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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/03/tole-j03.html
FCA Toledo Jeep workers support call for rank-and-file safety committees
By Marcus Day
3 July 2020
Join the fight to defend workers’ health and safety! For help starting a rank-and-file safety committee at your factory, send an email to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter at autoworkers@wsws.org to learn more.
Support for rank-and-file safety committees continues to grow among autoworkers, following the initiation of committees last week by workers at Fiat Chrysler’s Jefferson North (JNAP) and Sterling Heights (SHAP) assembly plants.
Autoworkers around the US have widely shared reports from the World Socialist Web Site about the courageous stand taken at the two Detroit-area plants, where workers stopped work to protest unsafe conditions and demand information about the spread of COVID-19 in their plants.
Anger is reaching a boiling point as workers continue to fall ill and management and the United Auto Workers union refuse to release information about the extent of COVID-19 cases. “It is ridiculous,” Johnny, a worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Toledo North Assembly Plant, said. “Threats and intimidation. People popping up positive left and right. I’ve been hearing we’ve had about 11 positive this week alone. All different parts of the plants. Plus, there are several other potential cases.”
Another worker at the FCA Toledo plant said that workers needed a rank-and-file safety committee at their factory, adding that they had read and shared the statement by the committee at Jefferson North. “Management and the union are two peas in a pod down in Toledo. Management has threatened the workers about any line stoppage. The union is still in hiding.
“The company and union have been hiding most confirmed cases and we are getting pissed at both the company and the union. We can’t get real answers and are very frustrated about this.”
Another worker described the rising tensions in the plant and the impossible situation workers are being forced into. “Things are about to get wild in Toledo. They are forcing every single one of the 1,600-plus SEs [temporary supplemental employees] to report every day.
“Last week they told full-timers they could not use PAA [paid allowed absence] on weekends anymore. Today they told full-timers no more pick days [select days off during the week].
“COVID is running rampant through the plant with no contact tracing. People are being fired for not wearing masks properly when there’s no airflow. AC pretty much nonexistent in some places. We are at our breaking point.”
Both FCA and the UAW are increasingly nervous over the growing unrest in the auto plants and are seeking to subdue opposition among workers.
On Monday, management personnel around the country read a letter from FCA’s head of manufacturing, Mike Resha, which threatened workers with termination if they stop production. “FCA will investigate any unauthorized work stoppage and will appropriately, immediately and decisively act on the employee that was found to have unnecessarily instigated such activities,” the letter stated. The company said it would take disciplinary action against workers accused of misreporting information on COVID screening questionnaires, in an attempt to shift blame for the spread of the virus onto the backs of workers.
The letter is “completely subjective and literally holding people hostage to the job,” an FCA worker in Kokomo, Indiana said. “If you get sick at work: can be fired. If everyone falls over cause of COVID and you walk off job: fired. We were told that anyone getting sick at work would be investigated and FCA would determine if the sick individual violated the questionnaire we are made to fill out daily. If they can prove you were exposed to COVID and didn’t answer the questionnaire correctly: fired. Even if you have no idea you were exposed to someone with COVID and they determined you were…fired.”
A nearly 40-year veteran at Toledo FCA pointed to the Catch-22 workers are being placed in. “If you fill that form out and say you have it you have to go on quarantine for 14 days. A lot of guys can’t do that with all the bills to pay!”
The worker said there should be regular and widespread testing for the coronavirus at the plants. “I think it’d be a good idea a couple times a day to go down the line and take their temp and swab in the morning. Why not? That would help out a hundred percent!”
“With all these temps, they’re paying them half price compared to the old timers. And they’re making a killing. The company can do more, but they don’t want to spend a nickel. They won’t fix anything until somebody dies from a safety error, then they fix it.
The UAW, far from opposing FCA’s threats against workers, issued a joint letter with the company Wednesday which sought to evade responsibility for the spread of COVID in the plants and offload the blame onto workers.
Signed by both UAW President Rory Gamble—who is under investigation in the UAW bribery scandal—and FCA CEO Michael Manley, the statement admonishes workers to follow safety precautions, such as handwashing, social distancing and avoiding contact with those who are sick, which they well know are difficult to impossible inside the plants. Cynically, the letter states, “Coming to work when you’re not feeling well or falsifying health information puts others at risk and compromises the safe work environment we are trying to create.”
“You are literally between a rock and a hard place,” Johnny said. “Every day and every week it keeps getting worse.
“The PPE that we’re given has written on it that it does not protect against COVID-19. The masks break very easily. I went through six in one day. They are a joke, they’re garbage.
“Our plant has always been a gutter, nasty conditions. The only reason we even got running water or soap in the bathrooms is because we shut the plant down. They’re not doing a thing.
“According to local union representatives, no one has contracted COVID-19 from anyone else in the plant,” he continued. “I don’t know how the hell they know that, and I don’t believe that.
“The union and the company are trying to condition us so that we fall in line. The UAW want to keep getting their union dues. They’re trying to keep the line running. ‘Be happy you got a job.’ The UAW bylaws have been violated on the international and local level repeatedly in a manner that says, ‘We’re better than you guys.’”
Johnny said that the corruption and bribery revealed in the UAW so far is “just the tip of the iceberg. [Former UAW Presidents] Dennis Williams, Gary Jones, how are we to think the people they appointed have even an ounce of respect for us? No way they have our interests at heart. There is no way the people they put into office are going to do anything for us.
“Now we have to figure out how we can fight them. We’re seeing the civil unrest all over the country, we need to have that within FCA, Ford, GM. The company, the union, they’re all just lying to us.”
Rank-and-file committees “need to happen everywhere,” he said. “The company needs to be held responsible for our safety. That’s what these rank-and-file safety committees need to do.
“This is my livelihood, this is my life, this is my family, these are my friends. And to have the company and the union stick it to us together is infuriating.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/03/ncar-j03.html
By Rosa Shahnazarian
3 July 2020
Health officials reported 1,629 new cases of COVID-19 in North Carolina on Wednesday, after a record 1,843 new cases reported the day before. A total of at least 1,391 have died from the virus, and 912 people are currently in the hospital fighting for their lives.
The situation in the state has worsened following the relaxation of restrictions on social gatherings and business operations in late May, but there are two reasons why the state has not seen the dramatic increases observed in other states that have reopened. First, many of the state’s meat and poultry processing plants never closed in the first place. Second, in the rural counties where meat and poultry facilities are located, under-testing has concealed the magnitude of the crisis.
While Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has so far resisted the pressure of the Republican-led legislature to allow bars and gyms to reopen, both the Democratic and Republican parties are complicit in permitting the meat and poultry industries in the state to endanger the lives of millions of workers with impunity.
The dangers presented by meatpacking plants are well documented. The online edition of Science, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, spoke with several experts, including Gwenan Knight from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who discussed some possible reasons behind the so-called “superspreading events” in the past few months, in which large numbers of people have been infected with COVID-19 at an alarmingly rapid rate.
Such superspreading events tend to involve enclosed indoor spaces where people are packed closely together. Meatpacking facilities fall into this category. Moreover, low temperatures in the plants also likely help keep the virus active for a longer period of time.
According to Knight, the fact that meatpacking plants are very loud places where workers have to shout to communicate may also play a role. Since the coronavirus can be spread by speaking, more virus is most likely expelled, and at a faster rate of speed, when people speak loudly.
However, private profit, not science, has driven the response of the ruling class to the immense dangers presented by the continued operation of such facilities.
President Trump himself intervened on April 28 to prevent the closure of meatpacking plants, signing an executive order classifying the plants as “critical infrastructure” under the Defense Production Act.
As the World Socialist Web Site insisted at the time, this order was “squarely aimed not at securing the food supply chain or defending workers’ safety, but rather at shielding the profits of the giant food processing conglomerates and protecting them from the impact of lawsuits from sickened workers.”
There are 35,000 workers employed in the meat and poultry industry in North Carolina, which has continuously ranked among the top five US producers of chickens and hogs in the country. According to the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), there have been more outbreaks at North Carolina processing plants than in any other state.
Some individual meat and poultry plants employ more than 4,000 workers, and whenever a single worker in one of these facilities unknowingly becomes infected it places the health and lives of thousands of other workers in immediate danger.
However, the impact of the reckless operation of these facilities extends well beyond the workplace itself. According to an investigative report published by the Raleigh News & Observer, the infection rates are highest in the zip codes of counties with significant plant outbreaks.
According to the report, “virus cases rose by nearly 600% on average” from May 1 to June 11 in the 13 ZIP codes closest to processing plants in seven North Carolina counties where outbreaks had occurred. “In contrast,” the article points out, “the number of cases statewide in the same time frame rose by 262%.”
Moreover, further highlighting the potential for the spread of the virus, not all meat and poultry workers reside in the same ZIP codes where the outbreaks have occurred.
As the report points out, meat and poultry processing facilities are not the only source of outbreaks in the state. Outbreaks in urban areas have been linked with nursing homes, prisons, jails and construction sites. However, in spite of the fact that these areas—including Wake, Durham and Mecklenburg counties—tend to be more densely populated, the infection rate there is lower than it is in rural areas where most of the meat and poultry facilities are located.
Although only 2,000 processing plant workers have reportedly tested positive for the virus, this number doubtless represents a vast undercounting of the number of cases at the facilities themselves.
The inadequacy of coronavirus testing in rural outbreak areas was highlighted in a report by ProPublica, which documented how at least one Tyson Foods facility in Wilkesboro, North Carolina attempted to wrest control of coronavirus testing from the county health department.
According to the report, Rachel Willard, the county health director in Wilkesboro, “watched with alarm as COVID-19 cases rolled in from the Tyson Foods chicken plant in the center of town.” For very different reasons, Tyson too was alarmed and “hired a private company to take over testing.”
At that point, the report recounts, “the information suddenly slowed to a trickle.” Tyson stopped testing in May, but, “nearly a week” later, “the county health agency had received less than 20% of the results.” The agency was prevented from carrying out comprehensive contact tracing because the information that the company did provide “was missing phone numbers and other data,” making it impossible to track down and speak with workers who tested positive for the virus.
As meat and poultry facilities have done their best to conceal the extent of the crisis in the industry in North Carolina, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which knows exactly which plants have led to outbreaks, has refused to release this information to the public. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is complicit in this effort.
In response, a coalition of media outlets is now suing both DHHS and Governor Cooper in response to their failure to provide public records relating to the outbreaks as required by law. On June 17, a judge ordered the parties to enter mediation in mid-July.
It is time to take the decisions about how to fight the coronavirus pandemic out of the hands of the ruling elite. Meat and poultry workers in North Carolina and around the country must join their class brothers and sisters in the auto industry and build rank-and-file committees to fight for safe and sanitary working conditions in their own workplaces and to fight for a socialist alternative, guided by science, to the criminal mishandling of the pandemic by the capitalist class. We urge all workers who want to fight for such an alternative to contact the World Socialist Web Site.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/03/pers-j03.html
3 July 2020
Not since William Randolph Hearst cabled his correspondent in Havana in 1898 with the message, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” has a newspaper been so thoroughly identified with an effort to provoke an American war as the New York Times this week.
The difference—and there is a colossal one—is that Hearst was fanning the flames for the Spanish-American War, a comparatively minor conflict, the first venture by American imperialism to seize territory overseas, in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Times today is seeking to whip up a war fever directed against Russia, one that threatens to ignite a third world war fought with nuclear weapons.
There is not the slightest factual basis for the series of articles and commentaries published by the Times, beginning last Saturday, claiming that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, paid bounties to Taliban guerrillas to induce them to attack and kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Not a single soldier out of the 31 Americans who have died in Afghanistan in 2019-2020 has been identified as a victim of the alleged scheme. No witnesses have been brought forward, no evidence produced.
The sole foundation of the reports in the Times, since reinforced by similar articles in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, and accounts on cable and network television, are the unsupported, uncorroborated statements of unnamed intelligence officials. These officials give no proof of their claims about the operation of the supposed network of GRU agents—how the money came from Russia to Afghanistan, how the money was distributed to Taliban fighters, what actions the Taliban fighters carried out, what impact these actions had on any American military personnel.
Yet six days into this press campaign, there has been no acknowledgement in the “mainstream” corporate media that there is anything dubious or unsubstantiated about this narrative. Instead, the main focus has been to demand that the Trump administration explain when the president learned of the alleged Russian attack and what he proposes to do about it.
The Times reporters spearheading this campaign are not journalists in any real sense of the term. They are conduits, passing on material supplied to them by high-level operatives in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, repackaging it for public consumption and using their status as “reporters” to provide more credibility than would be given to a press release from Langley, Virginia. In other words, the CIA has provided the plot line, and the newspaper creates the narrative framework to sell it to the American people.
The Times and individual reporters like David Sanger and Eric Schmitt have a track record. The newspaper played a leading role in helping the Bush administration fabricate its case for war against Iraq in 2002-2003. It was not just the notorious Judith Miller, with her tall tales of aluminum tubes being used to build centrifuges as a step to an Iraqi atomic bomb. There was an entire chorus of falsification, in which Schmitt (January 21, 2001, “Iraq Rebuilt Bombed Arms Plants, Officials Say”) and Sanger (November 13, 2002, “U.S. Scoffs at Iraq Claim of No Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and December 6, 2002, “US Tells Iraq It Must Reveal Weapons Sites”) among many articles, played major roles.
In this week’s “Russian bounties” campaign, Schmitt and Sanger are at it again. A front-page article published Thursday under their joint byline carries the headline, “Trump’s New Russia Problem: Unread Intelligence and Missing Strategy.” This article is aimed at advancing the claim that Trump was negligent in responding to allegations against Russia, either being too lazy to read the President’s Daily Brief—a summary of world events and spy reports produced by the CIA—or choosing to ignore the report because of his supposed subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The political line of the article is set early on, when the authors claim that “it doesn’t require a high-level clearance for the government’s most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.” The list is ridiculously thin, including “cyberattacks on Americans working from home” (no evidence presented) and “continued concern about new playbooks for Russian actors seeking to influence the November election” (this is a description of the state of mind at the CIA, not of any actual steps taken by Russia). The purpose is to place the current allegations about Russian bounties in the context of the long-running effort to portray Russian President Vladimir Putin as the evil genius and puppet master of world politics.
Schmitt, in an article co-authored with Michael Crowley, refers to “intelligence reports that Russia paid bounties to Taliban-affiliated fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan,” as though this was an established fact. The article cites various unnamed “former officials” of the Trump and Obama administrations who claim that such an allegation would certainly have been brought to Trump’s attention, and that his failure to take action in response must be seen as negligence.
The article suggests that there is “supporting evidence” for the CIA claims of a Russian bounty plot, citing, among other things, “detainee interrogations, the recovery of about $500,000 from a Taliban-related target and intercepts of electronic communications showing financial transfers between the Russian military intelligence unit and Afghan intermediaries.” In point of fact, every item on this list represents an assertion by unnamed intelligence sources, not evidence: no actual detainees, cash hoards or electronic intercepts have been produced.
Another article by Schmitt, along with three Afghan-based reporters, focuses on the alleged role of an Afghan businessman, Rahmatullah Azizi, a former drug smuggler and US government contractor, in whose home investigators found a cash hoard of half a million in US dollars. Again, “US intelligence reports” are cited, claiming Azizi was “a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban.” Again, there is no actual evidence cited, and Azizi himself cannot be found. As for the alleged cash hoard, this suggests more the proceeds of narcotics trafficking than anything else, an enterprise in which Azizi was supposedly engaged.
The article asserts that the Russian government organized the bounty scheme as “payback” for decades of humiliation in Afghanistan at the hands of the United States, although how killing a handful of US soldiers would accomplish such a goal is a mystery. Moreover, the Times also admits, citing an unnamed congressman who participated in a White House briefing on the allegations, that the intelligence briefing did not “detail any connection to specific US or coalition deaths in Afghanistan,” and that “gaps remained in the intelligence community’s understanding of the overall program, including its precise motive …”
In other words, the Russian “bounties” program has no identifiable victims and no credible motive. This makes the unanimity of the media chorus that much more damning a self-indictment. Why is there not a single article or commentary in the corporate media challenging the claims being peddled by the CIA? It is not that these claims are particularly convincing in and of themselves. Far from it. It is the source of the claims that is decisive: if the US intelligence apparatus says it is so, the American media obediently salutes.
The real question to be answered about the latest anti-Russian provocation is this: what political considerations are the driving force of this episode of media fabrication?
It is no coincidence that the Afghanistan “bounties” story has surfaced just at the point where the Trump administration is visibly reeling in the face of the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the popular upsurge against police violence. The American ruling class has been deeply shaken by the outraged protests by large interracial crowds, particularly of young people, that have swept virtually every American city and town. And the financial aristocracy is well aware of the deep-seated popular opposition to its drive to force workers back to work under conditions where every large factory, warehouse and office is a potential epicenter for the ongoing resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The response to this crisis by the political and media representatives of the ruling elite is twofold: seeking to split the working class along racial lines and seeking to divert domestic social tensions into a campaign against foreign antagonists, particularly China and Russia.
The New York Times acts as a political mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, which is determined to block any mass radicalization of workers and youth. In the event that former Vice President Joe Biden is elected in November and takes office in January 2021, an incoming Democratic administration will carry out policies no less reactionary than those of Trump.
The campaign against Trump’s alleged “dereliction of duty”—a phrase used by Biden three times during his Tuesday press conference—is nothing more than a continuation of the campaign by the Democrats to attack Trump from the right, as too “soft” on Russia and too unwilling to intervene in the Middle East. This began with the anti-Russia campaign that triggered the two-year-long Mueller investigation, continued with the Ukraine phone call that led to impeachment, and now emerges in the form of increasingly vehement demands that the US government “retaliate” for an entirely fabricated Russian effort to kill American soldiers.
Patrick Martin
