https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEgK7l7qD6M
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
The US Labor Movement Needs More of the UE’s “Them and Us” Unionism
The United Electrical Workers was one of America’s mightiest unions. Many leaders were leftists who challenged corporate power, so UE was decimated by McCarthyism. The union survived and UE's model of militant, democratic unionism can revive labor.
August 10, 2020 Jeff Schuhrke JACOBIN
https://portside.org/2020-08-10/us-labor-movement-needs-more-ues-them-and-us-unionism
The anti-communist fervor and McCarthyist repression that swept the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s drastically changed the course of labor history. These years witnessed the destruction of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — the dynamic union movement that adopted militant shop floor tactics and a class-conscious vision to rapidly organize millions of previously unorganized workers in the 1930s.
Surrendering to Cold War red-baiting, CIO leaders orchestrated the raiding and expulsion of eleven national unions — not because these unions were corrupt or failing to win good contracts for their members, but because they were either led by Communists or deemed too tolerant toward the Left.
The first target was the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), which was then the third-largest union in the CIO. Founded in 1936 by a few dozen industrial workers and leftist organizers in their twenties and early thirties, UE embodied the spirit of rank-and-file, class-struggle unionism that originally allowed the CIO to pose an unprecedented challenge to the power of capital.
UE’s formal ouster at the 1949 CIO convention, and the others that soon followed, cost the CIO its most dedicated and visionary unionists. Rendered a shell of its former self, the CIO became virtually indistinguishable from the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), with which it merged in 1955.
The US labor movement has never recovered, with union density consistently in decline since the mid-1950s and economic inequality steadily on the rise — and progressive, democratic, militant unionism all but erased.
But UE is still here. Seventy years after being kicked to the curb by anti-communist labor officials, the independent union — now with about 35,000 members from a variety of industries — continues to adhere to its founding principles of militant class-struggle, rank-and-file democracy, and worker-to-worker solidarity.
As a living example of what unionism looked like before McCarthyism poisoned the CIO, UE’s history and philosophy offer an insight into what the US labor movement could have been in the second half of the twentieth century — and what it could be today. The union is at once a reminder of a bygone, heroic era of labor history, and a prototype of the kind of movement workers can organize in the twenty-first century.
Them and Us
In a new booklet, which is a must-read for anyone serious about building working-class power, UE straightforwardly spells out the key elements of its model of “Them and Us” unionism.
In light of socialism’s growing popularity, Bernie Sanders’s two presidential runs, and movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, “we can talk about the economic system plainly in a way that unions really have not been able to since the late 1930s and early 1940s,” says UE general president Carl Rosen.
He says that the pamphlet is meant to inspire a new generation of working-class activists, both within and outside UE. It is particularly timely as non-union essential workers organize to protect themselves amid the coronavirus pandemic — illustrated by the recently formed Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project of UE and the Democratic Socialists of America.
“We would hope the booklet inspires a conversation among some of the best folks in the labor movement, and also among our allies, about the power of class-struggle unionism and why we need to be looking at it again as a way to deal with the problems we confront,” Rosen says.
UE has always had a clear-eyed understanding of how capitalism functions. The union argues that workers are not underpaid or overworked simply because some employers misbehave now and then. Instead, the exploitation of labor is a permanent feature of the dominant economic system, which divides society into a tiny class of those who live by owning (which UE calls “them”) and a much larger class of those who live by working (which UE says is “us”).
Without centering the fundamental conflict between “them and us,” UE contends, no strategy to reinvigorate organized labor, no matter how clever or innovative, will ever be truly effective.
Rank-and-File Control
This explicit class consciousness is enshrined in the UE constitution, which calls on workers to rely first and foremost on their own collective power — not only to bargain and enforce contracts at individual workplaces, but to advance the interests of the entire working class by fighting in the wider political arena.
To foster genuine union democracy and prevent leadership from getting out of touch, UE’s constitution mandates that the union’s top elected officers receive salaries no higher than that of the best paid rank-and-file members.
Instead of relying solely on paid, professional staff organizers, UE is driven by a robust system of stewards — rank-and-file members who receive the necessary training to negotiate contracts, pursue grievances, and organize job actions on their own. Strong steward systems are the antithesis of entrenched union bureaucracies that cut backroom deals with employers.
UE’s dedication to militant rank-and-file struggle can be seen through its many dramatic confrontations with employers over the years. Some of these include a 102-day strike at General Electric in 1969–70, which resulted in historic concessions from the company’s intransigent management; the 2008 occupation of Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory, which led to laid-off workers getting a $1.75 million settlement and the eventual reopening of the plant as a cooperative; and last year’s nine-day strike in the freezing cold of Erie, Pennsylvania, which resulted in manufacturing workers winning a first contract with Wabtec, the company that recently took over GE Transportation.
“When the workers realize that the few folks in the boardrooms are messing with our livelihoods, that’s when the rage sets in,” explains Bryan Pietzrak, a steward with UE Local 506 who participated in last year’s Wabtec strike.
Pietzrak adds that the union skillfully tapped into that anger by enlisting Wabtec workers to fight back. “Once that rage turns into solidarity, the company is screwed,” he says.
As for political engagement, UE’s approach is different from most other unions in that it maintains independence from both major parties, only backing specific candidates who champion the working class — evident in the union’s longtime support for Bernie Sanders. Further, UE doesn’t have a political action fund doling out huge campaign donations; instead, the union utilizes the power of its membership to get out the vote and put pressure on lawmakers.
Solidarity
In addition to aggressive struggle and union democracy, another core UE principle is unity among all workers. As the union’s constitution makes clear, UE’s founders were dedicated to organizing workers “regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race, creed or political beliefs” — an inclusive attitude that was still considered radical in 1936, when it was common practice for unions to limit membership to “skilled” white men.
UE was a trailblazer in winning nondiscrimination clauses in its contracts in the 1940s and 1950s, and was also the first US manufacturing union to elect a woman as a national officer in 1985.
In addressing globalization and free trade agreements, the union has refused to cast blame on foreign workers for “stealing” US jobs, instead directing the blame at corporate capital. UE has focused on building international solidarity with workers abroad, most notably through its nearly thirty-year partnership with the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, Mexico’s independent labor federation.
“It’s not just about UE,” Rosen says of the solidarity-based unionism laid out in the booklet. He notes that other unions already put this into practice, including the Chicago Teachers Union, which has reinvented itself over the past decade in order to fight and win based on these principles; and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which, along with UE, is the last of the old leftist-led CIO unions that were expelled in 1949–50.
“This tradition ran through most of the CIO unions, and in fact accomplished much of what the labor movement achieved over the last 85 years,” he says. “It’s what is needed now to carry things forward and try to rebuild an effective fighting force for the working class.”
Rebuilding and revitalizing the US labor movement in the twenty-first century will require the same kind of vision and dedication from today’s leftists as inspired the young organizers and Communists who founded UE almost eighty-five years ago. If more workers were organized along UE’s model of “Them and Us” unionism, the working class would be in a much better position to remake the world.
The $11 Billion Question: Will Californians Raise Commercial Property Taxes?
The Proposition 15 ballot measure aims to hike commercial tax rates and potentially raise billions to support funding for schools and other public infrastructure.
August 10, 2020 Bobbi Murray CAPITAL & MAIN
https://portside.org/2020-08-10/11-billion-question-will-californians-raise-commercial-property-taxes
Pandemic or not, in less than four months Californians will face two monumental choices at the ballot box. One will help determine the presidency for the next four years; another could begin to repair 40 years of economic damage self-inflicted upon the state’s education system.
In June the Schools and Communities First campaign submitted some 1.7 million voter signatures required to place “The California Schools and Local Communities Funding Act of 2020” on the November 2020 ballot.
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The initiative, Proposition 15, placed second on the state ballot, would create a split roll system by establishing a commercial assessment that looks at present land values. In the current system, both commercial and home properties are taxed at the same rates, but commercial properties’ taxes have barely gone up because they’re structured in such a way as to circumvent the kind of reassessments that residential properties cannot avoid. The ballot measure aims to hike commercial tax rates and potentially raise billions to support funding for schools and other public infrastructure. (Disclosure: Some of SCF’s leading backers are financial supporters of this website.)
A state analysis says a shift of most commercial and industrial properties to market value assessment would increase those properties’ annual taxes by $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion.
Supporters of SCF know that by putting Proposition 15 in play they are leaping feet first onto California’s third rail of state politics – the property tax system put in place in 1978 by Proposition 13. That measure passed in a landslide vote, rolled homeowner taxes back to 1975 levels and fixed the tax rate at a maximum of 2 percent a year. Prop. 13 has remained largely unaltered for more than 40 years and virtually untouchable in the minds of many California homeowner voters.
Reform advocates at the grassroots and in government argue that since it was put into place the tax structure has undercut funding for parks, schools and other public amenities; many who have navigated the arcane California tax political terrain for decades were part of crafting an initiative that won’t bring on the buzz saw from some of the largest business interests in the state.
Agricultural land taxes would remain largely untouched under Prop. 15 and commercial properties valued at under $3 million – the kind of places that rent to small businesses – would not be reassessed. Proponents had initially submitted a measure for the 2020 ballot that lumped small-fry commercial tracts in with the likes of multinational giants that evade tax adjustments under Prop. 13 rules. Partly in the interest of expanding the base of support they refiled for the 2020 elections with the small commercial property’s adjustment.
In 1985, seven years after Prop. 13’s passage, per-pupil spending in California dropped from fifth in the nation to 40th place.
November’s SCF referendum actually has little to do with what has made Prop. 13 sacrosanct for California homeowners. It doesn’t touch their property tax protections but is, rather, aimed at recalibrating the present commercial property tax system that Prop. 13 put in place – a structure, SCF proponents argue, that drains the state of as much as $11 billion annually.
Among the seismic shifts Prop. 13 caused in California’s revenue streams was the creation of a structure that allows big commercial properties to evade reassessment to higher tax rates even as land values go up.
According to a policy brief published in 2018 by the Make It Fair coalition, oil giant Chevron saves $100 million or more annually on its property taxes because its statewide properties, which include gas stations, oil fields and refineries, go unassessed or underassessed. The coalition’s brief was based on analysis by the University of Southern California’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE).
It’s far different for homeowners. While a typical buyer-to-seller home sale transaction triggers reassessment and the new residential property owners pay a tax that is adjusted to present market prices, commercial property can go years without taxes being reassessed.
That’s because of the many ways commercial and industrial properties can change hands (e.g., real estate investment trust transactions; private equity buyouts; corporate purchases of companies; publicly traded stock sales; bank mergers) in which no straightforward change of name appears on the deed your local county tax assessor would note.
In 2017 commercial property represented 29% of assessed tax value; residential properties represented 71%, says one study.
Furthermore, if commercial land sits idle for years with no construction or other changes on it to trigger tax reassessment to reflect current market value, the property tax rate stays the same.
In Los Angeles County, 57 percent of industrial and commercial properties haven’t been reassessed for two decades. Meanwhile, the county’s tax burden has shifted toward homeowners. In 2017 commercial property represented 29 percent of assessed tax value; residential properties represented 71 percent, according to PERE research.
In the Los Angeles County of 1975, the tax split between residential property taxpayers and nonresidential/commercial taxpayers was nearly 50/50, with homeowners paying slightly less. By 2009 the ratio had drastically shifted. Residential property taxpayers were paying around a 70 percent share, while commercial property owners’ share had correspondingly sunk to just 30 percent.
In 1978, residential taxpayers and commercial properties in Northern California’s Santa Clara County were neck and neck in tax contributions. By 2009 homeowner taxes were contributing 60 percent, commercial properties kicking in 35 percent.
A recent California Legislative Analyst Office assessment showed that, “Overall, $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion per year in new property taxes would go to local governments. Sixty percent would go to cities, counties, and special districts. The other 40 percent would go to schools and community colleges.” A February 2020 PERE analysis estimates that between $10.3 billion and $12.6 billion would become available to state coffers in the next two years if “commercial and industrial properties were assessed at market value.”
In Los Angeles County, 57% of industrial and commercial properties haven’t been reassessed for two decades.
Californians have been increasingly on the hook for more sales taxes and local fees to fill in the gaps as local governments scramble to fund schools and municipal services and amenities like park maintenance and road repair.
In 1985, per-pupil spending in California dropped from fifth in the nation to 40th place.
As the summer wears on, the fight is just heating up. Last week Politico reported that the pro-Prop. 15 campaign has spent $2.6 million, while its opponents have answered with $4.2 million. In one corner sits a coalition that includes the Service Employees International Union State Council, the California Teachers Association and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, along with a panoply of such civic and social justice organizations as the California League of Women Voters, the Advancement Project and the voter-mobilization operation California Calls.
These groups are opposed by the California Business Roundtable, which has vowed that “we will continue fighting to keep property tax rates predictable by protecting Prop. 13 and the certainty it provides California residents and businesses already struggling to make ends meet in our ongoing affordability crisis.” Major funding for the opposition comes from the California Business Roundtable, the California Taxpayers Association and BNSF Railroad, which owns vast tracts of land for their rights of way.
Other Prop. 15 opponents include the California Chamber of Commerce and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, named for the one-time Senate and Los Angeles mayoral candidate and California Apartment Owners Association lobbyist who was the face of Prop. 13 in the mid-1970s. He appeared regularly in the media decrying “the moochers and loafers” in government who squander property tax dollars.
Jarvis’ message tapped into the rising unease of 1970s homeowners—and resonates in today’s uncertain times. “If businesses lose their Prop. 13 protections, homeowners will be next,” says the website for Californians to Save Prop. 13. Also in the ring– of course: the present occupant of the White House.
Raphael Sonenshein, executive director at the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, thinks that California voters have been waiting for years to vote against Donald Trump, whom he calls “the largest noisemaker in the history of American elections” that will propel voters to cast a ballot. The $11 billion question, though, is will those voters also want to jump onto that third rail?
Class Solidarity: What It Is and How You Can Engage in It
Class solidarity is the glue that holds segments of society together, and can be a powerful tool for organizing and defending our communities.
August 10, 2020 Kim Kelly TEEN VOGUE
https://portside.org/2020-08-10/class-solidarity-what-it-and-how-you-can-engage-it
One of the most famous quotes about class in the U.S. is often attributed to revered novelist John Steinbeck. But the line actually comes from Canadian writer Ronald Wright, who paraphrases Steinbeck in his 2004 book, A Short History of Progress: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Convoluted origins aside, the phrase has stuck, and remained firmly fixed within the U.S. political imagination, particularly in regard to how we talk about class and economics. It also provides a handy, albeit flawed, interpretation of class solidarity.
And what is class solidarity? Simply put, it is the tendency for people of a certain economic or social class to feel affinity for and share interests and political goals with members of their own class. Class solidarity is the glue that holds segments of society together, and can be a powerful tool for organizing and defending our communities. Broadly speaking, there is the working class — the workers who sell their labor in order to survive, known in Marxist theory as the proletariat — and the ruling class, or bourgeoisie, the bosses and managers who profit off of workers’ labor.
Their interests are diametrically opposed, and the two classes are fundamentally in conflict with one another, given that the ruling class’s primary goal is to subjugate, exploit, and extract as much labor as possible from the working class without sacrificing any of its own profits. The rallying cry to “seize the means of production!” is based on the notion that the workers who actually produce and create things of value should be in control and redistribute the profits, instead of the bosses who do nothing but hoard that wealth for themselves. The tension between the two — the haves and have-nots, the makers and the takers — is the definition of class struggle.
The proletariat has long been an exploited and marginalized group in the U.S. and around the globe, but not every member is class-conscious, i.e., aware of their place in that greater struggle. Much of the blame for that lies on the enduring myth of the American Dream, a fallacy which politicians and wealthy elites have long relied on to mask their malevolent machinations, and that they continue to push on the working class to cover up their own failures and abuses of power. After president Ronald Reagan kneecapped the labor movement in the 1980s and the Democratic Party did little to halt its decline, many workers lost access to unions and the class consciousness that came with them. As the Democratic Party struggled to connect with lower-income voters, some turned to Republican-branded, racism-informed populism, despite the right’s enthusiasm for slashing social programs that benefit the working class and boosting handouts to the wealthy. The ensuing loss of a strong class identity left many people adrift. Even with today’s revitalized labor movement, there is much work to be done.
The sentiment behind the apocryphal Steinbeck quote is that poor and working-class folks have bought into the lies they’ve been told and are now determined to bootstrap their way up into the loftier tax brackets they’ve been promised they could reach — even if they have to stomp on the necks of their peers on the way up. “I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians,” Steinbeck actually wrote in 1966, gloomily pooh-poohing the revolutionary devotion of his own Communist friends. “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”
Many people in the U.S. do still believe in the idea of upward mobility and meritocracy, and cling to the notion that it is possible to achieve what they desire if only they work hard enough and play by the rules. It’s a nice idea, but is unfortunately little more than a pipe dream in a country where pervasive, structural inequalities are baked into the country’s own founding documents. As the coronavirus pandemic has made clear, those who control the flow of capital are concerned first and foremost for themselves, their peers, and their bank accounts; that’s why so many of the proposed aid packages in Congress focus on bailing out corporations, cutting taxes, and otherwise providing handouts to the ruling class. The vast majority of Democratic and Republican politicians are the same in that respect. As Billy Bragg once sang, “Money speaks for money,” and the ghouls haunting the halls of Congress are far more beholden to their corporate donors than to any working or unemployed person in this country. So who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?
To their grudging credit, the ruling class has always been a cruelly glinting beacon of class solidarity. When challenged or threatened, the rich will always circle the wagons to protect their own interests, whether it’s lawmakers gift wrapping treats for big banks in the midst of a global pandemic, a queer talk show host defending a war criminal, or celebrities quietly accepting piles of cash to perform for murderous dictators. They implicitly understand that a class war has been raging for centuries, and that they have been on the winning team since we started keeping score. And of course they want to keep it that way, because in historical terms, when the working class does finally rise up against their oppressors, things have a way of getting a bit…messy.
But thanks to a mix of rising inequality, revulsion at the brutality of the Trump presidency and the ensuing wave of activism against it, and, for some, hope inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign, the past several years have seen an explosion in explicitly leftist working-class organizing. Class consciousness is rising, and as more and more members of the younger generations reject capitalism, cracks have begun appearing in the establishment’s political façade. Mutual aid projects have sprung up everywhere to help working-class people cope with the coronavirus pandemic, and to support workers on the front lines who have been neglected or forgotten by the powers that be. Labor unions have mobilized in response to the police killing of 46-year-old George Floyd, releasing statements calling for justice and demanding police accountability. City bus drivers in New York and Minneapolis have refused to transport protesters arrested for speaking out against police violence because, as the Transport Workers Union put it in a tweet, they “do not work for the NYPD. We transport the working families of NYC.” Class solidarity can be as simple as wearing a mask and observing social distancing rules when you go to the grocery store, or as intensive as building up a community garden and organizing deliveries to help feed your neighbors. Keeping one another safe is an act of radical love as well as crucial political praxis.
The lessons of the past were learned with workers’ blood, and we’ve been paying for the bosses’ mistakes since antiquity. Now, as the government continues to muddle through its botched, heartless response to a panoply of crises — from the coronavirus to the recession to the surge in job losses to the looming storm of evictions on the horizon — workers, unemployed people, and those who are incarcerated are again offered little option other than to grit our teeth and say our prayers. All workers are essential, and yet even those whose labor is most needed to keep people alive and day-to-day life functioning are being mistreated, underpaid, and sent off to work without adequate protections.
Right now, class solidarity is not only a good and necessary means of navigating the world around us and looking out for our more vulnerable neighbors. It’s a strategy for survival. No one is coming to save us; our only hope is one another.
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