LABOR DAY 1997: FULL-TIME, PART-TIME AND UNEMPLOYED WORKERS
INTENSIFY THE STRUGGLE
By General Baker
DETROIT -- The year 1997 has sparked an intensification of the
class struggle here at home. Labor Day 1997 follows the first
anniversary of the so-called welfare reform bill, which ended the
historic social safety net dating from the New Deal of the 1930s.
Different states are still competing on the basis of which of them
can cut the safety net the deepest and fastest, beyond the
federally demanded cuts. But this section of society is fighting
back, as shown by the National Welfare Rights Union, with its
Kensington branch, when they marched from Philadelphia to the
United Nations. With the support of AFSCME and other unions, they
protested the welfare reform bill as a violation of human rights.
In Detroit, the newspaper strike is entering its 26th month. Here,
Labor Day has been bottlenecked since a federal judge refused to
issue an injunction that would have forced the newspapers to hire
back all of the strikers at an estimated $50 million in back
wages. This marked a severe setback to the union, whose strategy
for victory lay solely on the legal channels of the NLRB and the
courts.
The United Parcel Service strike and its aftermath show some
tremendous lessons for the upcoming period. No matter how
importantly UPS or the Teamsters viewed the pension package, the
issue of the part-time worker continued to take center stage in
the walkout. In the eyes of the general public, the strike became
a battleground for a new and growing section of society.
In the wake of the partial victory of the UPS struggle, President
Clinton quickly imposed a 60-day cooling-off period on employees
of Amtrak, in an effort to thwart an outbreak of strikes there.
With these struggles before us, we salute each other on this Labor
Day as a new class of impoverished proletarians begins to assert
its leadership of the social upheavals of our time.
[General Baker is the chair of the Steering Committee of the
League of Revolutionaries for a New America and a member of Local
600 of the United Auto Workers]
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This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition),
Vol. 24 No. 9 / September, 1997; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL
60654, [EMAIL PROTECTED] or WWW:
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