Socialist Alternative #102 – April 2024

SOCIALIST

ALTERNATIVE ISSUE #102 l APRIL 2024 KCVG WORKERS TAKE ON page 5 AMAZON THE LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS ITS OWN PARTY page 6 INDUSTRY PROFITEERING CAUSED BALTIMORE BRIDGE page 15 COLLAPSE

WHY I JOINED SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE

KELLIE CORWIN, NORTH CAROLINA

In the fall of 2023 I was already struggling to recover my sanity, having barely survived a pandemic-riddled for-profit healthcare system as a new nurse, when hospitals started getting bombed in Gaza, paid for by my tax dollars. Over the course of the next month, I was glued to my phone, trying to process how war crimes in Palestinians’ Instagram stories could be called anything as neutral as a ‘conflict’ on major news networks. For weeks I dedicated every morning to calling a list of representatives who shunned and ignored me, revealing that what had once felt like political negligence during my time as

an ICU nurse, was really state-sponsored murder for profit; any doubts I had that the system of capitalism creates violence disappeared.

Yearning to demand an end to the ongoing violence, I made the intimidating and vulnerable decision to leave my house and attend a local protest, where I came across Socialist Alternative members tabling. It was obvious from my first conversation that Socialist Alternative was as serious as I was about demanding change, requiring engagement and commitment from its members, rather than empty dues. I was immediately interested.

Over the course of my entrance into the branch, I was met with accurate historical analyses, engaging discussion, and consistent community, based on working-class solidarity rather than just hollow identitybased politics. I learned of our successful strategy in our council office in Seattle and I continue learning each and every weekly meeting as my mental health improves, knowing I’m not alone in embracing my humanity. In fact, despite my leaving the bedside, I feel more connected to my oath as a nurse than ever before, knowing that I’m finally working to solve the root of the problems for me and my past patients.

WHAT WE STAND FOR Rebuild A Fighting Labor Movement

scapegoating because the GOP have no real answers to the questions facing working people, but the corporate Democratic Party offers no solution to right-wing attacks against workers and marginalized people and has repeatedly failed to use their majorities to protect our rights. Biden is so unpopular, the (un)Democratic Party isn’t even allowing debates.

• Fight for the highest possible vote for Cornel West for president, an independent socialist with roots in the movement as a step towards building a new, working-class, multi-racial party that organizes and fights for workers’ interests.

• Inflation, unaffordable healthcare, rising gas prices and sky high rents, plus a lack of basic respect on the job are pushing hundreds of thousands of workers to go on strike. We need effective strikes that hit the bosses where it hurts most – their pocketbooks – to win lasting victories like Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA).

• Union leaders across all unions should accept the average wage of a worker in their industry and should be accountable to their membership and the broader working class.

• An injury to one is an injury to all! Unions Mobilize Against Gender need to fight all manifestations of racism, Oppression & Attacks On Bodily sexism, queerphobia, and all forms of oppression as part of the struggle to rebuild Autonomy a fighting labor movement.

• The overturn of Roe v Wade opened the • Unions should stop spending hundreds of door for vicious attacks on bodily autonomy millions of dollars on electing Democratic across the country. We need a mass moveParty politicians, and spend it instead on ment against the reactionary right on the efforts to organize the unorganized. scale of the 60s and 70s when Roe was • Unions should form consumer protection first won. committees to monitor price increases, • Free, safe, legal abortion. All contraception which should have the power to review corshould be provided at no cost as part of a porate finances, especially when money broad program for reproductive health! is squandered on CEO pay and stock • Fight back against brutal anti-trans legislabuybacks. tion and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. Noncompliance with these bigoted laws should be organized by the labor A New Political Party For movement among workers tasked with Working People enforcing them.

• Republicans are resorting to divide-and-rule • Full legal rights and equality for trans and

queer people, including the right to selfidentification! We completely oppose the attempts of the right wing to spread antitrans bigotry and isolate LGBTQ people from society.

• Fighting gender oppression means fighting for our rights to bodily autonomy, reproductive justice including universal childcare, and Medicare for All including free reproductive and gender-affirming care.

Invest In Our Basic Needs • Pass strong rent control. End economic evictions. Tax the rich and big business to fund permanently affordable, high-quality social housing.

• No pay cuts! We need a significant raise in the minimum wage and to tie raises to inflation.

• An immediate transition to Medicare for All. Take for-profit hospital chains into public ownership and retool them to provide free, state-of-the-art healthcare to all.

• Capitalism failed to stop COVID-19, with the “post-pandemic” new normal consisting of total indifference to public health.

We urgently need permanently free and accessible testing, paid sick leave, and to take Big Pharma into public ownership – vaccines should be for public health, not profit!

• Bring back the COVID-era child tax credit and make it permanent. Fully fund highquality, universal childcare. No cuts to food stamps!

• Fully fund public education! End school privatization. Give educators an immediate 25% raise and increase staffing.

Cancel all student debt and make public college tuition-free.

A Socialist Program For Environmental Disaster • We need fully-funded emergency systems to protect and evacuate people from everincreasing storms, floods, and fires, and we need to tax the rich to reimburse working people for their destroyed homes and livelihoods.

• In the wake of ecological disasters like chemical spills, corporations should immediately be responsible for relocation costs, health costs, and home remediation.

• We need a union jobs program to rapidly expand green infrastructure including a massive expansion of free, high quality, fast public transit.

• Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable future – ban new oil and gas drilling and take the top 100 polluting companies into democratic public ownership, while implementing a democratically planned, just transition to 100% green energy!

End Racist Policing And Criminal (in)Justice

white supremacist groups or any cop who has committed violent or racist attacks.

• End the militarization of police: ban the use of “crowd control” weapons and disarm police on patrol.

• Put policing under the control of democratically-elected civilian boards with power over hiring and firing, reviewing budget priorities, and the power to subpoena.

• Beyond fighting to end racist policing, we need a struggle against all forms of racism in our society, including segregationist housing and education policies.

No To Imperialist Wars • Socialist Alternative completely opposes Russian imperialism’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians who already suffer exploitation, oppression, corruption, and growing poverty conditions now face the horror of war and bloodshed.

• We oppose the aggressive imperialist agenda of NATO and the US for whom Ukrainians are a pawn in the wider Cold War conflict with Chinese imperialism.

• De-escalating the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine requires the return of Russian troops to the barracks in Russia and the withdrawal of all NATO troops from Eastern Europe.

• Build a massive anti-war and anti-imperialist movement linking up workers and youth across borders! Sending increasingly destructive weapons to the conflict only serves to escalate & poses a greater risk of all-out war – only socialist internationalism can end war and destruction and win lasting peace and stability for the working masses around the world.

The Whole System Is Guilty • Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, racism, transphobia, environmental destruction, and war. We need an international struggle against this failed system.

• Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership.

• We need a socialist world! This means a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people and the planet.

FIND US ONLINE

www.SocialistAlternative.org

• There is still a massive fight to be waged against police violence. We need a new movement in the streets and mass organizations of struggle to fight for Black liberation!

• Arrest and convict killer cops! Purge police forces of anyone with known ties to

info@SocialistAlternative.org @Socialist Alternative @SocialistAlt /SocialistAlternative.USA /c/SocialistAlternative @socialistus

EDITORIAL TEDDY SHIBABAW, MILWAUKEE Working people around the world have been appalled, enraged, and disgusted at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Public pressure against all governments with any kind of relationship with Israel has been rising sharply across the world.

In the US, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, there have been at least 6,889 Gaza solidarity protests in 828 localities in every single state with over 1.25 million people participating. Millions more in many countries across the world have joined protests calling for an end to the war.

The mass movement, but more particularly the threat of full scale upheaval in the Middle East, is undoubtedly a real factor in staying the hand of the Israeli state from going even further. US imperialism is also pushing for a ceasefire not because it cares about the Palestinian people but because it fears a full scale regional war that would tie it down in the Middle East when it is also engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine and sharpening conflict with China in the Western Pacific.

Israeli Politics Still, the Israeli government, while under pressure and increasingly isolated internationally, has not backed down from its ethnic cleansing. Netenyahu, a right-wing, anti-worker politician with authoritarian tendencies is himself besieged by those in his cabinet that are even further to the right and more committed to genocidal policies than even he is. His personal political future plays a part in this as well.

We do not agree with those on the left who see the Israeli working class as one reactionary mass. Israeli workers are not made safe by the occupation or by the latest mass killings in Gaza. In fact the Israeli economy is in deep crisis and new rounds of austerity threaten the working class along with the potential for future October 7 attacks. Despite the weakness of leftwing forces amid a harshly censored environment, the only viable future for both Palestinian and Jewish workers is through building a united movement to oppose the war, the occupation, and the ruling class exploitation across the region.

rich Middle East. However, the US has other alies in the region, reactionary Arab regimes who were prepared to normalize relations with Israel before the current conflict which now makes such a policy completely toxic.

How Can We Stop this Madness?

The search by ordinary people in the US to create a political cost for Biden is seen in the impressive showing of the Uncommitted vote campaign in the Democratic Primary. Over 100,000 in Michigan, over 50,000 in Wisconsin and double digit percentage points in numerous states like New York and North Carolina show the massive potential. However, for this to mean anything, a concrete break with the Democrats and Biden is necessary all the way through the general election and beyond. Without that, Biden can safely ignore the Uncommitted trend. The best way to do that right now is to begin with a campaign for the strongest possible vote for the most prominent of the

the most decisive potential power of all to cut off the flow of weapons with strike action and blockades. It’s very positive that some 275 labor bodies, including locals and regional bodies all across the country have passed various forms of ceasefire resolutions, even forcing the AFL-CIO itself to come out with such a resolution, weak though it might be.

Unfortunately all of these resolutions, even as just statements, are undermined by the fact that most unions have endorsed and will campaign for Biden’s reelection. For real international workers solidarity, for the sake of all the betrayals at the hands of Democratic Party politicians, and to bolster all the organizing efforts on the ground, it is well past time for the whole labor movement to declare its independence from the Democratic Party. A break with both the Democrats and Republicans to build an anti-war pro-worker party is an urgent task for the labor movement.

MASS MOVEMENT

NEEDED TO END THE SLAUGHTER IN GAZA

We Need New Party

Increasing Isolation Pressure from global protests has increasingly isolated the Israeli state in diplomatic circles. Canada, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands have already suspended arms sales to Israel. 18 out of the 47 countries on the UN Human Rights Council have brought forward resolutions calling for an arms embargo on Israel. The furthest the Biden Administration has gone is to abstain from the ceasefire resolution that finally made it through the UN Security Council.

But despite the increasingly sharp rhetorical rebukes by the Biden administration, as of today there is still no actual move to cut off military aid to the Israeli state. The words ring completely hollow.

In reality, Biden and Trump are not willing to create a serious breach with Israel that threatens long-term US foreign policy dictum that’s been in place since the 1967 War, especially that Israel has served as an indispensable armed beachhead for US imperialism in the oil

APRIL 2024

class, especially the most marginalized. Those funds could go to fund healthcare, education, public sector green jobs, and other vital services.

At the height of the George Floyd protests, Socialist Alternative members in ATU 1005 and NALC Branch 9 (both Minneapolis) refused to use city buses to transport protestors to jail, and organized solidarity protests outside a burned-out post office as powerful examples of how labor can directly support movements.

By mobilizing their members into a coordinated campaign of action, they can provide massive extra resources to the struggle against Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. This should include public statements, including encouraging union members to flood social media with interviews. This should also mean taking opposition into working class communities and into the streets.

Most powerful would be publicly setting in motion a series of escalating actions to end Biden’s policies. This should include nationally coordinated marches, escalating into a rampedup series of expanding strikes. Ultimately, to really raise the stakes for the ruling class would require 24-hour broad strikes by union members as well as coordinated strikes at ports, transportation and industrial plants involved in production, and shipment of arms to Israel.

Labor needs to link up with existing protests being planned in cities across the county. The anti war movement needs to take the struggle out to the wider working class. To do that it needs to bring forward demands that will attract the wider public. This should include linking the war with the Biden administration’s massive waste of resources on war spending, its ending of post-Covid benefits, its economic policies that have ramped up inflation and its failure to protect workers from the massive spike in housing and health care costs. It also needs to take a broader anti-imperialist, internationalist stance opposing both sides in the New Cold War but particularly “our side”, decaying US imperialism.

independent pro-worker, anti-war presidential candidates Cornel West or Jill Stein. This needs to be part of a project to build an independent working class mass left party based on our movements in the workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods While an electoral arm of the anti war movement is vital, what would be even more decisive is well coordinated and escalating disruptive action by the organized working class. Unions in the US need to follow the example of organized labor in Italy, Spain, India, and the UK just to name a few. Middle East Monitor reports that “Workers and trade unionists in the UK shut down major arms factories producing parts for F-35 fighter jets which Israel is using in its bombing campaign in Gaza.”

Workers in the manufacturing and logistics sector in the US (the country sending the lion’s share of weapons to Israel) actually have

Mobilizing The Power Of Organized Labor More than half of unionized workers in the US are in labor organizations that have called for a permanent ceasefire. The most dedicated anti war workers in these unions will need to push their organizations towards much more decisive action with a material impact on the war, as some already no doubt are trying to.

This can start with organizing labor contingents at broader anti war protests, calling its own protests and escalating towards strike action and blockades in coordination with workers at relevant production and logistics sites.

Every bomb, bullet, fighter jet and all manner of weaponry sent from US shores or purchased

by US funds and headed to Israel also amounts to grand larceny against the American working

Labor can’t build a serious movement against Biden’s military and economic support for Israel’s massacres in Gaza while also supporting Biden’s re-election. They need to publicly end their support for Biden and both political parties and publicly announce their intention to build a new political party representing the interests of working people and all the oppressed.

The labor movement in the US should also put its weight behind the growing international movement of labor. A coordinated struggle by the working class on an international level is the most effective way of ending the slaughter in Gaza and preventing Israel invading Rafah.

The threatened full-scale invasion of Rafah means there is no time to lose in pushing organized labor into action. We must organize against war and exploitation in the present day but as long as the capitalist ruling class is at the helm of the global economy and governments, we will not know peace. All our movements on immediate issues must be connected to building an almighty struggle to overthrow capitalism and replace it with revolutionary democratic socialism. Only then can we have a world free of war, exploitation and oppression. J

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REPORTS FROM THE GROUND

LETTER CARRIERS IN NALC FIGHT FOR OPEN BARGAINING TYLER VASSEUR, MINNEAPOLIS

Tyler Vasseur is a letter carrier in NALC Branch 9, writing in personal capacity, and a member of Socialist Alternative.

Hit by years of inflation, and inspired by examples of working class struggle and strike action by unions in 2023, letter carriers at the United States Postal Service (USPS) are building a movement for Open Bargaining and getting organized to fight.

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) has been in contract negotiations for over a year, and members have now been working without a contract for over 10 months, without regular updates from leadership, or a plan to engage or mobilize the membership to win a contract to meet our needs. Open Bargaining would give rank-and-file letter carriers the ability to see and participate in the contract negotiation process, and give us the best platform with which to fight the bosses tooth and nail for better pay and conditions.

Workers are at the end of our rope, and across the country, are getting organized to fight for more. Over 500,000 workers went on strike in the United States in 2023, the highest number of striking workers in decades.

It’s clear to a growing section of letter carriers that we need to be a part of rebuilding a militant labor movement.

In November, NALC Branch 9 in Minneapolis passed a resolution for Open Bargaining, calling on national union

l e a d e r s h ip to organize a public contract campaign, including regular updates for members, and to organize coordinated public rallies across the country with bold demands to mobilize the membership, the broader labor movement, and the public for a strong contract. NALC members have been getting organized with monthly “Build a Fighting NALC’’ Zoom meetings, which have brought together hundreds of letter carriers from across the country.

We’re building a real movement, shown by the 21 NALC branches, and one NALC state association, that have passed the Open Bargaining resolution so far. Many more are in the process of discussing the resolution with members, and are planning to bring it forward at upcoming union meetings. NALC members are organizing to fight for a top to bottom transformation of our union’s approach, at the National Convention this August, and beyond.

Where Does The Power Of A Union Come From?

From the beginning, NALC leadership have not been transparent about our contract negotiation process. In the over 13 months since negotiations between NALC and USPS began, NALC members have been kept in the dark, and when updates have been given they have been almost exclusively about the process, with little information about what our leadership is demanding around wages, Top, left: Graduate students at UW-Madison lead a Workers Strike Back meeting on fighting for a stronger union.

Bottom, left: August Easton-Calabria speaks at a Workers Strike Back meeting.

AUGUST EASTONCALABRIA, MADISON August Easton-Calabria is a graduate student worker in the Teachers Assistant Association (TAA), and a member of Socialist Alternative & Workers Strike Back. They are writing in a personal capacity.

Graduate workers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and members of Workers Strike Back are running for leadership of our union, and getting organized in defiance of one of the most repressive and anti-union

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laws in the country!

Act 10 is a Wisconsin state law that forces public-sector union members to vote to certify our unions every year in order to retain our collective bargaining rights, and prevents unions from bargaining for wages over annual inflation – which means we effectively can’t bargain for a raise. It was passed in 2011 in spite of massive protests against it, just three years after the devastating global financial crash. It was designed to foist the crisis created by the corporate elite onto us, the workers. But that was thirteen long years ago, and the labor movement in the US is waking up again. Since 2011, overturning Act 10 should have been the primary objective of the labor movement in Wisconsin, and union leadership should have coordinated to mobilize their memberships to strike in defiance of the law. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. For workers who are eager to fight for better lives, it’s our job to take on this fight ourselves, with a new strategy to rebuild fighting unions.

Abiding by this anti-union law makes it impossible to fight on bread-and-butter

or working conditions.

Wages in particular are the key question many workers have in the era of inflation and instabil- it y. Top, right: NALC letter carriers rally for a fair contract in MinLetter carriers need a raise, and neapolis. we need a real process for organizing around demands, mobiBottom, right: Tyler Vasseur lizing the membership, and win- speaks at a demonstration supporting the Justice for George ning a strong contract. We’re in a new era of the labor movement, and that demands that we have a discussion and debate about how to best meet the moment, and win big for NALC members and all working-class people.

Listen to Tyler The Open Bargaining resolution is not just on Episode 135 of about transparency, and the need for openthe letter carrier ness from union leadership, but also about podcast “From A strengthening our bargaining position by to Arbitration” by engaging with and activating the membership Corey Walton! of NALC throughout the process. A real question we must ask is: where does the power of a union come from? Does it come from having the best arguments at the negotiating hasn’t mobilized our power to do so, and we table for why we deserve a real raise, and the need to build a union that will. best team of lawyers and negotiators for our A key part to the Open Bargaining resoluside? Or does our power come from the over tion is the call for a complete transformation 200,000 NALC members across the country? of NALC’s strategy in contract negotiations.

It is the workers who make USPS run We’re calling for NALC to organize pubic conevery day, and who in the same turn can shut tract rallies in every city across the country it down, and are the ones who hold the real at the beginning of negotiations, and at key power to win concessions in negotiations. At times throughout, if USPS stalls, to mobilize the end of the day, it’s what is done outside our membership around key demands, win the bargaining room that wins a contract, not public support, and put pressure on USPS to inside it. NALC members need a contract that settle a contract with strong gains for letter meets our needs, and we’re the ones who carriers. J have the power to win it – but our leadership

GRAD STUDENTS BATTLE AGAINST WISCONSIN’S “ACT 10” FOR A FIGHTING UNION issues like wages.

Our socalled “progressive” university doesn’t even have to bargain with my union, the Teachers Assistant Association (TAA), because it’s been decertified. With across-the-board inflation and rapid rent increases nationwide, our already-low University of Wisconsin graduate stipends have become unlivable. Instead of paying us a living wage, the university sends us emails advertising local food banks.

For the last year, grad students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been organizing with Workers Strike Back to rebuild our graduate union, the TAA, back into a powerful union to fight for $50,000 stipends and 12-month contracts for all graduate workers.

That’s what is necessary to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Madison without being rent burdened – rent has increased over 30% since 2020 in Madison!

Bargaining for anything other than wages up to inflation is illegal for public-sector unions under Act 10. In other words, our demand for $50,000 stipends violates Wisconsin state law. But that is precisely the point. We need to build a strong movement that’s capable of re-certifying our union to regain bargaining rights, getting strike-ready,

and organizing with other public-sector unions, like Madison’s teachers and nurses.

We’ve been organizing for months and have built a base of graduate workers pushing this campaign forward – to succeed, we need to win our union to this campaign. That’s why we are now running to win leadership of our graduate union!

Act 10 is hated among Wisconsin’s workers – in 2011, thousands of people marched on Wisconsin’s Capitol to stop it from being passed. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful then. But with the resurgence of the labor movement, the time is now to take on fights that can electrify the whole working class to fight for our own needs. If we can build a movement strong enough to overturn Act 10, it will give new life to unions across the entire state, and become a reference point for workers to rebuild their own unions and fight against Right to Work and other antiunion laws.

Follow our fight on Instagram at @wsb_ madison, and if you’re a Wisconsin worker, join our movement to overturn Act 10! J

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

Union Drive Digs In At Amazon’s “Death Star” Interviews with the workers fighting to unionize Amazon’s KCVG Air Hub in northern Kentucky

JESADA JITPRAPAKHAN, CINCINNATI Nestled in the hills of Northern Kentucky, high above the Ohio River, towers one of Amazon’s most crucial investments: the KCVG Air Hub. The $1.5 billion facility opened its doors just a few years ago, destined to become the cornerstone of Amazon’s plan for optimizing next-day package delivery. The company is increasingly scheduling air freight around a few key hubs across the US, and the strategically-located CVG airport sees by far the most Amazon traffic. 39.2% of mainland Amazon Air flights come in and out of CVG airport, and they’re just getting started.

The 4,000 workers who keep this machine running are a cross section of American society: Kentucky farmers, Congolese immigrants, parents, students, ex-retirees. Amazon raked in $30.4 billion in profits last year. One thing these workers all have in common is the cut they’re not getting from Bezos’ bottom line.

Most of them are mad about it. And a lot of KCVG workers – far more than Amazon would like – are getting organized, joining the union, and fighting back.

Amazon is out of control, and it’s the task of the workers’ movement to subdue it.

In fact, it’s an imperative. The labor movement is on the rise, but it’s not inevitable that this will simply continue. The bosses, their backs against the wall, are going all out to destroy the momentum of workers. The best defense is a good offense: the labor movement must urgently organize large sections of the economy, and Amazon is one of the biggest beasts to take down. That’s why this union drive at KCVG is one of the most important in the country. It’s also why Amazon is fighting back harder than ever before.

We talked with KCVG workers Jordan Quinn, Marcio Rodriguez, and Parker Anderson about how they’ve built this union and where it’s headed.

Amazon workers are atomized, burned out, high-turnover, and busy as hell. What have been the most effective ways to harness the anger and frustration of your coworkers to build this union?

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JQ: A key thing is to organize around concrete issues in the workplace and to pose a solution by organizing around bold demands.

We’ve been organizing around $30 an hour, 180 hours of paid time off a year, translation rights for immigrant coworkers, childcare, and more. This is an important motivation for people to overcome all the obstacles that the bosses put in our way from organizing.

PA: One-on-one conversations about problems on the floor are crucial – we’re understaffed on fingers, we’re understaffed in dock, firing season just happened and there’s too much freight. Being able to connect directly to the issues we’re all facing is what allows us to point to the need for change.

JQ: We’ve also organized actions: we led a march on the boss, with 40 coworkers and community members, demanding professional on-site translators and free on-site English classes to make sure that language is not a safety hazard. We also led marches on the boss against illegal union busting which now the government is taking Amazon to court for.

Language barrier is a real challenge to organizing this workplace. How has the union built support among immigrant workers? Why is this work so crucial?

MR: We have people coming from all around the world, from different backgrounds, speaking different languages. When they come here they’re looking for a job, and it’s important for them to be trained in their language, to understand their job responsibilities and what benefits they have. Right now that’s something that’s not happening at KCVG, and there’s no excuse.

One way we’ve built support is with our translation petition. We want Amazon to have on-site paid translators, for workers to be trained in their language. That’s something that they deserve, that would show that Amazon actually respects them. As an immigrant, I don’t want to see my people getting taken advantage of anymore.

We’ve also built support talking to community leaders, going to mosques, to churches – and we’re reaching people, people are coming up and talking to us about it at work.

ORGANIZING THE UNORGANIZED

REPORTS FROM THE GROUND

Why does Amazon see this union as such a serious threat? Can you describe some of these next-level union busting tactics and how you’re fighting back?

MR: Amazon is one of the most ruthless anti-union corporations in the world and it’s because they know that with a union they will have to pay us better. Power is the one thing they care about - if they lose their power, we’re just gonna keep asking for more.

JQ: Amazon is using illegal tactics to intimidate coworkers from joining the union. They threaten our benefits, and they get away with a lot more with immigrant coworkers. They’ve hired millionaire lawyers to dress up like managers and lead captive audience meetings.

They’ve got an army of visiting managers who build friendly rapport with workers and use what they say against the union.

MR: Just today we had brand new security here at KCVG! They parked their vehicle right in front of where we were doing our table with flashing lights, and we confronted them about it. Said what you’re doing here is intimidation. You guys need to leave. And we saw them actually step away. When we stand up to them, we see that we can get what we actually want.

JQ: We filed over three dozen unfair labor practice charges against Amazon, now the NLRB has ruled in our favor on nine of them.

Amazon will try and defend themselves at the hearing in April, saying the NLRB does not apply to them. We’re very heartened by the decision, but we also know the courts take time and that ultimately no NLRB decision will grant us a contract – that’s something that we have to organize for ourselves.

Strikes and organizing drives are happening right in our backyard in Kentucky. How has this impacted your union campaign?

PA: The Teamsters just organized ramp and tug workers at the DHL CVG World Hub right across the street from us and won a breakthrough contract. When they went on strike last year, we were out there on their picket lines. They went from 70 planes flying out to three, and they extended picket lines to DHL facilities nationwide – in Miami, in Chicago, in Portland.

Their win was huge for our union campaign. It proves that building a union is possible – we’re seeing it right across the street, we’re having meetings with them, we’re learning lessons and building towards doing the exact same thing.

It also helps counter union busting arguments. Amazon likes to tell coworkers that with a union, you could lose your benefits. When I say that DHL workers won free healthcare across the street, that just proves them to be liars.

You’ve been building an independent union for over a year now. How does the broader labor movement fit into your plan to win?

JQ: We’ve had solidarity resolutions passed and donations from over a dozen unions, including the international ATU. And we’re building closer ties with other unions in the logistics industry. A few weeks ago, we invited the DHL Teamsters to lead a meeting, and over 50 coworkers came out to hear the lessons from their inspiring strike and contract win.

We’re also hosting trainings with Teamsters from Local 89 which organizes at the UPS Worldport down in Louisville. Uniting logistic workers across unions is going to be crucial for rebuilding a fighting labor movement, where we can put our heads together as we prepare to take action around our demands.

Amazon workers across the country need to work together too. We have key leverage on Prime Day in summer, during peak season in the winter. Taking united action – marches on the boss, walkouts, or strikes – that’s gonna be crucial for instilling confidence in our coworkers and putting Amazon on notice.

Last year we proved that we’re a union by organizing around our demands and taking action. We just finished officially establishing our union with our union constitution. Now we’re preparing for a fight for recognition and a contract, and that will be primarily won through a strike. Key to this is building stronger relationships with other unionized workers in our industry, like the Teamsters, to bring the weight of the entire labor movement to bear on Amazon. Ultimately for us to win, we can’t just fight at one facility – we need to organize this whole company. J

SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT TO UNIONIZE AMAZON!

STARBUCKS WORKERS BRING BOSS TO THE TABLE! read online:

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US POLITICS

Why The Labor Movement Needs Its Own Party

independently for what workers need.

Winning Medicare for All and similar demands to improve that social safety net would have an absolutely transformative effect on the labor movement itself, because it would take bargaining chips out of the hands of the bosses.

Your employer tries to take away your health insurance because you’re on strike? The boss says they can’t pay you more because health insurance costs so During the WGA strike in the summer of 2023, 72% of Americans supported the writers – in much to provide? other words, more Americans supported the writers’ strike than consider themselves sports With Medicare for All, fans (70%). suddenly that leverage disappears.

BIA LACOMBE, SEATTLE But as it stands, workers’ interests aren’t Last year, workers filed petitions for union being fought for in Washington, regardless of elections in record numbers. Nearly half a mil- which party is in office.

Biden called himself the “most pro-union lion workers went on strike, from auto workers to Hollywood writers and actors, nurses, president since FDR.” Here Biden is using and public school teachers. And out of those a fun, interesting definition of “pro-union” strikes came major victories, like UAW auto – FDR favored sending in the US military workers winning 33% wage increases and the elimination of a two-tiered wage system. The “Last year the American UAW and president Shawn Fain have now Federation of Teachers embarked on a bold campaign to unionize the entire US auto industry. spent over $1.3 million But as workers, we’re not just fighting our electing Democrats, and bosses in the workplace, we’re also fighting them in the political sphere. The billionwhat did public school aires don’t just own their companies, they teachers get for it? Budown the two major political parties and their politicians. In election after election, union get cuts, layoffs, and members and all working people are asked school closures from to choose between representatives of the Democrats across the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but neither represents our interests. country who refuse to Healthcare is one of the clearest examples tax big business to fund of how the working class and labor movement in this country have suffered from lack of public education.” political power. There’s a reason why workers in the United States spend more money on healthcare than workers in any other country to violently break strikes, like when he sent and yet have worse health outcomes and a troops into Philadelphia to break a transit lower life expectancy – the healthcare indus- strike in 1944. Biden, for his part, led the try bosses control both parties and would Democrats in breaking the rail workers’ strike never let Medicare for All even come to a in 2022. Even well-meaning left politicians like Bernie Sanders have failed to win any vote.

Nurses in the National Nurses Union meaningful victories because they won’t (NNU) have vocally fought for Medicare for challenge the Democrats and build workingAll for years, and it’s a demand that is over- class movements.

Of course, politicians can be influenced whelmingly popular among union and nonunion workers. But time after time, Medicare by a strong enough movement, especially for All has been sold out by the Democratic when working people exercise our key power Party especially, and millions of Americans which is to shut down production. But sink deeper into medical debt or go without there’s no denying that the labor movement desperately-needed care every day. We’re is held back by the two major parties in the the only advanced capitalist country without US. Every election cycle, unions collectively some form of socialized health care, with spend millions of dollars of dues money one of the worst social safety nets. And it’s from their members to help elect Democrats because the labor movement hasn’t broken who then refuse to fight for the things workwith the two parties of big business and fought ing people need, which gives Republicans

6

In a capitalist society where workers are being attacked from all sides, we have no choice but to fight the boss on all fronts.

ammunition to win disaffected people over to their right-wing agenda. That money would be better spent if it were being flushed down the drain.

Last year the American Federation of Teachers spent over $1.3 million electing Democrats, and what did public school teachers get for it? Budget cuts, layoffs, and school closures from Democrats across the country who refuse to tax big business to fund public education. Imagine if instead those millions went toward building a new workers’ party and electing politicians who were genuinely accountable to workers’ interests, who fought for things like a $25/hr minimum wage and a huge expansion in quality affordable housing?

President of the Teamsters Sean O’Brien’s recent buddy-buddy approach with the Republicans and Donald Trump is no better – it’s downright dangerous to Teamsters and the whole labor movement to help a rightwing billionaire pose as pro-worker.

The fact is that workers can’t afford to ignore electoral politics. Just look at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s, where workers are fighting for unions. What are those corporations doing in retaliation (besides illegally firing unionizing workers and all-out union busting)? They’re bringing a case to the Supreme Court to try to eviscerate labor law in the US by having the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. Where workers are on the offensive, the bosses will try to cut off movements however they can, including by using the political system.

Of course, electoral politics aren’t a replacement for building power in the workplace. Leveraging our power as workers is the most important thing if we want to transform the overall position of working-class people in society, because stopping production and profits is fundamentally what makes the ruling class listen. But electoral politics is a massive platform that labor can use to advance strategic victories in the class struggle, and we’d be seriously missing out if we gave up fighting for political victories.

Unions are more popular than any single party or politician right now – more people in America support unions than watch football. As our conditions get worse and worse, with spiking rents and food and gas, while we watch the billionaires get richer, increasing numbers of working people are becoming convinced that we have no choice but to actively fight for our own interests.

A workers’ party can actually help build the labor movement itself, by taking struggles into working-class communities to build movements to win concrete demands. It can be used as a tool to support new unionization efforts, as well as providing a political home for working people to discuss and debate the

most important priorities for our movement.

By organizing regular working people into political activity, this new party could ultimately build a movement strong enough to force the two political parties of big business to give up major concessions, or risk being replaced. Being involved in these struggles and engaging with members of the labor movement can inspire workers to step up to

National Nurses United (NNU) has vocally supported Medicare For All for years. Having national universal healthcare would be a game-changer not just for healthcare unions but for all unions, by removing leverage from the bosses’ hands.

build unions in their workplaces. Ultimately, a new party will be key to building a more powerful labor movement that encompasses a far wider swath of the working class than are currently unionized today.

The labor movement has a huge task in front of itself in terms of proving to millions of workers that being in a union is worth it, which means rebuilding fighting unions. It means building democratic unions where rank-and-file members can play a leading role. This process is already in motion with reform caucuses taking leadership positions and those leaderships being put to the test, like Shawn Fain in the UAW. A working-class party will also need to demonstrate a better method of politics than what we expect from capitalist parties like the Republicans and Democrats. That means union leaders and political representatives taking the average workers’ wage and being subject to instant recall if they betray us, and it means a program voted upon by rank-andfile members to which leaders and representatives are held.

In a capitalist society where workers are being attacked from all sides, we have no choice but to fight the boss on all fronts: in our workplaces, in our schools and communities, and in politics. The labor movement has the resources to take on this fight, but now we need leaders who are willing to spearhead it. J S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

GREYSON VAN ARSDALE, CHICAGO

YOU’RE NOT CRAZY; THE ECONOMY STILL SUCKS

You’re wheeling your grocery cart through the aisles, picking up what you need for another week of feeding yourself and your family. You’re clutching a Post-It note with your list on it, crossing things off as you go and mentally adding up the prices as you walk. While you do, it feels like you’re playing a game of what’s cheap this week, and what is suddenly very expensive. Two pounds of ground beef is $8.50… that can’t be right, can it? You hurriedly strike it from your list and replace it with a cheaper protein – maybe chicken, or maybe even just beans.

The weekly routine of going to the grocery store, where average prices are still up 20% compared to three years ago, has become a psychological roulette wheel. Some weeks you come away feeling like things aren’t so bad, and then other weeks you feel acutely the limitations of your wallet and the encroaching hold of debt.

While legions of pundits have been crowing from the rooftops that inflation is over and that the economy is actually doing great, the cold hard reality is that 40% of Americans reported last year that they’re struggling to make ends meet – up from 34% in 2022, and 26% in 2021. To see that this pain is very acutely felt at the grocery store, just look at Aldi, one of the most popular bargain grocery companies: it just launched a five-year expansion plan that will add 800 locations in the US, as more shoppers turn to their stores to cut down on spending.

But it’s not just groceries. The strain comes from all angles – rent that is constantly going up, healthcare that’s getting more expensive, the skyrocketing costs of dining out and live entertainment and other simple pleasures that make our lives enjoyable. The bottom line is that you’re not crazy; the economy still sucks for an average person or family.

Why Does Everything Still Cost So Much?

The truth is that the rising cost of almost everything isn’t due to any one thing – not even inflation – but a combination of crises that overlap and intensify each other.

For example: the cost of chicken is expected to rise dramatically this year, because of a serious outbreak of H5N1, or avian flu, which has been going on since 2022. Avian flu is getting worse, along with other diseases that affect livestock, for two main reasons. One, climate change’s warming temperatures, which cause better conditions for viruses and bacteria to thrive, and two, capitalist profiteering, which demand that hundreds of thousands of chickens be crammed together in the smallest space possible in order to meet demand and beat the competition, which gives the ideal conditions for avian flu to spread.

Then, factor in the war in Ukraine, a major producer of grain needed to feed livestock, and the growing threat of war expanding to larger parts of the world from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and you see how the general instability in the world right now APRIL 2024

ECONOMY

“How Do I Organize My Workplace?”

causes a domino effect. And at the end of the line of dominos is the international working class, which bears the brunt of all of the crises – from being the soldiers and casualties in war, to the workers who come into contact with diseases like avian flu at the farms and factories, to the families who have to abandon their homes and flee from climatefuelled floods and fires, to you, standing at the grocery store.

If that feels overwhelming, it’s because it definitely is. So how can we as working people protect ourselves from the downward spiral?

Defending Ourselves Against The Crisis There isn’t an individual answer to the constant onslaught of increasing prices. You can find a cheaper apartment and move in with roommates, go to a cheaper grocery store and limit what you buy, and cut down on fun experiences like going out with friends – but eventually, you run out of thrifty moves, especially if you have children or dependents to feed. The question is not how to limit our lives to fit our wallets, but what we need to

“While legions of pundits have been crowing from the rooftops that inflation is over and that the economy is actually doing great, the cold hard reality is that 40% of Americans reported last year that they’re struggling to make ends meet – up from 34% in 2022, and 26% in 2021.” organize and fight for to relieve the constant pressure on our bank accounts.

In the United States, this overwhelmingly means we need to organize a powerful movement to win policies that guarantee workers a decent life, affordable health care, and liveable rents. Worthwhile programs like food stamps and unemployment are underfunded and virtually inaccessible for all but the most impoverished workers, Social Security isn’t enough for anyone to retire on, and Americans pay more for healthcare than almost any other nation and get less for it. Winning a massive expansion of the social safety net, paid for by taxing the wealthiest people in society, would prevent working families from going from “broke” to “bankrupt”, and put us all in a better position to fight for even more gains.

This is a key task for a growing labor movement. Taking on these campaigns is not only of strategic importance to bring working people in droves towards unions, but these large-scale demands would be near impossible to win without labor’s power to organize in key industries and shut down workplaces. But if you’re one working-class person looking at prices in the grocery aisle, what’s your next move?

If you’re a union worker, it’s critical to get involved in your union and talk to your coworkers about beginning to fight for a contract that can support the needs of workers, like higher wages and health insurance.

If you don’t have a union, there may be a campaign to unionize your workplace already going on – or you may even be able to start one with coworkers if conditions are good for such a campaign. Our individual actions need to point to what’s collectively necessary: building a strong labor movement that can put its thumb on the scale against the

interests of our bosses, and in our favor.

We also need to use our position as workers in control of the economy to fight for our interests in the political arena. There are many activist and socialist organizations, including Socialist Alternative, that you can join and participate in to strengthen the movement. Ultimately, we need to fight for a workers’ party that can fight back against the two capitalist parties, the Republicans and Democrats, and act as a center of gravity in our communities to organize for better lives at all levels of society.

If we do, we can finally pull ourselves out of the clearance bins and into better lives. J

FIVE YEARS OF FOOD INFLATION EGGS on average went from $2.36 in 2019 to $3.84 in 2024.

+63%

CHICKEN on average went from $2.35 in 2019 to $3.29 in 2024.

+40%

+34%

BREAD on average went from $2.45 in 2019 to $3.29 in 2024.

Read Socialist Alternative’s Step-By-Step Guide

Despite inflation going down, food prices overall for the last five years are still way, way up.

Data from the Wall Street Journal.

+19%

MILK on average went from $2.73 in 2019 to $3.25 in 2024.

+43% FROZEN BERRIES on average went from $5.55 in 2019 to $7.95 in 2024.

DISH SOAP on average went from $2.87 in 2019 to $4.20 in 2024.

+46% 7

BRYAN KOULOURIS, ST PAUL

commentators in the media talk about how we need more (not less) layoffs and unemployment.

Their economy isn’t working for us, and we need to seize this moment of labor movement popularity and mood to struggle by winning victories to transform the lives of ourselves, our families, our co-workers, and our communities.

So, why haven’t we seen a shift in the lives, rights, and power of working people? What will it take to win lasting victories for unions and the wider working class?

Unions are enjoying record-high Organizing The popularity, and the labor movement Unorganized & The Mass is more well-liked than any corpora- Strike tion, politician, party, or pop star.

If all it took was popularity to This is especially among young people who polled at a 71% approval organize people into unions, then rating for unions in a survey con- far more than half of all workers ducted by Gallup in August 2022. would be unionized, and instead Yet union density is only about 10%, we have record low union density.

That’s because the billionaire class half of what it was 40 years ago.

Unions aren’t just becoming more (and their multimillionaire hangerspopular; struggle is on the increase on) conduct vicious campaigns of too. According to the Bureau of slander, lies, intimidation, and firLabor Statistics, nearly three times ings when they’re faced with workas many work days were taken by ing people getting organized. Unions aren’t good for the profits of corporastrikes in 2023 compared to 2022.

Some of these strikes, like most tions who make their money by keepprominently the one conducted by ing our wages, benefits, and rights to the United Auto Workers (UAW), a bare minimum so they can exploit us to pile won significant up obscene wage increases “In order to unionize milamounts and better of cash. It working condi- lions, bring bosses to the takes a welltions. Winning bargaining table and win organized a strong cond e te r min e d tract through better wages and benefits, response to a bold strike the labor movement will win a union is the main and inspire reason more have to rely on its most millions of auto workers powerful tool: the strike. people to join have signed the struggle. union cards in In 2021, the last couple Working people make the on the heels months than economy function, and we of the worst what the old, aspects of the corrupt UAW can shut it down to demand pandemic, regime manmore.” we saw an aged to achieve increase in in decades.

Still, despite a rise of union activ- organizing at Starbucks and other ity that started when West Virginia coffee shops. Workers at Trader teachers illegally went on strike in Joe’s, Apple retail stores, Dollar Gen2018 to kick off Red for Ed, we eral and Home Depot quickly won haven’t seen either significant union elections too. Then in 2022, increases in the real living standards at the country’s biggest and perhaps of working people or the emergence most ruthless anti-union employer of a widespread mass working-class Amazon, we saw an initial victory movement. Instead, we face ongoing at Staten Island’s JFK8 facility. The inflation, skyrocketing housing costs, victory at JFK8, one of the dozens of and record levels of debt, with over fulfillment centers across the couna trillion owed to credit card compa- try, accounted for 20% of all new nies and twelve times as much owed union members in 2022.

While these events inspired tens in mortgages! All this while we have a president who claims to be more of thousands closely watching the pro-union than any white house labor movement, the employers responded with the carrot and the occupant before him.

While rich investors enjoy highs in stick, intimidating (and firing) workthe stock market, and more wealth ers while dragging out negotiations gets concentrated in the hands of through the courts. There weren’t a few corporations, pro-capitalist ongoing credible and prominent

8

strikes to win first contracts to give millions of working people confidence that if they got organized, they could win. While victories could be on the horizon for these struggles, dozens of worker organizers were fired by these megacorporations.

In order to unionize millions, bring bosses to the bargaining table and win better wages and benefits, the labor movement will have to rely on its most powerful tool: the strike.

Billionaires don’t build cars, teach kids, clean floors, cook at restaurants, ship packages, fix computers, or drive buses. Working people make the economy function, and we can shut it down to demand more.

If the existing unions got organized for this type of struggle, then people would rally to the unions, and we’d be stronger united.

For decades, Socialist Alternative has pointed out that conservative labor leaders were a major obstacle building a fight against the billionaires. Many of these leaders are still in power today, making six-figure salaries to rub elbows with politicians rather than fight the bosses.

In 2023, Shawn Fain was elected as UAW President, and just months later, he led an important strike. It’s no coincidence that auto workers are now on the front lines of organizing the unorganized. People will be more willing to risk their jobs to organize unions if the labor movement is more democratic and fights harder for its members. This means that unionized workers should organize opposition groups against entrenched leaders who don’t allow democracy or lead determined struggles against the bosses.

In Fain’s December 11 speech to launch organizing drives across the country, he said: “Business leaders and politicians love to give lip service to the value of hard work. But companies don’t pay good wages out of the goodness of their hearts. They pay good wages because workers demand it and are ready to fight for it…This is our generation’s defining moment. It’s up to us to now carry the torch on the long road to economic and social justice. We are not the first. We won’t be the last. But now is our time.”

Fain has also called for the entire labor movement to prepare a mass strike on May 1, 2028. Unions are strongest when we fight together, and the billionaires want to keep us divided. Workers Strike Back, a campaigning organization set up

by Socialist Alternative and former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, is putting forward the need for all unions to line up contract expirations for May 1, 2028 to build towards the biggest possible strike.

Join Workers Strike Back to help with this effort!

Together, unionized workers and those trying to build power at nonunion jobs, can take united, deter-

mined action together to win bold demands.

This show of force can lay the basis for the type of movement we need to dismantle the dictatorship of the billionaire class, once and for all.

We Need Independent Working-Class Politics The two rich old men running for President aren’t our friends.

Biden claims to be a big friend of labor, but he used anti-union laws to prevent railroad workers from striking, shoving a concessionary contract down the throats of people who voted to reject it. Trump says he’ll bring back a golden age of strong jobs, but he’s a con-artist who wants to divide working people by attacking immigrants, who have often been the backbone of labor’s strongest struggles. Still, unions shouldn’t avoid politics. When we fight the bosses without working class political representations, it’s like going into a boxing match with one hand tied behind our backs. The billionaires pay off politicians, and we need people from our own movements fighting in the halls of power.

While the revival of strikes would bring our most effective tool back into our hands, we can’t win everything through contracts with employers.

Working people need quality guaranteed health care, drastically lowered housing costs, strong pensions, parental leave, child care, affordable education, and an environmentally sustainable future. To win all this, we need to take political action.

Many union leaders say they agree with this, but then funnel our money, organizers, and attention towards an ongoing dead-end strategy of making friends with existing politicians from the two parties, who are beholden to

the same billionaires we’re fighting on the job.

Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on electing Democrats (and sometimes Republicans!) unions should be running our own independent working class candidates. Workers candidates can be a step towards a new party that refuses to take a dime in corporate cash and uses elected office to mobilize movements that can better our lives. Kshama Sawant’s ten years in Seattle City Council shows what even one socialist elected representative can do by building power for working class people. Socialist Alternative and Sawant’s efforts won the first $15 an hour minimum wage in a major city, historic renters’ rights laws, a tax on Amazon to pay for quality affordable housing, and much more!

We see now in the Presidential elections that millions are fed up with both parties, and tens of thousands are showing their disgust with Biden’s support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza by voting “uncommitted.” There is an opening for a new type of principled politics, and the

HO TU W

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

labor movement could help fill this vacuum.

A new working-class party could run hundreds of independent candidates accountable to our struggles and fighting on a clear working class program. We could have real democratic structures to debate strategies in a new party and foster strong connections with union activists.

Labor Upsurges Of History

IO E NS LE F O ? R

Struggle is always necessary under capitalism. This system, here and around the world, concentrates massive wealth in fewer and fewer hands. It isn’t just terrible greed by companies that makes them treat us badly; they make more money by paying us less, working us harder, and forcing us to compete with other working people for meager resources in a world of plenty. History is full of lessons from the movements to improve our lives, and we need to learn from these class battles to build a better world.

The last big labor upsurge in the US that won major victories spanned from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Activists in the unions then had experience in the movements against the Vietnam War, for women’s liberation, and for Black freedom. Back then, like today, many activists had to form oppositions to their union leaderships in order to successfully fight against the bosses.

These strikes built the unions in the public sector where union density is highest today. One big highlight was the 1970 postal workers strike.

The big strikes of this era came at the tail end of the “postwar boom” of capitalist expansion and growth. In that context, the billionaire class and the politicians that they control were more willing to grant concessions to unions, and the billionaires reversed many of those gains in the 1980s and 90s. We can win victories today, but it will likely take a much bigger movement than what prevailed in the 1970s.

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, workers also built strong unions.

This required three general strikes in 1934 when workers in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo, Ohio all shut down their cities for workers rights. Those successful battles paved the way for the sit-down strikes in 1936 and beyond. Auto workers and thousands of others stopped work and occupied their jobsites. We need a return to these methods to shut down “business as usual.”

Just like in the 60s and 70s, worker activists in the big strikes of the 1930s had experience in other movements. Leaders of the Toledo strike came from unemployed organizing during the depths of the Great Depression. Leaders of the San Francisco and Minneapolis strikes were active in socialist and communist organizations. Strikes often helped

N U D N I W C A E T OP H E T N R P G N I WO R K

APRIL 2024

build movements for housing justice as well.

The labor movement, at our strongest, fights for the entire working class, not just members of unions. In the 1930s, there were many attempts to build new parties of the working class, but unfortunately labor leaders fell into the trap of supporting the “lesser evil” Democrats who often sent in the military to try to break strikes.

against the intimidation, trickery, and slander by the bosses. We need to start now with “May 1 2028” strike committees in all unions with monthly meetings, starting with a discussion about Fain’s speech launching the UAW organizing drive.

May 1, 2028 strike committees should formulate key demands for each union and workplace to bring to all union members for a vote in preparation to take united action. Wherever Building For A Mass Strike In 2028 possible, all unions should plan to line up contracts to expire on May 1, 2028. This is the The labor movement is more popular than best protection against anti-union laws; if we just about anything else in the country right all act together, then they can’t fine or arrest now, but the bosses are determined to stop everyone who defies the unjust laws written by us from organizing us. union-busting Struggles are winning billionaires. strong contracts, and Ongoing we need to use this May 1, 2028 to organize the tens strike planning of millions of nonshouldn’t only union workers who focus on existwant to get involved in ing union memthe labor movement. bers; there is a Instead of spendmassive opening labor’s resources ing to bring on hefty salaries for others into the union officials or camstruggle. Citypaigns for big busiwide and stateness backed politiwide strike cians, we should have p r e p a r a tion The “Big Strike” of longshore workers across the West Coast in 1934 a campaign coordicommit tee s was another turning point for the labor movement, showing that workers are capable of fighting back for our own interests even in nated by many unions should hold the midst of conditions like the Great Depression. to organize the unorpublic meetganized, especially at ings alongside Amazon. We can’t stop there. The billionaires community, student, and faith groups, open to control both major parties in the halls of power, all working people, to put forward the case for and we need to fight them on all terrains. We united action to fight back against the billionneed to make steps to launch a new working aire class. class party that doesn’t take a dime in corpoIf you want to get involved with building rate cash, is run democratically by its activists, towards the strongest possible strikes on May and fights with a program clearly in the inter- 1, 2028 and fighting for a new working class ests of working people. party, join Workers Strike Back. In all these UAW President Shawn Fain’s call for a mass movements, we must learn the lessons from strike on May 1, 2028 can be a crucial next previous struggles. History shows that when step on all fronts for our struggles. A strong the capitalists give concessions to our movestrike, organized from the ground up, across ments, they will always try to take away our many industries, with clear demands, could gains so they can get richer. That’s one reason dramatically shift the “balance of forces” why we need to end capitalism once and for towards working class power. A nationwide all. Consider getting involved with Socialist strike of this scale would have few precedents Alternative if you want to get organized and in this country, and it won’t be easy to pull off educated in the struggle for a better world. J Workers Strike Back is a movement launched by Socialist Alternative, organizing in our workplaces and communities for real change for working-classs people.

In order to win real victories like $25 an hour, rent control, and a union in every workplace, we need working and young people across the country to get involved and organize in their workplaces, campuses, and communities.

If you agree with our 5 demands, become a member now!

1. Workers Need A Real Raise!

2. Good Union Jobs For All! 3. Fight Racism, Sexism, & All Oppression 4. Quality Affordable Housing & Healthcare For All 5. No More Sellouts – We Need A New Party!

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C L I M AT E C R I S I S

The Cost Of War: Emissions Skyrocket EMILY MCARTHUR, SEATTLE

Every day the news cycle is flush with grim warnings from renowned scientists telling us that we urgently need to change course to avoid the most deadly impacts of climate change. In the US alone, a climate-changefueled extreme weather event causes over $1 billion in damage every 3 weeks!

From “once in a lifetime” flooding every few years, to extreme heat events, and deadly wildfires, climate warning lights are flashing.

Yet the priorities in the biggest economy in the world aren’t focused on addressing the crisis: instead all signs point towards acceleration.

The US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world, and has a larger carbon footprint than entire countries. Democrats have crowed about the “victory” of capping the military budget to a 1% increase this year, but that’s still $849 billion invested in worsening the carbon balance sheet.

This amount of military spending reflects the real priorities of the political establishment – even when the US isn’t technically at war.

The True Cost Of Military Spending Beyond just the burning of fossil fuels to transport military equipment and personnel around the world, the weapons the US and other nations are urgently stockpiling have no purpose other than destruction, which in turn pushes other ecological tipping points into hyperdrive.

Already, one in ten people globally are

PRIVATE INSURERS LEAVE HOMEOWNERS IN THE LURCH

by ELLIOT BARTZ, BAY AREA

10

experiencing hunger. Topsoil depletion, which has provoked what Socialist Alternative has is essential to crop growth, is already on described as a “new cold war”. track to hit 90% in the next 50 years due to The escalating tensions of the new cold unsustainable farming techniques. The cur- war undermine any push for the necessary rent priorities of the ruling class mean previ- global plan to address the climate catastroously fertile land like Palestinian olive groves phe. The drive for singular global economic and Ukrainian wheat fields are bombed into domination over resources and markets is barren wastelands. foundational to capitalism, and whoever sits Lack of access to clean water is cited as in the White House will face pressure from both a driver of, and a weapon in, war. Already big business to ruthlessly pursue the top spot. one in three people don’t have access to safe The signature pieces of legislation in drinking water, but bombs drop on precious reservoirs, water infrastructure, and groundwater to further punish ordinary (in million metric tons of CO2 equivalent) people in pursuit of global domination.

In short, the scramble for control over raw materials and short term profitable industries is more important for both parties than the immiseration of billions and preventable deaths of millions. And that’s the rub. Capitalism is fundamentally unable to prioritize the livability of the planet over this quarters’ profits.

We urgently need to build an environmental movement that fully breaks with the empty promises of the pro-war Democrats. Already young people are coordinating international walkouts on the climate and against the war on Gaza. This kind of international movement is urgently needed – climate catastrophe isn’t contained by borders.

This momentum should be built on by concretizing demands of a permanent ceasefire, and an end to the global military build up. Such a movement, to win, will need a serious strategy for escalation that includes organized work stoppages.

Beyond ending the wars, the next thing

Military emissions in perspective

Why Biden And Trump Don’t Care

Global military emmissions (2022): 1,221

600 million cars annual emmissions: 1,080

Why are emissions that drive climate catastro500 million transatlantic flights: 1,050 phe still going up despite constant promises to the contrary?

Neither presidential front runner is putting forward a green jobs Biden’s presidency, the CHIPS act and the program to massively expand public transit, Inflation Reduction Act, have as their central high quality housing, and other major proj- priority keeping an edge on China. Despite ects that would make a huge impact on cli- public transit being more sustainable and mate change. One reason is the opposition by affordable, Biden has prioritized handouts to big business, which sees it as a threat to their car companies to produce electric vehicles to outcompete China. In contradiction to his profits.

But another key reason is the pressure to denunciation of fossil fuels, Biden is underoutcompete China. US global prestige and writing oil pipeline expansion to power data competitiveness have been in decline for over centers deemed necessary to a rapid AI roll a decade. China’s expanded global influence out to stay ahead of China.

Many of the expected effects of global climate change are already impacting the US: stronger, more intense hurricanes, longer droughts, and devastating wildfires. Adding insult to profound injury, working people across the country, especially in states like Florida and California which are on the front lines of the climate disaster, are facing an appalling insurance crisis.

The main purpose of an insurance company is to make a profit for its shareholders. When a single home burns down, they are happy to pay out and reinforce the illusion that they exist to help people on their worst day. But when a thousand homes burn down, they fight tooth and nail to deny claims, cancel policies, limit their losses and renege on their obligations.

In California, three insurers, State Farm, Allstate, and Farmers

cover about 40% of the state’s home insurance market. Together, they represent a combined $255 billion in net total assets as of 2023. After decades of profits, all three have started to lose money in recent years due to wildfires. In response, they have revealed their true nature. Rather than spend some of that $255 billion to fulfill their obligation to working people, they have all stopped or severely limited new home insurance in the state. State Farm recently announced that 72,000 existing home and apartment policies would be canceled, many of whom paid their premiums for years without ever having a claim.

Much like California, Florida is also experiencing a massive insurance crisis. Following years of massive hurricanes and floods, the average cost of a homeowners policy

to tackle is major industries like rail, airlines, healthcare, and food production which are currently run for profit. The anti-war, environmental movement should advocate to rapidly take major companies that are responsible for essential goods into public ownership, so these industries can operate sustainably and for the public good. A planned economy, operating on a global level, is the only way to make the rapid, systemic changes that are necessary in time to head off the most deadly impacts of climate catastrophe. J

has reached $6,000 per year, three and half times the national average. Outrageously, Florida’s private insurers turned a $147.3 million profit in 2023, on the backs of working families paying outrageously high insurance premiums.

After decades of collecting money from working families (most of whom never saw a cent of that in return), the major private insurers are happy to leave us to face the brunt of the climate disaster while they enjoy massive dividends and bonuses.

The impact of the climate crisis on the home insurance industry has definitively exposed the absurdity of the for-profit system in the context of rapidly accelerating property losses. The answer is simple: we need a system that guarantees to either rebuild homes or relocate families at no cost. This could easily

be done by appropriating the $255 billion in net assets of just the three largest home insurers. The insurance executives and directors intimately understand this, however, and will wage a vicious, existential battle to protect their profits at our expense.

We need a mass movement to demand that families receive the assistance they need when they are unable to find insurance at a reasonable price. We must advance the demand to take the property insurance industry into democratic, public ownership that is accountable to the working families that are forced to rely on it. As workers, we create all of the value that the bosses take in profits, and have the power to collectively withhold our labor to shut down their system and win our demands. J

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

CHINA

WA R & I M P E R I A L I S M

Can China Find A Way Out? For the past 20 years many of China’s trade partners have profited from their relationship with the biggest manufacturer in the world. Australia experienced a 25 year economic boom, riding out the 2008-11 global crash, based entirely on its raw material exports to China. China’s rise integrated it with many economies. Its economic crisis will not be contained, but it will also be exported.

China’s BYD sold more electric vehicles than Tesla in the last quarter, making it the number one EV company in the world. However, the Chinese regime must be extremely nervous about its huge investments in EVs. Sales of EVs in the US leveled off last year and even dipped this year as the industry struggled to reach beyond its early adopters. EVs only account for 7% of US car sales. It is possible that fears of a recession may further dampen demand for EVs, at a time when Beijing will be hoping to export its way out of its crisis.

Regulators in Europe are seeking to put export levies on Chinese EVs, arguing that they are artificially low priced. The US will do the same. The US also looks likely to force China’s most successful cultural export, Tiktok, to sell to US owners. These are expressions of a period of increased protectionism and rising nationalism in the wake of the Ukraine War.

THE COMING STORM AND ITS GLOBAL REPERCUSSIONS

ROB ROOKE, BAY AREA China’s transformation, over three decades, from a mammoth rural economy to one of the most developed economies in Asia has been astonishing. Half a billion people left their farms to move to China’s cities. It now has the biggest high speed rail network in the world, and exports more cars than any other nation. Its production of electric vehicles (EVs), lithium-ion batteries and solar cells are currently outpacing any other country.

However this is only one side of China’s story.

Chinese capitalism is also faced with the biggest property crisis in world history, with 30 million brand-new empty homes that can’t find people to afford them. It is burdened with interest payments on the $47 trillion of debt it has borrowed for its vast infrastructure projects. Working people’s buying power has been squeezed by privatization of healthcare, housing and education: the result is collapsing domestic demand.

Emerging from its authoritarian Zero-COVID response to the pandemic, during 2023 China faced a new world. The Ukraine War had underlined the increasing division of the world into two new imperialist blocs. The New Cold War has dramatically hit China’s main source of income: exports.

While US and European imperialism have moved to rapidly decouple itself from trade with Russia, it has only just begun this process with China. The West refers to their decoupling with China as de-risking, that is, reducing reliance on Chinese goods in fear of the risk of a more serious conflict in the future.

Economists have described the multiple crises facing China as the four D’s: debt, deflation, decoupling, and demographics. The One Child policy enacted in 1979 and only abandoned in 2015, has altered the demographic balance of the country significantly. China now has a huge aging population that puts disproportionate pressure on its pension and healthcare systems.

APRIL 2024

“Involution” And The Deflationary Spiral The economy this year, according to government statistics, has seen its worst growth since 1976. Chinese people refer to the neijuan or “involution” in the economy: like treading water. People are working harder and not getting ahead. Housing construction has fallen to 40% of its 2020 levels. Youth unemployment is at a recent record high and wages are stagnant or falling.

Low domestic demand combined with high corporate, local, and national government debt has led to a cycle of price deflation. The government essentially outlawed property developers from lowering prices for fear of the complete collapse of the housing market. The massive levels of money borrowed by developers now threatens to create a banking and financial crisis on a level not seen globally since the 2008 US finance crisis.

While stock markets are only a limited measure of the health of an economy, the three Chinese stock markets have all fallen by 20%. Last year, optimists put billions in investments into Chinese start-ups and existing stocks. That flow has now reversed direction and has forced the government to step in to prevent a huge stock market crash.

In many ways the Chinese dictatorship is attempting to fill multiple cracks in the dam, but have failed to halt the momentum towards a full-on crisis.

The official statistics of the regime underplay the level of problems in the economy. The so-called Communist Party has its censorship tentacles everywhere. People have got around this by posting past overoptimistic government projections without comment, that are clearly now ridiculous and shared ironically by millions on social media.

An Era of Disorder For China?

The world has entered a period of economic and political disorder, with the last period of globalization and relative peace now ebbing.

Imperialist blocs, centered on the US and China, have developed to protect their own markets and to tentatively collaborate in fighting for new markets. With Russia, China, and Iran on one side and the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the US on the other, capitalism is sinking back into its normal conflicts.

“The world has entered a period of economic and political disorder, with the last period of globalization and relative peace now ebbing.”

US imperialism has brought a curtain down around China’s sea routes. Japan and South Korea are doing joint military exercises for the first time ever. Taiwan, still considered a part of China by Beijing, now receives military hardware and services typically restricted to sovereign nations from the US for the first time. The Filipino government has allowed US troops on its soil for the first time in 30 years.

While an all-out trade war is unlikely in the short-term, each side is increasing its regulations to protect their own industries. Trade uncoupling between the competing blocks are being accompanied by the rapid ramping up of defense spending. Arms budgets will deplete money for social spending, further undermining economic stability for working class people.

The increased “defense” will be paid by workers as billionaires rarely pay significant taxes.

Imperialist competition, militarism and virulent nationalism are the inevitable by-products of capitalism. As socialists we oppose all imperialist powers and blocs and stand for the international solidarity of the working class.

The regime in China has experienced decades of economic success on which it rests.

The protests in 2022 that forced the government to abandon its Zero COVID policy, while small, was the first expression of discontent on a national scale towards the CCP in decades. In the period ahead these protests are more likely to include economic demands.

The Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship is not prepared for the scale of anger that will be unleashed on it once the fear of repression collapses. The regime is moving to increase anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ propaganda, alongside its anti-Muslim and newspeak against those not ethnically Han. As President Xi Jinping increasingly constructs his cult of personality, associating all progress in China with him individually, so too,

“The Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship is not prepared for the scale of anger that will be unleashed on it once the fear of repression collapses.” as the economy goes into reverse, Xi will be associated with all problems as they unfold.

The CCP will not be a place where discontent can let off steam, but instead it will be seen as the architect of China’s crises. The National People’s Congress, with its 153 billionaires, will correctly be seen as the organ that failed the Chinese working class. In such a climate workers will look to the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 as a starting point for the kind of fundamental changes needed to pave a way forward for society. J

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H E A LT H C A R E

WORKERS

SPEAK

HEALTHCARE WORKER SAYS:

OUT

CHERI WILKINS, PHILADELPHIA I’m a music therapy intern at a psychiatric hospital in North Philadelphia, a block away from Kensington Ave, notorious for being the East Coast’s largest multi-billion dollar open air drug market, as well as ground zero for xylazine – a drug known as “tranq” increasingly found in fentanyl, with life threatening effects.

Philadelphia’s new Law-and-Order, “tough on crime” mayor, Cherelle Parker, has been talking big game about wanting to “clean up” Kensington; in reality, this means literally sending the national guard into the neighborhood and defunding the already underfunded public harm reduction services, like Prevention Point. The Democrats have no interest in actually trying to help people in Kensington, (which studies overwhelmingly show could be done by providing safe, quality housing and job programs) but rather they want to protect the business interests of wealthy land developers looking to gentrify the neighborhood.

The population I serve largely comes from the surrounding neighborhood and includes people experiencing acute mental health crises.

Over 70% of the people I serve are involuntarily admitted, and can be brought in by family, friends, or sometimes police; they often have backgrounds of incarceration, unstable housing situations outside the hospital, sexual assault, and more.

As healthcare workers, we want the best for our patients. However, it’s deeply frustrating that we can’t overcome the atrocities of capitalism and the for-profit healthcare system – the housing crisis and skyrocketing rent prices, unemployment, defunding of social services, and increasing rates of community violence – and these systemic burdens shouldn’t be placed on the shoulders of healthcare workers.

Each patient has their own individual story and experience, but the vast majority of the struggles that my patients face can be traced back to the capitalist system and its failure to meet basic human needs.

Trauma And Capitalism In recent years there has been an increased focus in mental healthcare, and healthcare more generally, on the effects of trauma on our bodies and what this means for the services we provide. This current resurgence in the understanding of trauma can be traced back to the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s, which brought attention to the impact of sexual assault on survivors and brought about a renaissance in how we address trauma. Previous research on

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CAPITALISM

trauma with war veterans experiencing PTSD as well as early research on women diagnosed with “hysteria” in the late 19th century found congruent results with traumatic experiences being the root of acute mental illness, expressed as what is often now diagnosed as schizoaffective disorders, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, etc.

There is now an increased focus, as well, on what we define as trauma and how we can have a more comprehensive understanding of trauma.

Trauma doesn’t just mean sexual assault or singular experience that puts stress on the body.

Trauma also includes adverse experiences such as poverty, unstable housing growing up, emotional neglect from parents who have to work multiple jobs. This kind of environment, which should be stressed is not an uncommon experience for working people under capitalism, can be a constant stressor on the body, leading to similar reactions to being in unsafe situations.

The impact of poverty, incarceration, and other traumatic experiences disproportionately affect people of color, which is reflected in psychiatric institutions. All non-white patients are more likely to be involuntarily admitted, are less likely to get access to newer facilities, and a disproportionate amount of African Americans are being diagnosed with schizophrenia and than with mood disorders.

Safety Requires Systemic Change Ultimately, trauma comes from our bodies sensing danger and how we cope with that.

Because of this, it has become widely understood that safety is the necessary precursor for working with patients with trauma in any capacity. Given the prevalence of traumatic situations that people are likely to encounter living under capitalism, this is the approach we should be taking with all patients.

Establishing safety in an underfunded mental hospital can be especially confounding when that is not the principle these institutions are founded on. They are founded on making a profit. It is hard to reach this point of safety when patients are unsure of housing placements when they get out of the hospital, worrying about missing rent payments, or other bills.

Not to say anything of the hospital environment itself. Patients are given very little choice in their day to day lives in the hospital, not even being allowed to go outside because the hospital does not have a safe area where they can get some fresh air. When the nurses and techs working at the hospital are overworked and overwhelmed, it can become even more difficult to express

DRIVES MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

e m p a t h y and kindness towards patients. Furthermore, the training that workers receive is entirely inadequate in providing verbal de-escalation – one of the main tenets being trying to identify someone’s want or need, which can require time and patience that workers don’t always have.

In order to establish this sense of safety that is so critical for the healing of our patients, it would require a complete overhaul of the

“... The vast majority of the struggles that my patients face can be traced back to the capitalist system and its failure to meet basic human needs.” system with patients’ interests in mind. While this does not discount the efforts made by individuals working within these systems to build relationships and rapport with patients to build a sense of trust and safety, these relationships cannot be the only sense of safety patients get. Furthermore, when workers don’t feel safe because there is not an adequate response to the sometimes aggressive behavior of the patients, it can be hard to try and build trusting and therapeutic relationships. Both workers and patients require safety, which isn’t possible when everyone is being overworked, underpaid, or can’t get their basic needs met.

How Workers Can Fight When we think about how we can fight for our patients, attempts can also feel futile: begging our bosses for more supplies, better staffing, more comprehensive training. While individually advocating for the needs of our patients is a critical part of our fight, we have more power as workers in our collective ability to affect the profits or day to day functioning of the institutions we work at.

Workers do absolutely everything to run these institutions and our working conditions are the healing conditions of patients. When mental health techs, the people who are interacting with the patients the most, are working 12+ hour shifts with minimal rest between

shifts, receiving the least amount of training, and being some of the poorest paid workers in the hospital, it can create a divide between techs and patients. This is not a problem of individual techs or patients, but rather a systemic problem that we face. In order for our patients to receive the best and most empathetic care, workers need to be fully rested, able to understand the needs of the patients, and be being paid a living wage!

The institution I work at is a publicly affiliated non-profit hospital, and has seen a decrease in revenue since COVID-era aid was halted. Bosses will use these losses to say that the money isn’t there for better conditions. To get even simple resources for the patients, like more books or outdoor access, requires grants and outside funding.

However, workers have been able to fight and win things, even when the bosses claim to be out of money. The CEO of Temple Hospital makes almost $1.5 million a year – I’m sure I could think of ways that workers could help balance the budget! When nurses in the Temple Hospital system went on strike in 2010, they were able to win huge gains even in an economic downturn. Ultimately, too, we need to fight for more funding for underfunded public hospitals, especially after the disastrous effects of the pandemic and its detrimental impact on healthcare workplaces right now.

Workers need to organize collectively against the bosses in order to build safer and better workplaces that are able to provide safe and healing environments for patients!

While we can fight within our institutions for better conditions, we also need to fight on a broader level for social programs that can address the bigger needs of patients and workers everywhere. We need to build a movement to fight for Medicare for All and fully funded social services and public schools. This will require fighting independent of the Democratic party and building a workers’ party that is able to organize for our needs and not those of wealthy land developers and corporations.

Ultimately, capitalism causes and perpetuates trauma and unsafe environments. With increasing escalations in the New Cold War and the emergence of more hot wars, like in Ukraine and the war on Gaza, we are going to continue to see the effects of capitalism on mental health globally. No amount of coping skills can stop the effects of war on working people so we must fight for a socialist world that does not depend on wars and is organized for human need! J

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

I M M I G R AT I O N

‘Progressive’ Mayor Evicts Migrants, Boosts Corporate Profits PROFITING OFF OF THE MIGRANT CRISIS

underpay $206 MILLION tohealthcare From City of Chicago to Favorite Healthcare

workers

From City of Chicago to Equitable Social Solutions

sewage

facilities $45.5 MILLION for with open providing $24 MILLION for inadequate and

From City of Chicago rotten food for to Open Kitchen Inc migrant families

Overcrowded conditions in a Chicago migrant shelter. Many have complained of rodent and cockroach infestations, as well as open sewage.

DUSTIN SPENCE, CHICAGO Hours after completion of the drunken revelry of Chicago’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, city officials began implementing the eviction of migrants from city-operated shelters under the orders of ‘progressive’ Mayor Brandon Johnson. Since the end of August 2022, over 37,000 migrants have been sent to Chicago, largely by right-wing Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The influx of migrants has tested the sincerity of Democratic politicians who have long proclaimed liberal bastions to be ‘sanctuary cities’, while assuming that they were safely removed from the day to day realities of the border crisis. While there has been much hand-wringing by city officials over what should be done, the capitalist class in Chicago and elsewhere has embraced the words of former Mayor Rahm Emmanuel – “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.”

To date the city has spent nearly $300 million on its ‘New Arrivals Mission’. It is clear from the state of overcrowded, rodentand cockroach-infested shelters that these funds are not being spent on ensuring the wellbeing of migrants. The city has reported a measles outbreak in at least one facility, the same facility where a five-year old boy died in December. Even as conditions worsen in the shelters and the city begins evictions, private contractors are raking in millions in fees.

The Cottage Industry Profiting Off Migrants The vast majority (nearly 70%) of the APRIL 2024

money paid out by the city has been to Favorite Healthcare Staffing, receiving over $206 million for its services. Favorite Healthcare is a Kansas City-based staffing agency with annual revenues of over $1.3 billion in 2023, and yet it is clear that the healthcare and safety of migrants arriving in Chicago is the last thing on their priority list. In late 2023, the Johnson administration renewed the city’s contract with Favorite Healthcare to the tune of $40 million. The staffing agency claims that its employees routinely work 84 hour weeks and it issued an invoice claiming to pay a single nurse $20,000 for one week of work. These numbers should have raised red flags for the city given that Favorite Healthcare is the same company that was ordered by the Department of Labor to pay over $3 million in back pay after underpaying 1,677 healthcare workers in the summer of 2020 – the height of the COVID-19 pandemic!

Other for-profit corporations have jumped at the opportunity to snap up their piece of the migrant crisis. Equitable Social Solutions, LLC raked in $45.5 million to ‘manage’ the properties where migrants are housed, and Open Kitchen Inc received nearly $24 million for food services. In light of the complaints to the city about inadequate access to food and water, and reports of buildings having open sewage and rotten food it is clear that most of the money spent by the city has lined the pockets of these companies’ owners.

The city has announced that it plans to evict over 2,000 people from the shelters by the end of April. As a part of that process the city has emphasized that migrants can travel from the wholly inadequate shelters and return to the city’s “landing areas” and

reapply for shelter access. Without being legally allowed to hold jobs, migrants will be forced into the underground economy, working off the books for companies willing to break the law in order to get access to exceedingly cheap labor. Others will resort to the informal market like selling candy on the streets for cash. None of these scenarios will actually be able to cover the cost of living in the city. To make matters worse there are reports of migrants losing jobs because they are forced to wait in “landing areas” or try to coordinate impromptu moves out of the shelters.

In the end neither the Johnson administration nor the wider ruling class of Chicago has any desire to actually resolve the migrant crisis in the city. The shelter evictions, beginning just before the annual summer migrant surge is about to begin, all but guarantee an endless revolving door of people from the city’s “landing zones” to the temporary stability of the shelters. All of which guarantees corporate profits for contractors, cheap labor for those seeking it out, and continued misery for migrants who have been shipped to the city.

Fighting For Migrants And Working-Class Chicagoans The increasing deterioration of the situation around the migrant crisis points to the absolute need for a socialist alternative to the situation. Chicago should immediately grant work permits to migrants regardless of legal status so that they can openly seek employment. There is a 23.8% vacancy rate for Chicago office space, much of that

being in luxury high-rises downtown. The city should bring that space into public ownership through eminent domain and convert it into high quality temporary housing for both migrants and American-born individuals who are currently homeless.

Any outside contractors hired to provide services for migrants must open their books for review so that resources are guaranteed to go to helping migrants and not towards padding the bosses’ pockets. City resources should be spent to provide housing, healthcare, education and community-run safety to all areas of the city to ensure that traditionally underfunded communities are not pitted against each other. Such resources should be raised by taxing the rich.

Many Chicago neighborhoods suffer from chronic neglect by the city’s political establishment, especially majority Black neighborhoods on the south and west side. Ten years ago Rahm Emanuel oversaw the shuttering of 50 public schools, most of which were in poor Black neighborhoods. One of these schools, Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn, has been converted into a migrant shelter, after the community had been demanding for years that it be turned into a community resource center for youth job training and recreational activities. This is a recipe for turning poor and working people against one another.

The struggle for high quality accommodations for migrants has to be connected to a struggle for housing, education, and public investment across the city. We need fully funded public schools, investment in community resources, high quality and permanently affordable housing, and rent control.

These demands are bold, but they are absolutely necessary and the only solution to the migrant crisis. As Chicago’s ‘progressive’ mayor has shown himself unequal to the task of standing up to the interests of big business and actually fighting for working people, we must get organized in our communities, in our schools and in our workplaces to build mass movements to fight back and win! J

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C O R P O R AT E C R I M E S

RAIL CRISIS CONTINUES AFTER EAST PALESTINE DISASTER East Palestine residents were offered $212 each in “charitable” donations from Norfolk Southern Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw gave himself a 37% raise, making his 2023 salary $13.4 million

by OLIVE KUHN, PHILADELPHIA It’s been a little over a year since Norfolk Southern’s disastrous freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The fire may be extinguished, but the consequences linger like smoke.

East Palestine residents are still waiting on basic services like water tests and healthcare. Joe Biden, a day late and an inflated dollar short, visited the beleaguered community for the first time this February, on the one year anniversary of the derailment; it appears he was only spurred to visit following the second derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in Lehigh Valley Pennsylvania. Norfolk Southern, meanwhile, appears to itself be going off the rails.

Immediately following the incident, Norfolk Southern unnecessarily burnt five derailed train cars of vinyl chloride, and then offered to set up a charitable fund of $1 million for affected residents, which works out to just $212 per person. Following these embarrassments, and under pressure from the unions, East Palestine residents, and the general public, Norfolk Southern has made a few concessions: rail workers now enjoy a whopping seven days of sick leave, and the company has implemented some preliminary safety measures such as classification yards. So, that’s relatively good news, right?

Not according to shareholders. An “activist investor” private equity firm called Ancora Holdings recently bought $1 billion of stock in Norfolk Southern and is now attempting to replace Alan Shaw, the CEO who presided over the derailment and gave himself a 37% pay raise, with an arguably worse figure: former UPS international executive Jim Barber, who, in that role, “capture[d] opportunities in south-tosouth trade in the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Africa.” Ancora also plans to instate a nightmare slate of directors, including former Ohio Governor Republican John Kasich, who notably quashed the Ohio Hub high speed rail project which could have provided high-quality public transportation for millions of working people.

Ancora’s slate would reinstate an even more extreme version of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which played a huge role in causing the derailment in East Palestine last year, and claw back the small safety concessions that workers have won in the past year in the name of “growing profitability”.

Railroads and freight transit are public goods.

When they are mismanaged, it is the public and especially working-class communities that suffer. So why can a private equity firm decide how a major railway corporation is run, just because they have a billion dollars to spend? Both the East Palestine derailment and the immediately botched response served as a public indictment of the privatized railroad industry,

which has been implementing dangerous cost-cutting measures like PSR and lobbying congress to do away with basic safety requirements for the better part of forty years. It could not be clearer that Norfolk Southern should be taken into public ownership under democratic control of the railroad workers: the people who prevent derailments and put out fires, instead of causing them.

So, where are the rail unions in all of this? Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) of the AFL-CIO, penned an open letter to Norfolk Southern Shareholders, urging them not to support Ancora’s coup ahead of the scheduled May 9 vote. It is certainly necessary that TTD, which represents Norfolk Southern’s unionized workforce, responds to this situation. Unfortunately, a letter that openly pleads with shareholders and defends the current CEO, is a show of weakness rather than strength by the union leadership. Unions don’t win demands by making requests of shareholders: they win demands by exercising their power and withholding their labor. Regan’s letter reads more like a correspondence between industry insiders, than like the voice of thousands of workers whose jobs and literal lives could be on the line. The letter attempts to appease everyone, workers and shareholders alike.

This is a mistake.

Regan is likely correct that Acora’s slate would be worse for the union than the current leadership.

Union struggles are often pragmatic and granular.

It is not abnormal, or necessarily bad, for unions to strategize around which boss they’d rather negotiate against. However, there is a difference between adapting to tricky terrain and completely capitulating to the current boss for fear of a worse one.

The current “leadership” of Norfolk Southern have proven completely incapable of running a railway, and Ancora’s attempted coup proves that the finance sector has only worse to offer, not better.

Now would be the perfect time for the unions to put forward bold demands, not make meek requests of shareholders. What would happen if Norfolk Southern workers instead demanded that they be put in charge, and organized a strike to show they meant business?

As workers, socialists, and union members, we don’t just make radical demands and expect the pieces to fall into place. Fighting for nationalization of key sectors like railways will take many strikes and a serious rank-and-file organization effort. But that doesn’t mean bold demands should be hidden.

The irony is that, by militantly organizing and putting forward serious demands, TTD just might scare Norfolk Southern’s shareholders into keeping good ol’ Alan Shaw – and making some more concessions of safety as well. J

Read our on-the-ground coverage of the disaster in East Palestine.

“What East Palestine Is “For Profit Railroads Caused The Disaster In East Palestine” From start to finish this disaster has exposed the complete barbarism of the capitalist system. A mass of safety violations and cover-ups going back decades have brought us to this exact moment, where thousands of families now live in what could become a cancerous wasteland.

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Owed: A Program To Make Norfolk Southern Pay”

In 2021,Norfolk Southern raked in $12.75 billion. In 2022, their profit – the amount they keep after all their bills are paid – was $8.65 billion.

They have more than enough money in the bank to meet the needs of this small community, and if they cannot afford to clean-up their own mess, they should be taken into democratic public ownership. This article details what we need to demand of them and our government.

S O C I A L I S TA LT E R N AT I V E . O R G

BALTIMORE BRIDGE COLLAPSE KILLS SIX, SHIPPING INDUSTRY TO BLAME DAVID RHOADES, LOS ANGELES

On March 26, the Dali, a container ship leased by shipping giant Maersk headed for Sri Lanka, lost all power while still in the channel in the Port of Baltimore. Despite the efforts of the pilots and crew, the 100,000-ton vessel struck the support beam of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it into the Patapsco River in seconds. An eight-man construction crew fixing potholes on the bridge fell into the water, but two were rescued. Two bodies have been recovered; the remaining four are presumed dead.

The accident shines a light on myriad maritime shipping issues, from widespread fuel fraud to the fact that 80% of global shipping capacity is controlled by three alliances of the major shipping firms – Maersk among them.

Shipping Monopolies Created Oversized Vessels The Dali’s mass was the immediate cause of the Key Bridge’s collapse.

Experts agree no bridge could survive a direct hit from a vessel that enormous, but the Dali is typical for its class. Container ships have outgrown the infrastructure around them – the result of intensifying maritime shipping capacity in recent decades.

Today, over half of global trade is shipped via containers. Since the 1950s, containerization – industry-wide adoption of shipping capacity standards – has ballooned profits for shipping firms and established the twentyfoot equivalent unit (TEU) as the chief measure of cargo capacity, outside bulk or liquid cargo. Swelling global trade in the 1980s compelled shipping firms to expand TEU capacity for fatter margins. Expansion accelerated post-2008: average container ship capacity has increased 50% since 2012, increasing total capacity by 2500% since 1980.

The Dali looks puny beside new ultralarge container vessels (ULCV); though it ‘merely’ has a capacity of 9,962 TEU, it destroyed the Key Bridge in seconds going 8 miles per hour. The latest ULCVs

possess double that capacity.

Workers Prevent Massive Loss Of Life Tragically, the Key Bridge disaster claimed six lives—all poorly paid construction workers from Latin American countries, working for a subcontractor on a state job. They were on break and had no access to radio communications that might’ve saved their lives.

But the Key Bridge’s destruction could have claimed far more lives if it weren’t for workers rapidly intervening on their own behalf. When the Dali lost power, the pilot – a port employee – rushed out a mayday call. Bridge authorities then coordinated via radio to stop all traffic from getting on the Key Bridge. Two tugboat crews rushed over in response to the mayday call as well.

Still, if it weren’t for cost-cutting measures imposed by employers, those tugboat crews would have prevented the entire disaster minutes earlier. They could have escorted the Dali past the vulnerable bridge – a common procedure – but terms between ports and shipping firms meant the crews were instructed to turn around beforehand.

Logistics Workers Have Vital Role To Play Tugboat work is specialized and critical; ballooning ship sizes accelerate the need for towing services as vessels travel through tightening channels. However, price negotiations between tugboat companies and port authorities force employees into smaller crews, intensifying shifts, and hazardous conditions.

Because ports pass the cost of towing onto shipping companies, both parties seek minimal services at the lowest possible rates. An escort for the Dali past the bridge would have taken 18 minutes; experts say it likely would have kept the ship on course after losing power, but neither the port nor Maersk wanted to pay the comparably small price this would’ve required.

Everything that tugboat employees would need to better their lives – bigger crews, shorter shifts for the same pay,

additional vessels, and mandatory escorts – aligns with the interests of every human being who needs reliable shipping for food, medicine, and critical supplies. Everything that ports, tug companies, and shipping monopolies have demanded – skeleton crews, fewer vessels, and minimal services – has made shipping less reliable while generating enormous profits for a few companies.

Port policies will lead to worse disasters if workers don’t organize and intervene.

Capitalist ‘Solutions’ Breed Crisis The Key Bridge collapse is one expression of the chaotic forces unleashed by the current period of capitalism. The now-enlarged Panama Canal, which has increased the Port of Baltimore’s international trade by 61% since 2016, now faces low water levels from an unprecedented drought, leading to a $270 billion traffic jam. Shipbuilding firms are fitting new cargo vessels to run on liquid natural gas in response to the fuel crisis created by the Ukraine War, accelerating fracking and climate destruction.

Economic, political, and military conflict – like the Houthi attacks on US ships in the Red Sea, which added a week to the Dali’s planned voyage – impair fragile supply chains.

Capitalism, far from handling the critical problems we’re facing, ‘solves’ today’s crisis by creating tomorrow’s.

Logistics workers control all ports, canals, shipping lanes, terminals, railways, and warehouses. If the maritime monopolies keep trying to handle these problems their way, more people will get hurt. By fighting for better working conditions, logistics labor is the only force capable of preventing people from dying in incidents like this while making shipping safer and more reliable.

What was true at the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore remains true for all working people: besides us, there’s no one else who can respond to the mayday call – there’s no one else equipped to save ourselves, and the planet, from this rotten system. J

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15

SOCIALIST

ALTERNATIVE

US CORPORATIONS PROFIT FROM DESTRUCTION OF GAZA SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE EDITORIAL BOARD

of history blown to pieces. All that’s left of the AlOmari Mosque, built in the 7th century, is a small tower and some crumbling walls.

With a whisper, Joe Biden’s a dminis t r a tio n authorized the transfer of an additional 1,800 MK 84 bombs, 500 MK 82 bombs, and 25 F-35A fighter jets to the Israeli military last month. One MK 84 bomb can kill someone standing 1,000 feet away in any direction – equal to 58 soccer fields in area.

With a shipment of 1,800 of these bombs, the lethal area swells to 104,400 soccer fields.

Since the beginning of the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Biden administra-

It continues unabated. Infrastructure pulverized. Masses of humans obliterated, maimed or forever wounded. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, just the official death count is at over 32,900 as of this writing, with over two thirds of them women and children.

Among the rubble is nearly all of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. The only fully operational facility is the European Hospital in Khan Younis. The venerated Al Shifa Hospital, one of the oldest institutions that also employed a large number of Gazans is now a barren wasteland after repeated raids and bombings.

There can no longer be any doubt that intentional mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is policy for Israel. So much so that there could be a new report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor titled “Killing starving Palestinians and targeting aid trucks: A deliberate Israeli policy to reinforce famine in the Gaza Strip.” The Israeli military is literally targeting and assassinating aid delivery workers.

An incident among many that has caused the latest outrage is the murder of seven foreign aid workers.

Nearly the bulk Stock prices of major weapons manufacturers shot up by of the population of 10% in the days after the Israeli regime invaded Gaza Gaza has been chased

by US-Israeli brutality Oct. 7 Oct. 7 towards the southernmost city on the strip, Rafah. Before the war, Rafah was home to about 275,000 people. Now the USIsraeli genocidal war has as many as 1.4 million souls cornered and packed into the city. The Israeli miliGeneral Dynamics Lockheed Martin tary has besieged, bombed and raided the city. And that only as a prelude to a full scale ground invasion that tion has approved more than 100 separate weapons sales to the Israeli military. By the may come in days or weeks. end of December, the US had sent more than 10,000 tons of weapons in 244 cargo planes US Weapons Kill Palestinians and 20 ships.

These horrors provide the backdrop for Joe On April 1, the IDF bombed a humanitarBiden’s proposal for an additional $18 billion in ian aid convoy that killed seven aid workers military aid for Israel. This gives the lie to all the from World Central Kitchen. That very same hand-wringing declarations of concern by the day, the US had authorized over a thousand administration for the “humanitarian” crisis.

MK 82 bombs – and even after the attack The devastation caused by US-made happened, chose not to halt the transfer. Even weapons isn’t abstract. We can see it as Biden changes his public posture, reportsplashed across all our social media feeds. edly calling for an “immediate ceasefire” on Thousands of children turned to mist, entire the phone with Netanyahu in the days after bloodlines permanently ended, and centuries the attack, he’s committed to arming Israel

ISSUE #102 l APRIL 2024

BLOOD ON BIDEN’S HANDS to the teeth, no matter the cost.

Taking Down The War Machine All this death and destruction comes down to a question of dollars and cents for major weapons manufacturers in the US. There is a direct correlation between every Palestinian child killed and Lockheed Martin’s stock increasing. In the six days after October 7, both Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics – the manufacturer of the MK 84 bomb – saw their stock shoot up 10%.

The murderous feedback loop between major weapons manufacturers and the politicians at the head of US imperialism means that without profound systemic change, there will always be a down payment on war.

So far in the 2024 elections, Lockheed Martin’s PAC has spent just under a million dollars – with 41.6% going to the Democrats and 57.3% going to the Republicans. In 2023, they spent over $14 million on lobbying efforts.

Any struggle to end the genocidal war on Gaza will have to take aim squarely at the major pillars of US imperialism which includes these behemoth weapons manufacturers and the politicians who do their bidding.

The merchants of death play their role in the core project of US imperialism which seeks to defend its waning global power and defeat Chinese imperialism’s bid to become the new hegemon. Both sides of this global New Cold War are enemies of the working class and the oppressed and their conflict means ramped up militarism, austerity and the threat of even more war. This is why we must oppose not just the sending of weapons to Israel but to killing fields of Ukraine and the massive military buildup in the Western Pacific.

We desperately need a new political party in the US which takes no money from big business or billionaires and stands in firm

Biden has authorized the shipment of 1,800 MK 84 bombs to Israel.

While it’s impossible to know for sure, it’s likely that an MK 84 bomb caused the crater pictured above. opposition to the US war machine. A new working-class party should put forward a bold program to dramatically cut military spending and redirect the money toward transforming the existing war industry into something socially useful. For example, the infrastructure that currently exists to make death machines like the MK 84 bombs could instead be used to develop and deploy green technology to slow down the devastation of the environmental crisis.

The mass anger at Biden for his complicity in this assault on Gaza needs to be organized into a sustained campaign for a genuine political alternative to the two parties of war. J