The American Empire is made up of capitalist corporations and
entrenched political factions serving as a protective front for the
White Male, 21 and over, Land Holders that still form the base of our
American Oligarchy. From its earliest conception, this Force, this
budding Empire made promises and broke them at will. Working class
people struggled long and hard to force such protections as retirement
pensions, medical coverage, sick leave, vacation leave and decent
wages. The Working Class has been fought at every turn by the
American Empire.
The American Empire is not now, nor has it ever been democratic in
it's composition. The American Empire is not a friend of the Working
Class. The American Empire will lie to the Working Class any time it
serves the Empire's purposes.
As the American Empire looms large above the Working Class, can little
David Workingman find a sharp stone to put in his sling and drop the
mad giant? Before it's too late?
Carl Jarvis
On 7/14/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://themilitant.com/2018/07/14/unions-rally-in-fight-for-govt-funded-pensions/
Unions rally in fight for gov’t-funded pensions
All workers need pensions at union-scale pay
By Emma Johnson
Vol. 82/No. 27
July 23, 2018
United Mine Workers rally, Lexington, Kentucky, June 2016, protests cuts
to pensions, health care.
Charles Bertram/Lexington Herald-Leader via AP
United Mine Workers rally, Lexington, Kentucky, June 2016, protests cuts
to pensions, health care.
Car caravans and busloads of active and retired union members from
across the Midwest and beyond are gathering in their thousands at the
Ohio state Capitol in Columbus July 12. They’re demanding that the
government fund the pensions for hundreds of thousands of workers who
depend on plans on the brink of bankruptcy.
The rally — set the day before a meeting there of Congress’ Joint Select
Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans — underscored the
need for the union movement to champion the fight for
government-guaranteed pensions for all workers at union-scale pay. More
than 600,000 retired and working members of several of the unions
organizing the rally — the United Mine Workers, the Teamsters, and the
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers — belong to
plans that face bankruptcy in the coming few years.
“If the pension fund goes insolvent, my pension will go from $4,000 to
$1,200,” Sherman Liimatainen, vice president of the National United
Committee to Protect Pensions, said by phone July 10. “I’m retired now,
but I paid into it for 38 years. The plan affects 400,000 retired
Teamsters. Our cuts would be anything between 50 and 70 percent.”
One bus from Duluth, Minnesota, where Liimatainen lives, traveled nine
hours to attend the rally.
“Because of health issues many are not able to make it,” he said. “They
can’t take such long trips and they can’t take the heat. We expect
10,000 Teamsters, but if all who wanted to could go, there’d be a lot
more.”
Phil Smith, communications director with the United Mine Workers, told
the Militant July 3 that the union had organized dozens of buses from
West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Alabama. Miners from
as far away as Utah and Colorado are going. Like the Teamsters, the
United Mine Workers 1974 Pension Plan is on the verge of insolvency, a
move that will affect 87,000 retired and 20,000 working miners.
Retirement is not a ‘fringe benefit’
During the world capitalist economic expansion from the late 1940s
through the early 1970s, labor officials steadily retreated from the
fighting militancy of the rank and file that had built the industrial
unions in the 1930s. The expanding economy of the U.S. rulers, based on
Washington emerging as top dog out of the second imperialist war for
markets and power, made it possible for workers to win modest, but real
wage increases and “fringe benefits” from employers without sharp class
battles.
Militant/George Chalmers
Miners march in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, April 1, 2016, protesting coal
bosses’ moves to gut pensions. UMW organized July 12 rally with
Teamsters, bakery workers and other unions.
More and more of these pension and health care plans become contingent
on the competitive edge and profitability of the bosses.
These benefits weren’t wrung from the government as social protections
for the working class as a whole. They are based on the individual
capitalist boss or, in the case of multiemployer plans, the
union-organized companies in one industry. In good times — for workers
who have these plans — they can seem eternal, something workers can
count on. But when the capitalists’ profits and world system of
exploitation started contracting in the 1970s, this all began to fall
apart.
Bosses started to turn on the unions, going increasingly after workers’
wages and benefits. Mines and plants closed, or reopened nonunion. And
in 2008 a big financial crisis dealt a blow to capitalist production and
trade worldwide. As plants closed, pension plans had less and less
workers paying in, and the speculation in stocks, bonds and hedge funds
that fund administrators used to increase them took a nose dive.
This is the price paid for the union officialdom’s
class-collaborationist policy of refusing to fight for the real needs of
the working class — wages high enough to cover workers’ real living
costs, federally funded retirement and health care, unemployment pay for
as long as you’re out of work at union-scale pay. And all this backed by
independent working-class action to take political power.
“We explain the need for the labor movement to fight for social rights
such as health care and adequate pensions for all working people,” SWP
National Secretary Jack Barnes writes in The Changing Face of U.S.
Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. “The unions
should take the lead in resisting the continual drive by the government
and employers to make meeting these life-or-death needs the
responsibility of individuals and their families.”
“Our fund was driven towards insolvency under the oversight of the
federal government with investment management by Wall Street companies,”
Liimatainen said. “Members of Congress knew funds were failing. But they
didn’t offer any solution. Instead, they sucker-punched us with the
Multiemployer Pension Reform Act.”
The act, passed by Congress in December 2014, allowed the managers of
pension funds deemed to be in “critical and declining status” to get
permission to slash retirees’ payments as much as needed to keep the
fund “solvent.”
“As authorized by the act, the leadership of our fund proposed a ‘rescue
plan,’ that would have slashed our pensions,” Liimatainen said. “But
when they sought federal approval to ruin our lives, we did what we do
best. We organized. We rallied. We proved that we have ‘power in the
numbers.’ We stopped the plan. And now we demand a real solution that
safeguards our pensions.”
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In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Unions rally in fight for gov’t-funded pensions
•SWP: Get US rulers’ troops, planes, bombs out of Korea!
•Workers’ struggles are key, not who’s on the Court
•‘We need to tell the truth’ about US colonial rule in Puerto Rico
•Washington, Moscow seek new Mideast arrangement
•Pittsburgh protests continue in fight to convict cop who shot Antwon Rose
Feature Articles •UK health workers beat back attack by hospital bosses
Also In This Issue •Twin Cities rally: ‘File charges against killer cop’
•Books by SWP leaders draw interest at Tehran book fair
•New Zealand retail store workers fight bosses’ attacks
•Hundreds celebrate life of ILWU fighter Byron Jacobs
•Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond freed!
On the Picket Line •Strikers chase scabs from Ontario salt mine
•Massachusetts natural gas workers fight National Grid lockout
•Illinois Teamsters end strike at American Bottling, make gains
•Vermont nurses call strike for wages, staffing
Books of the Month •Black troops had key role in revolutionary victory
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25, 50 and 75 years ago
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