This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Almost two years ago, workers in Seattle won $15/hr, sparking a broad movement for $15/hour across the country. Over the last year, we’ve seen victories in numerous cities and states, including California, the largest economy in the country. Now Minneapolis workers are launching a ballot initiative to win $15/hour this year, and they need your support!
Low wage workers have pushed the demand for a $15 minimum wage into the center of American politics as a concrete answer to one of the central issues affecting workers – income inequality. Already, national polls show 63% of the public supporting a $15 minimum wage. This shows how quickly things change when workers take action.
15 Now Minnesota has been fighting an uphill battle to win $15/hour in the face of a powerful business establishment, and local politicians who have refused to take meaningful initiative to win.
The Minneapolis area is home to 17 Fortune 500 companies – the highest concentration in the country – yet also some of the worst racial inequities in the nation. A staggering 48% of black people in Minneapolis live in poverty, compared to 13% of white people. Over 100,000 workers in Minneapolis are still below a living wage.
To address this, 15 Now Minnesota is working with a powerful coalition of community organizations, workers’ centers, and unions to launch a ballot initiative this year. They are planning on collecting 20,000 signatures, 10% of all registered voters in Minneapolis, building a base challenge to big business politics in city hall.
They’ve already collected 7,000 signatures in the first two weeks!
If they win, Minneapolis will have the highest minimum wage of any city inland from the coasts! It would be a dramatic example for the Midwest, one of the hardest hit regions in the country by the economic crisis, where workers have borne the brunt of the economic devastation.
Working people have tremendous power when we work collectively towards a goal. I want to appeal to all those who support a $15/hour minimum wage to support this movement today by donating $15.
*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
From The Pen Of Josh Breslin
Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. A song-catcher is an old devise, a mythological devise for taking the sound of nature, the wind coming down the mountains, the rustle of the tree, the crack a twig bent in the river, the river follow itself and making an elixir for the ears, simple stuff if you are brave enough to try your luck. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe, a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger, and maybe his son Peter too, in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County down in Appalachia, down in the raw coal mining country of Eastern Kentucky far away from Derby dreams, mint juleps and ladies' broad-brimmed hats, of story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing the word hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)
Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers taking in the poor lass who now seeks revenge if only through the lament implied in the lyrics, althougheven then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Olde Saco where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ from down in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene while at Harvard hustling around like mad trying to get a record produced to ride the folk minute wave just forming and who, by the way, was not a guy who said or wrote "hollas," okay ). That night I heard the gravelly-voiced late folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.
The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived on the mountain stage via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music, to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and then go out and buy the advertiser’s products once they, the great unwashed mass audience, were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt after consuming the sponsors' products. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, went out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, went out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance now repentant if not sober, went out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, went down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available who could rub two bones together or make the rosin fly, maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.
But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio River, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal from age thirteen, as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if he wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no,” and despite some very hard times later when there wasn't much work and hence much to eat he never regretted his decision at least in public to this wife and kids)
All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio. But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Wondering how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand local players who added their own touches and who no longer used the song for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.
Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.
Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]
COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES (A.P. Carter)
The Carter Family - 1932
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning
They will first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
To make you think that they love you true
Straightway they'll go and court some other
Oh that's the love that they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting
When your head lay upon my breast
You could make me believe with the falling of your arm
That the sun rose in the West
I wish I were some little sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I would fly away to my false true lover
And while he'll talk I would sit and cry
But I am not some little sparrow
I have no wings nor can I fly
So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow
And try to pass my troubles by
I wish I had known before I courted
That love had been so hard to gain
I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden
And fastened it down with a silver chain
Young men never cast your eye on beauty
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away
In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day Organizing 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
In Honor Of May Day 2016-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day Organizing
2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of
International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working
People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker
All Out For May
1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working
People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises,
unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of
poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a
result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there
although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your
situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s
global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our
forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling
class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one
of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the
working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury
in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back,
fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic
Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May
Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This
May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate
grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber
barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades
but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people
have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start
off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing
sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low
wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General
Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending
bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to
fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since
the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And
finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern
necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time
deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the
harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing
immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances
voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much
whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing
and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being
for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s
Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us,
great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some
lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the
ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle
like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and
Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of
working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling
class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut
the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take
(and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks
(up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to
eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits.
Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can
help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed,
homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from
under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of
our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree
and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins!
Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works
projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and
water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of
Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here
no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage
increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher
education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No
transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1,
2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective
participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal
workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some,
or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is
not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a
coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to
graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their
schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to
rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass
consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to
make purchases on that day.
Chicago: Union Tops Try To Put Lid on Struggle-Teachers One-Day Strike Draws Wide Support
On April 1, the 27,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) waged a one-day strike against the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The strike culminated in a downtown rally of well over 10,000 red-shirted teachers and working-class, black and Latino parents angered by the city’s boarding up of public schools in their neighborhoods. Working without a contract since last June, the rank-and-file teachers are ready to fight. Turnout on the picket lines was solid, well in the 90 percent range at many schools. The CTU members also attended joint rallies at several of the city’s public universities and colleges that are threatened with layoffs, furloughs and April shutdowns because the state government has cut off funding.
At the rally were contingents of auto workers, members of the SEIU and nurses in union jackets as well as Fight For $15 McDonald’s workers. Auto workers have had the recent experience of having a sellout contract with the Big Three rammed down their throats by the UAW bureaucrats in the face of widespread sentiment for a strike. The SEIU has seen its membership in CPS decimated since the 2012 teachers strike, when the CTU and SEIU union bureaucrats colluded to allow SEIU members to scab on the striking teachers. SEIU scabbing was again allowed during the recent one-day strike.
Notably present were members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Locals 241 (bus) and 308 (rail) who have been working without a contract since January 1. Under the grinding conditions at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), bus drivers are forced to work split shifts spanning 13 hours while getting only eight hours’ pay—or less for part-timers. Drivers are hounded by the CTA’s more and more bloated layer of supervisors, who write them up even for being one minute ahead of schedule. The intense appetite evident in the CTU ranks for a full-on strike, if realized in deed, could well ignite similar sentiments in the ranks of the ATU.
CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey’s observation in the aftermath of the strike that “the city is on fire and we are the catalyst” brims with an undeserved self-satisfaction but captures a sense of the impact that the teachers’ militancy is having on Chicago’s working and poor people. In fact, CTU president Karen Lewis and Sharkey are trying to douse the flames. They are working overtime to contain the anger of the membership in the service of avoiding upsetting the apple cart in this Democratic Party stronghold in an election year. When the union delegates approved the one-day strike in March by a lopsided 486 to 124 vote, Lewis acknowledged that the opposition was mainly from delegates who “feel like why don’t we just do it now, do a real strike now, and be done with it, as opposed to just a one day strike.”
Thus, the strike on April 1 was orchestrated by Lewis and Sharkey with the hope of allowing the angry ranks to let off some steam in lieu of an open-ended strike. Not a word was said by the CTU tops at the rally about an all-out strike against the Chicago Public Schools system, although Lewis continues to toy with the ranks by tossing around possible dates for strike action. Instead, the labor tops, themselves a central component of the Democratic Party vote machine, go out of their way to aim their fire at the Republicans. “This strike is targeted primarily to Bruce Rauner,” Karen Lewis made clear, referring to the state’s Republican governor, who has issued threats to take over the Chicago schools and throw them into bankruptcy in order to bust the CTU and zero out the teachers’ pensions (InTheseTimes.com, 2 April). What the union should be doing today is preparing for an all-out strike. The reality is that as of now the union’s leadership has no plans for a real struggle. The only scheduled event is an April 20 “day of action” crawl to Springfield, the state capital.
Rauner’s threats are in fact toothless because the Democrats are by far the dominant party in Illinois, including controlling the state legislature. While lambasting Rauner with “fight the right” rhetoric, the CTU bureaucrats endorsed the re-election of Democrat Mike Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In the aftermath of the 2012 CTU strike, Madigan tried to ram through a bill capping Illinois teachers’ pensions outside of Chicago. From Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to Madigan to Rauner, all the capitalist politicians are looking to bail out the state on the backs of the unions and the oppressed by gutting everything from workers’ pensions to public services. In pushing to bust the CTU, Emanuel has simply been carrying out the school “reform” policies of his former White House boss, Barack Obama. These policies are designed to help spur state governments to shutter supposedly failing inner-city public schools, roll out the welcome mat to non-union charter schools and launch anti-union attacks on seniority and tenure. Going to Springfield to beg from these enemies of labor is simply an exercise in masochism. Chicago’s teachers are more than ready to show the CPS and the bourgeois politicians a real display of labor’s power.
At the beginning of this year, Emanuel’s Democratic Party administration was on the ropes because of his cover-up of the dash cam video of black youth Laquan McDonald being gunned down in cold blood by a Chicago cop. On January 6, as the bully Emanuel’s popularity plummeted, the CTU House of Delegates passed a resolution calling for his resignation. But Lewis was quick to distance herself: “That was something that came from the membership and we respect our democratic process. Personally, I don’t care” (Chicago Tribune, 16 January). Since that time, demands for Emanuel’s resignation have dwindled, doubtless reflecting pressure from Democratic politicos to not make life difficult in the presidential election year.
But the cop murders of black people have not subsided a whit. A recent Emanuel-appointed task force delivered the unremarkable verdict that the Chicago Police Department is plagued by systemic racism. Not surprisingly, the report did not indict Rahm or his Democratic Party mayoral predecessors for their role in covering up and perpetuating the cops’ ongoing racist mayhem. The race-caste oppression of black people is an integral component of the American capitalist system and will not be reformed away. At the April 1 rally, Lewis responded to hecklers about police violence by intoning, “Cops are not our enemies.” In fact, the cops are the armed enforcers of the racist capitalist system. The next speaker, Page May, a representative of Assata’s Daughters, responded profanely and justly, “Fuck the police!” Sharkey later denounced Page for having “condemned police in a way our Union does not condone, and we regret what was said.”
It seems that there are a lot of fires for Lewis and Sharkey to try to put out. In January, Lewis tried to push a sellout contract deal that would have gutted pension benefits and jacked up health care costs, but that offer was unanimously rejected by the CTU bargaining committee. CPS fired back with a threat to stop making pension payments for CTU members. But in the face of the April 1 walkout, the city backed down and made the payments as scheduled. Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune waged a gutter press scabherding drive, ludicrously predicting thousands of scabs would cross the CTU picket lines. In fact, the strike was solid, with even CPS admitting that less than 1 percent of teachers reported to work.
In justifying limiting the strike to just one day, the CTU bureaucrats moan about “legality,” claiming a full strike would be against state laws that require a four-month “fact finding” period after the December strike vote before a strike can begin. Criminally, back in 2012 Lewis supported Senate Bill 7, which imposed these union-busting requirements, including mandating a 75 percent supermajority to approve a strike. This is an outrageous government interference in internal union affairs.
City Hall and the CPS were calling the solid April 1 strike “illegal” too, and are seeking a court order to prevent another one from happening. To that end, Emanuel and his flunkey Forrest Claypool, who now runs CPS, cried crocodile tears about the children who would miss a day of school when the teachers walked out. That is rich coming from politicians who have already closed the schools for three furlough days this spring to save money, who have shut down ghetto schools by the score and who cram the overwhelmingly black and Latino students into crowded classrooms without enough school supplies. It’s no wonder that a recent poll showed that the majority of Chicagoans favor the union over Emanuel as a force to improve public education. As one high school senior said before the strike rally, “Any kid who shows up to today’s protests is going to learn a lot” (InTheseTimes.com, 2 April).
The attacks on Chicago’s public schools are part and parcel of an all-sided drive to gut public education, falling heavily on the city’s black and Latino populations. For decades, Chicago State University (CSU) has served the impoverished ghetto masses, who can get a college education there at an “affordable” $12,000 a year. Close to half of its overwhelmingly black student body of 4,500 are mothers. With a campus shutdown threatened for April 30, the administration demanded that all the campus workers turn in their keys in anticipation of mass layoffs. Spring break was canceled and commencement was moved up to April 28. At Northeastern Illinois University, workers are being forced to take one furlough day per week, a 20 percent pay cut. “It’s aimed at hurting minorities,” said a black junior at CSU. “Other schools here would never close” (New York Times, 9 April).
In January, when there were widespread demands for Emanuel’s resignation for his cover-up of McDonald’s murder, we wrote: “The crisis now rocking his regime and reverberating up to the highest echelons of the Democratic Party opens the door for our class—the multiracial working class—to launch some real struggle not only in its own interests but also in the fight against racist cop terror and in defense of all the oppressed” (“We Need a Multiracial Workers Party!” WV No. 1081, 15 January). That observation is still true today. Chicago’s working and poor people would rise in support of an all-out CTU strike.
Open condemnations of such action come, not surprisingly, from the virulently right-wing governor and the anti-labor Chicago Tribune. But it is reliance on the Democratic Party, from City Hall to the state assembly in Springfield, pushed by its allies in the trade-union bureaucracy that poses the biggest roadblock to strike action. The trade-union bureaucracy subordinates the interests of the workers to the interests of the capitalist rulers, mainly through its support to the Democratic Party which, no less than the Republicans, is a party of the class enemy. This is just as true of “progressive” bureaucrats like Lewis, Sharkey, and their Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) that runs the CTU as of more conservative officials.
Lewis and her CORE operation continue to be darlings of the left. None are more fulsome in their enthusiasm than the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which has acted as CORE’s chief press agent, particularly touting Sharkey. For years, ISO supporters both inside and outside the CTU have promoted CORE with nary a word of criticism. The online Socialist Worker (4 April) lambastes the Republican Rauner as a “different bad guy on the scene this time around” without even mentioning, much less criticizing, the CTU’s endorsement of Rauner’s partner in crime, the Democrat Madigan.
These types advise the workers to put their trust in the very forces that have led and continue to lead the attacks on their wages and benefits. The collusion of the trade-union bureaucrats with the bosses goes hand in hand with their abandonment of union militancy. It has opened up their members to the unending attacks on their well-being while perpetuating the demoralization that has led to the decline in union membership nationwide. What the unions need is a genuine class-struggle leadership that is dedicated to fighting against all capitalist exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to begin to build the revolutionary workers party that will fight to overturn the racist American capitalist order.
