On The Wisconsin Recall Elections- The Limits of Parliamentary Tactics In Today's Class Struggle

Click on the headline to link to a news article concerning the recent Wisconsin recall elections in which those who advocated such a tactic were defeated.

Markin comment:
In the class struggle which is now raging more than somewhat in this country, a one-sided class struggle for the most part that we are not winning or even close to doing so, the militant labor movement has learned to use many forms of protest strategy and tactics. One such arena is the parliamentary struggle. But as the results here from the special recall election in Wisconsin show that is not always our most effective way to win what we need. Especially in this case where the fundamental labor right to have our own organizations for collective bargaining was at stake.

The attempt to try to defend that right, as has now happened in Wisconsin, by parliamentary means, has always struck me as somewhat utopian. Depending on the whims of an electorate, any electorate, where labor’s votes count for no more than a tea-partyite or those of any other political persuasion just did not make sense to me. Not these days. During the past winter when the Wisconsin organized working class was up in arms, both public and private, and with many in-state supporters as well as a groundswell of others nationally, there were calls for a general strike as a way to fight back. I raised that call in this space and others did in theirs as well. Who knows if that would have stopped this frontal attack on labor’s basic rights. What I do know is that it should have been tested under those circumstances. Yesterday’s defeats in Wisconsin only makes that more evident.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law
by Stephen Lendman

Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 15 Jun 2011
union busting

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

At the state and federal levels, pro-business/anti-worker rulings are nothing new. US Supreme Court history is rife with them since the 19th century, and no wonder.

From inception, America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.

In 1787 in Philadelphia, "the people" who mattered most were elitists. America's revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under a system establishing illusory democracy at the federal, state and local levels.

Today, all three branches of government prove it's more corrupt, ruthless, and indifferent to fundamental freedoms and human needs than ever, including worker rights to bargain collectively with management on equal terms. Forget it. They're going, going, gone.

Last March, a protracted Senate battle ended when hard-line Republicans violated Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring 24 hours prior notice for special sessions unless giving it is impossible or impractical.

The epic battle ended along party lines after State Assembly members past Walker's bill 53 - 42, following the Senate voting 18 - 1 with no debate.

At issue was passing an old-fashioned union-busting law with no Democrats present, brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses selling out rank and file members for self-enrichement and privilege, complicit with corporate CEOs.

Besides other draconian provisions, the measure permits collective bargaining only on wage issues before ending them altogether, what's ahead unless stopped.

On May 27, however, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi rescinded Walker's bill, ruling Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law. They promptly appealed to Wisconsin's Supreme Court, needing a decision before June 30, the 2011 - 2013 budget deadline.

Republicans, in fact, warned that without prompt resolution they'd include anti-worker provisions in their budget bill, practically daring the High Court not to accommodate them.

Unsurprisingly, they obliged, reinstating Republican Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measure, clearing the way ahead to strip public employees of all rights, heading them like all US workers for neo-serfdom without collective national action to stop it.

On June 14, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers Patrick Marley and Don Walker headlined, "Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law," saying:

"Acting with unusual speed, the (Court) Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of (Walker's) controversial plan to end most collective bargaining (rights) for tens of thousands of public workers," in clear violation of state law.

Nonetheless, ruling 4 - 3, the Supreme Court said lawmakers were "not subject to the state's open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily" acted in March.

Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson disagreed, rebuking her colleagues for judicial errors and faulty judgment in a stinging dissent, saying:

The Court unjustifiably "reached a predetermined conclusion not based on the fact(s) and the law, which undermines the majority's ultimate decision."

Majority justices, in fact, "make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties' arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891."

Republicans praised the decision. Democrats said they'd move to amend the state constitution to assure meetings law enforcement, what could take years and only be possible if they have majority powers.

The measure will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette publishes it, what he's certain to do quickly.

The ruling was similar to an Illinois January 27 one when its Supreme Court ruled Rahm Emanuel could run for mayor despite his residence ineligibility according to binding state law since 1818, the year Illinois gained statehood.

The law says only qualified voters who "resided in the municipality at least one year preceding the election or appointment" are eligible to run for office. Although Emanuel didn't qualify, the High Court ruled for him anyway, proving it's not the law that counts (in Illinois, Wisconsin or anywhere in America), it's enough clout to subvert it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

Wisconsin Judge Strikes Down Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

Saturday, May 28, 2011
Wisconsin Law Strikes Down Anti-Union Law

Wisconsin Judge Strikes Down Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

Since taking office on January 3, Republican Governor Scott Walker waged war on public workers and their unions, aiming to restrict collective bargaining rights to wage negotiations before ending them altogether.

He also demanded draconian health insurance and pension contribution increases, doubling them for state employees during hard times when they're already strapped to make ends meet. Doing so called for pay cuts ranging from 8 - 20% ahead of more planned reductions coming.

On March 9, a protracted Senate battle ended when hard-line Republicans violated Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring 24 hours notice prior for special sessions unless giving it is impossible or impractical.

At issue was passing an old-fashioned union-busting law with no Democrats present, brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses selling out rank and file members for self-enrichement and privilege, complicit with corporate CEOs.

The epic battle ended along party lines after State Assembly members past Walker's bill 53 - 42, following the Senate voting 18 - 1 with no debate. The measure reads:

"This bill authorizes a state agency to discharge any state employee who fails to report to work as scheduled for any three unexcused working days during a state emergency or who participates in a strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls. Under the bill, engaging in any of these actions constitutes just cause for discharge."

In addition, the governor may unilaterally declare "state of emergency" authority to fire striking workers, and under the section titled, "Discharge of State Employees:"

"The Governor may issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency for the state or any portion of the state if he or she determines that an emergency resulting from a disaster or imminent threat of a disaster exists."

In other words, he can dictatorially do what he wishes, especially regarding public worker rights and job security. They're gone unless resurrected by a sustained, mobilized, united, and committed mass action statewide shutdown for rights too important to lose.

Other provisions stipulated worker responsibility for half their pension contributions, and minimally 12.6% of healthcare premiums. In addition, future pay raises are pegged to annual CPI increases, a rigged index not reflecting true inflation. Greater ones may only be approved by statewide referendum, a cumbersome process taking time.

Further, unions must hold annual votes to let workers decide whether or not to be members, and state authorities no longer will collect union dues from paychecks.

Dane County Judge Strikes Down Anti-Union Law

On May 27, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi rescinded Walker's bill in a 33-page decision, ruling Republican lawmakers violated Wisconsin's open meetings law.

On March 18, she placed it on temporary hold, but Thursday's ruling voided it, pending an appeal to Wisconsin's Supreme Court that may reverse her.

Nonetheless, Dane County Democrat District Attorney, Ismael Ozanne, said, "It's what we were looking for," acknowledging the war isn't won, pending the higher court ruling. "The supremes are the supremes," he said. "They can do what they want."

Ozanne sued to block Walker's bill after Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D. Kenosha) filed a complaint about not being given lawful notice.

Expecting bill supporters to denounce her, Sumi cited "clear and convincing evidence" that Wisconsin's open meetings law was violated, one lawmakers are bound to uphold. She also said it carried constitutional force because its provisions say the Legislature's doors must remain open when in session.

In fact, while Republicans met in conference committee, only one entrance was open, police blocking people trying to enter. As a result, Sumi wrote:

"The Legislature and its committees are bound to comply with the open meetings law by their own choice. Having made that choice, they cannot now shield themselves from the provisions that give the law force and effect."

Afterward, Walker said Wisconsin's Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on June 6, then decide whether to take the case, adding:

"Either it will be resolved like that - through the Supreme Court - or we'll look at alternatives with the Legislature," suggesting union-busting will pass, whatever it takes to do it. In fact, Republicans must by June 30 to be part of the 2011 - 2013 state budget deadline.

Marquette University Law Professor Rick Esenberg said Sumi's decision didn't surprise him, adding:

"She had clearly indicated that was her view. (But) you had the sense that she had established that she wasn't going to rule this early, (yet) apparently decided she needed to do it."

Other issues are also in play, including recall petition drives, potentially targeting nine senators, six Republicans and three Democrats.

On July 12, recall elections will be held. In addition, two lawsuits were filed, other court challenges expected later. Moreover, if Republicans defeat open meeting violation charges, the legislation itself may be challenged, given its assault on longstanding rights, summarily annulled tyrannically.

As of now, however, a protracted battle perhaps looms, facing long odds of winning unless enough people power decides losing is not an option and will go to the wall to prevent it. Stay tuned. As Wisconsin goes, perhaps the nation.

On Wisconsin!!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:09 AM

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From The ISO Website- "International Socialist Review"- Class struggle in Wisconsin

Class struggle in Wisconsin

Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper

A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:

The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.

What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.

What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)

The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.

Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.

The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.

The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.

Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.

The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.

Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”

Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.

Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.

Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.

Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.

“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”

Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.

Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.

Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.

The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.

This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.

The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.

After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.

The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.

But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.

The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.

Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.

While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.

Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.

But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10 (California)!-Union Attacked for Solidarity with Public Workers

Workers Vanguard No. 979
29 April 2011

Union Attacked for Solidarity with Public Workers

All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10!

Reliance on the Democrats: Recipe for Defeat

In their call for nationwide protests on April 4, the AFL-CIO tops said the day would be one of “rising up to support workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states.” But the only genuine labor action was taken by members of Bay Area Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), who overwhelmingly stayed away from work that day. The port of Oakland was shut down for 24 hours.

Now the shipping companies represented by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) are gunning for the union with a lawsuit against Local 10 and its president, Richard Mead, demanding that the ILWU foot the bill for “damages sustained” by the PMA as a result of the port shutdown. Although no price is named, in a similar suit East Coast shipping companies are demanding that the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) pay $5 million for a two-day shutdown of the ports in New York and New Jersey last September in response to a union-busting attack on ILA jobs. According to the head of the PMA, the employers also want the courts to enforce an injunction against further work stoppages.

Local 10 longshore workers stood up against the assault on public workers unions. Now all of labor must stand up for Local 10! Stop the PMA’s union-busting attack!

That Local 10 members gave up a day’s pay in solidarity with embattled public workers unions is a real statement of the deeply felt anger and desire to fight at the base of the unions. This was also witnessed in the tens of thousands of workers who mobilized in protest outside the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, this winter. But the labor misleaders have done their level best to contain any militancy and redirect it back into support for the Democratic Party. This was the intended purpose of the April 4 “We Are One” rallies, as was baldly stated a week later by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in a speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. Declaring that “the energy of working people is infectious and their solidarity and commitment are inspiring,” Trumka advised that “if Democrats are to take back the House in 2012, and to hold on to the White House and the Senate, it will be because they succeed in riding this wave.”

The price of the bureaucrats’ subordination of the unions to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans represents the interests of the capitalist class enemy, can be counted in busted unions, millions of unemployed and the living hell that is life for the ghetto and barrio poor and countless others who have been written off by a system based on the exploitation of labor. So beholden are the labor bureaucrats to the capitalist order that even the notion that there is a working class in this country has been deep-sixed, reflected in the pitch at the April 4 protests to “reclaim the middle class.” By the same token, the union misleaders were desperate to avoid the remotest hint of working-class struggle against the one-sided class war by the capitalist exploiters and their state.

At the “We Are One” rallies in Oakland and San Francisco, called by the Alameda and SF Labor Councils, the organizers would not even allow a speaker from ILWU Local 10, the only union whose members took any kind of actual labor action! There was no such censorship of a representative of the strikebreaking cops. One of the few speakers at the opening rally for the thousands-strong SF protest was the president of the Police Officers Association of San Francisco, who used the occasion to declare: “I am a member of labor just like you are.” Far from being “union brothers,” the cops are the armed thugs of the capitalist state whose job is to smash labor struggle. This would readily be seen if there were any real fight against the union-busting assault on public workers, just as it was seen when the SF police killed two workers in the 1934 longshore strike. The “bloody Thursday” assault by the cops was the spark for the citywide general strike that laid the basis for founding the ILWU.

The only speaker who even mentioned that Local 10 members had not worked on April 4 was the secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, Stephanie Bloomingdale. But this was not to promote any such action by others, much less to address the crying need to mobilize the power of labor in strike action to fight the assault on public workers unions. On the contrary. Bloomingdale hailed the Wisconsin judge who put a temporary stay on the implementation of the state’s union-busting bill for not letting Republican governor Scott Walker “get away” with it. But Walker did get away with it, as did the Ohio legislature, which passed an even more draconian anti-union law in the immediate aftermath.

In response to the PMA’s lawsuit against Local 10, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution calling for a “mass mobilization of all Bay Area Labor Councils and the California AFL-CIO” on April 25 at PMA headquarters. But the Labor Council officials did little to nothing to mobilize their membership for this protest, which drew about 150 people. Fine words will not stop the union-busters!

The capitalist rulers have been winning the war against labor because the power of the working class has been shackled by the class-collaborationist policies of the trade-union leadership. Labor’s weapons are inherent in its collective organization—strike action, mass pickets, plant occupations, hot-cargoing of scab goods, etc. The capitalists’ arsenal is the state—the courts, cops and military. The 1934 SF general strike, and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year, were pitched battles between workers and cops and other strikebreakers. All of them were led by reds. The 1934 Minneapolis strikes, which forged the Teamsters as a powerful industrial union, were led by supporters of the Trotskyist Communist League of America. James P. Cannon, the founding leader of American Trotskyism, underlined the political program that lay behind this victory:

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt’s Labor Board; they weren’t fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal ‘friend of labor’ president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis.…

“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity.”

—James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)

If the unions are to wage the battles necessary for their own defense and in the interests of all the oppressed, they must be mobilized in opposition to the capitalist state and independently of all of the political parties of the class enemy—Democrats, Republicans and Greens. That means a political struggle to get rid of the sellouts sitting on top of the unions who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged. This is not simply a matter of militancy but, as Cannon pointed out, a question of political program. What is needed is a leadership that will arm the workers with an understanding both of their social power and their historic interests to free all of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war inherent to a system based on production for profit. Forging such a leadership is in turn an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.

“Progressive” Labor Tops: Different Talk, Same Walk

In an interview on KPFA radio the day after the April 4 protests, ILWU Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas said that “one of the reasons” no Local 10 member was allowed to speak “is because the Democratic Party is not in favor of workers taking independent action.” True enough. But when asked if he was opposed to the unions continuing to pour millions into backing the Democrats and funding Obama’s re-election campaign, Thomas responded that the unions should support only those Democrats who would be “accountable” to the working class. In short, behind all the seemingly radical rhetoric that has historically been a trademark of the “progressive” labor tops in Local 10 is the same old shell game of peddling the Democrats as a party that can be made to serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed if, in Thomas’ words, their feet are “held to the fire.”

Last year, the Local 10 leadership pulled out all the stops to mobilize the ranks for the election of Democrat Jean Quan as mayor of Oakland. Boosted as a “friend of labor,” Quan was the headline speaker at the Oakland April 4 rally. Denouncing Wisconsin governor Walker for stripping public workers unions of the right to bargain for their members, Quan contrasted the good offices of her administration, declaring: “We will have layoffs but they will come as part of collective bargaining.” It would be hard to find a more chemically pure expression of the role played by the Democratic Party. The Republicans revel in taking out the knife to slaughter the unions. The Democrats hand the knife to the union bureaucrats to slash the wages and benefits of their members in the name of “preserving collective bargaining.”

That’s exactly what the union leaders following the Democrats, who had already agreed to such givebacks, were willing to do in Wisconsin. In California, the bureaucrats promote Democratic governor Jerry Brown, who has axed millions from social programs for the poor, as a man they can do business with.

But Quan’s appeal for the unions to sacrifice more jobs did not go down well with much of the crowd at the Oakland rally. She was drowned out in a chorus of booing, a response aptly described by one reporter as reflecting “a schism between the labor leaders who invited Quan to headline their rally and rank-and-file workers impatient with years of government cut-backs” (Bay Citizen, 4 April). It is precisely such burgeoning anger that the labor tops are working overtime to head off.

At the same time, calls for a “general strike” have been coming from left-talking bureaucrats like Ken Riley, president of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina. Heading into an “Emergency Labor Meeting” held in Cleveland on March 4-5, which was called to “explore together what we can do to mount a more militant and robust fight-back campaign to defend the interests of working people,” Riley said, “I don’t see any other way than a general workers strike.” But there was no call for any such action coming out of this meeting, which drew some 100 of the more radical-sounding and even “socialist” labor fakers and their hangers-on. Rather, the best they could choke out was that labor “must go to the streets,” meekly adding that “where possible” the participants would promote “industrial actions” on April 4.

Evidently, they did not find it “possible.” Instead, the April 4 protests are being portrayed as helping build “momentum” toward a general strike. This is simply to provide some militant-sounding cover for a program these labor fakers share in common with the top AFL-CIO officialdom: reliance on the capitalist state. The “perspectives” approved by those attending the Cleveland meeting advise: “There is plenty of money available without demanding givebacks from public employees, but this requires changing our nation’s priorities to raise taxes on the rich, redirect war dollars to meet human needs, and more—all demands that we must place on the federal government.” Far from building momentum for any kind of real labor action, much less a general strike, such appeals serve merely to dissipate and divert the workers’ anger into the illusion that the government can be pressured into serving their needs.

A central chant at both the SF and Oakland rallies was “tax the rich!” The banks, corporations and other capitalist enterprises are sitting on mountains of cash, the ill-gotten gains of a system based on the exploitation of labor for the profits of the few. But the working class is not going to get its hands on this money by appeals to the federal government, whose purpose is not to “meet human needs” but to defend and increase the profitability of American imperialism.

Capitalist governments might temporarily increase tax rates for the rich to meet the needs of the ruling class as a whole, such as gearing up for war or bailing out their economies at times of crisis. And in the face of class or other social struggle, the rulers may shell out some money to buy social peace. But once such peace is purchased, the benefits gained through struggle come under attack, and all the more so in times of economic crisis like today. What they take out of the hides of the working class and oppressed at home they invest in waging war against the workers and oppressed abroad to expand their spheres of exploitation and their domination around the globe. These “priorities” cannot and will not change short of getting rid of the profit system in which they are rooted.

For the workers to reclaim the wealth that is the product of their labor, they have to break the power of the bourgeoisie and its state. That means fighting for a workers government that will expropriate the expropriators and put the wealth of this society to serving the needs of society under a planned socialist economy.

Bureaucrats Feeling the Heat

It’s not just left-talking labor bureaucrats who are mouthing the words “general strike.” In his column in the March issue of the ILWU’s Dispatcher, the union’s International president, Robert McEllrath, wrote: “Holding a rally is usually the first thing we think of. It’s good to feel pumped-up for a few hours or even a few days, but they’re soon over and then people ask: ‘now what do we do?’ If the answer is, ‘hold more rallies,’ then maybe we need to think harder, because our goal has to be about winning public support, and if rallies don’t help us accomplish that goal, maybe we need to be doing other things such as a general strike across the United States with support from all unions and labor.” This is an extraordinary, indeed unheard-of, statement coming from an official in the upper echelons of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, for whom the very mention of working-class struggle is to be avoided like the plague. While it lacks credibility, it is a measure of the desperation of at least some of the union misleaders as they feel heat from the ranks.

The industrial unions have been ravaged, with the rate of unionization in the private sector now below 7 percent. Public workers are now the majority of union members in the country, and the laws being brought down against them challenge their survival. Asking “Will we be able to win over workers—many who once belonged to unions—but have since seen their pay, benefits, and job security go down?” McEllrath argues: “The stakes in this fight couldn’t be higher, as it may determine whether the labor movement continues to shrink or survives long enough to organize and grow in the future.”

While the ILWU holds real social power in its hands, the union itself is an increasingly isolated bastion of labor organization in a sea of unorganized workers on the docks and the inland warehouses. The union leadership has done little to nothing to organize these workers.

Standing amid the wreckage that their sellout policies have produced over the past 30 years and more, McEllrath is expressing the bureaucrats’ concern for their own survival, which is, after all, dependent on having dues-paying members. To preserve their status, it is possible that they could be moved to take some kind of strike action. But that would not change their fundamental loyalty to the capitalist system, particularly as represented by the Democratic Party, which includes the labor officials among its key components. Following his musing over a general strike, McEllrath makes clear its purpose, arguing that “if we want more politicians to stand with us, then we’ll need to rally a lot more troops to our side.”

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

The April 4 protests were called in conjunction with the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, who was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was supporting a strike by black sanitation workers. The photos of these black workers with picket signs reading “I Am a Man” are a searing statement of the integral link between the struggles for labor rights and black rights. But while much was made at the protests of King’s dedication to labor’s cause, the truth is that King was a spokesman for reliance on the capitalist government, seeing the courts and the Democratic Party as the vehicles for legal reform of the racist status quo.

The myth that black people could achieve equality within the confines of racist American capitalism was ripped apart when the civil rights movement “came North.” Here the forcible segregation of blacks in the ghettos was not a matter of a legal code but was and is rooted in the very foundation of capitalist rule in America. When the black masses in the Northern ghettos entered the struggle—fighting for real equality, for jobs, for decent housing and schools—the role of King and others in the liberal leadership of the civil rights movement was one of fearful containment. Thus, King supported the troops sent in to brutally suppress ghetto upheavals in the 1960s.

With the deindustrialization of large swaths of the U.S., the ghetto poor who once supplied a “reserve army of labor” to be employed when the bosses needed them have been written off as a “surplus population” by the capitalist rulers, their labor and very lives no longer seen as necessary for the production of profit. But black workers remain a militant backbone of organized labor—from the ILWU to the public workers unions—and are critical to linking the power of the working class to the simmering anger of the ghettos. If the unions are to fight for their very existence, they must take up the defense of the ghetto and barrio poor by fighting for jobs, quality housing, education, health care and more, and must as well defend the rights of immigrants, an increasingly important component of the working class. Organizing the unorganized is a life-and-death question for labor everywhere. Crucially it means a fight to break the open shop South, directly posing the need for labor to combat anti-black racism and anti-immigrant bigotry.

Many workers no longer buy the lie peddled by the trade-union bureaucracy and its “socialist” water boys that the election of Barack Obama would bring “change” they could “believe in.” The massive protests in Wisconsin inspired many to believe that finally there might be some fightback against the war on their unions, their families and their livelihoods. The leaden hands of the labor bureaucracy are trying to drown any such impulse. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a real explosive potential here. But to transform that potential into some successful class struggle poses the question of leadership. The labor misleaders must be ousted and replaced with workers’ leaders who will link the fight to defend the unions to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party. This is the necessary instrument to lead the struggle to free the working class and the oppressed from the chains of exploitation, poverty and imperialist war.

No More Wisconsins!-Anti-Union “Mission Creep” In Massachusetts- State House Of Representatives Votes To Eliminate Bargaining Over Health Care

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe article, dated April 26, 2011, detailing a vote on a bill by the State House of Representatives essentially eliminating heath care issues as bargaining items in public union contracts.

Markin comment:

Okay, one more time by the numbers. Unions exist to bargain over wages, conditions of work, and benefits. Bargain in good or bad faith, but bargain. The defeat in Wisconsin over the right to collectively bargain on, in reality, anything has found echoes in other states using a slow fuse method to attain the same results-break the unions’ task as bargaining agent and go back to the good old days of workers taking what you get, and like it. The Massachusetts House of Representatives recent vote, in a so-called liberal, pro-labor state, on a bill to essentially take heath care issues off the bargaining table is a prime example of this latter strategy. If we do not want unions, public and private, to become mere company unions (or mere dues-paying fraternal organizations, like the Elks)then we had better do a better job of fighting to save the collective bargaining process before there is nothing left. And work under the slogan- No More Wisconsins! No More Massachusetts’! An injury to one is an injury to all!

From The Jobs For Justice Website- The April 4th Actions- A Report With Video From Boston

Click on the headline to link to a Jobs For Justice website post of the national actions on April 4, 2011 in defend of union rights.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"Wisconsin: Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!"

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History post, dated Saturday, March 19, 2011,From The Wisconsin War-Zone- Despite The Court Reprieve The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Still Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It.

Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011

Labor Tops Derail Anger, Promote Democrats

Wisconsin: Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!

MARCH 13—Republican Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has thrown down the gauntlet to the entire labor movement, signing a law stripping the state’s public workers unions of their right to bargain for their members. This is an open attempt to destroy the public sector unions, which are similarly under attack in Ohio, Indiana and other states. The law dictates that pay increases—the sole issue on which the unions are now permitted to bargain—may not exceed the cost of living index unless approved by a statewide referendum. Workers’ contributions toward their health care and pensions will be dramatically increased, meaning an effective pay cut of 8 percent on average. Wisconsin’s Democrats, who put up a show of stalling the vote on the union-busting bill by fleeing the state, had earlier stated their support to all the key economic take-backs, as had the state’s labor officialdom.

The labor movement must beat back this wage-slashing, union-busting attack. Six years ago in Indiana, collective bargaining rights were abolished for state workers, leading to a decline in union membership from 66 percent to 7 percent of the eligible workforce. What is and has been needed is strike action to close Wisconsin down. Many workers have shown their determination to wage such a fight. Tens of thousands have repeatedly rallied to defeat the anti-union onslaught. Across the U.S., private sector unions have joined in demonstrations against similar legislation and cutbacks, which are designed to make working people pay for the economic depression—a crisis caused by the capitalists’ insatiable drive for profits. National polls indicate that broad swaths of the population, hammered by the economic crisis, are opposed to the anti-union attacks.

Occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol by protesters drew worldwide attention to Madison, but to date there has been no strike action. Why? The pro-capitalist trade-union leadership has been working overtime to divert workers’ militancy into Democratic Party electioneering, centrally through a campaign to recall Republican legislators as well as Walker.

This was made clear at a 100,000-strong demonstration in Madison yesterday mainly organized by the AFL-CIO. After the farmers, after local Democratic officials, after the folk singers and a parade of speakers from the “Fab 14” state senators, after the preacher pronounced, “Amen,” and the crowd was dispersing—only then did a few labor officials speak. And when they did, they urged Wisconsinites to channel their energies into the recall of eight Republican senators who backed the governor and into pressuring the capitalist courts to overturn the bill. Not a word was uttered from the podium about mobilizing labor’s strike power. Spartacist comrades put up a banner and held signs highlighting the need to break with the Democratic Party and build a revolutionary workers party, selling most of our literature to people who sought us out because of our hard stand against the Democrats.

The labor bureaucracy’s service to the Democrats and prostration before anti-union laws are a recipe for defeat. Virtually every gain of the labor movement, including the very right for unions to exist, has been achieved through class struggle against America’s capitalist rulers. The Democrats, deceptively promoted by union leaders as “friends of labor,” are simply the other major party of U.S. capitalist rule. The union bureaucrats are core cadres of that party, assuring that the unions they lead provide votes for its candidates and millions of dollars in dues money to electoral campaigns.

For that reason, the Democrats seldom seek to bust the unions outright. But they are no more averse than Republicans to leading savage attacks on the wages and benefits of working people in the service of the bosses. In fact, Walker was elected governor in a contest against the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, who supported cutting back public employee benefits. The mother of anti-union legislation, the Taft-Hartley Act, was passed in 1947 over the veto of Democratic president Harry Truman, who knew full well that the veto would not withstand a Congressional override. Notwithstanding the Democratic Party’s pledges to abolish Taft-Hartley, the law survived several administrations, during which the Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Barack Obama, as a candidate for the presidency, promised to walk picket lines to defend union rights. Once elected as Commander-in-Chief of the American imperialist order, he quickly moved in collaboration with the auto bosses and the United Auto Workers misleaders to lead the assault that reduced the UAW—once the symbol of union power in this country, with a peak membership of 1.5 million—to a shell of its former self. Obama went on to launch a war against teachers unions by endorsing the wholesale firing of Central Falls, Rhode Island, high school teachers last year. Recently, a presidential spokesman repeated his boss’s “indictment” of the legislation in Wisconsin as an effort “to denigrate or vilify public sector employees.” This is equivalent to complaining that Hurricane Katrina was bad for tourism.

Scott Walker promised to create a PATCO moment for Wisconsin’s public sector unions, that is, to destroy them. Ronald Reagan’s unchallenged destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, utilizing a plan drawn up by his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, set the stage for a ruthless capitalist offensive against the unions and the working class as a whole. It didn’t have to be that way. Labor could have beaten back the union-busters by shutting down the airports. The power to do this was in the hands of unions like the IAM machinists, which organized the ground crews. There was plenty of sentiment in labor’s ranks to fight to defend PATCO, as seen in the massive 19 September 1981 labor demonstration—half a million strong—in Washington, D.C. But IAM president “Wimpy” Winpisinger, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, refused to call solidarity strike action, leaving individual workers to decide whether to honor or cross PATCO picket lines.

Emboldened by the decimation of private sector unions—a product of the prostration of the labor leadership to the dictates of the capitalist order—state governments under both Democratic and Republican administrations are threatening the hard-won gains and even the very existence of public employee unions. The Wisconsin law proscribes the dues check-off system and mandates yearly union recertification elections in the hope that workers will refuse to pay their dues and abandon their unions. We oppose the capitalist state abolishing dues check-off or intervening in any other way into union affairs. At the same time, it is in labor’s basic interest that union representatives, and not the bosses, collect union dues. This money should go toward building strike funds and otherwise supporting workers struggle, not be squandered to fund Democratic Party candidates. There must be a fight for the complete independence of the unions from the state agencies and political parties of the capitalist enemy.

The mass demonstrations in defense of Wisconsin’s public sector unions have moved various ersatz socialist organizations to respond to calls for strike action. In the case of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), this has meant issuing a few mealy-mouthed criticisms of the union bureaucrats while simultaneously supporting their pro-Democratic recall campaign. An 11 March editorial in the ISO’s Socialist Worker emphasizes: “The Republican senators should be recalled—and Walker, too.” Even while chastising union officials for “demobilizing and disarming” workers, the editorial disparages the call for a statewide strike as “unlikely to get very far,” advocating instead “pickets before work or noontime marches.” This is the kind of “activism” that would bring smiles to the bosses’ faces, as it neither stops operations nor challenges anti-strike laws.

The ISO is at one with the labor bureaucracy, which has itself made perfectly clear that the recall effort is counterposed to preparing the unions to wage the strike action that is necessary to defeat the union-busters. This comes as no surprise, as the ISO, along with the many other fake “socialists,” seeks not the overthrow of the system that is based on the exploitation of labor but its reform.

Wisconsin workers realize, correctly, that they are treated as if they have no rights. Anesthetized by decades of labor’s passivity enforced by capitalism’s labor lieutenants, in the face of repeated attacks by the bosses, workers must be won to the understanding that such treatment is not an aberration but the very essence of the capitalist “democratic” order. That order enforces through its state power the democratic right of the rulers to exploit and repress the toiling masses. The cops, falsely portrayed by many reformists as fellow workers, now close off the Capitol in Madison to demonstrators and will not, if the unions strike, be hesitant to employ force against the picket lines. The courts will quickly move to proscribe militant class struggle. And the “friends of labor” in the Democratic Party will promise reform while supporting the forces of law and order.

Many workers fear that strike action can only result in further losses. While it will not be easy to defeat the arrogant rulers’ union-busting drive, playing by the bosses’ rules is a sure guarantee of defeat. It requires the mobilization of the mass strength and solidarity of the working class to prevail against the capitalists’ attacks. As we wrote last issue in “All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!” (WV No. 975, 4 March):

“Two possible roads lie before the working class. There is the bureaucracy’s acceptance that the workers must ‘sacrifice’ to preserve the profits and rule of American capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in the necessary battles against the capitalist masters. In the course of such struggle, under a leadership that arms the working class with an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, the workers will become imbued with the consciousness of their historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all of the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means the fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it.”

From The Wisconsin War-Zone- Despite The Court Reprieve The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Still Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It

Click on headline to link to online news article -Judge blocks contentious Wisconsin public employee union law.

Markin comment:In the class struggle, and in class struggle-oriented politics, we use every weapon available including their courts in our battles against the class enemy. Still, the courts are an ephemeral thing and we best be prepared to take harder actions before this thing is done. I have reposted my entry on the need to prepare for a general strike below.
*****

Reposted

Monday, March 14, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the anti-union legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011

On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.

Markin comment:

Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.

That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.

And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.

Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.

How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.

Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!


posted by Markin at 1:15 PM

2 Comments:
Carol said...
Is there a link to the James P. Cannon article ?
If there is, its not working.

There is alot of talk about a general strike, but nothing happening so far. If they wait too long, then it will look like it was accepted. Like my friend says, " Shut the place down ". There is also talk about an action for April 4, but that would be largely symbolic, a Martin Luther King commemorative.

I also don't understand the Teachers Union concessions ( see the article in the World Socialist Website www.wsws.org ). They shouldn't be making concessions now when they're supposed to be fighting back. It seems like they're fighting to bargain to make concessions.

1:39 PM


Markin said...
Here is the Cannon link.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1944/ht03.htm

Good comments. The call for the general strike is very time sensitive. And from what I see people are starting to sit on their hands on this-or wait until 2012-Ya, right. Meanwhile the organized working class is being round to dust.

10:32 AM

Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!- From The Internationalist Group

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!


Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!-by Internationalist Group

Email: internationalistgroup (nospam) msn.com (unverified!)
Phone: 212-460-0983
Address: Box 3321 Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008 USA 15 Mar 2011
A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators, to be replaced by Democrats, whose “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits. There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. A general strike is needed to shut down Wisconsin now!
Defeat Governor’s Legislative Coup d’État
Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!
Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties!
Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators. To be replaced by whom? The Democrats’ “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits.

We have said from the outset that “It will take nothing less than a statewide general strike to defeat labor hater Walker.” But we warned , “union leaders block militant action as they chain workers to the Democrats” (The Internationalist leaflet, 18 February). There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. For a general strike to shut down Wisconsin now!

When Governor Scott Walker announced on February 11 a bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for almost all state, county and municipal employees, except for the Wisconsin State Patrol and firefighters, it was a blatant attempt to destroy public-sector unions. Using a phony state “fiscal crisis” as an excuse, its intent was to rip up a half-century of workers’ hard-won rights. Walker and his Republican cohorts tried to ram this draconian union-busting law through the state legislature in a matter of a couple days, declaring an end to hearings of the joint finance committee after only a few hours. But the working people of Wisconsin reacted angrily and massively, taking to the streets in huge numbers to emphatically demand, “Kill the Bill!”

Walker’s position, as one commentator put it, was “my way or the highway” – so the Democratic state senators took him at his word and drove off to Illinois, depriving the governor of the enhanced quorum required to vote on fiscal bills. As thousands of protesters occupied the state Capitol for more than two weeks and tens of thousands repeatedly protested outside (more than 100,000 ringing the square on three Saturdays running), the wannabe Duce of Madison was stymied, and increasingly frustrated. Sending police across the state line to kidnap legislators was ruled out. He admittedly considered sending provocateurs into the protests, but dropped that for tactical reasons. Finally on Wednesday, March 9 the governor decided he had had enough of democratic niceties and proceeded to carry out what can only be called legislative coup d’état.

Walker had aides take scissors to slice out the budgetary provisions of the bill, hoping to do away with the need for a “superquorum” (while also eliminating the supposed reason for such draconian action). The Senate majority leader then called a vote on less than two hours notice, and at 6 p.m. held a hurried Senate-Assembly conference committee that lasted only a few minutes. Moments later, the Senate gaveled through the excised “budget repair” bill by an 18-1 vote with no Democrats present. On Thursday, the Assembly dutifully voted the anti-labor, and on Friday the governor signed it, hoping to cancel union rights with a stroke of a pen. But the issue will not be decided by parliamentary sleight of hand – workers’ rights can only be won and defended through hard class struggle on the streets and in the plants.

Working people and defenders of democratic rights in Wisconsin are ready and willing to fight. The minute word leaked about the plan to drum the bill through the Senate, people headed to the Capitol in droves to try and stop this outrage. The Wisconsin State Journal (10 March) headlined the next day: “Thousands Storm Capitol As GOP Takes Action.” The article described the pandemonium:

“Thousands of protesters rushed to the state Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors, as word spread of hastily called votes on Gov. Scott Walker's controversial bill limiting collective bargaining rights for public workers….

“Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting ‘Break down the door!’ and ‘General strike!’

“Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes….

“At one point, officials estimated up to 7,000 people had spilled into the Capitol, some coming through doors and windows opened from the inside, including one legislative office and several bathrooms. Some door knobs and door handles were removed….”

Union officials issued angry statements: Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, said that the governor and his cronies had turned Wisconsin into a “banana republic.” Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said that “Senate Republicans have exercised the nuclear option to ram through their bill attacking Wisconsin's working families in the dark of night.” But when it comes to labor action, it’s a different story. Even as protesters were chanting “general strike” while trying to break down the doors of the Capitol, the union tops were preaching caution.

The next day the Wisconsin State Journal (11 March) reported, “‘General strike’ has been one of the chants that resounded through the Capitol during massive protests Wednesday and Thursday after the Legislature passed a bill that would remove bargaining rights for about 175,000 workers and create major obstacles to basic operations for unions representing teachers, state workers and local government employees.” But, the paper said, “Union leaders say the Republicans' fast-track passage of the bill has fueled strike talk, but for now most are urging legal measures such as recall of Republican legislators as a way to repeal the law.”

Teachers are a main target of Walker’s law. Even though enough Madison teachers called in sick four school days to shut down the schools, and many others around the state did likewise so they could join the protests at the Capitol, Wisconsin State Education Association Council president Mary Bell urged her union’s 98,000 members not to walk out. Instead, the Madison teachers union, MTI, concentrated on negotiating a concessionary contract with the local school board before Walker’s new law kicks in. The agreement, which would extend the contract through mid-2013, would take an estimated $3,900 annually out of the pay check of the average teacher, amounting to a 7.35% wage cut.

A number of other contracts have been extended, some until 2014, but those covering 39,000 state workers expire today (March 13), because two Democratic senators voted against them (one was later rewarded by Walker with a plum state government job). Currently the union tops are pushing to recall Republican legislators, and various legal actions. Suits have been announced charging that Walker violated the state law on open meetings, since the public was excluded from the Senate vote; the conference committee and Senate vote violated a provision of the state Constitution requiring 24 hours notice before a vote by a government body. The Madison district attorney says he is investigating, etc. But at most such tactics would only delay the law.

Usually when union leaders want to drag their heels and head off militant action, they put the blame on the membership, saying the ranks aren’t ready. Certainly, to undertake a general strike in this country that hasn’t seen one in more than 60 years would take a lot of guts and gumption. But of all the times in recent memory, right now, as workers stand to lose thousands of dollars in wages and any semblance of job security, is when they are most likely to take such a bold step. And many are ready. “General strike” was once again a frequent chant among the 150,000 trade-unionists and supporters (including quite a few from neighboring and far-away states) who filled Capitol Square and all the way down State Street on Saturday

Talk of a general strike has not just been whistling in the wind. On February 21 the South Central Labor Federation voted that “SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his budget repair bill.” At the same time it set up an education committee to prepare materials for union locals about how to fight “this naked class war waged upon us.” A history professor at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), Peter Rachleff, prepared a brief history of general strikes, pointing to the 1886 May Day struggles for the eight-hour work day. In Milwaukee, the governor called out the National Guard to squelch a strike that shut down virtually every factory in the city (as Walker threatens to do today), killing seven strikers. Thus serious preparation for a strike should include organizing workers defense guards.

The SCFL educational materials include a “how to” guide on strike preparations by Dan La Botz of Labor Notes on the series of “Days of Action” in various cities in Ontario in 1995-98. Like many one-day “general strikes” in Europe, these were not real general strikes which pose a contest for power, over which class shall rule, but rather a series of labor demonstrations whose ultimate purpose was to moderate the anti-labor policies of the provincial government of Tory (Conservative) premier Mike Harris. La Botz doesn’t mention that they failed to do that. But even if they had brought down Harris, what was the alternative: the discredited labor-backed New Democratic Party? The NDP was voted out of office after imposing a wage freeze and curtailing bargaining rights of public sector workers?

This underlines that a general strike is ultimately and inevitably political. Many in Wisconsin portray the battle as one against the Republican governor and legislators and reactionary forces such as the Tea Party movement and Americans for Prosperity, the political action committee of Charles and David Koch, millionaire funders of ultra-rightist outfits who were Walker’s biggest financial backers. The toilet paper kings (Koch Industries owns the Georgia-Pacific paper company) are sinister for sure, but the far right are not the only ones going after labor these days. In New York state, a liberal Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, got elected on a union-bashing platform and is demanding $450 million in givebacks while threatening 10,000 layoffs. And nationally Barack Obama has imposed a wage freeze on federal workers while spearheading attacks on teachers, even supporting the firing of an entire district teaching staff in Rhode Island.

Illusions in the Democratic Party are a big problem in Wisconsin. As a result of their grandstand play of decamping to Rockford, Illinois, the 14 Democratic senators were hailed by the protesters demonstrating against Walker’s union-busting bill. On Saturday, when they returned to Madison, supporters chanted “Fab(ulous) 14, our heroes.” They then paraded in a line around the Capitol with senators and the crowd chanting “thank you” to each other. State Assembly Democrats sported their orange T-shirts claiming to support Wisconsin working families. But for all their phony “friend of labor” rhetoric, the Democrats were prepared to vote for all the budget cuts the governor wanted. They only want to preserve the unions’ bargaining rights (and dues check-off), because labor is a key source of funds for this capitalist party.

Just about every left-wing and self-proclaimed socialist group in the country has written about the events in Wisconsin, which are the biggest upsurge in labor struggle in decades in the U.S. Mostly it is just cheerleading, ducking the key issue of the Democrats. In 20 articles on Wisconsin, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Stalinoid-reformist outfit, assiduously avoiding taking on the Democratic Party. Its main activity in Wisconsin was circulating a petition to “tax the rich,” lending credence to Walker’s talk of a budget deficit. (While claiming there was a $137 million budget shortfall this year, right after taking office he legislated $140 million in tax breaks for businesses, banks and industry.)

The problem is not lack of money – right now the Federal Reserve is funneling tens of billions of dollars to the banks at essentially 0% interest, not to mention the trillions they gave to Wall Street for the “bailout” and hundreds of billions paid to business under the “stimulus” bill. It is not the job of revolutionaries to give helpful hints to the bosses’ government about its budget priorities and how to finance them. We have nothing against taxing the rich, but a “millionaires tax” will not do a thing to defend working people. To think that it would is to promote illusions that the capitalist pols would spend money on education, workers pensions, health care if only they had the dough. We need to mobilize our power to defeat the attacks on working people, poor, oppressed minorities and other victims of capital.

The social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), one of the biggest pushers of the “tax the rich” nostrum, just published an editorial, titled “Now is the time to fight.” But according to the ISO, a general strike is not the way. It argues that “given the low level of strike activity in the last decade, and the overall decline of the labor movement over the past 30 years,” therefore “calling for a general strike – no matter how enthusiastically it is received – is unlikely to get very far.” Its alternative is to “build union activity in the workplaces” by “organizing pickets before work or noontime marches to other unionized workplaces.” In other words, do anything but don’t strike during working hours. So here the ISO, is actively aiding the sellout bureaucrats in suppressing calls for militant union action.

Another group, the Workers Socialist Web Site, which also goes under the name of the Socialist Equality Party (WSWS/SEP), takes a somewhat different tack. The WSWS chimes in on the need for a general strike, and criticizes the Democrats and union bureaucrats for trying to squelch struggle. But in numerous articles, while referring to Walker’s “anti-worker” law, it never mentions the fact that this is union-busting legislation. The reason why not is simple: the WSWS opposes unions as inherently bourgeois. They support scabbing, and tell workers not to vote for unions in union recognition votes. These scab socialists try to hide this fact by denouncing the bureaucrats, who have hamstrung workers’ struggle for decades. But the unions remain workers organizations, even though they are betrayed by the union misleaders who tie them to the capitalist parties, principally the Democrats.

That is why it is necessary to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions, to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and break with the Democrats and bourgeois politics overall. The Wisconsin union-busting law, by outlawing collective bargaining for government workers aims at destroying public sector unions. Following the decimation of many private sector unions over the last three decades, these are the mainstay of what is left of the labor movement. Walker & Co. would certainly make impossible the class-collaboration policies of business unionists who are willing to sacrifice all sorts of union gains as long as they get to negotiate the sellout. Class-struggle unionists do not call for or rely on such mechanisms as a dues check-off, precisely because the government and the bosses can use it as a weapon to cripple labor by cutting off its finances. But we oppose anti-union attacks as an assault of workers’ rights and gains.

A statewide general strike is urgently needed in Wisconsin, and the time is now. To win against all the union-bashers, it is necessary to promote the political independence of the workers movement and break with both Democrats and Republicans, the partner parties of American capitalism, as well as minor bourgeois parties such as the Greens and sundry reformists (of which the social-democratic NDP in Canada is an extreme example) who only seek to modify the workings of the capitalist system rather than bringing it down. Thus the Internationalist Group, in calling for a general strike in Wisconsin links this to the need to build a class-struggle workers party to lead the fight for a workers government and socialist revolution. ■

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights - by Stephen Lendman

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights

Battleground Wisconsin: Corporate Power v. Worker Rights - by Stephen Lendman

The issue in Wisconsin and across America is simple and straightforward - a corporate-financed offensive to crush unions, returning workers to 19th century harshness with no rights whatever.

As a result, well-funded union busting organizations want collective bargaining rights abolished, social benefits ended, wages kept low as possible, and corporations allowed to exploit workers freely, unimpeded by legal protections and rights.

A previous article discussed right-wing think tanks infesting America's landscape, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/waging-war-on-working-americans.html

Generously funded, they include the Koch Family Foundations (established by David, Charles and Claude R. Lambe), several Scaife ones, John M. Olin Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, various others, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations, pretending to be liberal, when, in fact, he supports everything smelling money.

Their agenda includes marketplace sovereignty, deregulation, privatization of government services, ending popular entitlements, social spending, and affirmative action, prioritizing business friendly policies, waging class war, controlling electoral politics and supportive media backing everything on their wish list.

Among many others, their beneficiaries include the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, best known for inaction while America sank into depression while he was president.

Less known ones include:

American Crossroads

Founded by Karl Rove, it's "dedicated to renewing America's commitment to individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense," entirely benefitting business at the expense of workers.

Americans for Job Security

An anti-labor insurance industry front group backing unrestricted free enterprise, tax cuts for the rich, job-killing trade agreements, and worker rights ended for greater profits.

The Club for Growth

A neofascist organization wanting Medicare and Medicaid abolished, Social Security privatized, unions eliminated, and business given unimpeded power to plunder and exploit freely.

Americans for Prosperity

A virulently anti-labor group backing all of the above and more, including the right to destroy US jobs by offshoring them freely to the world's lowest wage locations.

Freedom Works

Led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, it conducts aggressive campaigns against worker rights nationally.

Center for Union Facts

Led by pro-business lobbyist Richard Berman, it focuses on anti-union propaganda, destroying worker rights, obstructing organizing efforts, and promoting other anti-union initiatives.

National Right to Work Foundation and Committee

America's oldest anti-union organization, it bogusly claims pro-worker credentials. In fact, it's extremely hostile to high wages, essential benefits, job safety, and favorable working conditions, considered impediments to profits.

Public Service Research Foundation and Public Service Research Council

Composed of small organizations nationwide, they oppose collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public sector workers. In 1981, PSRF led the campaign to fire PATCO strikers, a watershed event weakening organized labor overall.

For-Profit Unionbusters

Describing themselves as "union avoidance firms," "management consultants," or "labor consultants," they use lawyers and other credentialed professionals to manipulate labor laws to subvert organizing efforts and worker rights overall.

These and other groups have full-time staffs, lawyers, and other credentialed professionals conducting media campaigns, seminars, workshops, lobbying efforts, and other initiatives to subvert organized labor for business. Nothing unethical is avoided to accomplish ends they'll go to any extreme to achieve, within or outside the law they freely exploit advantageously, flush with cash to do it.

Annually, they spend tens of millions of dollars for anti-union initiatives, allied with the US Chamber of Commerce - "the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations."

Although most of its members are small enterprises, it overwhelmingly represents giant ones and their campaign for unimpeded free enterprise at the expense of worker rights and small competitors. As a result, it spends millions of dollars annually opposing them.

Wisconsin - Ground Zero Outside the Beltway

A previous article explained March 9 Wisconsin Senate maneuvers described as a corporate coup d'etat, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/corporate-coup-detat-in-wisconsin.html

In violation of Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring "24 hours prior to the commencement of (special sessions) unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical," Republican senators passed Gov. Walker's union busting bill with no Democrat members present.

On March 10, Milwaukee Sentinel Journal (SJ) writers Jason Stein, Patrick Marley and Lee Bergquist headlined, "Collective bargaining bill passes; courts, recalls next," saying:

The epic battle ended along party lines after Wisconsin's State Assembly past Walker's anti-union bill 53 - 42, "but only after police carried demonstrators out of the Assembly antechamber." Going forward, "a wider war now remains for both sides, one expected to be fought in the courts and through recall efforts against 16 state senators."

After three hours, legislators cut off debate, refusing to recognize Democrats wanting to speak. They were ignored. Angry worker responses inside followed to no avail. Others there the night before were forced out of the Capitol. On the morning of the vote, they and Democrats were kept out, Rep. David Cullen saying he and others had to climb through a ground floor window to enter.

On March 10, the SJ's editorial headlined, 'Defining Moment," saying:

"Republicans were right to demand more of government workers (but) were wrong to demand this much." In fact, "(r)eason (took) a holiday in Wisconsin politics. Civility along with it....Republicans got what they wanted Thursday: a flawed and divisive bill," destroying hard-won collective bargaining rights and more. "Gov. Scott Walker (and his) party may now reap the whirlwind."

"This is a war of attrition now - one that has been nationalized because of the implications for a key Democratic constituency in a key battleground state with a presidential election coming."

Indeed so, and it might help congressional Democrats solidify control in both Houses and give a failed anti-populist president a second term by default, fearing a worse alternative when, in fact, there's not a dime's worth of difference between either party, especially on major issues.

On Thursday night, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama understands state budget problems but opposes "denigrat(ing) or vilify(ing) public sector employees." Noticeably, however, he said nothing publicly to support them, expressing silent approval for destroying their rights, a policy his administration endorses.

On March 11, Washington Post writer Karen Tumulty headlined, "Wisconsin governor wins his battle with unions on collective bargaining," saying:

The epic battle ended along party lines after Wisconsin's State Assembly past Walker's anti-union bill 53 - 42, "but only after police carried demonstrators out of the Assembly antechamber." Going forward, "a wider war now remains for both sides, one expected to be fought in the courts and through recall efforts against 16 state senators."

Despite winning legislatively, "the political battle over public employees and their rights to bargain is likely to continue - not only in Madison." Fervor is resonating among workers signaling "it's not over." In fact, the struggle just began with strong public support against Republican thuggishness.

On March 11, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal editorialized, "Taxpayers Win in Wisconsin," saying:

"Congratulations to Wisconsin Republicans, who held together this week to pass their government union reforms....maybe there's hope for taxpayers after all. (Walker's) reforms change the balance of negotiating power in ways that give taxpayers more protection."

In fact, over 200,000 Wisconsin public workers pay taxes, less of them ahead as their wages are cut, ranks thinned, and other rights lost, affecting them and their families, unimportant people for Murdoch's Journal, one-sidedly pro-business like the boss.

According to Democrat pollster Mark Mellman, Walker is "winning the battle through pure, uncompromising force, but he's losing the war."

Unless reversed, however, state workers are losing their rights. Besides collective bargaining, their healthcare and pension contributions will double, resulting in pay cuts ranging from 8 - 20% ahead of more planned reductions coming. Moreover, the measure reads:

"This bill authorizes a state agency to discharge any state employee who fails to report to work as scheduled for any three unexcused working days during a state emergency or who participates in a strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls. Under the bill, engaging in any of these actions constitutes just cause for discharge."

In addition, the governor may unilaterally declare "state of emergency" authority to fire striking workers, and under the section titled, "Discharge of State Employees," stating:

"The Governor may issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency for the state or any portion of the state if he or she determines that an emergency resulting from a disaster or imminent threat of a disaster exists."

In other words, he can unilaterally seize dictatorial power and do what he wishes, especially regarding public worker rights and job security. They're gone unless resurrected by a sustained, mobilized, united, and committed mass action statewide shutdown for rights too important to lose.

Nonetheless, Democrats and union bosses oppose it, focusing instead on recall campaigns and lawsuit challenges when, in fact, shutting down the whole state is essential and perhaps the only way to achieve justice.

However, in a March 9 conference call, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) president Mary Bell, representing 98,000 public education employees, told teachers "to be at work tomorrow as we determine the next step to have the voices of Wisconsin's workers to be heard."

Wisconsin Public Employees Union president Marty Beil said "peaceful demonstrations" and recall campaigns are the only way to "change the face of government" when doing so will take months and may fail.

Democrats were just as submissive, supporting every anti-worker provision except ending collective bargaining, and they were willing to compromise on that. So was Jesse Jackson. Ahead of the Assembly vote, he gave the official prayer, asking for Republican - Democrat unity, not joining protesters outside demanding justice. Instead, he urged them to "honor (Martin Luther King's) legacy" by voting for Democrats who betrayed them.

Planned Mass Actions

On Sunday, March 13, mass protests are being organized across the state, involving teachers, students, police, firefighters, small business men and women, farmers, unemployed men and women, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, community leaders, seniors, and others for worker justice.

Wisconsin Wave.org says:

"Forward! Not Backward! We won't pay for their crisis! We stand united as never before around a common sense of human dignity. Today we exercise our freedoms of speech and assembly to defend the Wisconsin that we love, its people, and its lands and waters. We call on" everyone to challenge government and "narrow corporate interests that are hijacking our democracy."

It calls for a "Wisconsin Wave of Resistance against corporatization and austerity and for democracy and shared prosperity." It wants all Wisconsinites involved in a common struggle affecting every working person in the state. Taking aim at corporate giants, it says:

"(W)e will not stand by and watch you destroy Wisconsin democracy, Wisconsin's economy, Wisconsin's schools, and Wisconsin's communities. We will not pay for your crisis. We will organize. We will march. We will nonviolently resist your policies and overcome your agenda."

So will courageous supporters, joined by private sector workers, united in a common struggle for justice. They're on their own knowing it's up to them to do what union bosses and Democrats won't - shutting down the entire state proactively. In Wisconsin and across America, nothing less can work. Battle lines are drawn to regain rights too important to lose, never without a fight!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.