Workers Vanguard No. 1014 |
7 December 2012
|
Billionaire Bloomberg Squeezes NYC Workers-Hungry and Homeless in the Shadow of Wall Street
DECEMBER 4—Five weeks ago, a weakening Hurricane Sandy, which had
devastated parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. East Coast, combined with a
Nor’easter to steamroll much of the coastal areas of New York City. From the
east and south shores of Staten Island across the Lower New York Bay into
Brooklyn’s Coney Island and Red Hook and the Rockaways in Queens, the densely
populated banking center and port metropolis was slammed with killer winds, a
record storm surge and massive flooding. Since then, what stands in stark
contrast is the extent of recovery for the city’s rich and poor, for the
capitalist owners and for the workers who make the city run.
Wall Street was back online within two days of the storm’s
landfall. In little more than a week, a grueling, 24-7 deployment of transit,
sanitation and utility workers had restored life in most of Manhattan to
conditions little changed from the holiday shopping season one year prior. But
for the largely black and Latino residents of public housing projects and the
homeless, the picture was very different. Many were served their Thanksgiving
dinners from volunteer food lines in outdoor parking lots or inside parish
halls. More than a month after the storm, thousands of people still lack heat,
water, power or working elevators, at best getting intermittent service. The
high-traffic emergency room of Bellevue, the 276-year-old free public hospital
evacuated in the storm, is still closed and will not resume operation as a Level
One trauma center before February.
After Sandy flooded the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, it took the
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) two weeks to dispatch workers to knock
on tenants’ doors to see if they were alive. When agency workers finally did
arrive, they found 127 residents requiring medical care, six of whom needed
ambulances. When the NYCHA showed up in the Rockaways, one member of a family of
12 living in a single apartment told the New York Daily News (13
November), “We’re living like animals and all they were worried about was the
$1,000-a-month rent.”
Even in fair weather, it is a struggle for the impoverished
families who live in the projects to get apartments painted, elevators
maintained or broken boilers fixed. But after the storm, even as the NYCHA
announced that it would be weeks or months before heat was restored, it
initially threatened to evict anyone who didn’t pay rent. No surprise, then,
that Red Hook residents lining up for Red Cross blankets were furious when NYCHA
chairman John Rhea showed up on November 12 to magnanimously announce that they
would get a partial rent credit, calling this “a nice little Christmas present.”
Evidently NYCHA bureaucrats view the public housing residents in about the same
light as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bosses and city administrators
view their workforces, which is to say, as master to subject.
The disaster brought on by the storm threw into sharp relief the
everyday cruelties of life in the financial center of U.S. capitalist society,
which is run for the profit of the tiny group of families who own industry and
the banks. The number of New Yorkers who are dependent on food pantries or soup
kitchens—a number that includes many working poor as well as unemployed—has
swelled far beyond the 1.4 million (17 percent of the population) who survived
in this way before Sandy hit. Already before the storm, there were 47,000
homeless in shelters across the city, many of them victims of bank foreclosures,
others too poor to afford the cost of rent. Sandy increased the number of
homeless by tens of thousands, with most of those driven from public housing in
low-lying areas. The new homeless have been shuffled chaotically from evacuation
centers in public schools to armory floors to hotel rooms without cooking
facilities. One Far Rockaway evacuee, roused from his bed for a transfer,
declared: “It’s like you were being processed to go to jail.”
The scourge of homelessness, though compounded by natural disasters
like Hurricane Sandy, is firmly rooted in the normal functioning of the
capitalist system. A study early this year by the advocacy group Picture the
Homeless estimated that the thousands of properties in New York City that are
kept vacant, largely for the purpose of real estate speculation, could house
some 200,000 people. The same is true nationally as banks have driven millions
from their homes, leaving the properties vacant until real estate prices
rebound. According to the 2010 census, almost 19 million homes in this country
sit vacant while some 3.5 million people remain homeless.
By the lights of the capitalist profit system, it is entirely just
that the bourgeoisie and its high-priced executives possess mansions and
vacation homes around the world, with more rooms than they can count, while the
poor are consigned to crumbling, rat- and roach-infested projects. Meanwhile,
working people who buy homes are prey to the banking and insurance vultures. As
long ago as 1872, Friedrich Engels, who co-founded with Karl Marx the modern
communist movement, addressed the problem in his work The Housing
Question:
“One thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of
houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing
shortage,’ provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally
only occur through the expropriation of the present owners by quartering in
their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As
soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by
concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other
expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.”
Engels concluded:
“As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist
it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any
other social question affecting the lot of the workers. The solution lies in the
abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the
means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.”
Picking the Pockets of Heroes
The heroes of the Hurricane Sandy disaster are those unionized
workers who were key to saving lives and getting the city back up and running,
even as many of their own homes were destroyed. Transit workers have been lauded
for rapidly restoring subway and bus service. Sanitation workers, who worked
12-hour shifts for weeks, have been hailed by those in hard-hit neighborhoods
for removing mountains of storm debris at great personal risk. But even as NYC
mayor Michael Bloomberg and his cronies pat workers on the back with one hand,
they’re picking their pockets with the other.
The MTA docked the pay of thousands of transit workers who could
not get to work in the first days of the disaster because mass transit was shut
down and bridges and tunnels were knocked out of commission. For workers who
needed emergency leave because their lives had been upended, the MTA bosses came
up with a cynical scheme to allow them time off from work—by having other
transit workers “donate” their own vacation days or sick leave! Yet even that
plan cannot trump the artifice of Mayor Bloomberg. A capitalist in his own right
with a net worth of $25 billion, Bloomberg e-mailed city workers to press them
to contribute, through an automatic payroll deduction, to a “Mayor’s Fund” that
supports volunteer relief efforts.
This is just a sick twist to the lie of “shared sacrifice” that
government agencies and corporations, echoed by the pro-capitalist trade-union
bureaucracy, have foisted on workers for years. Throughout the five-year-long
economic crisis, both Democratic and Republican state and local governments have
cut into wages, pensions and other benefits as part of their war against public
employees unions, which are portrayed as public enemies. Even before that,
bourgeois politicians invoked budget crises to slash the workforce rolls.
During a blizzard that hit NYC two years ago, the same sanitation
workers lauded in the press today were targets of a tabloid hate campaign for a
supposed work “slowdown.” In fact, the workers had to deal with the emergency
after 400 jobs had been cut in Bloomberg’s austerity budget and in the face of
utter negligence by the city administration, which was completely unprepared for
that storm. Today, the unions in every single municipal bargaining unit in the
city, plus the subway and bus workers in the Transport Workers Union, are
working without a contract or with their old contract extended, and some have
been doing so for many years. In fact, all the unionized workers
who are laboring mightily to provide necessary services in the New York-New
Jersey region have been under attack. Last summer Con Edison, backed by
Democratic NY governor Andrew Cuomo and rolling in profits, strong-armed the
Utility Workers union into making major concessions to end a lockout. This gave
the lie to the union tops’ tired refrain that Con Edison bosses and workers are
a “family.”
The labor officialdom has played dead in the face of the anti-union
assault, bowing to New York State’s Taylor Law, which bans public employee
strikes, and the whole gamut of laws and regulations aimed at hog-tying union
struggle. To fight for what’s needed, the labor movement must be broken from the
program of class collaboration, which has its political expression in the union
misleaders’ support to the Democratic Party.
The labor movement should be fighting for a massive program
of public works to restore the damage done by Sandy and rebuild the
decaying infrastructure that the capitalist rulers have allowed to rot. This
would necessarily be combined with a fight to organize the
unorganized and for jobs for all through a shorter
workweek at full union wages. Struggles for these necessities point to the need
to fight for a workers government that would seize the productive
wealth that has been squandered by the capitalist rulers and put it toward
rebuilding this society. This calls for the forging of a new, class-struggle
leadership of the union movement as part of the struggle to build a
revolutionary workers party.
Bourgeoisie Appeals to Volunteerism
If one feature has clearly stood out in the aftermath of Sandy, it
is the massive volunteer effort that continues into the second month of the
disaster. Out of basic human decency, thousands of people have manned food lines
and free clinics and assisted with debris removal, or have simply passed out
bottles of water. But their efforts can fill no more than a tiny part of the
void created by the capitalist rulers’ refusal to mobilize the resources—like
massive amounts of money and hired labor—required to address the crisis.
The volunteer effort has been promoted by bourgeois politicians
from Barack Obama to Bloomberg and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who are
seizing on it to alibi their neglect of the needs of the
population. Thus it does not come as a surprise that Bloomberg and the
publishers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have
hailed the aid provided by Occupy Sandy, a grouping that harks back to last
year’s Occupy Wall Street movement. Chiming in from the left side of the choir,
the reformist International Socialist Organization gushed that Occupy Sandy
signaled that “a push for a people’s recovery is beginning to emerge”
(Socialist Worker, 28 November).
In a brief appearance in the Rockaways on November 29, Bloomberg
told Occupy Sandy volunteers, “You really are making a difference.” He then
hopped into his SUV to flee the wrath of residents still without heat. Earlier,
a reporter for the left-liberal Nation (5 November) observed Occupy Sandy
volunteers joining with FEMA personnel and city cops who brutally drove Occupy
protesters from Zuccotti Park in Manhattan last year, in chanting, “We are
unstoppable, another world is possible.” The reporter thought this was “a truly
bizarre moment.” But in fact the populist Occupy movement from the beginning saw
the cops—the racist, strikebreaking enforcers of capitalist rule—as part of the
“99 percent,” promoting the lie that the police and those they are paid to
suppress have common interests.
As seen today in New York, this country’s ruling class possesses
boundless contempt for workers, the poor and everyone they have relegated to the
bottom of society. At the same time, they moved with alacrity to get the stock
market and other major businesses back in gear after the storm hit.
On a much more massive and deadly scale, the same “priorities” were
at play when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and especially New Orleans
seven years ago. For the capitalist class, what mattered in New Orleans was the
port and the tourist trade. Poor and black residents of the city were left to
die or suffer horribly in the sweltering heat. With the National Guard
patrolling the streets, black people were criminalized as “looters,” shot at by
cops and vigilantes and locked up in “Camp Greyhound.” Those whose homes were
flooded were shipped out of state, with the intent that they never return.
In the months and years that followed, the bourgeoisie used every
opportunity to reshape the previously majority-black city—it was even blithely
argued that a city at or below sea level (a requirement for a port) is by nature
uninhabitable. The public school system was largely privatized and the teachers
fired, decimating the union and making the city the epicenter for the charter
school movement. Intact and scrubbed of damage, Charity Hospital, a public
institution, was nonetheless closed down. Large- and small-scale construction
speculation abounds to this day. The port has grown, but the International
Longshoremen’s Association has lost more ground to scab outfits. Although
consisting of solid low-rises that survived the storm well, most public housing
was simply razed.
While the devastation wrought by Katrina was on a scale far greater
than that of Hurricane Sandy, both crises, in their own way, laid bare the
social reality of capitalist America. Why were the 40 nursing homes in
flood-prone areas of New York City not evacuated? A report in the New York
Times (3 December) showed that it was all about saving money. According to
the Times, the evacuation of patients last year in the face of Tropical
Storm Irene “led to millions of dollars in health care, transportation, housing
and other costs.” Thus “when Hurricane Sandy loomed, the officials were acutely
aware that they could come under criticism if they ordered another evacuation
that proved unnecessary.” Nor were the highly vulnerable Bellevue and New York
University hospitals evacuated until after the storm knocked out power, forcing
workers to carry patients down flight after flight of darkened stairways.
Bloomberg’s focus was on the NYC marathon money machine—for which dozens of
generators had been reserved—until a public outcry forced the cancellation of
the race.
There is a fundamental divide in society between the capitalist
class and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’
immense profits. The working class is not just one more victim of austerity
within the “99 percent.” It is the only force with the potential social power
and historic interest to sweep away the barbarous capitalist system. As we wrote
in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (“New Orleans: Racist Atrocity,” WV
No. 854, 16 September 2005):
“Despite differences over particular policies, the Republicans and
Democrats are united in defending capitalism—an anarchic, irrational
profit-driven system that cannot even provide for the safety and welfare of the
population. The situation cries out for a socialist planned economy, in which
natural resources and the technological and productive forces of society would
be marshaled on behalf of human needs, not profit. What is
urgently required is to build a workers party that can lead a workers revolution
to rip power from the hands of the capitalist class and its political agents,
right-wing Republican and liberal Democrat alike.”
