Posted on

Letter to Our Fellow White Workers:

Are you tired of being afraid? The news says we’re threatened by protests and “unrest.” But show me the protestor that’s a banker, a boss, a bill collector, or a landlord. While the boss is trying to cut your benefits or wages, we protestors are fighting to raise them.

Our wages are pitiful, our debts are piling up, and good jobs are harder and harder to come by. Yet the talking heads on TV are telling us to blame everyone but the ones sitting on all the money and power, who are living in mansions while we struggle to make ends meet.

The government can’t find the money to guarantee hurricane evacuees a place to lay their heads at night while billionaire Trump is handing out millions in “relief funds” (our tax dollars) to his slumlord son-in-law. Trump handed out trillions to increase the value of his cabinet’s corporate investments.

The politicians and their mouthpieces in the big business media are selling us lies. Trump, Pelosi, and all their billionaire buddies are the real criminals.

They want us to believe that Black or immigrant workers are stealing our jobs or living off what we pay in taxes. Our fellow workers aren’t the ones to blame for the more than 30,000,000 layoffs this year. Immigrant workers pay taxes; Amazon doesn’t. While we’re going hungry, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has gotten $48 billion richer since the beginning of the pandemic. Who’s stealing from who?

Whether by layoffs or cut hours, slashed benefits and pensions, or attacks on union rights, the rich are out to turn us into paupers—now more than ever. And though some may be spared today, the capitalists have it out for workers of all nationalities, Black and white, documented and undocumented. They’re poisoning and killing us off with drugs. Now they’re threatening tens of millions of us with evictions and foreclosures in the middle of a pandemic. We’re doomed if we don’t wake up and unite.

Are you better off now than you were in 2016? In 2008? Obama dumped trillions into the banks 12 years ago, and this year, Trump has dumped trillions into Wall Street. Yet again we workers have been hung out to dry.

Trump’s campaign promised to protect our jobs four years ago, but where are they now? Real unemployment numbers are worse than any time since the Great Depression. Instead of jumpstarting a jobs program, the Federal Reserve just spent $250 billion of our money to buy private corporate stocks. Just like after the 2008 bailout, trillions of dollars of our money will wind up stashed in private off-shore bank accounts.

Trump had four years to bring the troops home. Instead, he’s brought us to the brink of war with countries that have done nothing to us, like oil-rich Venezuela and Iran. Meanwhile, 200,000 people in the U.S. have died of COVID on his watch.

Trump sits on his gold-plated toilet and offers us nothing but fear and bullshit. And Trump’s fear-mongering is nothing but a service to the billionaires who sit on the boards of insurance, pharmaceutical, oil, and war-profiteering companies. He wants you to pay more for private health insurance even though the deductible is so high you can’t even use it. He wants you to doom the future of the planet to protect oil companies’ profits, not oil workers’ jobs. He wants you to believe that China threatens our national security so that he can give billion-dollar contracts to his buddies on the boards of war-profiteering companies.

It’s time we see through the lies that keep us workers from getting organized. Our enemies have enormous wealth that they’ve taken from our labor. But we’ve got the power of the world’s working class on our side—as long as we stay united. The bankers, bosses, and war-profiteers will do their damnedest to pit us against each other, to bribe us, or to trick us into squabbling over crumbs while they make out like thieves.

White workers, aren’t you about done letting the rich use us make themselves richer? They don’t give a shit about us. Trump said of his own supporters that COVID-19 might be a “good thing” because it would keep him from having to shake hands with “disgusting people.” Biden is just the same.

It’s only right if you’re angry. It’s time to turn that anger against the real enemy. Reject the racist lies of the rich! Reach your hand out to your fellow workers and start marching towards the future we deserve. United, we workers can win the world.

Sincerely, Sally (Alabama) and Joseph (Mississippi).

Posted on

Bayou Steel Should Be Owned by the Workers!

For decades millions in profit have gone to the capitalist owners of Bayou Steel from the labor of the workers and community. Despite the continued need for reclaiming scrap steel for reuse, the company was handed over by a rotten transnational corporation to a vulture capitalist hedge fund. Hedge funds make their profits by selling off inventory and assets. The Black Diamond fund announced it would close the plant throwing hundreds of workers out and harming local towns.

None of this is the fault of the union, but today unions and workers are trapped in the mindset that capitalist owners can do whatever they want with “their” property.

To fight back against the effects of “restructuring,” run away shops, and automation, we workers must climb out the box and challenge that notion that capitalists, by virtue of laws they passed, cannot be challenged on these decisions. But that won’t happen by relying on courts or politicians. Workers will need to struggle.

The sit-down strikes of the 1930’s all over the country built the unions and defended those workers’ jobs. They are not romantic history but a guide to what is needed now.

The following letter is addressed to members of the United Steelworkers facing layoffs at Bayou Steel:

Dear Officers and Members of the USWA,

We are outraged by the lies and trickery of Black Diamond. ArcelorMittal LaPlace clearly conspired with the BD hedge fund to loot the profits and assets of Bayou Steel, leaving the workers and community high and dry. That BD was obviously negotiating in bad faith is even more egregious.

This bankruptcy should also outrage every hardworking taxpayer in Louisiana. Since 2008, ArcelorMittal LaPlace has enjoyed nearly $11,000,000 in tax exemptions from the state and yet workers will have nothing to show for it if Arcelor and BD have their way. The company should be forced to pay these deferred tax dollars to meet its obligations to the workers.

The company’s illegal actions are not confined to conspiracy and bad-faith bargaining. Failure to abide by the WARN act (by claiming sudden economic catastrophe), premature cutoff of health benefits, and failure to provide severance pay are all crimes against the workers.

Pouring acid on the wound, BD is keeping a crew in shipping to move remaining inventory out and suck the last drop of profit out.

Their lawyers were fully prepared and filed bankruptcy immediately in Delaware, a tax haven for corporate crooks. The union and community should be appointed trustees based on their investment of decades of labor and support. Rather than getting nothing in these proceedings, the workers ought to be entitled to a preferred status based on the labor they’ve invested in the plant.

After the sit-down strikes in the 1930’s in plants across the country, the U.S. Department of Labor under Frances Perkins was forced to declare the strikes legal as the workers had a property right due to their labor.

Depending on politicians to assist in this situation is a delusion. A recent action by coal miners in Harlan County, KY, shows the way forward. When their company filed for bankruptcy and attempted to cheat the workers out of back pay and more, the workers blocked a train carrying coal inventory until they got paid. Joined by the community, Bayou Steel workers should stop the inventory from leaving the plant.

As long as labor is shackled into believing that only corporate owners have rights and that we must play by their rules, workers will suffer as they force us into a race to the bottom.

The loss of any union job hurts all Louisiana workers; we need more unions. Taking bold action outside the box can invigorate workers and help them see that unions are organizations willing to fight for their rights.

We are workers and community members and would do anything we can to support such an effort. We are sure that many workers will join you if you decide to fight back. It is only by fighting back that you can win even a small measure of what is owed to your members and the community.

In solidarity,
New Orleans Workers Group