Mexico's Electrical Workers Under Attack

An attempt is underway by the Mexican government to destroy Mexico's electrical workers' union, the SME. On October 10, just before midnight, the Mexican federal government sent more than 5,000 police and army troops to occupy more than 100 generating plants and other electrical installations of the state-owned company Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC). Shortly after, the president decreed the firing of 44,000 SME union workers.

The SME and its allies immediately countered with mobilizations, including a 300,000-strong mass march in Mexico City on October 15. Thousands of students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM),and the National Technical Institute (IPN) are supporting the SME by participating in the massive rallies.

In the tradition of chaining the workers down to the bosses, the strategy of the SME union tops appears to be counting on the congressional and legalistic support of the "center-left" bourgeois Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).  But what the SME workers and other sectors of the Mexican working class need is their own revolutionary workers party. This will require that they first break with the popular front and all bourgeois politicians, including and especially the PRD.

Wall Street Gets Trillions, We Get Cut - That's Capitalism for You

What follows is the text of a new leaflet issued by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs:

The Democrats' Budget Cuts Are Targeting YOU
Militant, Mass Worker/Student Struggle Needed To Defeat These Attacks

Fight for open admissions, no tuition!

On October 6 Governor David Paterson announced massive mid-year cuts to the state budget, on top of those that were already imposed in May. The hardest hit section of the budget, with over a third of the total cuts, is higher education. Out of $500 million in budget cuts, $53 million come from CUNY, $90 million from SUNY and $35 million from the state Higher Education Services Corporation, which administers the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) and other aid programs. Seventy percent of CUNY students depend on financial aid.

This means classes will be canceled. Professors and campus workers will be laid off or will have their hours and pay cut. More working-class and poor students will be driven out of college, or will never have a chance to go. These cuts affect everyone.

Ignoring student and faculty protests, the state and city governments agreed to raise tuition this September by about 15 percent across the board at SUNY and CUNY. Now spokespeople for the CUNY and SUNY administrations tell the New York Daily News (6 October) that it's "too soon to say whether tuition increases will be needed" yet again. This means they're already calculating the amount of the next hike they're going to impose. Last year, a report by the state Commission on Higher Education recommended annual tuition increases.

In March, Democratic New York State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver bragged of restoring $50 million in cuts to TAP that his fellow Democrats had proposed months earlier. Six months later, Democrat Paterson plans to cut TAP and other aid by $35 million. These cuts aren't about "misplaced priorities." The Democrats and Republicans are waging war on public education for the same reason they're waging war against Afghanistan and Iraq: because this is what is wanted by the capitalist ruling class, the bankers and business owners who run this country.

Wall Street has been pushing for years to slash expenditures on public education, health, transit, etc. that it considers a drag on profits. The attacks on CUNY and SUNY students, teachers and workers are also part of the rulers' drive to remake public education to better serve their needs: militarized high-school education for most, job-oriented technical "college" for some, and "liberal" university education for an elite few.

They look to the Democrats to carry out these attacks, not some right-wing Republicans. If someone like Bush, McCain or billionaire Bloomberg were pushing this program, there would be big protests in the streets. But they figure we'll just eat it coming from the Democrats. A serious fight against budget cuts, tuition hikes and layoffs requires a political struggle against the Democrats and all capitalist parties.

Last September the CUNY Internationalist Clubs sounded the alarm: "Democrats, CUNY Trustees Vow: Tuition Increases Forever!" (Revolution No. 5, September 2008). At the time, the stock market crash had just hit and the recession was just beginning. Many hoped for a new "New Deal" and expanded aid to public
education in response. Unions turned out the vote for the Democrats. Most of the left tried to hook up with the "movement" for Obama. When the election results came in, they celebrated, we didn't. We warned that Democrat Obama was no "antiwar candidate" and his education program was the same as McCain's.

You can't fight the cuts without fighting the Democratic Party that controls the government of the city, the state, and the whole country. Yet eager to go with the flow, many left groups take the opposite tack. The day after Democrat Obama's election, the International Socialist Organization plastered Hunter College with his campaign slogan, "Yes We Can!" Next they echoed the liberal Democrats' call to "tax the rich," which actually got passed in Albany. (In contrast, revolutionaries are for expropriating the capitalists. ) Now they're trying the same tack with a rally in front of City Hall - not Paterson's office - in the midst of the mayoral campaign. Not a word in the protest call about the fact that the 90-percent Democratic City Council sought big cuts to CUNY community colleges' budget last spring, which were only narrowly averted - until the next round. In reality, it's tailor-made for liberal Democratic politicians to jump on the bandwagon.

Since the early '70s, in good economic times and bad, tuition has been rising at CUNY. This is closely connected with a racist purge of CUNY and of education in general. The imposition of tuition was a response to the victory of open admissions at CUNY in 1969, which effectively desegregated what had been an exclusive white enclave in a city of blacks and immigrants. Today public schools are more segregated than they have been in 40 years. And they are being closed to make room for anti-union, publicly funded, privately run charter schools - an Obama favorite.

The most persistent voices calling for higher tuition have come from the CUNY Board of Trustees itself. That's one reason why we call for abolishing the Board of Trustees and administration, for CUNY and SUNY to be democratically governed by students, teachers and workers. We fight for free tuition, open admissions, living stipends for students and free child care 24 hours a day.

Workers in New York have a vital interest in opposing the budget cuts and tuition purge at CUNY and SUNY: these cuts are taking away the only chance at a college education for many workers and their children. We fought for united student-worker action to defeat the tuition purge: hundreds of demonstrators
last March picked up our chant, "Students and Labor: Shut the City Down!"

Today we're calling on students and faculty to stand with the Hunter cafeteria workers who are fighting to save their health benefits and pension.

In California, where the UC system faces a huge budget cut and a whopping tuition increase, massive walkouts on September 24 brought out thousands of students as well as a one-day strike by unionists. That would be a good start here too, but to win, we need to be part of a broader class struggle against the profit system that generates endless war and racist attacks on public education.

It will take a socialist revolution that overturns capitalism and puts the working class in power to achieve the basic democratic right to higher education for all. The CUNY Internationalist Clubs want students to be part of building a revolutionary workers party to lead this struggle. Join us!

For copies, contact a club member or email cunyinternationalists@gmail.com

SEIU, AFL-CIO battle Puerto Rico’s governor over looming layoffs

An article published at thehill.com by Kevin Bogardus titled "SEIU, AFL-CIO battle Puerto Rico’s governor over looming layoffs" reports "the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are battling against Luis Fortuño, Puerto Rico’s GOP governor, over his plan to lay off 17,000 government workers on Nov. 6."

Bogardus also writes the following:

Facing a $3.2 billion budget deficit, Fortuño says he’ll have to shut down the government if he does not lay off workers. The governor already laid off 4,000 workers in June and Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate is already 15 percent.

Dennis Rivera, chair of SEIU Healthcare, and other SEIU officials have been in San Juan since Wednesday. Many of those facing layoffs are SEIU members.

“It is critical. 7,500 members of SEIU are going to lose their jobs. If SEIU cannot help their members in their time of need, what good would this organization be?” Rivera said on the phone from San Juan.

Workers rallied Thursday in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, in coordination with a worker strike backed by the unions. Rallies also were held in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in solidarity with the workers from the U.S. island territory.

In a letter dated Thursday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumkahe said Fortuño needs to reverse his plan to lay off workers. “Laying off public servants, particularly at the scale that the governor is planning, is not only anti-worker, it will set back national efforts towards an economic recovery.”

What this article does not point out is that AFL-CIO President Trumkahe's wording suggests that the AFL-CIO would be willing to accept layoffs on a smaller scale. Despite the pro-imperialist politics of the union tops, real labor solidarity between U.S. and Puerto Rican unionists is possible. It is the duty of all revolutionaries to assist in forging that solidarity and recruting the best elements to the essential task of building a revolutionary workers party based on the principles and program of Lenin and Trotsky in order to provide the leadership the working class requires to win this struggle and many more.

Puerto Rico: Reflections on the National Strike

BY Firuzeh Shokooh Valle

On October 15, thousands of people in Puerto Rico flooded the streets to protest the government's decision to lay off around 17,000 government employees (in total there have been around 25,000 lay-offs this year). Workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, religious groups, students, teachers, professors, lawyers, and the LGBT community, among many other groups of the civil society, answered the call of the labor movement that initially convened the strike. Universities, schools, and stores closed for the day.

The organizers of the event estimated that 150,000-200,000 people participated in the massive demonstration that started from different points in the heart of the metropolitan area of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, particularly from the financial district, and converged in the immediate surrounding of Plaza Las Américas, the largest mall of the Caribbean and whose owners contributed to governor Luis Fortuño's campaign. There have been no official estimates, although government officials minimized the number. The Governor and his Chief of Staff, Marcos Rodríguez Ema, immediately stated that the anti-labor law (Law 7 of Fiscal Emergency) that made the lay-offs viable would not be repealed.

Bitter health pill for Hunter cafeteria union Unite Here

by Albor Ruiz

Early this week, Deborah Johnson, a Hunter College cafeteria worker for the last 10 years, received some unwelcome mail.

"I got a letter advising me that I will have no health coverage at all after Nov. 1," Johnson said. "The old company is not there any more and the new company hasn't picked the health plan up. They want us to pay for it."

Johnson wasn't the only one who got the letter. All 25 Hunter College cafeteria employees, members of Unite Here Local 100, could soon find themselves without health coverage.

The problem began this fall when AVI Foodsystems, an Ohio-based company, took over the food service contract at Hunter College from Sodexo, Inc., Johnson said.

Although none of the workers were fired,Johnson, a member of the workers' negotiating committee, said AVI is refusing to honor the workers' old collective bargaining agreement at the end of the month. That agreement includes a pension plan and free family health benefits.

The fact is, the workers say, that the hard working men and women who make their living at the Hunter College cafeteria - some of whom have been there for decades - are not asking AVI for anything new. They say they just want the new contractor not to take from them what is already theirs.

"There are negotiations scheduled for [today] and the workers are determined to fight to keep what they had," said Ian Mikusko, a union organizer. "Depending on how negotiations go, many students and faculty members are willing to fight along with the workers for a fair contract."

Last month, the cafeteria employees staged a 15-minute union meeting during a Thursday lunch rush to signal their determination. And on Monday, more than 150 students and faculty members rallied along with union members and workers at the college's main campus to protest what they consider is AVI's hard-line stance on health benefits and pensions.

"There is a lot of student support. Students are shocked when they find out what's going on with the cafeteria workers," said Owen Hill, 20, a history major at Hunter who was one of the speakers at the rally. "If the company doesn't budge there will be more rallies and even a boycott of the cafeteria. It's important to protect the workers' rights."

According to Johnson, what the cafeteria workers are paid - an average of $10.15 an hour - is not enough to afford the wage reduction that paying for part of their health coverage means. AVI, she said, also wants to substitute the pension plan with a 401(k) plan.

"And we know how well that has worked for a lot of people," Johnson said with some bitterness. "Besides, we are workers, food service workers, we don't make a lot of money, we cannot contribute to a 401(k), we don't have that kind of money."

What they do have is the support of the college community.

On Sept. 24 the Hunter College Chapter of the Professional Staff Congress - the CUNY system faculty union - passed a unanimous resolution endorsing Monday's rally. Tami Gold, the chapter president, wrote to her colleagues the vote was "in support of the cafeteria workers, who are represented by Unite Here Local 100, in their fight for decent wages, pensions and health benefits."
Richard Martin, AVI Foodsystems' senior vice president of business development, remains positive about today's negotiations.

"We really want to work things out," Martin said. "We are much closer to an agreement that most people think."

Originally appeared on the New York Daily News website dated October 8th, 2009.

The author can be reached at aruiz@nydailynews.com.