class struggle

By Marisol Cantu, et. al. - Richmond Progressive Alliance, February 7, 2022

By Jeremy Brecher - The American Prospect, February 4, 2022

When the Union Pacific Railroad closed its Global 3 Intermodal Ramp outside of Chicago in 2019, Union Pacific marketing executive Kenny Rocker promised that closing the facility would bring “more consistent, reliable and predictable service” to shippers who depend on rail. Union Pacific was cutting costs by consolidating its unloading facilities in Chicago, a national center of transshipment for goods that come by rail from ports.

Two years later, as the supply chain crisis gripped the country, the railroad had to abruptly reopen Global 3. In the meantime, Union Pacific stopped service between the all-important shipping hubs of Los Angeles and Chicago for one week last July while the company reconfigured its operations. Union Pacific’s remaining facilities in Chicago couldn’t keep up with the volume, nor could Union Pacific find enough workers or equipment to handle the goods. Industry analyst Larry Gross told Trains.com that Union Pacific “sacrificed surge capacity” when it closed Global 3. “If you don’t have any additional capacity in your hip pocket, even moderate disruptions put you in a world of hurt.” Gross estimated that Union Pacific’s weeklong suspension of service would keep roughly 40,000 containers stranded on the West Coast.

Every other major railroad suffered from supply chain snags in 2021. Another overwhelmed rail company, BNSF, ordered a slowdown of shipments into its Chicago facility. Two other remaining large rail companies, Norfolk Southern and CSX, received sharply worded letters from the head of their primary regulator, Surface Transportation Board Chairman Martin Oberman. In his letters, Chairman Oberman asked each railroad to respond to complaints from shippers—across different types of goods—of worsened service delays and higher costs.

But the freight railroads’ poor operational performance has not impaired their spectacular financial performance. If anything, the bottlenecks create more pricing power. Less than a week after his company reversed its 2019 decision and reopened Global 3, Union Pacific executive Rocker optimistically predicted on an earnings call that Union Pacific would be able to “take some pretty robust pricing on the market”—in other words, keep its prices high. The stock market shared Rocker’s optimism for all Class I railroads, whose stock prices rose in 2021, many by 20 percent or more. The last year was one more of a decade of financial prosperity for the industry as the stock price and total return of every publicly traded Class I railroad from the end of 2011 to the end of 2021, except for Canadian National, grew faster than the S&P 500. Union Pacific earned the second-highest total return in that period, getting investors an almost sixfold return on their money and beating the S&P 500 by over 100 points.

By Ron Kaminkow, et. al. - More Perfect Union, February 3, 2022

By Joe DeManuelle-Hall - Labor Notes, February 2, 2022

Contract negotiations covering 115,000 rail workers in the U.S. are expected to heat up in 2022.

Workers are seething over the impact of extreme cost-cutting measures. Rail unions are escalating through the slow steps of negotiations under the Railway Labor Act—toward a resolution, a strike, or a lockout.

Rail remains one of the most heavily unionized industries in the country, and rail workers maintain the arteries of the economic system.

In 2018, U.S. railroads moved 1.73 trillion ton-miles of freight, while trucks moved 2.03 trillion. (One ton-mile is one ton of freight moved one mile.) A slim majority of rail freight consists of bulk commodities, ranging from grain to mined ores to automobiles; slightly less is made up of consumer goods.

COST-CUTTING FRENZY

In the flurry of reporting on what’s slowing down the supply chain, little has been said about one contributing factor—the years-long squeeze that major railroads have put on their operations and workforces.

Precision Scheduled Railroading is a nebulous term that has come to cover many measures aimed at cutting costs and increasing profits. (Although the name refers to trains operating on a set schedule, that’s just one piece.) All the railroads engage in elements of it.

PSR is basically the railroad version of lean production—the methodology of systematic speedup and job-cutting that caught on in manufacturing in the ’80s and spread to many industries.

The railroads have done it by cutting less-profitable routes; closing and consolidating railyards, repair barns, and other facilities; running fewer, longer trains; and laying off tens of thousands of workers while demanding the remaining workers do more.

Class I railroads—the companies with annual revenues over $900 million—employed fewer workers this January than any month since 2012, falling below even the early-pandemic slump.

Railroads have cut as many as 35 percent of workers in some titles over the past several years. Overall there were 160,795 Class I rail workers in December 2015, and only 114,499 by December 2021.

At the same time, individual freight trains were hauling, on average, 30 percent more tonnage in 2020 than in 2000.

But all these practices add up to a system that doesn’t function well under pressure—the pressure of a global pandemic, or even just the pressure of normal operations. In stretched-out, just-in-time supply chains with no room for error, delays cascade into more delays.

By Max Alvarez and Jeff Kurtz - Real News Network, February 1, 2022

By Chris Saltmarsh - The Ecologist, February 1, 2022

A review of Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read, published by Polity Press.

Activists in Extinction Rebellion are currently discussing the movement's new published strategy. The debates within XR often centre on a difference of approach between long standing members who were influenced by Dr Jem Bendell's paper calling for "deep adaptation" and those who want to focus on climate justice and a rapid dismantling of "fossil fuel capitalism" to avoid the need for such adaption.

This is the context in which many people are now reading Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, a collection of essays brought together by Bendell and Dr Rupert Read, his long time collaborator and one of the many XR co-founders.

Read: The new XR UK strategy

Read: XR 2.0: We appreciate power

The book starts from the premise that societal collapse induced by climate change is inevitable or highly likely, arguing that humans should adapt to this new reality by moving away from industrial consumer society. This retains and amplifies the main arguments first proposed by Bendell in his online paper, which went viral and became influential within Extinction Rebellion, including among its co-founders.

By Marisol Cantu, et. al. - Richmond Progressive Alliance, January 31, 2022

By Amal Ahmed and Emily Pontecorvo - Grist, January 31, 2022

A union is warning Texas officials not to give Exxon money for carbon capture until it fixes its labor problems.

In Beaumont, Texas, working at one of Exxon Mobil’s plants has long been a way to earn steady wages and support a family in this industrial corner of the Gulf Coast. “We take care of more than just our immediate family,” said Darrell Kyle, the president of the local United Steelworkers chapter, the union representing workers at the plants. “We’re the uncles and aunts,” he said, who help “the struggling nieces or nephews who need a couple hundred dollars to get by, to pay a bill.” 

But for the past nine months, about 600 union employees at Exxon’s refinery and other plants have been struggling to pay their own bills: They have been locked out of their jobs because Exxon has been unable to come to an agreement with the union over a new contract. Kyle said that the company is refusing to honor protections for senior workers that have been in place for decades, while the union is demanding that those protections remain in place. At the end of last April, without a contract finalized and with the threat of a union strike pending, the company began escorting employees out of the complex, the Beaumont Enterprise, a local newspaper, reported. The company stated that the provisions the union was asking for were “items that would significantly increase costs and limit the company’s ability to safely and efficiently operate.”

Some workers, willing to take the deal Exxon was offering, began a campaign to decertify the union, which would end union representation at the plants. The United Steelworkers union believes that Exxon illegally assisted the campaign and has filed complaints with the National Labor Review Board. 

But in addition to using this legal channel to try to protect their union, the Steelworkers tried a different tactic. They started their own campaign to pressure Exxon into a deal — by undermining the company’s push for public money to build a $100 billion carbon capture hub in nearby Houston.

By Javier Sethness - The Commoner, January 27, 2022

published on The Commoner, 27 January 2022

This exclusive interview with Assembly, a magazine based in Ukraine, provides a fresh, on-the-ground perspective on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Writers from Assembly have published articles with The Commoner before, which you can find here. You may otherwise find their website here.

Comrades, thank you for agreeing to this interview. We very much enjoyed your recent article in The Commoner, ‘The Time Has Come?’, about ongoing socio-economic resistance in Ukraine.

Today, the world looks on in horror as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military is amassing over a hundred-thousand troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. These forces are reportedly composed of sixty battalion tactical groups (BTG’s), including Spetznatz special forces, hundreds of tanks, and dozens of ballistic-missile units—not to mention either the Black Sea Fleet or aerial forces. Although Ukraine gained formal independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991, Putin has repeatedly expressed nostalgia for Tsarist and Soviet imperialism, while Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, has long belittled the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Currently, the UK is selling light anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, while the US has supplied billions of dollars in military aid to the country since 2014, when the Russian military occupied and annexed Crimea. Some media sources suggest that Putin has not yet decided whether to order the invasion, which could spark the most destructive conflict in Europe since World War II, even if Ukraine is not a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Now, following a breakdown in negotiations, President Joe Biden is reportedly considering sending thousands of NATO troops to the Baltic countries.

By Marisol Cantu, et. al. - Richmond Progressive Alliance, January 24, 2022