ISRAEL CUTS FUEL, GAZA GOES DARK

By Tamara Nassar, Electronic Intifada.

August 22, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/israel-cuts-fuel-gaza-goes-dark/

The Gaza Strip’s only power plant shut down on Tuesday after Israel stopped the transfer of fuel to the territory.

The halting of fuel transfers is among a series of collective punishment measures Israel has imposed on Gaza.

Israel has claimed the measures are a response to incendiary balloons released from Gaza. The launching of such balloons by some Palestinians is, in reality, a symbolic effort to draw attention to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, long subject to an Israeli siege.

Although incendiary balloons caused several fires in Israel, “no injuries or damage have been reported,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

Israel has also bombed Gaza on an almost daily basis over the past week.

Two million Palestinians in Gaza have been under a lethal Israeli siege for the past 13 years. Israel subjects the territory to bombing whenever its people resist or protest collective punishment measures.

It is a vicious cycle that only Israel can stop.

The availability of electricity in Gaza stood at about 10 to 11 hours before further restrictions. It is expected to drop over the next several days to four consecutive hours per day, followed by 14 to 16-hour cuts.
Hospitals And Factories

The Israeli human rights group Gisha warned that hospitals, schools, workshops, and quarantine facilities will all be impacted by fuel cuts.

While most hospitals in the Strip are supplied with 24-hour electricity through the main power plant, Gisha says it is unclear if that will be sustained.

Gaza’s health ministry warned that power outages at hospitals would “have serious repercussions on the lives of premature babies in nurseries and intensive care and kidney failure patients.”

Israel’s fuel ban will also affect factories in Gaza, where the economy has already been all but destroyed by 13 years of blockade and repeated military assaults.

The head of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions said that factories and workshops are expected to operate at less than 20 percent capacity by relying on generators.

Quarantine facilities in Gaza, which are currently housing some 2,000 people, will also have no more than four hours a day of electricity.

Israel announced on Sunday that it would entirely prohibit fishers from sailing off Gaza’s coast, having already imposed tightened restrictions last week.

Gaza’s fishing industry is crucial to its economy, with tens of thousands of Palestinians dependent on it.

Last week, Israel closed the Kerem Shalom checkpoint, the sole point of transfer for commercial goods in and out of Gaza, for all but the transfer of “vital humanitarian aid.”
Bombing School

Since the beginning of August, Israeli warplanes have bombarded the Gaza Strip with air strikes on agricultural land and what Israel claims are Hamas posts.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesperson for Hamas, which runs Gaza’s internal affairs, assigned Israeli occupation forces “the full responsibility” for the “results and repercussions” of the tightening of the siege and cutting of the fuel.

Last week, Israeli warplanes struck a school in Gaza City run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees, causing damage and disrupting school activities.







“How can a school surrounded by three UN schools and a UN health center and considerable distance to known military sites be hit by accident?” Matthias Schmale, who heads the agency in Gaza, asked on Twitter.

Students were evacuated from the school, and police teams are working to remove remnants of the missile from campus, according to Al Mezan, a human rights group based in the territory.

Israel’s constant restrictions and bombardment constitutes collective punishment, Gisha said on Tuesday. Collective punishment is a violation of article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and therefore a war crime.

“Israel must immediately reverse these illegal measures of collective punishment and stop deliberately violating the fundamental human rights of Gaza’s residents,” Gisha stated.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza has turned it into a sealed ghetto.

While insisting that it “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005, Israel still controls the maritime, aerospace and land borders of the coastal enclave.

While always cruel, the effects of Israel’s actions are even worse during a pandemic.

Working In These Times: Links to articles

Hello my friends,

One political convention is over. Another is soon to begin. I encourage you all to watch them, because it’s good to remember that there are things more interminable than union meetings. Heyo! And hey, it’s time to sign up for the big In These Times (online) annual gala. We’re celebrating 44 years—almost as long as it feels like a political convention lasts. Whoa!

Folks—let’s talk labor.

This Week in Working


A Pricey Private School Says “Quaker Values” Justify Aggressive Campaign to Destroy Its Union
By Hamilton Nolan

Brooklyn Friends School takes advantage of a Trump labor board ruling.

In The Gap

If you have not already, please check out In The Gap, a brand new 12-episode podcast series by Chandra Whitfield about the gender pay gap that Black women in America face.

The Working People Podcast

The People's Movement, the People's Media (w/ Mel Buer, Gabby, & Garrison Davis): Working People talks to Mel Buer (Protean Magazine), Gabby (DefendPDX), and Garrison Davis, three independent journalists who have been on the front lines this summer covering the anti-police protests in Minneapolis, Portland, and Omaha. We talk about how events have unfolded from their vantage point, the hazards of doing this vital work, and about the importance of anticapitalist media. Listen here.

The Big Issue: Reopening, Unions, and Strike Threats

There is a 100% chance that college kids, if they return to campus, will get drunk, have parties, and generally act in ways that will facilitate outbreaks of coronavirus. This is guaranteed to happen. To pretend that it will not happen is to exhibit a plainly idiotic refusal to recognize reality. Nevertheless, many major universities have forged ahead with the fantasy of reopening for in person classes. Some took less than a week to be forced to shut down again.

Universities are a good demonstration of the fact that, absent any serious countervailing pressure, businesses will reopen whether it is safe or not, because they fear the devastating economic consequences if they remain closed. Some businesses, like meatpacking plants, have been very up front about their willingness to sacrifice workers for profits since the beginning of the pandemic; others, like universities, have searched painstaking for fig leaves to cover this reality. But reality it is. All of these enterprises do different things, but none of them are in the worker protection business. Nor is the U.S. government very interested in worker protection, these days. That means unions are the last line of defense.

In industries that are dense with unions who are willing and able to make credible strike threats—public schools, entertainment—employers have been forced to put together believable safety plans for returning to work, or else their people are not going to return to work. In industries that are not unionized much at all, or have only unions that are unwilling or unable to make credible strike threats, businesses are mostly doing whatever they think they can get away with. Funny how that works.

So, unionize your industry. But don’t just unionize your industry. Make your unions organize to be able to strike. The threat needs to be real, so the strike isn’t necessary. If it is necessary, though, you want to be able to do it. It’s better than death.

Labor News This Week


The business model of Uber and Lyft—to attempt to destroy all competitors in the transportation market by subsidizing the cost of rides through a combination of investor capital and brash avoidance of labor costs by misclassifying workers as independent contractors—is, perhaps, collapsing, as courts slowly begin to enforce the law. Good.


This week in “America is a hell society”: California is having trouble fighting their deadly wildfires because so many of the prison inmates that make up a large portion of their firefighting teams are on lockdown due to prison Covid outbreaks. PRISON LABOR IS LABOR. Get these people in the firefighters union.


Here is a very long piece by an anonymous “research collective” detailing the history of the UFCW’s multimillion-dollar payments to a consultant in return for services of dubious value. If you are a UFCW insider who would like to share your thoughts on this, you can email me.


More public defenders are unionizing. So are Greenpeace workers.


ProPublica details how meatpacking companies spent years ignoring warnings about the very things that have happened to their workers in this pandemic.


And unions want slower line speeds in chicken plants.


An interesting look at how police unions have bullied public officials in various cities.


Employees at the Tate galleries in England are on strike.


More than 100 workers have tested positive for Covid at a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina. Send angry letters to Santa.

Final Thought

“I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.” —Emma Goldman

In solidarity,

Hamilton Nolan

Tapping the Enormous Electoral Potential of Low Income Voters

What impact could 34 million poor nonvoters make if they started participating in elections? According to a new report commissioned by the Poor People’s Campaign, it could be massive and warrants the deployment of significant 2020 campaign resources.

August 22, 2020 Frances Madeson CAPITAL & MAIN

https://portside.org/2020-08-22/tapping-enormous-electoral-potential-low-income-voters

It seems a little risky in retrospect, but since launching three years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign has been executing its political strategy on a dearly held hunch: namely, that increasing the volume of poor and low income voters will make for more democratic elections and more equitable social policy. Putting their intuition to the test, the national advocacy group, which garnered 3 million attendees at its virtual Moral March on Washington in June, commissioned a study to learn if their best guess, which Poor People’s Campaign policy director Shailly Gupta Barnes calls more of “a motivating belief,” was even in the ballpark.

What they learned made them glad they’d followed their political instincts. According to Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a co-director of the Poor People’s Campaign, the data empirically prove what the organizers themselves have long understood—“poor and low income people can become a transformative new electorate.” Especially in the South, where they’ve already made a difference in competitive gubernatorial races in Kentucky and North Carolina, unseating incumbents even in the face of extreme voter suppression.

As the national conventions of the two major U.S. political parties approach, the Democrats on August 17-20, followed by the Republicans on August 24-27, the Poor People’s Campaign has released a white paper written by Robert Paul Hartley, an economist with the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Entitled Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Income Americans: Changing the Political Landscape, the 22-page analysis crunches numbers from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab’s 2017 reports on presidential and U.S. Senate elections and the Current Population Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 20 percent of the total electorate in Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia are low income nonvoters.

Hartley has quantified the number of eligible low income nonvoters in each state in relation to the state’s total electorate – about one out of five in Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia – and has related those percentages to margins of victory to show the potential impacts on elections. He then calculated what percentage of new low income voters would have to vote the same way in order to flip the party affiliations in the 15 states where the victory margins are small enough to be affected. Poor People’s Campaign leaders say the newly revealed possibilities warrant a fresh look from party apparatchiks strategizing where best to deploy campaign resources.

“In the South, if you just take the 13 former Confederate states, that’s over 168 electoral votes,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, the second Poor People’s Campaign co-chair at Tuesday’s press conference announcing the report. “And if you change just three or four states in the South, then you fundamentally shift the political calculus.”

Some of the findings are based on speculative questions, e.g., if low income voters participated at the same rate as higher income voters, then what effects can be expected? One likely answer is that rebalancing representation between higher and lower income voters may take more than one election cycle. But other findings mark what could be the beginnings of a shift away from the widely accepted notion that poor people don’t vote. The increase in responsiveness among poor and low income voters measured in Figure One below, which correlates to the worsening of their economic circumstances, shows a renewed engagement with the electoral process.

“Over time, the data shows that eligible voters living below twice the poverty line do respond to changes in the economy and the candidates and issues,” Barber says.

“For the 2018 mid-term, the four year increase in voting percentage, around 10 percent, was about the same for higher and lower income voters,” he explained. Interpreting the data, he says, “There’s an opportunity for mobilization. They are responsive and they do move in tandem with one another.”

Candidates are taking note and are stepping up to center poor people’s issues in their electioneering. Theoharis says the Poor People’s Campaign will be sponsoring upcoming town halls tied to eight U.S. Senate races, details soon to be announced.

“The Senate is in play,” confirms Rev. Barber. “And poor folk have the power to make the play.”

He’s referring to the 34 million poor and low income people in the U.S. who, though eligible, did not vote in the 2016 election but who, if galvanized, could turn many tides in November. Hartley shows that in some states even if only a fraction of this untapped voting pool is activated, the victory margins in prior elections are easily surpassed. “In Michigan,” Hartley explains, “if only one percent of low income nonvoters moved to the polls and voted, they would in total equal the most recent margin of victory.”“In Michigan, if only one percent of low income nonvoters moved to the polls and voted, they would in total equal the most recent margin of victory.”
Robert Paul Hartley, economist, Columbia University

In the seven states that the United States of Inequality has identified as 2020 battleground states, the percentages of low income eligible nonvoters relative to the total electorate in 2016 are considerable: 17 percent in Arizona, 11 percent in Florida, 13 percent in Michigan and North Carolina, 14 percent in Ohio, 12 percent in Pennsylvania, and 11 percent in Wisconsin. When compared to the victory margins for the races in the 2018 midterms, real political transformation starts looking achievable in a dynamic political environment.

For the 2016 presidential race, not all but some margins of victory were less than the percentage of representation in the total electorate – 13 percent in Arizona, 7 percent in Florida, 1 percent in Michigan, 19 percent in North Carolina, 35 percent in Ohio, 4 percent in Pennsylvania, and 5 percent in Wisconsin. For those who support the Poor People’s Campaign emphasis on building political power by “registering people for a movement that votes,” these findings are invigorating, notwithstanding the safety challenges for voter registration drives and ultimately get-out-the-vote efforts posed by the pandemic.

“Poverty and racism are the fissures, the wounds, through which this pandemic has power,” Barber said at the event on Tuesday.

The way Barber sees it, the fight to the ballot box is also a fight for self-survival.

“There’s an economic annihilation going on. Seven hundred people die from poverty every day in this country,” he says. “But poverty is not inevitable, it’s created by public policy. We’re tired of being ignored and so we’re going to show our power at the ballot box in November. That’s what our campaign is committed to from here until we no longer exist on this Earth.”

Barber’s pleased to have Unleashing the Power in his back pocket. He says:

“It’s amazing when people see this data and see how much power poor and low income voters have. They are not going to just wait for the politicians to acknowledge them; they are going to change the narrative, they are going to be a power, they are going to vote in a way that expresses that power.”

Team Biden attacks TMI — help us keep up the pressure

Biden's campaign hates that our accountability journalism forced them to stop echoing GOP talking points.


David Sirota
Aug 22




Friends:

Joe Biden’s campaign is attacking us because we reported something that made them retreat — and so we need you to click here and help us right now.

To review: this week, we published a huge story that forced Biden’s campaign to frantically backpedal away from echoing Republican talking points. It was proof that our accountability journalism is working. Now, Biden’s campaign is attacking us — it deployed its paid campaign consultant to publish an angry diatribe calling TMI “irrelevant,” even as our reporting forced Biden’s campaign to walk back its comments about budget austerity.

Clearly, our accountability journalism about both parties is having a major impact — and we are right now trying to expand that journalism. So here’s my ask:

We need everyone who can to go to sirota.substack.com/subscribe to pitch in and become a supporting subscriber.

Let me be clear: in the same week we published our impactful story about Biden, we also broke some big news about Donald Trump administration rewarding GOP donors. The point here is: we are a grassroots-funded news outlet that scrutinizes BOTH political parties, whether they like it or not.

If you want journalism that isn’t afraid to hold politicians accountable, please click here and become a supporting subscriber — and please pass on this request to anyone else you may know who wants to support this kind of work.

Thanks for considering this request. Onward.

Rock the boat,

Sirota

Palestinian child shot by Israel dies in detention

Maureen Clare Murphy Rights and Accountability 

21 August 2020

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/palestinian-child-shot-israel-dies-detention




A Palestinian boy who was shot and detained by Israeli occupation forces in the central West Bank on Wednesday died of his injuries.

The family of Muhammad Matar was informed on Thursday that the 16-year-old had been killed. Israel has not transferred the teen’s body to his family, Defense for Children International Palestine stated on Friday.


An Israeli military spokesperson claimed that troops “spotted a terrorist cell” preparing Molotov cocktails and laying tires on the road with the intention of setting them on fire.

Two other boys – aged 14 and 15 – were wounded by live ammunition during the same incident, according to Defense for Children International Palestine.

“They were not detained and both boys are in stable condition in Ramallah-area hospitals,” the group stated.
Children killed

Matar is the second Palestinian child killed over a Molotov cocktail this year.

Muhammad Suleiman al-Haddad, also 16, was shot multiple times in the chest during a protest in the city of Hebron in February. Israel claimed the teen had thrown a Molotov cocktail at soldiers.

Defense for Children International Palestine stated that al-Haddad “appeared to be holding a Molotov cocktail at the time he was shot, according to a video” seen by the group.

“However, he was far enough away from Israeli forces, including the soldier that fired at him, that he likely did not pose any imminent threat when he was shot.”

Israeli forces have killed four Palestinian children so far this year and a fifth child died of injuries sustained during protests along Gaza’s boundary with Israel in 2019.

Three other Palestinian teenagers are presumed dead after Israeli soldiers shot and detained them as they allegedly attempted to breach the Gaza boundary fence and threw an explosive device towards soldiers in January.

Nearly 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces so far this year. One Israeli soldier was killed when a rock was dropped on his head during a raid on a West Bank community in the same period.

Palestinian disability and human rights groups told the United Nations last month that “Israeli occupation forces have escalated their use of lethal and excessive force” since 2015.

More than 750 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 2015, the groups stated.
Gaza bombarded

Meanwhile, Israel continued to pound what it called Hamas targets in Gaza overnight Thursday.

Israel has been bombing Gaza nightly over the past week and has imposed collective punishment measures on the territory’s population of 2.1 million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees.

Israel has claimed the measures are a response to incendiary balloons released from Gaza which have damaged agricultural fields in southern Israel.

Palestinians fired rockets from Gaza, which has been under a tightened Israeli blockade since 2007, overnight Thursday. Fragments from a rocket damaged a home in the southern Israeli city of Sderot.

On Friday, Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz threatened to deal “a very severe blow” to the impoverished and besieged Gaza Strip.

Last week, human rights groups in Israel called on Gantz to “immediately reverse measures constituting illegal collective punishment that deliberately infringe upon the human rights of Gaza residents.”

Instead, Israel cut fuel supplies to Gaza, causing its power plant to shut down.

UAE bets on Israel for US favor

Omar Karmi The Electronic Intifada 

21 August 2020

https://electronicintifada.net/content/uae-bets-israel-us-favor/31036




It is perhaps fitting that the recently signed UAE-Israel agreement should be known as the Abraham Accord (not, mind, the Ibrahim Accord).

Old Testament Abraham, after all, lived a life of some pronounced treachery. He abandoned his father in pursuit of divine promise. He betrayed his wife, Sarah, on several occasions. He exiled his first born and that child’s mother, one of his servants. And he was prepared to kill his only other son for divine favor.

Accusations of treachery is the Palestinian response to the deal. It arises from a somewhat complacent confidence in the resonance of the Palestinian cause on the “Arab street” and the level of fear Arab leaders hold of their own publics’ opinions.

Yet, perversely perhaps, it is the “Arab street” that likely prompted, rather than deterred, the UAE’s move. Not Emirati public opinion, which has little purchase or influence.

Rather, it is the vulnerability of a country built primarily on foreign – much of it Arab – labor and oil. The UAE has to shore up its foundations before it is too late, before more regional uprisings erupt and blow through or the demand for oil declines as it must and will, sooner or later.

The UAE, in other words, needs to diversify, economically and politically, in order to safeguard the continued familial rule that underpins this not-yet-50 year-old union of seven principalities. And ensuring an unshakeable layer of protection in Washington, through Israel’s good offices there, is one way of doing so.

The “threat” of Iran has only little to do with it, despite the many column inches given over to this supposed point of agreement between the UAE and Israel.

Of all Gulf states, the UAE probably has the most mature relations with Tehran, especially in trade. Like Israel, Abu Dhabi overstates Iran’s power when it suits. Iran’s military is aged. Its supposed political reach across a region in disarray after a disastrous US-led Iraq invasion is limited by sectarianism. And its economy is floundering after decades of sanctions.
Resisting the winds of change

Iran did play a part in the calculation, of course. But any security considerations are trumped by the lessons the UAE has chosen to learn from the Iran nuclear deal struck under Barack Obama.

The UAE was lukewarm at best on the deal. It viewed the agreement, perhaps correctly, as part of a wider attempt by the US under Obama to pivot away from the Middle East after the disastrous Bush-era interventions.

The Obama administration worked to leave in its stead a triangular balance of power between Israel, Arab Gulf monarchies and their dependants, and Iran.

It was a triangle, Gulf countries feared, that would leave them very much the weaker party.

Compounding the UAE’s growing unease with American policy under Obama was the US reaction to the Arab uprisings. Washington allowing its erstwhile ally Hosni Mubarak to fall under the weight of Egyptian street protests, bringing a Muslim Brotherhood government to power in that country’s first democratic election, was particularly troubling.

This all followed years of a massive public relations effort after 9/11 when Arab governments, afraid of the fallout, pulled out all the stops to ensure they stayed in America’s good books.

US-Arab relations came under intense scrutiny in the years that followed. The UAE’s Dubai Ports World company lost a lucrative contract to manage six US ports in 2006 – when even Israeli help could not save the deal – in part because of a campaign spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, then senator for New York where some of the ports were located, due to security concerns.

Oil prices have fluctuated wildly in the decades since 2001, which also saw a global financial crisis that forced Abu Dhabi to use its oil money to bail out Dubai’s more diversified but also more vulnerable service economy in 2009.

With a region in political chaos, the UAE long ago identified as a priority to shore up US support, come what may.
Learning from the Arab uprisings

But simply being part of the region’s “moderate” club did not seem enough during Obama’s presidency, as was evidenced by Mubarak’s demise. Nor was the opposite the case, as shown by Obama’s reluctance to get directly involved in Syria.

Where the US dithered, the UAE took action. It supported Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s coup in Egypt in 2013 and has acted to shore up the Egyptian leader since.

It has intervened in Libya, provided material support to various groups in Syria and, with Saudi Arabia, launched a war on Yemen, all in an assertion of muscle that belies the country’s size, if not its wallet.

Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 proved a godsend to the UAE, ending the Obama administration’s drifting Middle East policies.

There has even been speculation that the UAE actively interfered – in more ways than one – to aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The UAE has denied such accusations.

Relations between the UAE and the White House have improved immensely over the past four years. In 2018, Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, to the satisfaction of the UAE, Israel and others.

Not long after, the UAE joined countries attending a United Against Nuclear Iran summit on the sidelines of the United Nations calling for Iran’s “economic and diplomatic isolation.”

So much have relations improved, in fact, that another US port deal, this one with a Sharjah-based company, passed without comment or controversy in 2018.
November looms

In return, the UAE has largely supported Trump’s Middle East initiatives, not least on Palestine.

It described Trump’s much-ridiculed Peace to Prosperity plan as a “serious initiative.” Abu Dhabi, the leading emirate, was also clearly not put off by the administration’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

But good relations with one administration are no guarantee of good relations with another. One country that has successfully pulled off that stunt is of course Israel, which remains a truly “bipartisan” issue in Washington.

With Trump stumbling in the polls, and the possibility of an Obama 2.0 administration under Joe Biden, the UAE has thus played its hand to ensure its future protection. What better advocate in the US than Israel, after all? It has worked for Jordan, the third largest beneficiary of US aid in the world, after Afghanistan and Israel.

And it took a full-scale popular revolution for the US to denounce an obviously corrupt and despotic Hosni Mubarak regime. In the UAE, where even a polite letter can land you in jail, decisive steps to snuff out even the hint of opposition have been taken to ensure that nothing like that would ever happen there.

In other words, the Palestinian issue played a very minor role in the calculations of the UAE leadership when entering into the Israel normalization agreement.

If concerns for Palestinians played any role at all, if was only for the optics and then only as an afterthought, so brazenly ad hoc was the suggestion that the agreement was partly forged to prevent a formal Israeli annexation of more occupied land.

Palestinians might take note. While brotherly loyalty is always welcome, a cause that relies mostly on an appeal to justice, rights, freedom and equality before law might need more reliable allies than rentier states organized along hereditary monarchical, or even hereditary republican, lines.

The UAE did what it did simply because it wants the US to unquestioningly and uncritically support it in the same way the US supports Israel, regardless of who occupies the White House.

After all, Israel bombs and kills at will, whether in occupied territory or in other countries. It is a longstanding transgressor of international law, occupies the lands of its neighbors, has forcibly expelled and continues to subjugate an entire people simply because they are of another ethnicity.

Through it all, the US holds its hand over Israel. That’s the kind of powerful paternal protection we all crave, whatever the price.

Just ask Abraham.

CUPE union shuts down 12-day strike at Port of Montreal

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/port-a22.html

By Laurent Lafrance
22 August 2020

Yesterday, after 12 days of a general strike by 1,150 dockworkers at the Port of Montreal against management’s efforts to eliminate jobs and impose more oppressive working conditions, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) agreed to a seven-month truce during which the strike will be “suspended” and all protest actions canceled.

This “truce” marks the final stage in the union’s efforts since the beginning of the strike to end it as quickly as possible and betray the demands of the rank and file.

The Montreal dockworkers had been without a contract since December 2018. Their strike was part of growing resistance by workers in North America and internationally to the incessant attacks of big business on jobs, worker rights, and public services.

Members of CUPE Local 375, the longshoremen, foremen, and maintenance personnel at the Port of Montreal are fighting for a new contract that guarantees job security and an end to current scheduling practices, which force workers to labor 19 days out of every 21.

The two major container-shipping operators—Termont Montreal and Montreal Gateway Terminal (MGT)—are demanding a threefold increase in the pace of work during weekend shifts. The Maritime Employers Association (MEA), which oversees contract negotiations at the Port, is calling for job cuts on top of the continuing speedup.

The 12-day strike against the Port of Montreal began on August 10 after a 21-month contract dispute in which the unions—CUPE Local 375 and Local 1657 of the International Longshoremen’s Association—did everything to avoid a confrontation with the MEA.

In three limited strikes in July, the unions ordered a section of their membership to stay on the job to comply with the federal government’s “essential worker” regulations that require them to process grain shipments and shipments bound for Newfoundland. Even after the beginning of the general strike, the union continued to observe the essential worker regulations.

It wasn’t until early August that CUPE was forced to submit a general strike notice in response to a provocation by the employer—a 50 percent reduction in wages for night and weekend shifts, and a “technical lockout” involving the routing of several cargo ships to other ports (including those of New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia).

CUPE launched an all-out strike only to defuse the anger of rank-and-file workers while it negotiated a concession-filled contract with management behind the scenes. In defiance of the overwhelming vote of workers in favor of strike action (more than 99 per cent), the union had already proposed a 60-day truce that would have kept the port open during negotiations. But this first offer was rejected by the MEA, which chose to maintain a hard line.

On Wednesday, its CEO Martin Tessier threatened to use managers and scabs to move 477 containers on the pretext that they contained goods “important to the health and safety of Quebec’s economy,” citing without further details pharmaceutical and medical products, sugar and perishable goods.

CUPE responded, after its usual demagogic denunciations, with utter prostration. On Wednesday evening, it canceled the mass picketing that it had threatened to organize the next day in front of the port with the help of other unions. On Thursday afternoon, it agreed to “move containers of controlled products and COVID-19-related cargo and unload a sugar ship.” And on Friday, it signed a full-blown sell-out agreement with the MEA.

The general strike at the Port of Montreal, the first in 25 years, was having a major impact on the entire economy. The activities of the port, the only container port in Quebec, account for 19,000 direct and indirect jobs in 6,300 companies and generate annual economic output estimated at $2.6 billion. According to the Montreal Port Authority, the labor dispute was preventing the shipment of the equivalent of 90,000 containers, which are currently on the docks or have been diverted to other ports.

The Port of Montreal handles close to $100 billion worth of cargo each year, including more than 2 million metric tonnes of iron ore. The shutdown of its operations had already led to a reduction in steel mill production, according to the Mining Association of Canada. The second-largest port in Canada after Vancouver, B.C., it is the country’s main marine gateway for trade with Europe.

That is why the Quebec and Canadian ruling class as a whole reacted with anxiety and anger to the port workers’ strike.

On the very day the strike began, five Quebec employers’ associations signed a joint declaration calling on Ottawa to appoint a mediator and force a return to work. In addition to issues related to US tariffs, supply from China and the health crisis, the signatories wrote, there was “the strike at Canadian National, the railway blockades (Wet’suwet’en), and now the strike at the Port of Montreal.”

At a press conference that day, the president of the Conseil du patronat (Quebec Employers’ Federation), Karl Blackburn, said the general strike is “very bad news that has immeasurable impacts,” blaming the strikers for “taking businesses as hostages.”

For their part, the Quebec and Ontario Economy and Labor ministers sent a joint letter to the federal government asking it to “exercise its leadership” in the face of the strike—an implicit call for back-to-work legislation and criminalizing the strike. Acting as a mouthpiece for big business, Quebec Labor Minister Jean Boulet tweeted Wednesday that “the federal government must act immediately to settle the dispute at the Port of Montreal.”

Federal Labor Minister Filomena Tassi responded to employer pressure with a press release. “We will monitor the situation closely and continue to assess how to support ongoing mediation efforts,” she wrote.

The Trudeau government is relying on the union bureaucracy to impose on its members the dictates of management without government intervention, as was the case in the 2015 railway workers’ strike at Canadian National (CN). But if CUPE proves unable to impose its sellout “truce” deal on the rank and file, the Liberals are ready to use the entire repressive apparatus of the state to impose the demands of big business, including through back-to-work legislation as they did to shut down the 2018 strike at Canada Post.

Management at the Termont terminal has already used the courts to muzzle workers. It filed a complaint following an altercation with striking workers on July 29 in a Montreal parking lot. A group of workers had confronted Termont executives who crossed the picket lines during the four-day strike at the end of July to do work usually done by workers. According to union leader Michel Murray, tension rose a notch when a scab drove his car into a striker. Nine workers were subsequently arrested and charged with physical and verbal intimidation against management and their security guards.

To prevail in their struggle, Port of Montreal workers must make it the spearhead of a mass working-class counteroffensive against capitalist austerity. This strategy is opposed by CUPE and the entire union bureaucracy. Before announcing their sell-out agreement with management on Friday, they had done everything to isolate the strike and channel rank-and-file anger into futile appeals to government mediators and the very employers who are leading the charge on the Montreal dockworkers.

Their radio silence on the threat of back-to-work legislation underscored that CUPE never had any intention of waging a genuine struggle to defend the workers’ interests, which would require the mass mobilization of the working class in defense of jobs, wages, and decent working conditions. Time and again, CUPE and the union bureaucracy as a whole have docilely submitted to anti-democratic strikebreaking legislation, including during the Quebec construction workers’ strike of 2017, the Ontario college lecturers strike of 2017, and the Canada Post strike in 2018.

Against the attempts by the pro-capitalist unions to betray their struggle and impose a new sellout contract, Montreal dockworkers must form an independent rank-and-file strike committee to fight for their demands, including rejection of the truce deal, an end to the use of scabs, no more grueling work schedules and guaranteed jobs for all workers.

This committee must make a broad appeal to workers across North America for a common counteroffensive against the big business assault on wages and working conditions, and to guarantee decent and secure jobs for all. An industrial mobilization of the working class must be combined with a political struggle, based on the socialist perspective of a complete reorganization of the economy to meet the social needs of all, not the profits of a tiny minority.