Click here to download the January 2021 issue of Workers Voice.
A Worker Goes to the State Capitol
by Caleb Wassell
On December 18th, I visited the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge for the first time. The visit was equal parts nauseating and unsettling.
There are about a million steps that lead up to the face of a jutting tower. Carved into the stone walls of the Capitol building are tributes to Louisiana’s most depraved genocidal maniacs and defenders of white supremacy: DeSoto, Claiborne, Bienville, Iberville, Jackson, and E D White. Inside it’s all marble and shiny wood with gold handrails and giant chandeliers. In these gold encrusted chambers, politicians have been quietly defunding the people for decades.
Incarcerated people are the only ones doing any real work in the building. “CORRECTIONS” is boldly marked across the shoulders of the workers’ gray jumpsuits. They’re forced to serve food and clean up after politicians and corporate lobbyists who meet over lunch to scheme against the people of Louisiana.
I learned that you are safer from COVID exposure in your average Walmart than on the floor of the state capitol, as there is no mask mandate. A Black lawmaker wearing a mask and face shield told us as much after the session adjourned. She lost her husband to the disease this year. Another representative that was with her told us that her district suffers “repercussions” when she raises objections or asks too many questions.
The language of the day’s proceedings is boring and legalistic. It’s hard to track what’s really going on through all the jargon. This is by design. I watched millions of dollars of our money get moved around in minutes. Incredibly, public comment was not allowed until the end of session, after the agenda items were already voted on. Online there was an email address to submit comments for those who can’t make the meeting in person. These comments were never read or mentioned. At the seat of our state’s “democratic” government, the people’s voice can barely be heard.
Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils Tells Louisiana Legislature: Bail Out the People!
On December 18 members of the Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils (LMWC) held a press conference at the Louisiana state Capitol to demand that state legislators use the tens of millions of unspent federal relief dollars to bail out workers suffering hardship because of the COVID pandemic.
The state of Louisiana received $1.8 billion in federal relief (CARES Act) funds to supposedly cope with the fallout from the pandemic. Around $525 million of those funds were used to reimburse local governments for “pandemic related expenses.” Yet many of the poorest parishes were excluded from relief because they couldn’t afford the expenses in the first place.
Tens of millions of dollars were used to pay off sheriff’s departments instead of going to food, housing assistance, health services, or economic relief.
Of the $50 million dollars set aside for (pitifully low) $250 payments to essential workers, $11 million never made it into the hands of workers.
$362 million in CARES Act funds are simply unaccounted for.
LMWC demands that these funds go directly to low income households who are bearing the brunt of the crisis. 200,000 Louisianans are jobless. At least 1 in 6 Louisiana households is struggling to put food on the table. Around 30,000 households are on the verge of eviction in Orleans Parish alone.
We refuse to go hungry and die as our tax dollars are used to bail out big corporations or buy arms for the police. We need jobs, income, housing, and healthcare. The LMWC is prepared to fight to get what we deserve. Join us!
Pandemic Relief Showered on Anti-LGBTQ Orgs
by Sally Jane Black
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) gave $4.3 million to anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion organizations, including American College of Pediatricians, American Family Association, Center for Family and Human Rights, Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media, Liberty Counsel, Pacific Justice Institute and Ruth Institute.
The American Family Association, which targets not only LGBTQ people, but also women and non-Christians, received $1.4 million alone. They have 200 radio stations across the country that tout their violent and divisive ideology. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, which received over $600,000, was foudned and named after a demagogue who promotes child abuse.
These organizations are funded by the same capitalists, such as the Koch Brothers and the DeVos family, that are behind the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws that have swept through state legislatures in the last few years. Their goal is to pit people in the working class against one another, misusing religious freedom to make religious workers and LGBTQ people blame each other for their oppression instead of the capitalists. The use of PPP loans to fund these hate groups during the pandemic while millions of workers have lost their jobs is not an accident, but the priorities of the super-rich.
These right-wing organizations should be shut down and their leaders jailed, not funded by money that should be spent supporting workers during these crises.
Racism in Healthcare: A Disease We Must Eradicate!
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Z Petrosian
In the U.S. COVID-19 has infected Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian people at rates higher than whites, and the disparity is even greater when it comes to the severity of illness and death from COVID-19. Centuries of racism in the U.S. healthcare system are to blame. We don’t need more studies. We need action to demand expanded access to healthcare for all, especially people of color and very poor people, through national Medicaid for all. We must also create independent community-based boards that have the power to accept complaints, implement changes, and review materials and practices.
Centuries of racist abuses call for reparations
Racism in healthcare can be traced to the foundations of the U.S., which is based on the genocide of Native peoples and chattel enslavement of Africans. For centuries, non-white, particularly Black, people were treated as less than human, only to be kept healthy enough to work or to be experimented on without consent, as in the case of gynecological experimentation carried out by James Marion Sims on enslaved Black women. This abuse and experimentation continued long after slavery was abolished, most infamously in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study wherein Black men were deliberately infected with syphilis and denied treatment.
This abuse is not just in the past but continues to exist in healthcare, particularly in the lack of equal access to quality medical care. Studies show that, overall, Blacks who report medical problems receive less timely and lower quality treatment than whites; illness and disease is more likely to be found and addressed later in its course, resulting in worse outcomes and preventable deaths.
Dr. Susan Moore, 52, dies of COVID-19 while fighting for equal care
The quality of care routinely given to rich whites and politicians is denied to the working class and people of color. Recently Susan Moore, a dedicated Black family medicine doctor, called out racism at the hands of a white doctor and staff who were treating her for COVID-19 at a hospital in suburban Indianapolis. Being a medical professional, Dr. Moore was able to make detailed demands about the specific treatments she knew she needed even as her reported symptoms went unheeded.
Despite her objections, Dr. Moore was sent home prematurely while her condition deteriorated. “This is how Black people get killed, when you them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Dr. Moore said. Just hours later, she was transported in an ambulance to another hospital where she died from COVID-19.
This most horrible outcome was compounded by a lifetime of unequal access to medicine due to the racism of the system. Income, housing access, geography, and education all play a major role in the health outcomes of U.S. residents. But Black people are sicker and die younger even when their education levels and incomes are the same as whites. Racism kills.
Affected communities should have the final say on care and equal access to medical education, research, & healthcare delivery
One way to address racism in healthcare is to guarantee free medical coverage and high-quality care to everyone through national improved Medicaid for all. There should be no red tape and no medical bills; this system should cover all necessary medical care for every person in the U.S. for their entire lifetime.
Socialist countries, such as Cuba, provide excellent healthcare at no cost to patients, keeping their populations healthy through a focus on equal access to both prevention and treatment. We can also look here at home to the Veterans Administration (VA) health system to see evidence that guaranteeing health coverage improves health outcomes, especially for Black people. The VA is a health system in need of improvements – long demanded by veterans – still, while Black people in the general population have higher rates of heart disease and death than whites, a study of three million people guaranteed care through the VA showed Blacks were 37% less likely than white men to develop heart disease and had a 24% lower death rate than white patients.
Calls for improved Medicaid for all are urgent during pandemic
It should not have taken a global pandemic for racism to be more broadly recognized as a pervasive and insidious public health issue affecting all aspects of U.S. society, including the healthcare system. However, the current crises give urgency to demands for consistent, free, and equal access to healthcare.
All medical knowledge, treatments, medicines, and therapies are produced by the global working class. It is wrong to allow governments and corporations – including pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital corporations – to hoard healthcare for the privileged few and make profits. We must take up the fight for Medicaid for all. Equal, quality healthcare is a right!
Put an End to Gender Violence – Get Organized!
by Lauren Gutierrez
With consistent attacks to dominate our bodies, control our lives and degrade out worth, the U.S. government and many other countries around the world still fail to acknowledge women or femmes as whole and autonomous human beings. Instead, we are left to persistently fight for our human rights along with the day-to-day struggle of living in this over-burdening capitalist world.
Women or femmes are disposable property within their own homes. According to a new study, one in three women murdered worldwide are killed by an intimate partner, which may actually be a higher number due to lack of data or missing information. From the pathetic criminal justice response to reported rapes and domestic violence to a broken healthcare system, society, and government continue to fail women and femmes, leaving us to depend on our partners support, even if they are toxic and abusive. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are in jail for defending themselves.
The U.S. has taken it upon itself to remove women’s body parts. Doctors have been removing the uteruses of migrant women in ICE concentration camps built under the Obama administration and utilized in Trump’s America. Some of the most vulnerable women are those from a foreign country caged and dependent on their captors to provide food and healthcare. Our government has seen this as an opportunity to mutilate and torture mostly black and brown migrant women.
There is an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and Canada where 4 in 5 Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime, which includes human trafficking. In many cases, missing Indigenous femmes are misclassified as Hispanic, and missing adults don’t show up in the law enforcement database. These crimes aren’t even reported on or resolved within the public eye, so they basically remain invisible to society.
Since 2015, police have murdered 48 Black women. How many of them can you name? The most noted young woman of them all, Breonna Taylor, has yet to see any justice after police took her innocent life.
The life expectancy of a Black transgender woman is 35 years. At least 350 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed globally in 2020. 98 percent were trans women or trans feminine. 79 percent were people of color. This doesn’t include those deaths that were unreported or misreported, either by deadnaming or misgendering the victims.
The majority of Louisiana voters have chosen to add oppressive language to the Louisiana Declaration of Rights, weakening the protection of and funding for abortion access. The addition begins with the words, “To protect human life” as it utterly disregards the human life of the woman herself. But just as has been done in Argentina, Ireland, and Poland, we will turn this around in Louisiana. Massive, women-led struggles around the world demand abortion rights, an end to violence against women, and rights to food, wages, and housing. We need to get busier here.
In a capitalist patriarchal society, it is okay to oppress or dominate women or femmes. We are still seen as property within our homes and the government still fights to control our bodies and decisions on family planning. Our lives are valued less than a masculine person and even seen as a commodity for sex or slavery. Women and femmes are treated as less than human – as an object. In my opinion, people and the government seek to control what they fear. If dominance over femmes is a badge of honor, then being a femme in control of oneself must be the “holy grail.” Onward.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry: Enemy of Working People, Friend of Fascists & White Supremacists, Servant of Oil Companies
Here are just a few of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s Crimes Against the People. Landry has overstepped his authority by actions not authorized by the people of Louisiana.
- As head of the Republican Attorneys General, Landry organized a robocall for people to march on the Capitol. Landry refused to sign letters from other attorneys general to condemn the fascist violence in D.C. Instead he attacked Black Lives Matter protesters and said Antifa was responsible. Landry is not representing the people but a small group of racist thugs. He should lose his office for using his position to encourage them.
- Despite 400,000 dead in the U.S. from Covid including 8,000 so far in LA, Landry sued to end safety measures in LA. Landry has opposed all workers’ safety measures against COVID, including hazard pay and universal healthcare.
- Landry gets funding from billionaires like Charles Koch and ALEC, the ultra-right wing corporate lobby that funds most of the state legislators, and writes the laws they submit. When they say jump, he says “How high?”
- Landry sued to get rid of Medicaid and deprive nearly 700,000 adults and children of healthcare. The people did not authorize him to do this as the State attorney general.
- Landry wants to kick 810,000 Louisianans off of Food Stamps.
- Landry opposes raising the minimum wage.
- Landry opposed workers getting paid sick time off.
- Landry is for increased fossil fuel production but not for guaranteeing jobs for oil workers.
REMOVE LANDRY FROM OFFICE AND THROW HIM IN JAIL FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE PEOPLE!
NYC Fast Food Workers Win Just Cause Protections (Labor Briefs)
On December 17, fast food workers in New York City became the first in the country to win protections against arbitrary layoffs and reduced hours. NYC passed two “just cause” bills that prevent bosses from firing a worker or cutting their hours without giving a valid reason, either economic or related to job performance. This is a historic win for fast food workers who have been declared essential during COVID-19 but are treated as disposable, forced to work without healthcare, a living wage, hazard pay, and paid sick leave. They are often fired without warning or reason. Like many other essential work forces, the majority of fast food workers are Black and Brown people and women, who have suffered the most from COVID-19 and bear the brunt of the exploitation and lack of job security in the fast food industry. But fast food workers have fought back valiantly. They were the first to hold rallies for a $15 minimum wage and have been rallying and striking across the country demanding safety protections and higher wages since the pandemic. We should celebrate every victory for workers, anywhere and everywhere and never forget that it is our collective power that will help us win our long overdue rights.
Alabama Amazon Workers Build Towards Union (Labor Briefs)
Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL are organizing for union representation with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This is a historic step towards organizing the first union ever in Amazon, at a time when hundreds of Amazon workers around the globe have gone on strike. While CEO Jeff Bezos’ fortune has surpassed $200 billion, Amazon workers continue to fight for benefits, a living wage, hazard pay, and safe working conditions during a global pandemic. But Amazon is already trying to sabotage workers in Bessemer by delaying the union election and will likely spend millions of dollars on union-busting campaigns. Nevertheless the struggle in Bessemer is a tremendous example to other Amazon workers around the world whose labor reaps huge profits for corporations but almost nothing for the workers themselves. A win for Amazon workers would be a win for us all!
End the U.S./Saudi Genocide of the Yemeni People
World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis Must be Stopped
The people of Yemen are suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in the world because of U.S. imperialism. Since 2015, the U.S. had backed a Saudi led war against Yemen by supplying weapons and bombs that have killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people and destroyed the county’s cities and agriculture. 20.5 million of the 29 million people living in Yemen lack access to clean water and sanitation, and over 60% of the people are starving. Half of the country’s healthcare facilities have been destroyed. Every day children are dying from starvation and preventable illnesses.
Stop the War Coalition has called for a global day of action on Monday, January 25. Join the Workers Voice Socialist Movement as we stand in solidarity with workers and oppressed people all over the world to say:
No War on Yemen!
12 Noon, January 25 at Duncan Plaza
Loyola Ave at Gravier St, New Orleans
U.S. uses “terror” designation to starve more children through sanctions and blockades.
Now international organizations are withdrawing aid from Yemen because the U.S. is calling Houthis in Yemen “terrorists.” This designation goes into full effect on January 19. The Houthis are an Indigenous people that have long resisted U.S. imperialism, overthrowing the authoritarian U.S.-backed regime in 2014 and establishing a government in the north of Yemen, while the south is ruled by a U.S. puppet government. The U.S. has no right to determine the national destiny of the Yemeni people.
Not only is the U.S. spreading vicious lies about the Houthis, they are recruiting members of al-Qaeda to help Saudi-backed militias overthrow the Houthi government. The U.S. capitalist ruling class doesn’t care if millions more Yemeni people die so long as they can crush any opposition to U.S. imperialism.
Workers around the world must unite to demand an end to the U.S./Saudi war on Yemen. As workers living in the most powerful and violent imperialist country on Earth, we have a special duty to stand with the people of Yemen and demand that not one more of our tax dollars go towards aiding, supplying, or abetting the Saudis in this genocidal war.