Monthly Archives: September 2022

CHICAGO Mario Aurelio Navarro, a 49-year-old experienced conductor, was killed in a derailment in a Union Pacific rail yard in El Paso, Texas, Aug. 29. Two cars derailed, crushing Navarro and crashing into a neighboring backyard, rupturing a gas line and forcing the evacuation of 50 residents. Navarros death on the job was entirely preventable. According to a police report, supervisors told him the track was clear, but in fact a derailer had been installed there when work was done on the track earlier.

Brother Navarro is the fourth TD member who has died while in service in 2022, said a statement issued by SMART-TD, the conductors union.

This latest fatality underscores the fact that the rail bosses drive for profits, which has led them to slash crew size and impose unlivable and dangerous schedules, is a crucial question.

These questions are not addressed in the proposed national contract for over 115,000 rail workers organized by a dozen different unions who are facing off against five Class 1 railroads and some 30 local carriers.

The contract for the majority of the unions ran out at the end of 2019. Under the notorious anti-union Railway Labor Act, they entered mandatory talks organized by the National Mediation Board in June 2021. Those talks were unsuccessful and ended June 14 this year, followed by a 30-day cooling off period. Then Joseph Biden imposed a Presidential Emergency Board to draw up proposals, which it issued Aug. 16.

Most of the rail unions, under pressure from workers, have said the recommendations are not acceptable and are continuing negotiations. If a settlement is not reached by Sept. 16, the unions are legally free to strike, and the rail bosses are free to lock out workers.

The board recommended a pay raise of about 24% over five years, some of it retroactive, and the bosses have ballyhooed this as the largest in decades. But most, if not all, of the raise will be eaten up by high inflation and increases in health insurance costs. And the proposal does nothing to address the issues of exhausting work schedules, draconian attendance policies, job cuts and speedup.

Overall, the rail bosses have slashed the workforce by 29% over the last six years, resulting in soaring profits. Now the carriers want to impose engineer-only operations on road trains, and have been cutting yard crews to the bone.

On Aug. 9 CSX unilaterally turned what had been two-person remote control switching crews into one-person jobs in its Selkirk yard near Albany, New York. Since then, Selkirk employees have been harassed, intimidated, and bullied into accomplishing more work with half the crew, Joshua Therrien, chairman of SMART-TD Local 212, wrote in a letter to the federal Surface Transportation Board.

My people were already fatigued and beat down from the employee shortage, Therrien said. Now my members are being forced to work 12 hours vs. 8 hours because the state of the railroad is in shambles. They are being yelled at on the radio, met by management in the field and being harassed for not moving quicker, or doing more, and when they cant find any rule violations, they are flying a drone over our heads 24/7.

The railroad issued a statement saying, CSX strongly refutes the allegations of harassment and intimidation.

Therrien also accused CSX of skimping on routine maintenance in the Selkirk yard. Crews are operating switches that are hard to operate because there are not enough maintenance workers to properly adjust or lubricate them, he wrote. We are walking on road ballast, so that the carrier can save a few pennies on good walking ballast to protect our feet, and we walk around debris. This description rings true for many rail workers across the country.

A track crew of three, the same size as it was decades ago, now is responsible for maintaining five times more trackage from our home base in Lincoln into eastern Iowa, including any yard tracks in between, over 100 miles of track and a number of bridges, Jake Forsgren told the Militant Sept. 3. Forsgren has 11 years as a track worker and welder in Nebraska and is the local chair of Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division Lodge 1320.

Track workers travel long distances, at times hundreds of miles from their home base. Travel allowances paid by the companies were last adjusted in 1996 and meals and lodging have not been raised since 2005.

The Presidential Emergency Board acknowledged the BMWE provided scores of anecdotes of employees who were forced to sleep in cars, skip food or eat nothing but fast food, sleep in substandard hotels with bed bugs and criminal activities taking place on premises, or sleep multiple employees in a room even during the COVID pandemic.

So far, our national negotiating leadership has been unsuccessful getting a contract with railroad companies, Forsgren said. Strike ballots of BMWE members were counted the last week of August, resulting in over 97% for a strike if an agreement isnt reached.

The rail bosses profit drive, crew cuts and resulting worker resignations have led to many delays in servicing customers. Some major capitalist businesses have appealed to the federal government to intervene. In June the Surface Transportation Board issued an emergency service order directing Union Pacific to prioritize corn shipments to Foster Farms, after the poultry giant complained it might have to euthanize millions of chickens for lack of feed.

But the business associations and government agencies, such as the Surface Transportation Board, are united in their opposition to any strike action by rail workers to fight against their conditions. They are counting on Congress to rapidly order a halt to any work stoppage, as it has done many times in the past.

The last national rail strike took place April 17, 1991, after three years of negotiations, mediation and cooling off periods. One of the major issues was the rail bosses drive to cut what were four- or five-person crews to two. The strike showed the tremendous power workers have. Virtually all freight ground to a halt.

By the end of the day, Congress passed legislation ordering the strikers back to work, and the unions complied. The vote was overwhelming and bipartisan, with only five representatives opposed. Most of the bosses concession demands were imposed.

This record proves more clearly than ever that organized labor needs its own political party and not the so-called friends of labor in the Democratic and Republican parties, Joe Swanson, a retired rail worker and the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Congress in Lincoln, told the Militant. The SWP campaign supports the formation of a labor party that would fight for abolition of the Railway Labor Act, which severely limits the right of rail workers to strike.

Rail workers have historically honored the picket lines of other unions when they go on strike, as they did in the 2021 Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 50G strike at Kelloggs in Omaha, Swanson said. Such acts of solidarity by the entire labor movement can both help and inspire others to stand up and fight. All out in support for the railroad unions in their struggle for a contract and for schedules and crew sizes that protect workers health and welfare. This is in the interest of all workers.

Naomi Craine is a freight conductor and member of SMART-TD.

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Build solidarity with rail workers fight! Help strengthen, expand the labor movement! The Militant - The Militant

Reviews & Culture

Jesse Osalvskys new book The Most Absolute Abolition looks at how the Underground Railroad was supported by a network of activists organised in Vigilance Committees, writes Dave Clinch

Tuesday 13 September 2022

In this carefully researched narrative history author Jesse Osalvsky has brought into focus the names and the lives of runaway slaves. They were escaping the prison house of the Southern plantations of the United States. Its a particularly interesting read as its written by and with those who escaped enslavement in pre-Civil War America.

Osalvsky also looks at those who worked with slaves within Vigilance Committees. They listened to and recorded their stories and guided escaped slaves on their dangerous passage to safety away from the reach of slavecatchers on the Underground Railroad.

There was much debate about the methodology of conducting interviews which became an interchange of thought between slaves and interviewers. Critically, it was understood that runaways drove the narrative, with support from those who listened and recorded their experiences.

Several went on to write their own autobiographies, such as fugitive Harriet Jacobs. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet wrote about her traumatic experiences. She would become a major figure in the abolitionist movement.

Danger was around every corner for the escaped slavesthey were surrounded by heavy surveillance. Organisations such as the Richmond committee for the Prevention of Absconding and Abducting of Slaves offered considerable rewards for captured fugitives.

It was what scholars describe as a carceral landscape and has a direct link to the present disproportionate number of black people in US jails. It is shocking to learn that those who absconded were described as stealing themselves. The slave was merely a machine who worked harder for a Master.

Women, as philosopher and activist Angela Davis has explained, were classified as breeders not mothers. They could therefore have their children sold away from them like calves and cows.

Former slave Lewis Clarke in his autobiography estimated that some 60 million was robbed from slaves each year. Runaways knew that the capitalist system and the wealth it produced was built on their brutal exploitation.

Reading this history is an immersive experience. There are five chapters that show how the Vigilance Committees helped fugitives from 1835 to 1861 when the Civil War began.

This includes details from individual stories. So I learned that the origins of the committees which were rooted in black resistance and how they operated. Olsavsky examines, for example, how the committees overcame sectarian divides in the 1840s to focus on bringing runaways into the abolitionist movement.

The chapter The Pedagogy of Radical Abolitionism shows how the Vigilance Committee networks assisted in bringing the ideas of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown to publication. Runaways were writing about how to overthrow society.

The collaboration between fugitives and Vigilance Committee members created a radicalised body of work that was critical of the American slave economy.

The development of revolutionary ideas about religion, feminism, anti-racism, prison abolition, novel writing, transcendentalism and music is explored in considerable depth. Its interrogated in a chapter entitled All Shall be Thrown Down, which for me demonstrates the possibilities of resistance to the slaveholders by any means necessary.

Olsavskys impressive research draws out differences between abolitionistswho advocated for no further extension to slaveryand those who campaigned for it to be ended immediately. He also shows that where there were differences of philosophy they did not necessarily interfere with the collaboration between the Vigilance Committee networks and the Underground Railroad.

The Vigilance Committees worked with anti-slavery societies. But they went further in advocating armed self-defence and insurrection against the slaveholders. One notable occasion is the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 led by John Brown, a revolutionary act which was a contributory factor to the American Civil War.

Its clearly a highly researched narrative that sheds light on the actions and activity of creative individuals, both women and men. Their courage clearly influenced the struggle against the prison house of slavery.

Yet paradoxically they have been sidelined by the powers who benefit from those who continue to exploit labour in the pursuit of profit in the contemporary world. That is why The Most Absolute Abolition is an invaluable resource for understanding the history of revolutionary struggle.

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The Most Absolute Abolitionnew book explores abolition and lives of escaped slaves - Socialist Worker

In a moment of rising living costs, climate emergencies and infrastructure failures in Jackson, Mississippi, Baltimore and Kentucky, two recent polls from NBC News and Quinnipiac found a majority of Americans viewed threats to democracy as the top election issue going into the 2022 elections. Looking to bolster the Democratic Partys position before the midterms, President Joe Biden sought to address the threat of right-wing authoritarianism (or semi-fascism, as he called it) to representative democracy.

As constitutional law scholar Leah Litman demonstrated in a recent Twitter thread, curtailing voting rights is not the only strategy authoritarians are willing to pursue on their way to political dominance. On August 31, the two Republicans sitting on the four-person Michigan Board of State Canvassers voted against including an abortion rights initiative on the November ballot after canvassers throughout the state acquired more than 750,000 signatures to do so. In other words, two Republicans blocked the will of more than 750,000 Michiganders, presumably not all of them Democrats, in order to undermine reproductive rights. But it is part of two larger trends that are worth understanding: (1) the relationship between the attacks on reproductive freedom & voting rights (2) the GOPs efforts to win by attacking democracy itself, in part by seeking to control all state & local levers of power, Litman rightfully explained on Twitter. The theft of voting and reproductive rights go hand-in-hand.

Yet, the curtailment of democracy runs deeper than the far-right attacks on the electoral process. President Biden and other Democrats continue to resist calls to defund the police. President Biden recently also laid out his Safer America Plan, which seeks to add 100,000 more police. His plan expands policing, which as an institution, along with prisons, has successfully shielded itself from public accountability and calls for radical changes. In addition to acknowledging these aspects of the criminal legal systems undemocratic nature, political scientists Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver argue that disproportionate contact with police and the legal system suppresses civic participation as police tactics such as stop and frisk tend to engender more estrangement from all government institutions, including those administering elections. And, on the economic front, corporations such as Amazon and Starbucks continue to resist unionization campaigns across the country, blocking democracy at the workplace.

However, media conversations about the decline of, or the threat to, representative democracy obscures how participatory democracy in all areas of life has driven change, or at least opened possibilities for transformation. While the protests against police violence of 2014-2015 and the massive uprisings in 2020 might appear to arise spontaneously after police killings of Black Americans, Black Lives Matter and defund the police, and the protests that carried these demands didnt arise out of nowhere. Calls to defund the Minneapolis Police Department brought the demand into popular discourse after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We would not have been ready that summer had we not been organizing and educating ourselves for years prior, Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery of Minneapoliss Black Visions wrote in the Foreword to No More Police: A Case for Abolition.

In another moment illustrating the importance of grassroots democracy, the campaign to abolish student debt led by the debtors union, the Debt Collective, won a national victory when they pushed Biden to abolish up to $20,000 in college debt for borrowers. They won this campaign after years of holding meetings, building their membership and organizing protests, including a national student debt strike with students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges, as well as joining progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to push for mass student debt cancellation and free college.

In turn, the Debt Collectives roots rest in the Occupy Movement, which not only popularized calling the ultra-wealthy the 1% while declaring itself to be the 99%, but also inspired participants to devote themselves to taking back control over privatized and public spaces by developing and practicing forms of direct democracy through popular assemblies. The Debt Collective, as well as the Movement for Black Lives, demonstrate the ways in which democratic social movements can encourage people to engage in what Robin D.G. Kelley calls freedom dreaming, or imagining and organizing for a more liberatory future, and to lay the foundation for future movement victories. Participatory democracy encourages us to adopt a long-term perspective in the quest for transformation.

Mainstream conversations about the threat to democracy also miss how contemporary movements flow from a larger tradition of radical democracy that stretches from the abolitionists of the 19th century and through communist and labor organizing of the 1930s to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society and their practices of participatory democracy during the 1960s. It is not a coincidence that some participants involved in the Movement for Black Lives in the last decade, such as Alicia Garza, Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, have drawn lessons from civil rights organizer Ella Baker and point to her commitment to guiding activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a source of inspiration. And the grassroots participatory democratic politics of the 1960s and today provide us three key lessons of transformative organizing: engage in the radical questioning of society, to get to the root of the problem; practice democracy among ourselves, to allow ourselves to experiment with changing institutions and our environments; and allow ourselves to make mistakes.

Ultimately, demands from workers to unionize, as well as efforts to engage in participatory budgeting, and to address the climate crisis, also represent calls for, at the very least, popular control over how our resources are allocated.

Some anti-police-violence activists and organizations such as Action St. Louis have turned to participatory budgeting as a strategy not just to divert money away from law enforcement, but also to further democratize decision-making around public spending. This process ignited a successful campaign to close a local jail known as the Workhouse, an institution that functioned as a debtors prison.

Meanwhile, calls to defund the police, cut defense spending and abolish college debt in the context of the larger effort to transform policing, law enforcement and higher education highlight the meaning of what W.E.B. DuBois called abolition-democracy. DuBoiss illustration of abolition-democracy in his study of Reconstruction entailed not just the dismantling of oppressive institutions but also replacing them with ones that could support a more just and free society.

It is necessary to defeat right-wing extremist authoritarianism wherever and whenever it rears its head, whether in streets in protest, or at the ballot box. However, it is necessary for us to remember that democracy cannot be reduced to participating in elections. For us to build a truly democratic society grounded in economic, racial, climate, reproductive, gender, disability and restorative justice, we must engage in more radical education, organizing and protest. We must support groups working at the front lines of these struggles, such as the Kentucky groups EKY Mutual Aid and Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, which have been extending relief to flood victims. Cooperation Jackson (in Jackson, Mississippi) has also exemplified radical grassroots organizing. In response to the citys water crisis, the organization is leading a mutual aid campaign for Jackson residents and calling for Justice4Jackson, which demands that the federal and state government completely overhaul and modernize the citys water filtration and delivery systems in an environmentally sustainable manner. We will not defeat authoritarianism with neoliberal technocracy. Grassroots organizing and power is the way we will transform public safety, abolish debt, build workers power and revolutionize work, and stem the climate crisis.

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Democracy Cant Be Reduced to Voting in 2022 We Must Build the Future We Want - Truthout

IN BRIEF While the Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire confirmed the forthcoming abolition of the contribution on the added value of companies (CVAE), Christophe Ferrari shows the niche and denounces political and financial nonsense . For the president of the Metropolis of Grenoble, the measure will be harmful to companies and could weigh heavily in the coffers of the Metro.

The abolition of the CVAE is political and financial nonsense . This is how Christophe Ferrari comments on the announcement by Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy and Finance, of the abolition of the contribution on the added value of companies, spread over two years. An announcement that comes as no surprise, since the Prime Minister had already mentioned it in her general policy speech.

Problem ? The CVAE is a local tax, which benefits in particular the regional councils (up to 50%), but also the departmental councils, the municipalities and the intermunicipalities. Unsurprisingly, the president of Grenoble-Alpes Mtropole (also mayor of Pont-de-Claix) Christophe Ferrari sees, therefore, with a very bad eye this announcement.

Political nonsense? This amounts to thinking that local authorities do not work with companies in their territories. , castigates the chosen one. For who investments made by local authorities [] are also essential elements of the well-being, the attractiveness and the dynamism of our territories and therefore of the proper functioning of our companies .

Removing the CVAE is not encouraging the hosting of economic activities, it is choosing to slow down the reindustrialization of our country , therefore denounces Christophe Ferrari. Taking the example of land, which is essential for businesses but valuable for communities, and which risks tomorrow not being oriented towards the needs of companies if the CVAE is abolished .

In addition, the president of the Mtropole de Grenoble further indicates, the CVAE comes under a taxation adapted to the turnover of companies . We are therefore not talking about a tax that would weaken artisans or local businesses. , is indignant the chosen one. For whom, on the contrary, the CVAE protects small businesses .

As for the financial nonsense, this is based on the compensation provided by the State which already does not run on gold. For the Mtropole alone, revenue linked to the CVAE represents 40 million euros per year. That is the equivalent of the investments planned by the Mtropole in sport and culture by 2026. And the chosen one concludes by asking himself: What will we do tomorrow if the State were to stop compensating these sums?.

Excerpt from:

Christophe Ferrari denounces the announced abolition of the CVAE - US Sports - US Sports -

By PTI

MUMBAI:Members of a tribal community in Nashik facing livelihood crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic "handed over" their children to goatherds for up to Rs 10,000 a year to work as labourers, police said on Sunday.

The matter came to light after an 11-year-old girl working as a labourer died recently, they said, adding that a case of murder has been registered in this connection.

The Nashik rural police have so far rescued eight such children from neighbouring Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. Two persons have been arrested in connection with the murder case and three others held under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act-1976, a senior official said.

On August 27, the girl was found lying unconscious outside a tribal community camp where 12 families were staying in temporary sheds on a roadside at Ubade village in the Ghoti area on Sinnar road, he said.

Somebody had left the girl outside the camp, he said. The police and the girl's relatives later rushed her to a hospital where she died during treatment on September 3, he said.

During the enquiry, the police came to know the girl and her 10-year-old brother were handed over to goatherds in Ahmednagar, the official said. The girl used to come to meet her parents once or twice a year.

She had been unconscious since August 21 and was admitted to hospitals in Ahmednagar and Pune apparently after a snakebite and finally sent to her parents, he said.

Nashik rural Superintendent of Police Sachin Patil took serious cognisance of the issue and asked his team to conduct a detailed investigation into it. The police found that at least 11 such children, aged 6 to 15, were given by their family members to goatherds in Ahmednagar, the official said.

After the girl was found unconscious, the Ghoti police initially registered an FIR against unidentified persons under Indian Penal Code Section 307 (attempt to murder).

Later, it was converted to a case of murder, the official said, adding that two persons were arrested. The final cause of the death was awaited, he said.

"We are waiting for a medical opinion in the case, but any kind of sexual assault has been ruled out," a police official said on condition of anonymity. After this incident, the Nashik police with the help of their Ahmednagar counterparts have so far rescued eight minor children from goatherds, another official said.

An investigation revealed parents of these children gave them to goatherds through agents for getting up to 10,000 a year and a goat/sheep in return, the official said. The children were deployed for guarding sheep and goats, he said.

Asked about children being used for such jobs, the official said if an adult is kept the work, he would have to be paid Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 per month besides food and accommodation. But, the logistics for children would be comparatively less and they would require a small place to stay, he said.

The official said while enquiring with the parents of such children, they came to know these people were jobless due to the COVID-19 pandemic and did not have adequate food.

Before the pandemic, they used to go to brick kilns and do odd jobs at sugarcane farms. "But, during the pandemic they did not find jobs to sustain their livelihood and handed over their children to goatherds," he said.

Police are searching for the agents involved in such activities and goatherds who used the minors as labourers, he said. The official said they are also searching for some more children and collecting data about such minors to rescue them with the help of NGOs, he said.

So far, two separate offences under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act have been registered in this connection at Sangamner in Ahmednagar, the official said.

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Child labour: Nashik tribals struggle to survive, give kids to goatherds for Rs 10K - The New Indian Express