class war

Maradonna supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

class war, Football
Published on

The Argentine football team supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at the worldcup

As you should know Bob, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties, the Argentine military waged a dirty war against its own people, disappearing thousands of trade unionists, activists, socialists and other leftists and all other sorts of socalled subversives. Most of the disappered were first tortured then killed, were often young, in their tens, twenties or thirties, sometimes had children of their own who also disappered, being adopted by the very same people who tortured and murdered their parents. And it was not just leftists who got disappeared: ask too many questions and you would be tortured and murdered as well. But some of the mothers of disappeared people refused to be intimidated and kept asking the government where their children were and when they got no answers, they started a silent protest on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, keeping up throughout the dictatorship even though several of the original mothers were disappeared in turn. They did not stop when the dictatorship ended, but kept up demanding answers, keeping up their weekly protest until 2006, when finally a government was elected that wasn’t interested in continuing the coverup. In later years, as the truth did start to come out the mothers also campaigned for the truth about the children of the disappeared, those adopted by their killers.

It’s not surprising then that the Argentine football team chose to honour these women at the start of the Worldcup, by calling for them to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. If any groups deserve it, they are. What is surprising is how little attention this gesture got in the mainstream meda. I myself only read about this today, on Inveresk Street Ingrate. You would think this should’ve gotten more coverage, as such a political statement is not exactly common amongst footballers. The Worldcup itself after all is tainted by having been held in Argentine at the height of the dictatorship, in 1978. Perhaps this is why it was slipped by almost unnoticed?

CotD: family time

class war
Published on

If there’s anybody who could convince me Christianity is not just a scam for suckers run by frauds or a way to get greedy fatheads to feel superior to people less lucky than them, it’s Fred Clark. Since 2003 he’s been tireless in showing that you can be a Christian and be smart, compassionate and — not unimportant — have a sense of humour. All of which are on show in his ongoing critique of the Left Behind series, about what happens when the x-tian Apocalypse finally happens and which so far has only managed into making the end of the world as we know it sound dull. Fred is excellent in taking the mickey about the writing and plotting of the books, but even better in skewering the little morality tales the authors indulge in. The following quote comes from
his latest post on the series, in which Fred moves from dissecting one trite moral about putting family over work and how in the real world few of us might have that luxury to addressing his readers directly about this:

For those who can afford them, I suppose these moralistic platitudes are true. But only for those who can afford them. If you’re such a person, then: 1) You might want to follow Rayford’s example and deliberately set aside time with your family free from the demands and distractions of your career; and 2) You should also thank your lucky stars that the universe has conspired to allow you to be one of the very, very few people in such a position. (Don’t ever forget this. I’m sure you’re very gifted and you’ve worked very hard. Good for you. But billions of people work much, much harder and have little to show for it. And plenty of gifted people never get the breaks you’ve gotten. There’s a reason it’s called a “fortune,” you know.)

It’s something that struck me, as I have been lucky in being able to spend so much time this year in dealing with my partner’s medical problems and that the people at work have been so understanding about this. Part of this however isn’t due to fortune, but has been due to hard work and a long struggle; not mine, but those of workers and socialists before me, who won all the rights and benefits I am now profiting from. That solidarity and common struggle is one of the things the righrwing x-ianity Fred blogs about has also undermined, with its preaching of the idea ofindividual wealth as a sign of having the right morals

No we should not retire later

class war, Life under Capitalism
Published on

Raising the retirement age is a popular way to pay for the bankers’ crisis. Voters may not like it, but it’s delayed pain for most of them and if done smart enough it won’t trigger much resistance. But is it a good idea to raise the retirement age outside of this context? John Quiggin says yes, at least for Australia:

There are two main factors that should influence the age at which we retire. First, improving productivity means that any given standard of living can be achieved with less work, and we would expect at least some of this benefit to take the form of an increase in leisure, including more years spent in retirement. Second, and going in the opposite direction, we are living longer and (because of higher education levels and increased difficulty of entry to the workforce) starting work later[1]. So, with a fixed retirement age, the number of years out of the workforce is increasing, while the number in the workforce is decreasing.

[…]

Those who think employment conditions reflect voluntary bargaining might argue that this apparently unsatisfactory outcome must reflect the preferences of workers and employers. I don’t buy this, at least as far as workers are concerned. But even if it were true, preferences are affected by policy settings such as pension ages. Leaving the pension age unchanged when life expectancy changes pushes people to work harder since their required savings increase. This is, on the face of it, a bad outcome. So, it makes sense for public policy to encourage later retirement, and discourage ultra-long working hours.

In short, retirement schemes have been designed at a time when life expectancy was much less; now that we’re living longer and be able to enjoy our pensions for longer as well they are unaffordable, or so we’re told. Hence the choice John talks about: either work harder now to pay for the same pension, or retire later. But it is a restricted choice, one that in each case puts the burden on the worker, rather than e.g. cut into profits to pay for it. Raise employer contributions rather than employee contributions; after all productivity has risen as well, so we are making more money for our employers. These options are never on the table but instead this crisis is used yet again to wage class war against the working classes.

We spent approximately sixty years of our lives in study and work, from when we turn four of five and go to kindergarten, to sixtyfive when we finally get to enjoy retirement. That’s long enough. If more money is needed to keep our pensions safe, get it from those who can miss it, not those who have had to work hard their entire lives already.

Amsterdam garbage strike is over

class war, Unions
Published on

But it will take an estimated two weeks before the entire city is clean again. The strike ended yesterday, after the unions and the joint Dutch municipalities reached an agreement in which the unions got much of what they demanded. This year municipal civil servants will get a onetime raise of 1.5 percent on their wages, as well as a 0.5 percent raise on their end of year bonuses this year and in 2011, with the minimum bonus for the lowest pay scales raised from 836 to 1750 euros. As important if not more is the agreement that there will not be forced redundancies in the next two years. The agreement still has to be voted on by the union members, but there’s a good chance that they will accept it and in the meantime the strikers have gone back to work, just in time before the weather gets too hot…

All in all another excellent lesson in how a little bit of pressure can force employers back to the negotiation table…

Amsterdam garbage strike: a new workers offensive

Activism, class war, Unions
Published on 2 Comments on Amsterdam garbage strike: a new workers offensive

garbage piling up in Amsterdam

As I warned last month, the municipal garbage collectors in Amsterdam went on strike following Queensday, though waiting until after Memorial and Liberation Day. A week later and the garbage has started to pile up everywhere, both in the streets and at every collection point. This isn’t helped by those assholes who decide to profit from the strike by dumping commercial waste as well. Luckily the weather has been cold enough that stench hasn’t been a problem yet, though with the promise of warmer weather next week and the strike continuing all that rotting garbage may become a health hazard…

The garbage strike is just one tool the unions are using to try and get the joint municipal employers back to the negotiation table; earlier the parking ticket collectors had a one day strike (very popular) and there have been a few big demos as well. It’s a sign of the growing militancy and changing role of the unions how quickly they’ve used such an aggressive tactic however.

It didn’t used to be this way. For years, if not decades, the unions had become little more than negotiating partners for business and government, operating on a policy of compromise in what has become known as the “poldermodel“, with strikes becoming rare and ritualised pressure tools. It meant a certain amount of social stability, but the price was a growing irrelevancy of the unions to the average worker who did not see the need for union membership anymore, or at best saw it as equivalent to membership in a fitness club. As socialists like Anton Pannekoek warned about more than eighty years ago, unions had become just another tool to manage and control workers.

But in the past decade this has slowly changed. Partially this has been forced upon the unions, as the political climate in the Netherlands changed and became more openly rightwing, but not entirely so. There’s also been an internal radicalisation, a growing willingness to fight rather than compromise, as well as the realisation that the unions needed to change to become relevant again, could not longer permit themselves the luxury of only defending rights already won. One result has been a growing internationalisation of union struggles, for example in the fight to stop the EU-wide liberalisation of sea ports. The other has been a revamp of tactics and methology, heavily influenced by the experiences US unions have had in organising workers in traditionally weak and vulnerable trades, like the hotel cleaners as immortalised in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses. A lot of these lessons were on display in the earlier cleaners strike I’ve reported on before, were the struggle was organised together with the (non-unionised) cleaners themselves, and instead of impossible mass strikes various companies were surgically targeted.

The current civil servant strike is done in the same spirit, with a series of short, smart actions rather than one long strike. So you had a public rally first, to get people’s blood up, followed by a one day strike by parking ticket collectors to hurt the city councils in their wallets, followed by the garbage strike to make it both public and impossible to ignore. Behind that and less visible in both strikes, as well as elsewhere are less visible and actually quite oldfashioned methods to get workers organised, by union activist actually going to a workplace and talk with workers there, persuade people to become unionised, get a nucleus of such workers to organise the rest of the workforce and if necessary use the same sort of smart, targeted strikes to force concessions from the bosses. And the best thing about this is that finally the unions have stopped doing purely defensive strikes, defending rights already fought for and won decades earlier, but have gone on the offensive, winning rights for those groups of people not having them yet.