Views in Brief

September 21, 2010

Why unions still matter

MY FATHER was a union steward for the United Electrical Workers (UE) back when there was a plant near Philadelphia.

Westinghouse had to be the worst employer ever. UE was forced to strike almost every time the contract was up, and was accused of being controlled by Communists working for Moscow. Because of those charges, the union got scant sympathy from the public and businesses, and the strike in 1956 lasted six months before the workers got a decent contract--which Westinghouse never followed, having sleazy lawyers and government help.

In fact, their favorite tactic was to force a strike right before Thanksgiving, knowing the workers needed to make money for the upcoming holidays.

If not for the militancy of UE, people like my father would have been working for almost nothing. Anytime he had an idea that would boost production, the supervisors would steal it and get the bonus, instead of my father. When he retired and moved to Florida, he was forbidden to visit the plant there, because management said he was a dangerous union agitator. All he had done was belong to a union. If he had tried to visit, the police would have hauled him away! And this was in 1971!

Because the shop floor in the metal-cutting factory, where he worked six, and sometimes seven, days a week wasn't properly ventilated, he was diagnosed with health problems and died 10 years after retiring.

Thank you for your efforts to protect workers. I hope you will get unions recognized as legitimate.
Fran Stein, from the Internet

Why Obama alone isn't to blame

MUCH OF the left's criticisms of Obama and the Democrats mistakenly personalizes what are, at bottom, political and social-economic issues. This is common fare in a celebrity-obsessed society that prides itself on individualism, and is thus hostile to a class-based outlook.

The liberal political view is that the political system basically works--it only requires "good people" to run it. But it is not a question of lack of courage and determination or good will on the part of an individual named Obama. It is the lack of maneuvering room available to the ruling class that Obama and his corporate Democrats serve.

This is not the 1930s when, despite being in the midst of a depression, the U.S. capitalist economy was in a much better position vis-à-vis international competition, a favorable balance of trade, a strong manufacturing base, and wealth not yet squandered for 65 years on an obscenely wasteful military establishment.

It's a different ballgame now. FDR couldn't be FDR today. Obama's political weaknesses are those of his party and their class. There is no way that he/they can put forward a bold and massive public spending program to create jobs, repair the infrastructure and strengthen the social safety net.

Because of the decline of U.S. capitalism, by the early 1970s a shift was deemed necessary--a shift away from New Deal/post-Second World War social democratic reforms to an era of takebacks.

This is known as neoliberalism--outsourcing/stripping away the manufacturing base, privatizations, reducing the social safety net, and successfully attacking and decimating the labor movement. This has been a completely bipartisan shift--Democrats like Mondale, the Clintons, Gore, Schumer, Emmanuel and their think tanks, have been just as important players as Reagan, Cheney and the Bushes.

Obama is merely the latest neoliberal ('blue dog" Democrat) to roll off the assembly line and he won't be the last. The defenders of the New Deal ("progressive Democrats") want to bring back the "good old days", but U.S. capitalism has no more of these days left.

It can only compete by taking back more and more (Social Security is next). Sooner or later there will be mass resistance to this, which will necessitate increasing repression.

All this will go down easier (so they hope) with some Islamophobia and immigrant-bashing as a chaser.
Dennis Brasky, from the Internet

Circumcision not an answer to HIV

INSTEAD OF merely contradicting Mike Marqusee's claim that there is no evidence that circumcision affects HIV spread, Lonnie Lopez needs to come up with concrete evidence ("Circumcision and HIV infection").

The World Health Organization may have endorsed circumcision as HIV prevention, and this may have been based on three randomized clinical trials in Africa, but all those studies found was a correlation--and correlation does not equal causation. The correlation that "the incidence of HIV is 60 percent lower in men who were circumcised" fails to appear in other countries that circumcise.

In the U.S., for example, 80 percent of the male population is already circumcised, and yet we manage to have the highest HIV transmission rate in the industrialized world. In Israel, where the majority of men are circumcised, there is a rising HIV/AIDS epidemic.

According to Malaysian AIDS Council Vice President Datuk Zaman Khan, more than 70 percent of the 87,710 HIV/AIDS sufferers in the country are Muslims, where all men are circumcised. Only 60 percent of the Malaysian population is Muslim--which would mean that HIV is spreading at a rate higher than in the non-Muslim, non-circumcised population.

Let's have circumcision "researchers" explain why something that has never worked in the U.S. or anywhere else will suddenly start working wonders in Africa.

I think it's time we called out circumcision for the quackery that it is. Socialists should oppose the Swaziland government's imposition of any medical procedure on the population because it is a violation of basic human rights. The WHO would never endorse female circumcision, not even if "studies showed" that it could completely block sexually transmitted HIV in women.

Socialists should demand doctors find a better way than genital mutilation to prevent HIV transmission. Circumcision "studies" are a disgrace to modern medicine.
Joseph, Stockton, Calif.

Unions can't do the work for us

REGARDING "WHAT'S wrong with our unions": It is interesting that that the worker who wrote about his/her issue with the union never mentioned anything about going to a union meeting, learning the contract well enough to be a steward, or, in this person's situation, electing a steward to take on weekend grievances.

The union is not a country club that you belong to and, once in a while, use when the time is right to get back in shape. The union is there to help a worker raise their standards, have a voice and to define concrete work rules, among a number of other benefits.

The worker says, "About six months before I left, we had a new contract signing that screwed over our 20-year-or-more employees, forcing them to work until they were 64, or lose half of there retirement benefits. Most of these people started working there when they were 16!"

A new contract signing? Didn't the membership vote? If the terms of the new contract were not to the workers' liking, the members should have voted down that contract...especially the older workers. Why wasn't this person organizing and mobilizing?

The problem that I have with this piece is that the worker sounds like he/she is a victim of circumstance. What's wrong with our unions is people like this who don't participate in their union, but expect their union to wave some magic wand and make it all better. This person should be far more active than they make themselves out to be. If changes need to be made, they should speak up--but not after the fact!

This person needs to realize that the union is not a separate entity from them. They are the union, and they should own it.

I realize that not all unions are fantastic and wonderful. I know that some people are harder to communicate with than others. I realize there are a lot of union people in bed with the corporation.

Still, I believe that if a worker is in that situation, only they can make change happen. They can't expect stuff to happen because of wishful thinking.
Richard, from the Internet

Leaving out an alternative in Calif.

ALESSANDRO TINONGA'S column on the California governor's race didn't even mention Carlos Alvarez, the Peace and Freedom Party candidate ("A rotten choice in California").

We all expect California's feminist/socialist party to be ignored by the mainstream media, but by Socialist Worker too? Hey, maybe recognizing each other will help build that "mass movement" we all want.
Bob Maschi, California