan. 15. They have
requested a meeting with Seattle Times management to settle
their contract.
Striking Seattle Post-Intelligencer workers, also members of
the Guild, returned to work on Jan. 2.
The contract included the same pay raise offered by
management at the beginning of the walkout: $3.30 per hour
over six years. But some important economic gains were made.
The company will pay 75 percent of medical-insurance costs
rather than the 66 percent in the previous contract. A
number of the lowest-paid job classifications have been
upgraded to higher-paid categories.
The two-tiered pay system for reporters who work out of
suburban offices will be phased out.
Union leaders pointed out other gains from the strike. Guild
spokesperson Ron Judd said, "This is the first contract
since 1987, when the Joint Operating Agreement went into
effect, that we haven't given anything up."
Under that federal joint operating agreement, the Times and
Post-Intelligencer have separate newsrooms, but the Times
handles both papers' advertising, printing and circulation.
STRIKE SHATTERED 'FAMILY FRIENDLY' FACADE
Others pointed out that Times management's "family friendly"
facade has been shattered forever.
"The Guild is now a real union, a fighting union," said
Northwest Newspaper Guild President Jean Achziger.
As the strike went on, the unions' focus shifted from mainly
economic demands to protecting the workers' jobs.
On Dec. 19 the Times announced it would begin hiring
"permanent replacement" scab workers.
Community outrage was formidable. The King County Council of
Churches, for example, issued a statement condemning the
Times bosses' action.
Community support and the strikers' strength forced
management to back down from its attempt to punish the Guild
and the workers who held the line. Under the agreement
approved by Guild members, all "permanent replacement"
workers will be removed within eight weeks.
Any layoffs resulting from loss in circulation and
advertisers will be made according to seniority--not by
giving preference to the scabs, as the company had demanded.
The contract retains language allowing one in 10 workers to
be non-union. The company had sought a one-to-five ratio.
But the fight's not over.
After the strike, Times President H. Mason Sizemore said he
expects to cut 163 Guild-covered jobs in the name of
"increasing productivity." Most of the cuts will take place
through attrition and buy-outs, according to the Guild.
NEGOTIATIONS MOVED TO D.C.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray intervened in the strike, citing
concern for the paper's profitability. She said she feared
Seattle could "become a one-newspaper town."
After the first contract offer was overwhelmingly voted down
in late December, Murray called negotiators away from
Seattle to continue meetings in her Washington, D.C.,
office. The Democratic senator said she was "afraid the
situation was spinning out of control."
That's what the bosses and politicians feared: that the
workers' struggle would grow beyond their control.
Momentum was on the strikers' side. There was a possibility
that Teamsters Local 763--the second-biggest bargaining unit
at the Times--would join the strike.
The boycott campaign against the Times also took on new
life. The combined daily press run for the Times and Post-
Intelligencer before the strike was 600,000. By the end it
was down to 400,000.
A number of major advertisers, including Banana Republic,
were withholding their ads under community pressure.
On Jan. 4, while Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley and
Communications Workers President Morton Bahr met with Murray
and federal negotiators in Washington, over 250 workers,
family members and community supporters held a solidarity
action at the Times' downtown office.
Called together on two days notice by the People's Coalition
for Justice and the International Action Center, protesters
at the "Hands Around Fairview" rally encircled the Times
building.
"We are here to demand justice for the workers at the
Seattle Times," the IAC's Jim McMahan told the crowd. "If we
don't get it now, we will be back."
A photo of the IAC's banner was printed in the last regular
edition of the strike newspaper, the Seattle Union Record.
While the settlement was negotiated in Washington, the
contract was won through the power of the strikers and their
supporters here.
This was shown as the workers began returning to their jobs
in mid-January. The spirit of unity that prevailed during
the strike was clear to the bosses, who were very
accommodating to the returning workers.
Northwest Newspaper Guild members fought the good fight and
are feeling their strength.
The writer was one of the Local 767-M members who honored
the picket lines.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 25, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
CALIFORNIA: PROFIT GRAB BEHIND ENERGY CRISIS
By Brett Ryan
San Francisco
The current power problem in California, caused by
deregulation of the state's electricity market, is an
example of how the free market works--or doesn't work.
In March 1998 legislation to deregulate the power industry
went into effect. The state's three utility companies--PG&E,
Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric--
pushed for deregulation. They saw it as an opportunity to
expand into new markets and make greater profits.
Company spokespeople and government officials claimed that
deregulation would lead to greater competition and thus
lower prices for consumers.
Prior to deregulation the three so-called investor-owned
utilities supplied all the electricity in California. They
generated the electricity in their power plants, transmitted
it over power lines and distributed it to customers.
Under the deregulation law, the companies were required to
"unbundle" these services and auction off most of their
generating plants. The three utilities sold most of their
plants to about a dozen other companies outside California
who now sell power back to them.
PG&E, Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric sold electricity
at regulated rates set by the state public utility
commission. But the new owners of the power plants are free
of such regulation. They can charge whatever they want. And
they have.
Their prices began skyrocketing last summer. While Edison
paid about $35 per megawatt hour in December 1999, it now
pays as much as $1,400 per megawatt hour. In the past year
the power generating companies have seen their profits
increase by 300 to 600 percent. Together they made an
estimated $12 billion in profits last year.
The utility companies, of course, wanted to pass this huge
hike in the costs they pay for electricity onto consumers.
But they were temporarily blocked from doing so.
That's because the deregulation law prohibits utility
companies from raising their rates for a certain period of
time. Specifically, the companies can't raise their rates
until March 2002 or until they recover expenses they
incurred prior to deregulation.
The price freeze was initially a good deal for the utility
companies. Rates were frozen at 50 percent above the
national average. And the utilities tacked on an extra fee
to recover past expenses.
PG&E says it paid off its old expenses last May and is
demanding the freedom to boost its rates. San Diego Gas &
Electric had already recovered its previous costs at the
time the power generators boosted their rates last summer.
So it immediately tripled and quadrupled consumer
electricity bills.
Deregulation didn't turn out to be the golden egg that
utility companies expected. Instead PG&E and Edison are more
than $11 billion in debt. And they want consumers to bail
them out.
On Jan. 4, the Public Utilities Commission okayed an
immediate 9-percent increase in electricity rates for
residential users for 90 days. After that time, regulators
will decide whether to extend this rate increase or raise it
higher. PG&E had requested a 26-percent increase.
Meanwhile the power crisis has intensified. On Jan. 11, the
California Independent System Operator--the entity that
operates the utilities' power-transmission lines--declared a
Stage-3 emergency when energy reserves fell below 1.5
percent. It was also on the verge of instituting a rolling
power outage before electricity was brought in from other
states.
Claiming they were on the verge of bankruptcy, PG&E just
laid off 1,000 workers. Edison has announced plans to lay
off 1,450 workers.
Government officials are now decrying the free market they
have always extolled.
California State Treasurer Phil Angel ides concluded in the
Jan. 13 San Francisco Chronicle, "I think everyone has seen
the evidence that if you allow markets to do what they will,
you're going to have victims."
