Exploited employees across the country are
rising up and taking direct action to tackle low
pay and appalling working conditions.
By Chris Hedges
January 18, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "The
Age" --
Scheerpost
There is one last hope for the United
States. It does not lie in the ballot box. It lies
in union organizing and strikes by workers at
Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg,
the Special Metals plant in Huntington, West
Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Northwest
Carpenters Union, Kroger, as well as teachers in
Chicago, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona,
fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in Worcester,
Massachusetts, and the members of the International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Organized workers, often defying their timid
union leadership, are on the march across the United
States. Over four million workers, about 3% of the
workforce, mostly from accommodation and food
services, healthcare and social assistance,
transportation, housing, and utilities, have walked
away from jobs, rejecting poor pay along with
punishing and risky working conditions.
There is a growing consensus – 68% in a recent
Gallup
poll, with that number climbing to 77% of those
between the ages of 18 and 34 – that the only way
left to alter the balance of power and force
concessions from the ruling capitalist class is to
mobilize and strike, although only 9% of the US
workforce is unionized. Forget the woke Democrats.
This is a class war.
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The question, Karl Popper reminded us, is not how
we get good people to rule. Most of those attracted
to power, figures such as Joe Biden, are at best
mediocre and many, such as Dick Cheney, Donald
Trump, or Mike Pompeo, are venal. The question is,
rather, how do we organize institutions to prevent
incompetent or bad leaders from inflicting too much
damage. How do we pit power against power?
The Democratic Party will not push through the
kind of radical New Deal reforms that in the 1930s
staved off fascism and communism. Its empty
political theater, which stretches back to the
Clinton administration, was on full display in
Atlanta when Biden called for revoking the
filibuster to pass the
Freedom to Vote Act and the
John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,
knowing that his chances of success are zero.
Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey
Abrams, along with several of the state’s voting
rights groups, boycotted the event in a very public
rebuke. They were acutely aware of Biden’s cynical
ploy. When the Democrats were in the minority, they
clung to the filibuster like a life raft.
Then-Senator Barack Obama, along with other
Democrats, campaigned for it to remain in place. And
a few days ago, the Democratic leadership employed
the filibuster to block legislation proposed by Sen.
Ted Cruz.
The Democrats have been full partners in the
dismantling of our democracy, refusing to banish
dark and corporate money from the electoral process
and governing, as Obama did, through presidential
executive actions, agency “guidance,”
notices and other
regulatory dark matter that bypass Congress. The
Democrats, who helped launch and perpetuate our
endless wars, were also co-architects of trade deals
such as NAFTA, expanded surveillance of citizens,
militarized police, the largest prison system in the
world and a raft of anti-terrorism laws such as
Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that abolish
nearly all rights, including due process and
attorney-client privilege, to allow suspects to be
convicted and imprisoned with secret evidence they
and their lawyers are not permitted to see.
The squandering of staggering resources to the
military – $777.7 billion a year – passed in the
Senate with an 89-10 vote and in the House of
Representatives with a 363-70 vote, coupled with the
$80 billion spent annually on the intelligence
agencies, has made the military and the intelligence
services, many run by private contractors such as
Booz Allen Hamilton, nearly omnipotent. The
Democrats long ago walked out on workers and unions.
The Democratic governor of Maine, Janet Mills, for
example,
killed a bill a few days ago that would have
allowed farm workers in the state to unionize. On
all the major structural issues, there is no
difference between the Republicans and the
Democrats.
The longer the Democratic Party does not deliver
real reforms to ameliorate the economic hardship,
exacerbated by soaring inflation rates, the more it
feeds the frustration of many of its supporters,
widespread apathy (there are 80 million eligible
voters, a third of the electorate, who do not cast
ballots) and the hatred of the “liberal”
elites stoked by Donald Trump’s cultish Republican
Party. Its signature infrastructure package, ‘Build
Back Better’, when you read the fine print, is yet
another infusion of billions of government money
into corporate bank accounts. This should not
surprise anyone, given who
funds and controls the Democratic Party.
The suffering and instability gripping at least
half the country living in financial distress,
alienated and disenfranchised, preyed upon by banks,
credit card companies, student loan companies,
privatized utilities, the gig economy, a for-profit
health care system that has resulted in a quarter of
all worldwide Covid-19 deaths – although we are less
than 5% of the world’s population – and employers
who pay slave wages and do not provide benefits, is
getting worse.
Biden has presided over the loss of extended
unemployment benefits, rental assistance,
forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the
moratorium on evictions and now the ending of the
expansion of the child tax credits, all as the
pandemic again surges. The handling of the pandemic,
from a health and an economic perspective, is one
more sign of the empire’s deep decay. Americans who
are uninsured, or who are covered by Medicare, often
frontline workers, are not reimbursed for
over-the-counter Covid tests they purchase.
The Supreme Court – five of the justices were
appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote –
also
blocked the Biden administration from enforcing
a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers.
And on the horizon, fueled by the economic fallout
from the pandemic, are large-scale loan defaults and
another financial crisis. The worse things get, the
more discredited the Democratic Party and its
‘liberal’ democratic values become, and the more the
Christian fascists lurking in the wings thrive.
As history has repeatedly proven, organized
labor, allied with a political party dedicated to
its interests, is the best tool to push back against
the rich. Nick French, in an
article in Jacobin, draws on the work of the
sociologist Walter Korpi, who examined the rise of
the Swedish welfare state in his
book ‘The Democratic Class Struggle’. Korpi
detailed how Swedish workers, as French writes,
“built a strong and well-organized trade union
movement, organized along industrial lines and
united by a central trade union federation, the
Landsorganisationen (LO), which worked closely with
the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden
(SAP).”
The battle to build the welfare state required
organizing – 76 % of workers were unionized – waves
of strikes, militant labor activity and SAP
political pressure. “Measured in terms of the
number of working days per worker,” Korpi
writes, “from the turn of the century up to the
early 1930s, Sweden had the highest level of strikes
and lockouts among the Western nations.” From
1900-13, as French notes, “there were 1,286 days
of idleness due to strikes and lockouts per thousand
workers in Sweden. From 1919-38, there were 1,448.”
(By comparison, in the United States last year,
according to National Bureau of Economic Research
data, there were fewer than 3.7
days of idleness per thousand workers due to
work stoppages.)
There are a few third parties, including the
Green Party, Socialist Alternative and the People’s
Party, that provide this opportunity. But the
Democrats won’t save us. They have sold out to the
billionaire class. We will only save ourselves.
Unions break down political divides, bringing
workers of all political persuasions together to
fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once
workers begin to exert power and extract demands
from the ruling class, the struggle educates
communities about the real configurations of power
and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that
have driven many into the arms of the neo-fascists.
For this reason, capitulating to the Democratic
Party, which has betrayed working men and women, is
a terrible mistake.
The rapacious pillage by the elites, many of whom
bankroll the Democratic Party, has accelerated since
the financial crash of 2008 and the pandemic. Wall
Street banks recorded record profits for 2021. As
the Financial Times noted, they milked the
underwriting fees from Fed-based borrowing and
profited from mergers and acquisitions. They have
pumped their profits, fueled by roughly
$5 trillion in Fed spending since the beginning
of the pandemic, as Matt Taibbi points out, into
massive pay bonuses and stock buybacks.
“The bulk of this new wealth… is being
converted into compensation for a handful of
executives,” Taibbi writes. “Buybacks have
also been rampant in defense, pharmaceuticals, and
oil & gas, all of which also just finished their
second straight year of record, skyrocketing
profits. We’re now up to about 745 billionaires in
the US, who’ve collectively seen their net worth
grow about $2.1 trillion to $5 trillion since March
2020, with almost all that wealth increase tied to
the Fed’s ballooning balance sheet.”
Kroger is typical. The corporation, which
operates some 2,800 stores under different brands,
including Baker’s, City Market, Dillons, Food 4
Less, Foods Co., Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Gerbes, Jay C
Food Store, King Soopers, Mariano’s, Metro Market,
Pay-Less Super Markets, Pick ’n Save, QFC, Ralphs,
Ruler and Smith’s Food and Drug, earned
$4.1 billion in profits in 2020. By the end of
the third quarter of 2021, it had $2.28 billion in
cash, an increase of $399 million in the first
quarter of 2020. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen made
over $22 million, nearly doubling the $12 million he
made in 2018. This is over 900 times the salary of
the average Kroger worker. Kroger in the first three
quarters of 2021 also spent an estimated $1.3
billion on stock buybacks.
“Kroger is the only employer for 86 percent
of their workers, making it their sole source of
earned income,” Economic Roundtable in a
survey of Kroger workers found. “Working
full-time to earn a living wage would require Kroger
to pay $22 per hour for an annual living wage total
of $45,760. The average annual earnings of Kroger
workers, however, equal $29,655. This is $16,105
short of the annual income needed to pay for basic
necessities required for the living wage. More than
two-thirds of Kroger workers struggle for survival
due to low wages and part-time work schedules. Nine
out of ten Kroger workers report that their wages
have not increased as much as basic expenses such as
food and housing have increased. Since 1990, wages
for the most experienced Kroger food clerks have
declined from 11 to 22 percent (adjusted for
inflation) across the three regions surveyed. Across
the entire grocery industry, 29 percent of the labor
force is below or near the federal poverty
threshold.”
More than one-third (36%) of 10,000 employees at
Kroger-owned stores in southern California,
Colorado, and Washington said they were worried
about eviction. More than three-quarters (78%) are
food-insecure. One in 7 Kroger workers faced
homelessness in the past year. Nearly 1 in 5 (18%)
Kroger employees said they hadn’t paid the previous
month’s mortgage on time.
More than 8,000 unionized Kroger’s King Soopers
employees went on
strike on Jan. 12 in Colorado, demanding higher
wages and better working conditions from the
country’s largest grocery store chain and
fourth-largest private employer.
This is where one of the emerging front lines in
the class struggle is located. It is where we should
invest our time and energy.
Our capitalist democracy from the start was
rigged against us. The Electoral College permits
presidential candidates such as George W. Bush and
Trump to lose the popular vote and assume office.
The awarding of two senators per state, regardless
of the state’s population, means that 62 senators
represent one quarter of the population while six
represent another quarter. The founding fathers
disenfranchised women, Native Americans, African
Americans, and men without property. Most citizens
were intentionally locked out of the democratic
process by the ruling white male aristocrats, most
of them slaveholders.
All the openings in our democracy were the result
of prolonged popular struggle. Hundreds of workers
were murdered, thousands were wounded, tens of
thousands were blacklisted in our labor wars, the
bloodiest of any industrialized country.
Abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, crusading
journalists and those in the anti-war and civil
rights movements opened our democratic space. These
radical movements were repressed and ruthlessly
dismantled in the early 20th century in the name of
anti-communism. They were again targeted by the
corporate elites following the rise of new mass
movements in the 1930s.
These popular movements, which rose again in the
1960s, moved us, inch by bloody inch, towards
equality and social justice. Most of these gains
made in the 1960s have been rolled back under the
onslaught of neoliberalism, deregulation, and a
corrupt campaign finance system, legalized by court
rulings such as Citizens United, which allow the
rich and corporations to bankroll elections to
select political leaders and impose legislation. The
modern incarnation of 19th-century robber barons,
including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each worth some
$200 billion, summon us to our radical roots.
Class struggle defines most of human history.
Marx got this right. It is not a new story. The
rich, throughout history, have found ways to
subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the
masses, throughout history, have cyclically awoken
to throw off their chains.
Chris
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist and the author of 14 books, including
several New York Times best-sellers.
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