The Battle at Big Brown: Joe Allen's The Package King

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/29/the-battle-at-big-brown-joe-allens-the-package-king/

Management: Your Friend Until They Aren’t

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/22/management-your-friend-until-they-arent/

Revolutionary Communists in the US of A...And the Feds That Hated Them

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/23/revolutionary-communists-in-the-us-of-a/

Making Rabble Rousing Relevant Again--The Return of Class Struggle Unionism

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/08/making-rabble-rousing-relevant-again/

Strikes and Class Consciousness

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/28/strikes-and-class-consciousness/

Why I Won't Cross the CCTA Picket Lines

                I ride CCTA buses every day back and forth to work.  This is why I support the drivers call for a strike.  I started riding CCTA buses when I first moved to Burlington in 1992.  The improvements in the service since then are immeasurable.  One thing that has not changed, however, is the professionalism, courtesy and commitment to safety exhibited by the bus drivers.  I have seen drivers help disabled folks get on the bus, help mothers with babes-in-arms get their children situated, give precise directions to newcomers and tourists, and more. 

                Recently, CCTA management walked out on negotiations between the drivers and management.  These negotiations have been going on since April 2013.  When I talk with drivers I am told that the real issue is not the money, but the working conditions and the way they are treated by management.  Foremost among these issues is the question of safety.  As I remarked earlier, I have always found the CCTA drivers’ attention to safety first-rate.  I always assumed that management shared this commitment.  However, their proposal to add an additional hour of time between shifts for drivers assigned to split shifts seems to prove my assumption wrong.  What this proposal would do is keep drivers on call for 13.5 hours.  In other words, a driver who drove school kids to school early in the morning would be expected to still be driving thirteen hours later.  Drivers have told me that, when they have raised the issue of how this would affect passenger safety, management dismissed their concerns.

                Another issue is one many of us have experienced in our own workplaces.  This involves the addition of part-time workers to the staff in order to avoid providing benefits to the workers.   This ploy by management is just wrong.  It ignores the fact that the people who do most of the work in CCTA-the drivers—are real people with families, mortgages, rents and other bills.  Like management, which usually only has full-timers with benefits, the drivers can perform their work better if they have a full-time job with benefits.  Otherwise, their lives take on added stress as they struggle to make ends meet.

                The final element of the contract where there are major disagreements is the way CCTA management treats it drivers.  For those who do not ride public transit, nowadays most buses have surveillance cameras on them.  Although the cameras are there to record instances of passenger disturbances in case a crime occurs on the bus, CCTA management seems to use their cameras to spy on the drivers.  According to drivers, management spends a fair amount of time reviewing surveillance tapes looking for any driver infractions.  If any are found, drivers are called in and threatened with suspension or firing.  The contract proposed by CCTA management would prevent any suspended or fired driver from appealing any such disciplinary action.  Besides creating an abusive work environment, this type of managerial behavior is just plain wrong, especially if the worker is not allowed any type of appeal.

                After unanimously rejecting the contract offered by management on March 12, 2014 (after driving through the worst March snowstorm in Vermont since 1969), the CCTA drivers will go on strike.  I will not cross their picket lines.  There is one right way to prevent a strike.  That is for CCTA management to get off its managerial high horse, and sign the contract as proposed by the drivers.   Chittenden County has taken the CCTA bus drivers for granted long enough.  If there is a strike we will discover just how important they really are. 

Wake of the Flood-Progressivism and the Workers

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/15/wake-of-the-flood/

She Ain't No Working Class Hero

The recent selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee has revived the media's interest in what they love to call the white working class in the United States. Her husband, write commentators across the spectrum, is a union member. He is what we like to think of when we talk about the US working class. Well, besides the fact that Mr. Palin is one-quarter Yu'pik, his union membership is another aspect of his person that makes him a non-typical member of the US working class. In fact, not only is union membership at historical lows in the US, a good number of the workers joining unions these days are not white. Neither are they in jobs that pay well like those in the Alaskan energy industry (according to his tax records Todd Palin earned close to 93,000 in 2007 from his energy industry job and other earnings as a salmon fisherman.)

Back in the 1970s, the US Left was much stronger than it is today. This was true not only in the nation's schools, but also in its workforce. Part of the reason for this was the intentional strategy of many Left formations to seek work in the labor force and organize among the workers. Several of my friends began working in factories making everything from bricks in Maryland to auto parts in Michigan. Others took jobs as bus drivers or laborers building Washington DC's subway system. Some became pressmen and some went into the fields to work picking fruit and vegetables. A couple even ended up in West Virginia's coal mines. It was the efforts of these individuals and their cadres that helped foment the upsurge in militant labor activity across the US in the early to mid-1970s. Wildcats in the mines and auto plants. Militancy among the pressmen during newspaper strikes in DC and elsewhere. Communists elected to union positions on the floor and in district offices.

Behind this leftist surge into the workforce were some very intense debates regarding the nature of the US working class. There were those groups that still considered this class to be composed of white males. Subsidiary to this perception was the unspoken assumption that these men, while understanding the issues of labor, were essentially reactionary when it came to issues of race, gender and culture. The ultimate media representation of this stereotype was the US television character Archie Bunker on the popular TV show All In the Family. It's not that this perception came out of nowhere, as unions had historically excluded blacks and others from the construction and other trades. Perhaps foremost among leftist groups that perceived the US working class in this way were the Revolutionary Unions. These affiliated regional organizations eventually whittled away dissenters and coalesced under one Revolutionary Union that evenually became the Revolutionary Communist Party (which was a different creature than the current RCP). Their perception of the working class as reactionary and culturally conservative led them to imitate what was in actuality the most reactionary part of the US working class. The wrongness of their analysis became apparent to many in the RU and elsewhere on the Left when the RU found themselves aligned with some of the most reactionary and racist elements of the movement against school busing in Boston.

Meanwhile, others on the Left saw a different trend in the US working class and focused their attention on that trend. Put simply, these leftists recognized that the US working class was changing from the enclave of white men to a workplace where people came from all parts of US society: blacks, immigrants, women and the young. Seeing this demographic change and realizing that it was probably a trend that would continue, many of these groups organized among the new workers. This naturally led to workplace divisions, but it also gave a new life to workplace organizing. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that the existence of certain unions owe their continued existence to the realization by the US Left of the 1970s that this new element of the US working class would not only respond to union organizing efforts, but would also eventually become the majority demographic in certain sectors of the labor force.

Which brings us back to the selection of Sarah Palin as the 2008 GOP VP nominee. The selection was quite obviously made with two elements of US society in mind--the socially conservative Christian fundamentalists that serve as the GOP's voting base and the US working class. It is my contention that the latter element is a misnomer. It is not the US working class that the GOP is chasing with Palin's nomination. It is the reactionary element of the white part of that working class. The pretense by the GOP, the media and others in US society that this element of the working class is "the working class" is not only incorrect, it is (at the least) unconsciously nativist, if not outright racist. After all, the working class is composed of a very large percentage of women, blacks, Latinos and others with non-US national origins. Many, if not most, of this part of the working class do not share Sarah Palin's (and the Christian conservative base she represents) apparent views on the war in Iraq, women's rights, race, and even the ultimate goodness of the US capitalist system. Instead of reminding US voters that Palin is nothing more than a right wing Republican that believes that the Iraq war is a mission from God, which is exactly what George Bush is, the media present her to the US public as a real representative of the working class. Tthe Democrats seem to share that view. Yet, if they listened to their rank and file, the Democratic leadership would know better. Instead, they share with the media the essentially elitist view that the working class is mostly white and mostly reactionary. Consequently, they look for ways to pander to this element of the US voting public while ignoring the rest of us who work for somebody else to make a living, are not reactionary, and want nothing to do with Sarah Palin and her sidekicks John McCain and the US right wing.