How Workers Are Winning as the Nation Adds Jobs, Manufacturing

U$A SPECIFIC FROM A NORTH AMERIKAN UNION

BY DAVID MCCALL

 JUNE 25, 2024
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Photograph Source: Nancy Pelosi – CC BY 2.0

John Ralston went into bargaining with Transco last fall intending to negotiate one of the strongest union contracts in his three decades with the company.

Carmakers urgently wanted to get new vehicles to market. The railroads needed to get more autoracks—enclosed rail cars used to transport vehicles—into service.

And Ralston said he and his co-workers, who maintain autoracks and other rail cars at a sprawling yard in Logansport, Indiana, had “more work than we could handle.”

He and other members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-00007 ended up exceeding their expectations, winning wage increases of 24 percent over three and a half years along with important benefit enhancements.

It’s one more example of the significant gains that workers across the country are making as the nation continues to add jobs, invest in manufacturing, and meet the growing demand for products ranging from aluminum and steel to automobiles, appliances, and many other kinds of goods.

“They knew they were going to have to offer a pretty substantial wage increase in order to hire more people and keep them there,” Ralston, the local’s recording secretary and a bargaining committee member, said of Transco management.

“I think they knew they were going to have to do something. They really want to add a second shift. They really want to expand our operations,” added Ralston, who repairs the air brake systems on rail cars.

The hiring buzz at Transco reflects a nationwide trend.

Employers created 15 million jobs, hundreds of thousands of them in manufacturing, over the past three and a half years. The nation added another 272,000 jobs in May alone, beating economists’ projections, and workers are benefiting with strong wage gains that outpace the cost of living.

“The American middle class is seeing their economic standing improved. The strong wages and improving living standards are the main takeaway from this very strong jobs report,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM US, explained to The Washington Post.

“The labor market remains tight, and firms have to compete and offer higher wages to attract and retain workers… This really is the best labor market since the 1950s,” he said.

Transco’s business depends on the fortunes of the auto and rail industries. Both are thriving.

Automakers increased production to meet customer demand in the wake of the pandemic, only to see tens of thousands of vehicles left stranded on factory lots last year amid a shortage of the autoracks needed to get them to dealerships. Car industry officials demanded more autoracks and the railroads pledged to put thousands more into service this year.

While Ralston and several dozen colleagues maintain various kinds of rail cars, autoracks—cars with galvanized steel sides and two or three tiers for holding vehicles—account for the lion’s share of Transco’s business in Logansport.

He and his co-workers perform routine repairs, ensuring the autoracks meet safety standards, and overhaul cars severely damaged by derailments or other incidents. They also convert the three-level autoracks into the two-tier models increasingly needed to move the larger pickups and SUVs most popular with U.S. consumers.

The workers went into negotiations realizing that demand for their work gave them leverage they hadn’t enjoyed in previous years. Now, the new, stronger contract benefits all of Logansport, said Ralston, noting he and his colleagues have some of the best manufacturing jobs in town and support local businesses, schools, and other community essentials.

Dave Martin sees similar growth in the Ravenswood, West Virginia, area, where ongoing construction of a $3.1 billion sheet steel mill for Nucor and the development of a factory and solar energy field for titanium parts manufacturer Timet will create thousands of production jobs in the coming years.

But the investments are already paying dividends right now, observed Martin, a longtime USW member who serves as president of the Mason-Jackson-Roane Labor Council.

For example, USW-represented construction workers have a hand in the factory construction. And the burgeoning demand for factory workers already prompted another employer, Constellium, to significantly increase wages for USW Local 5668 members who make aluminum at the company’s Ravenswood plant.

“It’s benefited us a lot,” Martin said of the growing need for workers.

Union-backed legislation—including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act—unleashed customer demand and sparked the needfor additional manufacturing capacity in the Ravenswood area.

The IIJA and Inflation Reduction Act also allocated up to $75 million for upgrades to the Constellium plant, creating additional production jobs and ensuring that facility’s future, said Martin.

“It’s a big transformation,” Martin said, referring to the local economy. “There’s not been this kind of potential for new jobs for quite a while.”

Like workers in many industries, the pandemic dealt a severe blow to John Martinez and his colleagues, members of USW Local 12-593 who make carbon fiber at Hexcel in Salt Lake City, Utah.

But Martinez, the USW unit chair, said the nation’s astonishing leap forward over the past three and a half years not only brought employment roaring back but enabled the union to negotiate a major mid-contract wage increase for new hires.

He said high demand for carbon fiber also enabled the company to expand from its traditional customer base—in the aerospace, defense, and recreational equipment industries—into new sectors like computers and car parts.

Even better, many other workers have similar opportunities to forge brighter futures, Martinez said, noting Texas Instruments last year announced an $11 billion investment in a new semiconductor factory projected to create hundreds of manufacturing jobs near Salt Lake City.

“I feel the economy is in a really good spot,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

David McCall is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

In France, a Bold New Take on ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’

BY SAM PIZZIGATI

 JUNE 25, 2024
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The Coat of arms of France – Public Domain

France has rendered unto the world, over the past quarter-century, a distinct public service. Thanks to the trailblazing research of three French scholars — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — we know much more about the world’s maldistributed wealth than ever before.

Could France now be on the brink of making another significant contribution to a more equal global future? That question has suddenly become surprisingly timely. French voters, after an unexpected turn of political events, will shortly have a real opportunity to begin shearing our global super rich down to something approximating democratic size.

France’s surprising turn of events started earlier this month when millions of voters went to the polls to elect the 720 members of the next European Parliament. For Europe’s centrist political leaders, most notably French president Emmanuel Macron, the results would turn out to be a disaster. Candidates with Macron’s French centrist coalition garnered less than half the 31 percent of the vote that the French far-right coalition, the anti-immigrant Rassemblement National, took in.

Macron’s reaction? He quickly dissolved the French National Assembly and scheduled a “snap election” to replace it, with the first voting round coming June 30 and the second July 7. Then, right on the heels of Macron’s move, another stunning surprise. In the June 9 European Parliament balloting,  France’s four top left parties had competed separately. For the new French National Assembly elections, the four parties announced, they would be fielding a single, unified slate of candidates.

That single slate — the Nouveau Front Populaire, the New Popular Front — has what many observers see as a real shot at beating the election’s initial favorite, the French far-right coalition led by Marine Le Pen. And if the Nouveau Front Populaire does gain legislative control, France could soon be experiencing a distinct egalitarian shift. The Nouveau Front Populaire, as Jacobin analyst Harrison Stetler notes, has “laid out a radical program to rebuild France’s dilapidated democracy.”

The New Popular Front has framed this “radical program” as a three-part “legislative contract” with French voters. The first part lays out the “emergency” steps the new government will take in its first 15 days in office. The second covers the New Popular Front’s action plan for its first 100 days and the third the longer-range “transformations” the Front plans on pursuing.

The struggle for a more equitable distribution of French income and wealth figures prominently throughout all these three stages. The Front’s “legislative contract,” points out Jacobin’s Stetler, “would mark a clean break” from the Macron years and their “transfer of economic power to the wealthiest.”

In the emergency first stage, the Front is promising to advance a quick hike to the French minimum wage coupled with new taxes on “the superprofits of agro-industrialists and mass retailers.” The first 100 days will concentrate on enacting five legislative packages that include moves “to abolish the privileges of billionaires.”

Among those moves: increasing the progressivity of the French income tax by adding new tax brackets that will subject ultra-high incomes to higher overall tax rates, establishing a meaningful tax on vast accumulations of wealth, and setting a limit on how much the already rich can inherit.

The New Popular Front legislative contract also aims to turn French corporations into something more than wealth-accumulation machines for the execs who run them.

Those corporate accumulation machines have of late been running in overdrive. One current French CEO, the LVMH luxury giant’s Bernard Arnault, is now sitting upon the world’s third-largest personal fortune. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts his latest net worth at just under $200 billion.

Fortunes like Arnault’s would shrink significantly if a New Popular Front administration gets to take power. The Front’s legislative contract promises to “make employees real actors in economic life by reserving for them at least a third” of the seats on corporate boards and expanding the worker “right of intervention” in how companies operate.

The legislative contract the Front is proposing would, in still another egalitarian move, “create a right of pre-emption to allow employees to take over their business in the form of a cooperative.”

The New Popular Front’s vision extends outward to Europe as well. The Front’s legislative contract  calls for taxing Europe’s richest — and corporate “superprofits” — at the continental level to increase the budget resources available to the European Union.

None of this agenda, of course, will ever see the light of legislative day unless the New Popular Front maintains enough unity among its four prime partners — France Insoumise, the Parti Socialiste, Les Écologistes, and the Parti Communiste — to top the far-right.

“It’s going to be either the far right,” as Greens party leader Marine Tondelier puts it, “or us.”

France’s most recent public opinion polling has the New Popular Front gaining on the ultra-right Rassemblement National, the National Rally party that Marine LePen leads, with the Front now up to almost 30 percent of the vote and the National Rally hovering just a few points above that.

Meanwhile, in many districts across France, candidates with president Macron’s center-right party now appear likely to not even win enough votes in the June 30 first round — at least 12.5 percent of the total cast — to make it into the July 7 second.

And if the New Popular Front should win, then France just might be able to resume its role as a global egalitarian beacon. Back in the 20th century, the top 1 percent’s share of French wealth fell from 56.7 percent of the nation’s total in 1905 down to a mere 15.8 percent in 1984. By 2022, that 15.8 percent share had rebounded up by over half, to 24 percent.

What does France’s future now hold? We’ll know much more in just a few weeks.

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press). 

REST IN POWER

Conn Hallinan: He Knew What Side He was On

BY DAVID BACON

 JUNE 26, 2024
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Conn on a panel opposing Trump’s bombing of Iran, 2020.

Editor’s note: I was distressed to learn of Conn Hallinan’s death last week. I’d heard from our mutual friend, P. Sainath, in the fall that Conn hadn’t been well, but the news still came as a jolt. Conn started writing for CounterPunch in 2003. His first story was a blistering attack on Ariel Sharon (The Consistency of Sharon.). And a new dispatch landed in the inbox with fearsome regularity for the next 18 years, searing critiques of neoliberal economics and imperial war-mongering. Conn’s writing was clear and forceful. His columns never left you wondering what the point was or whether he’d proved his thesis. Like the late Uri Avnery, Conn had the ability to cut through the manufactured fog and allow you to see complex issues in a fresh light. In person, he was warm and funny. He was hit hard by Cockburn’s death and rang up frequently in the weeks and months after Alex’s death to see how we were coping. When Conn finally stopped writing his column, he devoted himself to finishing a trilogy of novels on rarely examined middle empire period (third century CE) of classical Rome (Hispania, Mauretainia and Tarraco), as the rot of imperial over-reach had begun to set in. The novels are as enlightening on the subject of imperialism as his columns–fast-pace, historical accurate object lessons in the crimes of conquest and occupation. Go Raibh Suaimhneas Síoraí Air, Conn. –JSC

I learned a lot from Conn “Ringo” Hallinan, who passed on June 19. Ringo had a full life as both a writer and political organizer, and ran the journalism program at UC Santa Cruz for 23 years. But that’s not the way I knew him. For me, Ringo was a guide to a path through the hard knocks of labor and radical journalism.

Ringo was foreign editor at the West Coast People’s World for many years. I spent a year of apprenticeship there, as it became a national newspaper, the People’s Daily World. Both were publications of the U.S. Communist Party, but regularly carried news and analysis that went beyond, and usually in contradiction to, the mainstream media. Ringo’s international columns, especially during the Cold War and the era of national liberation conflicts, were often the issue’s high point.

Ringo was a voracious reader with an encyclopedic knowledge, ranging from defense budget figures to the world view of anti-apartheid fighters in southern Africa. He carried his “Dispatches from the Edge” into Foreign Policy in Focus (and CounterPunch) after he left the paper and got his teaching gig at Santa Cruz.

I had no problems with the idea of being, as we called it at the paper, “profoundly partisan.” I came out of union organizing drives and factory work, and became a labor reporter at the PW after getting laid off for a time as an organizer. So, while I shared Ringo’s general perspective, I had a lot to learn as a would-be journalist.  The terrible PW pay couldn’t sustain my family for more than a year, and I then had to go back to organizing work. But the bug bit me, and eventually I found a way to freelance fulltime journalism.

Organizing gives you a good grounding in the lives of working people, but the PW job taught me how to put that into a coherent news or feature article. Although no longer at the paper, Ringo would often send me critiques of my articles, and our former editor, Carl Bloice, and the previous labor reporter, Billy Allan, helped me learn as well.

Ringo had a sense of dry humor and irony about the vicious absurdities of capitalism that appealed to me. His last column, written many years after his PW days, still could make me laugh. “But the illusions of Empire are stubborn,” he wrote. “The US still thinks it can control the world, when every experience for the past 50 years or more suggests it can’t: Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the last war we ‘won’ was Grenada, where the competition was not exactly world class.”

Or giving unwanted advice to the British about independence for Scotland and northern Ireland, or the Spanish about Catalonia: “You can’t force people to be part of your country if they don’t want to be, and trying to make them is like teaching a pig to whistle: can’t be done and annoys the pig.”

I could never imitate that sly style. But what I really learned from Ringo, and what I think he passes on, is his demand that journalists take sides, recognizing our interest in being participants in a broad movement for social justice. That includes his sharp analysis of the relationship between media workers and the people who employ them.

I interviewed Ringo not long after the huge and bitter Detroit News Strike, which ground on from 1995 to 1997. “The anti-union bias in the industry is very deep,” he said.  The strike put that on display, but Ringo warned that the bias went beyond violent efforts by corporate owners to break the Newspaper Guild (as we were then called—the NewsGuild now). That bias is evident in the content of the papers and media, which gives it enormous political power in our world.

“So how is that produced?” he asked. Although corporate class interest certainly leads to overt censorship, media workers themselves share responsibility, he argued. Thousands of us belong to unions and care a lot about our salaries and working conditions. “And there were real efforts by dedicated newspaper union activists to challenge the suppression of the news from Detroit. But most media workers didn’t feel a strong sense, not just of personal, but of class responsibility to report it.”

Journalists are taught, Ringo observed, both by their education and the rules of the corporate newsroom, that they must not participate in movements for social justice, especially organizations on the left that challenge the established order. “Many reporters internalize the ban on being participants,” he explained, “and believe it would compromise their supposed neutrality and objectivity. For reporters and editors, if they don’t already know about something, it’s not news. But the neutrality rule says you can’t cover a story if you know about it from your personal experience, because it’s a conflict. And of course, behind this lies the knowledge of what you need to do to please your boss and get ahead.

“The objective persona is like the tooth fairy—it doesn’t exist,” he added. “It not only makes reporters unwilling to be participants, but it keeps them from being good journalists. Was I.F. Stone neutral on Vietnam and Korea, or Mike Quinn on the San Francisco general strike? The point isn’t to be objective and neutral, but to be fair and accurate. Neutrality destroys independent reporting—no one but reporters believes in it.”

Belonging to the union can provide important job protections for journalists who challenge corporate power. But union membership doesn’t automatically lead to better coverage of workers and communities of color, or international stories where U.S. foreign policy demands agreement. “For that, unions need to actively educate their members and appeal for loyalty to the labor movement and struggles in working-class communities. Some of the stories most hostile to workers during recent strikes and organizing drives, were written or aired by union members,” Ringo charged.

“Look at the class origin of reporters and editors. Seventy-five years ago, they were overwhelmingly working-class people. Today they’re largely middle class. Yes, corporations own the newspapers. But if reporters bit and screamed more, they could change a lot. Newspapers have to rely on them to produce the copy. Sure, publishers and editors have a class stance, but so does the average reporter, even if they belong to the Guild.”

Ringo demanded political independence, both to know what side you’re on, but even more important, to give working people what they need to make social change. “We need an analysis of the system in this country that reflects the reality of our lives,” he said.

The media talk about our economic system in black-and-white terms. Communism is dictatorial and repressive. The free enterprise system is the savior of all people. The media says our economic system allows us the freedom to do wonderful things, but there’s no discussion of how this system really works, and its true impact on working people.

I took Ringo’s call to heart. When the United States bombed the headquarters of Serbian television during the Yugoslav war, media workers in other countries voiced outrage.  But the U.S. journalism profession generally remained silent. I wrote a letter to our union newspaper, the Guild Reporter, with his words in my ear.

“We need independent international relationships, based on mutual working-class interests, free from the defense of U.S. foreign policy which characterized so much of labor during the cold war,” I warned.

The Guild has to find ways to support our right to independence from the bias of the corporations we work for, and the efforts by our own government to enforce political conformity. Independence means a culture of solidarity, identifying our common interests with other journalists and workers internationally and here at home.

The letter stirred up the predictable controversy, and I still remember the “Right On!” note I got from Ringo. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and fought the battles that make our own work possible. Ringo’s were pretty broad.

This first appeared on FPIF.