 |
| Source: Bloomberg Businessweek |
by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
US workers and the middle
class have taken a pounding over the past 40 years. We have shown in previous blogs the
increasing inequality gap between the haves and the have not’s in US society.
According to the Economic Report of the President this trend is continuing as real wages fell 2% in
2012, the 40th consecutive year they have been below their 1972
high. Along with these new historic lows when it comes to workers’ pay,
corporate profits hit a 60-year high as a percentage of US gross domestic
product.
Caterpillar is one of the
world’s most successful companies, a global giant with 70% of its sales outside
the US. It provides the machinery the Zionists use to demolish Palestinian
farms and homes. In 2012 the company made $5.7 billion profit on $66 billion in
sales. While Caterpillar machinery is used to wage a war of sorts on
Palestinians, its political and economic muscle is used to wage an equally
savage war against workers at home. When
Canadian workers rejected a 50% pay cut in 2012 Caterpillar closed the plant
and moved to Muncie Indiana where “workers
accepted lower wages” says Bloomberg Business Week. “Accepted” is the key word here. Workers accept lower wages in the same way a
rape victim accepts rape; it’s forced upon them. Caterpillar and its boss, Doug Oberhelman is
in the forefront of the war on workers.
After discarding Canadian workers the company waged a successful battle
against workers on strike in Joliet Ill who after three months on picket lines
ended up with concessions and a 6-year wage freeze for senior employees.
CEO Oberhelman explains why American workers must accept a lower standard of
living. “We have to be competitive if
we’re gonna win. And frankly, if we’re not competitive … we’re not gonna be here in the next 30 years.
That’s a simple message…..” he tells BW adding that it’s a tough decision
as all these characters do when they destroy people’s lives. “I always try to communicate to our people
that we can never make enough money….we can never make enough profit.”
Caterpillar’s success at
driving down wages has been stellar with some of its workers qualifying for
welfare. In other words, the taxpayer is subsidizing capitalism again. “I don’t understand how a company can make
billions and billions of dollars in profits and have people on welfare,”, John
Arnold who has worked for the company for 14 years tells Business Week. Understanding
why this is so is important if we are to move from being victims of history to
making it.
As its employees qualify for
government subsidies, CEO Oberhelman and the company’s executives have been
raking it in. Oberhelman received a 60%
pay increase in 2011 breaking the $16 million annually mark. Then in April this year his pay took a leap again
to $22 million according to BW. “The average pay for an executive officer at
Caterpillar has risen 56 percent over the last six years, to more than
$10 million.” A Bloomberg study
finds.
“I love Peoria”
says Oberhelman, and we can see why. Him
and his wife own a couple thousand acres outside town and when he’s not
savaging workers’ living standards he’s transforming a former coal mine they’ve
purchased in to a nature preserve.
Anything these types do that appears egalitarian is all about satisfying
their own personal desires this nature preserve is a gift from the workers at
Caterpillar.
I remember a Caterpillar
strike in Peoria back in 1991. It went
on for months around the same time as the uprising in LA around the Rodney King
beating. This was part of the
generalized offensive that heated up in the wake of the PATCO strike 10 years
earlier. Business Week describes the effect of that strike on workers and their
families:
“As production employees went without pay for months,
several small Illinois towns were devastated. Desperate scabs crossed picket
lines, pitting brothers against each other. The divorce rate soared, and a
handful of workers committed suicide.”
This description of the
effect economic terrorism has on workers’ lives could apply to any of the
battles fought to defend our living standards and the living standards of the
next generation. These class battles
receive little mention in the mass media once they’re over and media coverage
laced with lies and bias during them, but despite the propaganda of the 1%’s
media that workers are “strike happy”
the decision to strike is not taken lightly, it always means great sacrifice
for the workers involved.
Like the strikes before it,
the strike at Caterpillar in the 1990’s was defeated. It was defeated due to
the failed policies of the Labor officialdom that leave strikes isolated,
individual workplaces or local Unions fighting what are global corporations
independently of the rest of the organized Labor movement and the working class
as a whole. Appeals are made to
Democratic Party politicians to write a letter to this or that CEO or walk the
picket line for half an hour. When
workers struck Caterpillar’s Joliet factory last May, Illinois governor, Pat
Quinn came to the picket line with a $10,000 donation to the strike fund, ”When people are united they can’t be
defeated” he told workers. It’s the
same old failed strategy.
At the time of the Peoria strike in 1991, the same forces waging war on Caterpillar workers were savaging
workers in LA and creating the conditions that led to the uprising in
that city. The economic conditions in these communities were akin to those in the third world and still are, unemployment, lack of opportunity etc. which was exacerbated by the fleeing of the aerospace industry. Part of a winning strategy in that instance would have been
to link the two struggles, mostly white Unionized workers in Peoria and
mostly non-union workers and youth of color in LA. We have the same enemies. But for the Labor officialdom, a victory is a dangerous thing as it inspires people and moves us forward. Such a development threatens capitalism and the Labor officialdom having no alternative to it undermine any encroachment on its rights by their own members.
When we read the more serious
journals of capitalism like Business Week, journals the capitalist class
produce for themselves about how best to manage the system they govern as
opposed to the mass media which is designed for the rest of us, we can see why
the Labor hierarchy’s strategy of damage control, of blaming individual CEO’s
and having inflated rats on picket lines to discredit this individual or that
has led to defeat after defeat for organized Labor and workers in general.
Guys like Oberhelman, Gates,
Buffett, and their political representatives in the two Wall Street parties recognize
they are in a class war and wage it consciously as they deny publicly that it
exists. They understand they are defending a system of production; that
they are defending capitalism, they are fighting for their system.
Speaking of the former Caterpillar boss Don Fites who oversaw the concessions
forced on workers in the nineties, “What we had going on was what I would
call a labor rejuvenation,” Oberhlman tells Business Week, “It was over
who was going to run the company.”
We need to take heed of such
statements. Every strike is about who is running the company. But we are taught not to think of it that way. We are taught not to think of economic
systems except when their media talks of communism. When Stalinism collapsed it
was the failure of communism. The
causes of the Great Recession or the failure of capitalist states in the former
colonial world are not due to the failure of capitalism but of crooked
individuals, corrupt CEO’s “accounting
errors” and most commonly as “crony
capitalism” which is in some way different to regular capitalism. There are
crony (greedy) capitalists and good capitalists. We must join with the good capitalists and
help them make their profits at the expense of the bad capitalists for without
the capitalists we cannot work; there will be no jobs. Even if we work for good capitalists we must
remain competitive, keep wages low, unions out so that our individual employers
can increase their market share and profits. Profits that come from the unpaid
labor of the working class.
When looked at objectively,
the war waged by American capitalists on American workers has been far more
violent and more successful than any terrorist attacks from forces outside our
borders. The rade Union hierarchy has no
answer to such an offensive accepting as they do the bosses’ view of the world,
that the market and capitalism is the only possible way society can be
organized. They have moved from a pathetic almost childish response to open
collaboration.
My first thought on writing
this commentary was to direct it not to other socialists and leftists, not that
I am not interested in those who have similar political views, but to those
workers who are drawing conclusions about the battles we have fought and lost
over the last 30 or 40 years, the defeated strikes, endless picket lines that
accomplish nothing as individual locals are left to fight a global corporation,
the state and the police. We can see
that all the gains we have made over 150 years are being taken back and that the
US ruling class is becoming ever more aggressive in its assault on our material
well being. For the youth, there is only
a future of debt, low wages, war and environmental degradation. There must be many, many workers in the same
position I was in before I was introduced to the ideas of scientific socialism
as described by Marx, Engels and others. I was trying to understand the world
around me; why they do what they do.
It is this competition, this
rapacious struggle for profits that drives the bosses’ to attack our living
standards as profits have their source in the unpaid Labor of the working
class. It is not personal; it’s business as they say in mafia circles. They are
driven by the laws of the system to attack us and it is the system that we have
to change if we want to stop that.
This blog exists not simply
to provide some information to readers or to satisfy the authors’ need for
expression. We have an agenda, a point
of view. In a nutshell, that point of
view is that the way human society is organized, and by human society I mean
how we produce, distribute and exchange the necessities of life and the
superstructure that supports it, is not only driving us back to Dickensian
conditions, conditions that are already the norm for millions of workers under
its sway in the former colonial world; it is leading us down the road to
extinction through its destruction of the environment, its complete disregard
not only for human life but for the natural world that nurtures us.
We argue that we must
transform society. Capitalism, as Rosa
Luxembourg once said, has “forfeited its
right to existence”. The class that
governs the system has forfeited their historical right to govern. Capitalism
when it emerged from the ashes of the decaying feudal system, socialized
production. We must now socialize ownership of production if we are to feed the
world’s hungry, end poverty, wars and disease and avoid environmental
catastrophe.
While we defend every gain no
matter how minor. While we wage every individual battle whether a strike, an
occupation at our school or university, a rent struggle against slumlords or
any other fight to keep what we need to live a decent and productive life, we
must do so with the idea firmly entrenched in our mind that any victory is only
temporary as long as the system remains intact, as long as the means of
producing the necessities of life or the machinery that helps us produce the
necessities of life like the products made at Caterpillar remain in private
hands and are set in motion only if it swells the bank accounts of the 1%.
As
I pointed out in a previous blog, in order to do that we must study our own
history and events like the Seattle General strike and rise of the CIO and the
US civil Rights movement as well as the great social struggles, strikes,
revolutions, battles fought by our ancestors, workers throughout the world from
the factories of Bangladesh to the mines of Asturias and South Africa. We must learn the lessons of our victories
and defeats. We must read the writings of revolutionists and writers who have
waged an ideological struggle over the centuries against the propaganda and
world-view of the mouthpieces of capitalism. We must not be afraid of these
ideas and make up our own mind about them rather than rely on our history
brought to us by the 1% and their institutions. It is important always to remind ourselves that
those that own the means of production of goods (economic power) also own the
means of producing the dominant ideology in society.
It is the task of the class
that does not earn its means of subsistence from the profit of capital to
change society and change society we must if we are to survive as a species. We
owe this to our children and future generations.
