class struggle

By Eriel Deranger, Jacqui Patterson, Moñeka De Oro, Tom Goldtooth, and Ananda Lee Tan - Tishman Environment Design Center, October 8, 2021

By Aragorn Eloff - New Frame, October 5, 2021

A radical collective committed to change in the face of climate collapse calls for global solidarity and a turn to the worker to revolutionise how we relate to the world.

The tone of The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene is set in the opening paragraph with a sobering addendum to the Communist Manifesto’s most well-known sentences: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win. What if the world is already lost?”

This important new book, written by the Salvage Collective – of which well-known science fiction author China Miéville is a member – is a manifesto-like cry to countenance the state of our social and ecological lifeworlds, and to grapple with the question of how “we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet”. Herein, for Salvage, lies the titular concern of the book, which unashamedly wears its politics on its sleeve: the tragedy of the worker is that “she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe”.

How do we think about progressive – even revolutionary – forms of politics when we live “at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear”, and where, even if capitalism were overthrown tomorrow, we would “inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death”?

As we are relentlessly reminded throughout the text, the situation is not good. The current confluence of accelerating ecological crises, most popularly termed the “Anthropocene” or the “sixth mass extinction crisis” is, as Salvage describes, “a megaphase change taking place in microphase time”.

By Frank Duffy - The Guardian, September 20, 2021

More than 500 workers, myself included, at the GKN Automotive factory in Birmingham have voted for strike action to save both our plant and British manufacturing. It’s the last thing we ever wanted to do, but we feel we have been left with no choice.

Currently, we manufacture and assemble components for drivelines, the all-important section underneath your car for transferring power from the engine and transmission to the wheels. In 2019, 90% of GKN’s components went into traditional combustion engines, but that may halve by 2025, with electric vehicles (EVs) taking 15% of components, and hybrids about 40%. The move to electric will only continue, as UK factories unveil their new vehicle plans before purely internal combustion engines are banned in 2030.

In order to future-proof our jobs and the British automotive industry, we need to transition to producing components for EVs, including new propulsion systems and e-drives. GKN has developed a new e-drive with UK government funding at its Oxfordshire research facility, but sadly we won’t see this innovation creating new green jobs for British workers. Melrose, the owners of GKN, have decided to close our plant in 2022 and move jobs overseas.

We realised that if we want to see a green future for the UK car industry and save our skilled jobs, we couldn’t leave it to our bosses and had to take matters into our own hands. We put together a 90-page alternative plan detailing how we could reorganise production to save money and make these new components.

Ours is the first transition plan for an automotive plant proposed by union stewards in the UK, and an echo of the 1976 Lucas Plan, when shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace, also in Birmingham, proposed converting their plant to socially useful products.

Now, as then, our alternative plan proposed saving jobs in Birmingham while transitioning the plant into an asset to support the wider UK industry. That’s a win for the workforce, the industry and the environment. If that isn’t what’s meant by the phrase “just transition”, I don’t know what is.

By Art Francisco - Oakland Socialist, September 18, 2021

By Nina Wirz - Oakland Socialist, September 18, 2021

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, September 17, 2021

Two thousand Washington carpenters went on strike yesterday, out of 6,600 who currently work under the master agreement with the Association of General Contractors (AGC). Five jobs were picketed, including construction projects at Facebook’s Building X, the Microsoft’s Campus in Redmond, and Alphabet’s Google.

“I didn’t know what to expect. People can talk on Facebook, but you don’t know until it’s time for people to show up,” said Joe Rice, a general foreman at Local 30.

Local 816 carpenter Bryce Owings was required to report to work, but he took the day off to stand on the picket line. “I’m a card-carrying carpenter” before anything else, said his superintendent at the jobsite, when Owings asked for a personal day to stand on the picket line.

“This is the beautiful part—now the membership is taking their union leadership and guiding them in the right direction,” said Jimmy Castillo Matta, Jr., a delegate in Local 41, who spent his 25th birthday on the picket line.

The support has also come from other trades. “The fight they’re having, we’re all facing. The AGC isn’t stupid,” said H.M., a member of Operating Engineers Local 612 who asked to use only her initials.

By Zack Haber - Medium, September 1, 2021

Following threats of a worker strike over labor day weekend, the around 600 workers with the East Bay Regional Park District came to a tentative agreement with the district’s board and management on Tuesday that raises salaries, putting all workers at or just above median wages for such similar jobs in the region.

“I’m feeling not only elated and exhilarated but also really tired,” said Sergio Huerta, a park supervisor and fire fighter who has worked with the district for over 30 years. “I’m really proud of the work that we’ve all done.”

Starting about eight months ago, workers had been negotiating with the district through their union, AFSCME 2428, to raise salaries. Huerta said the struggle was hard and long, adding 12–16 extra hours to his work week. During a press conference on Tuesday, a naturalist with the district named Melissa Fowlks said “getting to fair equitable compensation has been a mountain of a struggle.” But park workers felt they had much to gain, because their previous contract had them making a lower salary than they felt was fair.

“I love my job, but I don’t want to have to choose between my job and providing for my family,” said Pia Loft in an interview several days before workers announced their win. “I want respect and I want fair pay.”

Loft is an educator with the district who is raising two children.

While parks workers fulfill a vast array of jobs to maintain and improve the park and its community including education, fire fighting, life guarding, and accounting, almost all park workers take home a lower salary than those doing similar jobs in the area. According to a report Ralph Andersen & Associates released in 2019 that analyzed the salaries of 37 different park positions, 34 of these positions make less than the median salary for similar jobs in the region and seven make over 20% less than the regional median salary. On average, parks workers make 10% less than the median regional income.

Workers say the low salaries cause people to leave the district which has resulted in vacancies in over 40 positions. Loft said if these positions were filled, visitors would likely see an improvement in park services including cleaner bathrooms, visitor centers that are open longer hours, and more educational and volunteer opportunities. Huerta keeps hearing stories about workers leaving the district because of the low salaries. One of Huerta’s close friends recently told him he is leaving the district for a better paying job.

“It hurts because these are really good people who are dedicated to their work,” he said.

By Jared Spears - The Progressive, August 30, 2021

All summer, fed-up employees across the United States have been refusing to work. From frustrated food service employees to exhausted factory line workers, they are banding together to push back against punishing schedules, precarious conditions and unresponsive management.

Despite these workers being lauded as “essential” at the onset of the pandemic, major news outlets have been more interested in billionaires’ private space-race than in covering, say, Western farm pickers’ petition to OSHA for extreme-heat protections or the Teamsters’ drive to unionize Amazon workers nationwide. 

Meanwhile, the urgency of climate change is only growing more intense. And, with so many workers across the country struggling against subsistence wages and conditions, the prospect of organizing a society-wide response to meet the emissions reductions outlined in the latest IPCC report still seems far off. We upended our lives during the pandemic, but our response to what we know is happening to the planet has remained business-as-usual. 

Government can and should assume a much larger role, coordinating industries and reshaping markets to address our urgent threats while guaranteeing better, more humane and socially beneficial work for all. This is precisely why the demand for a Green New Deal was never limited to energy transition alone: it was also tied to quality of life issues such as raising the minimum wage and providing universal health care access.

The term evokes a broader realignment between labor, government and the private sector — as occurred during the Great Depression — that would unleash the nation’s untapped potential. If our red-hot summer of wildfires, heatwaves and labor confrontations underscores anything, it’s to drive home the wisdom of the Green New Deal. 

By James Daria - Labor Notes, August 30, 2021

In 2015, tens of thousands of poor, mostly indigenous migrant farmworkers (or jornaleros) went on strike in Mexico, blockading the transpeninsular highway that connects agricultural production in the valley of San Quintín, Baja California, with distributors across the border in the United States. These workers produce crops including tomatoes, cucumbers, and berries for U.S. and world markets—under conditions they decry as “modern slavery.”

The federal recognition of the National Independent Democratic Union of Agricultural Workers (Sindicato Independiente Nacional Democrático de Jornaleros Agrícolas, or SINDJA) was one of the few concrete achievements of negotiations between workers, growers, and state and federal governments.

The union—Mexico’s only independent farmworker union—has carried on in the years since, though it’s fighting an uphill battle. SINDJA has yet to achieve a collective bargaining agreement with the local growers and multinational corporations that operate in the valley.

This July, SINDJA elected a new executive committee, which could mark an important turning point for farmworkers in Mexico. Abelina Ramírez Ruiz, the new general secretary, began her involvement with the union by organizing around the multiple forms of violence suffered by migrant farmworker women. This includes issues of gender inequality, harassment, and sexual assault in the fields as well as domestic violence in the home.

Even as the migrant farmworker workforce becomes increasingly female, women continue to struggle to gain equality in both migrant and labor justice movements. Local social movements, community groups, and labor organizations have been largely male-dominated spaces where the voices of women are marginalized. The farmworker strike of 2015 was a watershed moment as female leaders emerged to challenge the gender hierarchies inherent in previous organizing efforts.

In another hopeful development, the Mexican government has agreed to work towards more transparent and democratic labor relations. Recent labor reforms stipulate that all collective bargaining agreements must be renegotiated by 2023 by means of democratic elections where workers decide their union representation. That’s thanks to reforms implemented by Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as well as pressure by U.S.-based unions in negotiating important labor provisions into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the successor to NAFTA. This could potentially offer unions like SINDJA a more favorable environment for organizing.