class struggle

By Elana Kessler and Richard Marcantonio - Labor Notes, January 21, 2022

Oakland transit worker Connie McFarland drove home after a long shift last July 28 and logged onto Zoom for a board meeting of her employer, AC Transit. She joined a chorus of 40 workers and riders who held up the start of the agenda with nearly two hours of public comment.

Their demand: hazard pay for frontline transit workers.

Bus operator Sultana Adams, an assistant shop steward with Transit (ATU) Local 192, described the trauma of an assault by a rider who spat in her face. McFarland told the board, “We really would like to have some form of appreciation that’s more than lip service.”

By coming together around this popular demand, Bay Area transit workers built power across unions in the lead-up to their contract campaigns and fought to improve transit for their riders.

By Sarah Jones - Intelligencer, January 20, 2022

Over the last ten months, Brian Kelly has traveled, twice, from his home in Alabama to New York City. Kelly, along with roughly 900 of his co-workers, has been on strike since April 2021, a lengthy ordeal they pin on their employer Warrior Met Coal’s lackluster proposals for a new contract. In an unusual move for a labor strike, he and hundreds of workers came to protest the three hedge funds that own Warrior Met and pressure them to pressure the company’s management. It hasn’t been easy: Last November, the NYPD arrested Kelly and several others in front of the headquarters of BlackRock, the largest shareholder in Warrior Met.

A third-generation coal miner, Kelly worked for Warrior Met’s predecessor, Walter Energy, for two decades until it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2015. That’s when a judge allowed the private equity firms that took it over, including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and KKR, to reject prior labor contracts with Kelly’s union, the United Mine Workers of America, as the Financial Times previously reported. Miners accepted a pay cut of $6 an hour to keep their jobs. Health-insurance costs increased. “Then they forced us to work seven days a week, up to 16 hours a day,” Kelly recalled. “Overall, we made a sacrifice during that time.” The firms say they saved jobs; instead, miners say private equity prospered from their suffering. Though private equity no longer owns the company, the strike is arguably their legacy.

“All told, we estimate that this conglomerate of private equity firms realized about $1.1 billion in savings coming out of the bankruptcy court just over the past five years, that were essentially taken out of the pockets of workers,” said Phil Smith, a spokesperson for the United Mine Workers. A bigger payday was still to come. “Before its initial public offering in 2017, Warrior paid them a $190m dividend from cash on hand,” the Financial Times reported. “A few months later it paid a $600m dividend funded with cash as well as a $350m debt offering.” Austerity for some can be a windfall for others.

In statements, Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR all emphasized that they are no longer intertwined with Warrior Met. “Our former investment in Warrior Met saved the company’s mining operations from the brink of collapse, allowed the company to deleverage and invest in its business and preserved more than a thousand high-paying jobs in Alabama,” a spokesperson for Apollo said. “During the time of Apollo’s investment until our ultimate exit in 2019, the company thrived — its stock price increased, they had positive relations with its workforce and the representative union, and employees, who rank among the top earners in Alabama, received significant pay increases and bonuses.”

That likely won’t persuade Smith or the miners who make up his union. Smith calls the firms “vulture capitalists,” which he explained in detail. “What the vultures do is they see something lying down on the ground and they come and they eat it, right?” he said. Warrior Met’s predecessor, Walter Energy, “was lying dead in bankruptcy court,” he explained, when private equity swooped in. “They’re preying on distressed and dead companies and figuring out ways to extract more money for themselves and for their investors from the bones and the remains of those companies,” he added.

By Marisol Cantu, et. al. - Richmond Progressive Alliance, January 16, 2022

By various Russian anarcho-syndicalists and anarchists - International Workers Association, January 13, 2022

Statement by Russian anarcho-syndicalists and anarchists on the situation in Kazakhstan

We, Anarcho-syndicalists and Anarchists of Russia express our full and complete solidarity with the social protest of the working people of Kazakhstan and send them our comradely greetings!

The current explosion of social protest in Kazakhstan, one of the most outstanding and brightest since the beginning of the new century, has become the apogee of the wave of the strike struggle of oil workers and other categories of workers in the country, which has not stopped since last summer.

The working people of Kazakhstan gradually recovered from the terrible massacre of the proletarians, organized in 2011 by the dictatorial regime of Nazarbayev, and began to consistently seek higher wages and the ability to create trade unions and other workers' associations. The poverty of the majority of the population, the cruel exploitation of labor, the rise in prices, daily oppression and lack of rights made the position of the working person unbearable and forced him to rise to protest actions.

The last straw was the layoffs of tens of thousands of oil workers in December 2021, the introduction of a "sanitary" dictatorship under the pretext of "fighting the pandemic" and a draconian increase in gas prices. On January 3, a general strike of workers began in the Mangistau region, which soon spread to other regions of the country. In the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, clashes erupted between protesters and repressive forces; there are tens or even hundreds of people killed and wounded. During the protests, disadvantaged people, primarily young unemployed and internal migrants, committed acts of popular expropriation, destroying many large shopping centers, shops and bank branches. In a number of cases, the troops refused to open fire on the rebels.

By Franziska Heinisch - Progressive International, January 11, 2022

Workers at a Bosch plant in Germany are fighting to keep their jobs with, to their surprise, support from climate activists. Their common demand is that there are no layoffs for climate protection, but instead a transition to ecological production.

ultinational corporations in the automotive industry like Bosch say they need to lay off workers in the transition to less-labour intensive e-mobility. In reality, they want to relocate production to low-wage countries to safeguard profits.

This is a catastrophe,” says Giuseppe Ciccone standing in front of “his” Munich plant during the German trade union IG Metall’s action day on Bosch. Shortly before, he had given a combative speech to about 600 workers. Since then, most of them have gone back to the plant or left. The chairman of the Bosch works council in Munich has been working at the local Bosch plant for almost forty years. He started at the age of 18 and is still there today. The plant and its employees are a central part of his life, “Like a family,” he says. But, as of late, a sense of crisis is prevalent in the family because the future of the plant is at stake.

Last year, Bosch announced plans to close its Munich plant which, until now, has been a production site for combustion engines, manufacturing fuel pumps and valves for diesel and petrol engines that will no longer be used in electric cars. Twenty years ago, about 1,600 people worked there but now there are only about 260 left. Even though it’s actually a rather small site, the struggle of the 260 against the planned closure has come to exemplify the conflict over the car industry and its workers’ future.

By various - Scottish Trades Union Congress, December 10, 2021

By Dr Eurig Scandrett - The Jimmy Reid Foundation, December 3, 2021

Introduction

It is no use simply saying to South Wales miners that all around them is an ecological disaster. They already know. They live in it. They have lived in it for generations. They carry it in their lungs… you cannot just say to people who have committed their lives and their communities to certain kinds of production that this has all got to be changed… Everything will have to be done by negotiation, by equitable negotiation, and it will have to be taken steadily along the way. Otherwise, you will find … that there is a middle-class environmental group protesting against the damage and there’s a trade-union group supporting the coming of the work. Now for socialists this is a terrible conflict to get into. Because if each group does not really listen to what the other is saying, there will be a sterile conflict which will postpone any real solutions at a time when it is already a matter for argument whether there is still time for the solutions. Raymond Williams (1982/1989)

The idea of ‘Just Transition’ (JT) has gained traction in recent years. With its roots in the union movement at the end of the twentieth century, it has developed into a concept with diverse and contested meanings. This engagement with JT has created spaces within the urgent policy areas of climate change mitigation to address potential job losses and the disproportionate impact up on the poorest communities, and more positively, to work for the generation of good quality, unionised jobs and greater social equality in a green economy. This is a fast-moving and often technical area of policy development. In Scotland, the Just Transition Commission (2021) reported in May 2021 after meeting over a period of two years, and relevant technical and policy reports are published with increasing frequency.

This paper is not a detailed contribution to these debates, on which others are more competent to comment, although it will inevitably touch on these. The paper aims to take a somewhat longer-term and more abstracted view of JT. It asks what do we mean by ‘Just’ and to what are we expecting to ‘Transition’ to? It argues that, in the discussions over the meanings of JT, the collective interests of workers, low-income communities and the environment are central, and require mechanisms to facilitate challenging dialogues between these interests.

There is an inevitable tendency, in developing positions on JT, to seek common ground between the two principal social movements that have driven JT debates: unions and environmental NGOs; or else between different unions or different industrial sectors. This process of seeking common ground can lead to a dilution of principle on all sides, a common denominator that all can live with, but with which none is entirely satisfied. While the process of negotiating common ground is a necessary and useful process for practical purposes, and a process at which the union movement is particularly adept, this paper argues that JT also provides the opportunity for a deeper dialogue in which all key stakeholders – the environment and working-class people who are either dependent on or excluded from the current unsustainable economy – can seek to incorporate the principles of the others. There are areas where the union movement and the environmental movement disagree. These areas of disagreement could be seen as potentially fertile grounds for deep dialogue in order to seek meaningful and lasting resolution.

This paper is, therefore, not intended to reflect the policy of any union or environmental group, but rather constitute a contribution to a debate within these movements and outwith them as well. It is, in places, designed to challenge. Indeed, it makes the case that the union and environmental movements can best learn from one another by being willing to be challenged by each other. All social movements reflect the interests of their participants, members, opinion formers and supporters and are contingent upon the social and political conditions in which they are acting. This is a strength, but also leads to ‘blind spots’ which are best addressed through collective self-reflection and challenges in solidarity from comrades in the struggle.

It is argued here that JT provides an opportunity to explore, for example, the tension well known in unions between representing the immediate interests of members and the long-term interests of the working-class; and in the environmental movement between the disproportionately educated, white, professional middle-class membership of the NGOs and the communities most directly affected by environmental devastation.

As has been recognised in some of the debates about JT, the idea can be located in a radical working-class tradition which, in Britain includes defence diversification, the East Kilbride Rolls Royce boycott of Chilean engines, the Lucas Aerospace Alternative Plan, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in, amongst others. JT can be more than a mechanism to address climate change, for it can also be a process which can be applied to transitions of many kinds that the labour movement and the left more generally have long advocated: the transition to a more democratic economy, more equal society and socially beneficial system of production, distribution and exchange. The paper, therefore, argues that the union movement, along with environmental and anti-poverty movements would benefit from going ‘beyond’ just transition.

By Elizabeth Perry - Work and Climate Change Report, November 17, 2021

On November 1, the Centre for Business and Human Rights Resource Centre released the 2nd edition of its report: the Renewable Energy & Human Rights Benchmark 2021 Report. Although the report notes some improvements from the inaugural 2020 edition, the Centre states that the “ overall results remain profoundly concerning, with companies scoring an average of just 28%.” In the past 10 years, the Centre has recorded over 200 allegations linked to renewable energy projects, including land and water grabs, violation of the rights of Indigenous nations, and the denial of workers’ rights to decent work and a living wage. Only 2 companies in the survey guaranteed the right to a living wage.

The wind and solar sectors accounted for 44% of the total allegations of abuse. The Key Findings for the Wind and Solar sectors report includes analysis, and makes recommendations for corporations and investors. For corporations, the key recommendation is: “Set a clear and urgent goal to implement human rights and environmental due diligence in operations and supply chains, alongside access to remedy, with special emphasis on land and Indigenous rights risks.”