THOSE WHO OPPOSE MEDICARE FOR ALL AS TOO COSTLY  ARE THOSE WHO APPROVED THE WAR IN IRAQ WITH NO BUDGET OR FUNDING REQUIREMENTS OR LIMITS COSTING AMERICANS TRILLIONS IN DEBT FINANCING.
THE WAR WAS SO CORRUPT THAT THE USA LOST BILLIONS TO THE LIKES OF HALLIBURTON IN CONTRACTING OUT COST OVERRUNS ACCORDING TO THE INSPECTOR GENERAL 

Massive US embassy compound in Lebanon goes viral, sparks conspiracy theories

Does this large embassy compound reflect 2023 thinking or thinking from the last decade?

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Updated: MAY 7, 2023 

A Lebanese protester holds an anti-US banner behind razor wire during a protest in front of the US embassy near Beirut, March 15, 2005
(photo credit: REUTERS/DAMIR SAGOLJ/FILE PHOTO)

Photos posted on Twitter Friday by the US Embassy in Beirut showing the progress of construction on the new compound for the embassy have received an unusual amount of interest in the region and globally.

As of Saturday, there were some 1.5 million views of the photos and hundreds of comments, quoted tweets and bookmarks of the post. The reason is the photos show the huge mass of the new multi-building compound. The US has said it will sit on a 43-acre site. Other posts by the embassy get far fewer replies or interactions

The US Embassy's post on Twitter was relatively short in terms of description. It simply said, “things are progressing at our new compound” and a follow-up tweet noted the visit of the Lebanese foreign minister. The compound, when completed will become one of the largest of its kind and it will have been an expensive project.

Does US investment in Middle East illustrate its feelings on security?

The US has done this before in the region, investing in large embassy compounds. It has a large compound in Baghdad and the embassy in Kabul was built on 36 acres of land before Kabul fell to the Taliban. A new consulate in Erbil is also of massive size, sitting on some 50 acres of land. These are expensive projects too, running into the hundreds of millions and billions to build and maintain.

The decision to invest heavily in Beirut and Erbil would appear to illustrate where the US feels the future and security of the region are going. While in the 1980s, the US embassy was targeted in Beirut by terrorists, today the sense is that Beirut is a good choice. There aren’t a lot of other options. There is hostility to the US in Baghdad, generally driven by Iranian-backed militias.

Lebanese anti-US protesters wave a big Lebanese flag during a protest in front of the US embassy near Beirut, April 1, 2005 

(credit: REUTERS/DAMIR SAGOLJ/FILE PHOTO)

What’s interesting about the photos of the Beirut compound construction is the replies it has received and the attention it is getting. This is because there are a lot of commentators who sense a shift in US policy in the region or are critical of the US. They see the images and they see a symbol...some of the comments wondered when the next “color revolution” would be set off in Lebanon.

Apparently, this is a reference to the US backing various pro-democracy revolutions in other places, but these “color” revolutions are also critiqued by those who see them as some kind of US conspiracy. Some comments wondered if the US would plant trees around the compound, which currently has a kind of brutalist feel to it. “Let them eat concrete,” one reply said.

Others had more comedic replies, such as wondering how many bags of Cheetos could fit in the massive compound. The quote tweets of the images included references to it looking like the “Death Star” from Star Wars. Another person wondered how the US could accuse Lebanon of being under Iranian influence if it was building such a massive compound.

Embassy construction sparks Israel conspiracy theories

Of course, some had the usual claims of the embassy somehow serving as a center for “spies” or being linked to US support for Israel. And then there were the cynics who wondered if the place has enough helicopter pads for when it needs to be evacuated as the US has evacuated diplomats in Kabul, Iraq, or Sudan.

The overall symbol of the massive investment in places like Beirut and Erbil is that the US is not withdrawing from the region, but it is shifting focus. It takes a long time to build an embassy or massive consulate on dozens of acres of land. One needs to find the land and set aside the funding in Washington. Then there are the inevitable cost overruns and construction delays. This means that from the point of deciding to do something, it might take 10 or 20 years.

That means the current investment in Beirut or Erbil was decided upon long ago at a different time when the region was different before it became normal to see the US as withdrawing and shifting priorities to deal with Russia and China. These compounds are the results of 2015 thinking when the US was involved in the war against ISIS and the Iran deal had just been concluded, and while Kabul was still safe.

It is worth considering that reality when thinking about whether this large embassy compound reflects 2023 thinking or thinking from the last decade. Either way, the US embassy has had its photos and post go viral.

 

Artificial Intelligence Goes to War

by William D. Hartung and Tom Engelhardt Posted onOctober 04, 2023

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps we should just be happy that an F-35 ever even made it into the air, given its endless problems in these years. After all, as Dan Grazier of the Center for Defense Information wrote, it’s now “the largest and most expensive weapons program in history.” Yet when it comes to something as significant as “mission availability,” according to the Congressional Budget Office, only about 26% of all F-35s, each of which now costs an estimated $80 million to produce and $44,000 an hour to fly, are available at any moment. Not exactly thrilling, all in all.

As TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung makes clear today, if that’s what happens with the Air Force’s least intelligent fighter plane, what should we expect of its just arriving artificial-intelligence-driven fleet of drones or “robot wingmen” that could be deployed, as he suggests, in a future war with China? Given the history of the U.S. military’s three-decade-old drone warfare program, which caused such havoc among civilian populations during this country’s Global War on Terror, what could the future hold in store? After all, non-AI drones were “roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft.” And remember, that fleet of aircraft was still, at least officially, run by human intelligence, not the artificial variety. Who knows what may occur when such drones, freed from the human brain, are let loose on this planet? While you’re considering that possibility, let Hartung take you on a quick flight to the Pentagon and then to China.  ~ Tom Engelhardt

---

Will the Pentagon’s Techno-Fantasies Pave the Way for War with China?

by William D. Hartung

On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war.

Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing. As Hicks’s speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute: “1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.” Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy, and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.” That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said: “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years. But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though! They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing “the China Threat”

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the Trump years. In fact, for the first time since the twentieth century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3% to 5% above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3% to 5% real growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern. What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

Beware of Pentagon “Techno-Enthusiasm”

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Kathleen Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that “the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century). China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention. As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’s speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come. There has to be a better way.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration.”

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

Laundry Workers Fight Privatization

Around the world Laundry and Custodial workers are the 'canaries in the mine' of public sector privatization.What happens to them will happen to you.

A question was posted on H-Labour Discussion about the history of Laundry workers in the US. Having written and researched the privatization of Laundry Workers in Alberta's hosptials I responded with a note and the links below. I expanded the links to include a wide variety of countries to show the battle of laundry workers against privatization of is world wide.

The privatization of the work of this largely immigrant and female workforce is widespread through out Canada and around the world. Even when unionized these workers remain the lowest paid in the workforce. They become interchangable workers, being the same workers who are forced into low waged jobs in the private sector, if their public sector jobs are privatized they end up being the benificaries of a reduction in wages. In the UK and other countries these same workers also are part of the underground economy, as illegal immigrants they are paid under the table and work the same jobs as their 'legal' counterparts.

Overall these jobs in hotels, hospitals, schools, etc. are done by 'invisible workers', when we think of staff in schools or hospitals we refer to the professionals or para-professionals in those institutions, teachers, doctors, nurses, teacher aides,etc. We do not consider the importance or impact of those who 'clean healthy built environments'. Instead these invisible workers are the first to be laid off, cut back or privatized. They and their jobs reflect the 'canaries in the mine' of capitalism, if a move is afoot to privatized or contract out their invisible services will be the first to go.

But laundry workers have fought back, despite the government, the privateers and even their own unions. The Calgary Laundry workers, largely immigrant women, held a wildcat strike in 1995 to save their jobs, it almost led to a General Strike of workers not only in Calgary but across Alberta. A General Strike that would have done more to stop the Klein government then the marches and demonstrations in the streets did.

It was the power of women workers, once again, who having nothing to lose actually fought against the contracting out of their jobs. The union representing provincial workers AUPE and the national public sector union CUPE both had jurisdicition in the hospitals, and like the government the leadership of the unions was terrified of a general strike. So they capitulated to the government, and accepted the death by a thousand cuts, the eventual contracting out of these workers jobs.

Jobs that were lost to K-Bro an international company located in Edmonton. K-Bro eight years later is benefiting from the B.C. governments largese, and the unions protesting the privatization had an opportunity to nip it in the bud in 1995. But they are terrified to use the power of the General Strike and once again as in Alberta, on the verge of a General Strike in B.C. last summer, the unions packed up and went back to the table to .....get what? Nothing. Another sell out.

Contracting Out (privatization, outsourcing) is the beginning of the process of casualization/flexible work at all levels of the organization except administration and management. It is the management theory of just in time production/delivery developed by the Japanese state capitalist corporations after studying the works of U.S. engineer Demming and his Total Quality Management (TQM) theories.This coincides with increasing reliance on technology to impose more teleworking, home working and contracting out of IT services at the higher end, again resulting in lowering of wages and reducing organizational costs of benefits and pensions. What begins with laundry workers ends up with part time nurses, etc.

The great irony of contracting out is that it actually began over two decades ago in the computer industry and IT services, where it still dominates today. It began with having a just in time delivery process for production of semi conductors produced by low waged immigrant women workers who were not unionized, then led to the idea that IT services themselves were best delivered not by inhouse IT specialists but by IT corporations. Today outsourcing of IT services is the norm. However in Canada, where the largest outsourcing of IT has been done by the Federal Government this has led to massive cost overruns as well as outright theft by IT contractors. The billion dollar Canadian Firearms Registry boondogle is just one example of how expensive outsourcing can be.

Outsourcing was part and parcel of the 'Reinventing Government' movement of the ninties, the creation of lean mean, government, replacing government delivery of services with the contracting out of those services for private delivery. It's the new bugaboo of CNN's Lou Dobbs, who sees American jobs going to China and India, however he didn't go on a tirade when American corporations laid off workers and contracted out their work in America nor did he oppose the privatization of government services all of which logically and eventually lead to outsourcing work abroad. And he goes on nativistic tirades about illegal immigrants, ignoring the fact that they are needed for working inthe new just in time contracted out form of globalized capitalism in the era of free trade. If there were no jobs available there would be no immigrants, illegal or otherwise. It's not that Canadians or Americans or Brits don't want these jobs, it's the fact they are low waged jobs and they certainly are not what one considers 'careers', which now includes many IT jobs such as call centres. And in some cases this low waged work such as nannies, are only available to immigrant women who are willing to agree to live in indentured servitude, slavery by any other name. Contracting out profits from low wages despite rhetoric about better service delivery, efficiencies, or quality etc. This is the real secret of this new age of global capitalism; privatization and outsourcing. See: Global Labour in the Age of Empire.

K-Bro is based in Edmonton Alberta Canada though it has venture capitalist shareholders in Boston. They have benefited the most from this which is why the IWW Edmonton Branch issued a call out to labour unions to oppose K-Bro and the privatization of laundery workers in B.C.

Unfortunately privatization of support services, laundry and caretaking, did not get criticized in the Romanow report on health care commisioned by the Federal Government. In fact Romanow, ever the social democrat approved of contracting these "non-essential" service, which is ironic because if they ever went on strike they would be deemed as 'essential', as Romanow did when he was Premier of Sasakatchewan.

All the reports on Medicare in Canada have allowed for the contracting out of these support services. They have not called for a reduction of administration, or putting doctors on salary, or reducing the university qualifications for a basic GP degree. Nope these might break the doctors guild monopoly they have on services. Easier to pick on the immigrant workforce, they are replaceable and interchangable. The same workers unionized today, will be working tommorow for contractors.

The Edmonton IWW criticized the Romanow report for these shortcomings as did unions representing public sector workers. And as we can see from the result of the privatization putch in B.C. , "Alberta set's the agenda for the rest of Canada". Like Alberta (which has been ruled by a one party dictatorship for 33 years under the Conservatives, and a decade under the Premier privateer Ralph Klein) Gordon Campbells Liberals ( an unholy alliance of the Old Socreds -Social Credit-Federal Reform/Alliance/Tory party members, the B.C. Conservative Party and the B.C. Liberals) won an unprecidented 98% of the seats, decimating the NDP and leaving an opposition of two! With this mandate, the Liberal Government went on a privatization spree, especillay in Health Care using the old deficit/debt hysteria to claim that health care costs were out of control. They also sold off B.C. Rail and are looking at privatizing liquour sales, and hydro.

This is already the case in Alberta, where electrical deregulation has created increasing profits for electrical utilities and higher costs for consumers including industrial and farming consumers (businesses) and the governments liquor board was privatized, stock and buildings sold below cost, and wiping out small distributors as the market ineviatbly moves towards monopolization. The favorite argument of the right is that the State has a monopoly on public services and privatization increases competition and lowers prices. The facts show otherwise, private contractors lead to increased costs over time and monopolization of the market. That old Karl Marx was right on, again.

K-Bro purchased the actual laundry equipment from the University of Alberta Hospital, the Royal Alexandera Hospital in Edmonton, and hospitalis in Calgary at cut rate fire sale prices. They have used this model for privatization across Canada and into the United States. They not only provide the workers and their own laundry equipment, they make sure their monopoly is maintained by stripping hospitals of their taxpayer funded laundry equipment so they don't face in house competition. And it makes it harder if not fiscally impossible for hospitals to return to in house laundry services if they have to purchase new equipment. Where hospitals have maintained their own laundry equipment they eventually returned to in house services, finding that the contractors were more expensive, and increased their charges for services (surprize, surprize).

To add insult to injury, as the B.C. government forced opening of collective agreements with HEU, the International Woodworkers of America( IWA) began raiding public sector unions, hand in paw with the privateeers. See Has the IWA, the flagship of B.C. labour unionism, signed a yellowdog contract with a multinational British health services corporation, the Compass Group?

Once again business unionism proved it was a business first and a workers organization second. Facing declining membership and reduced dues, the IWA looked at the privatization of laundry workers as an opportunity to gain membership and dues. It created an unneccasary second front battle between the unions as the workers were getting screwed by the government. Laundry workers were privatized and those who joined IWA took a 50% cut in pay to save their jobs. Between a rock and a hard place they had no other choice when sold out by a business union. The declining fortunes of the IWA led to it raid HEU and then to do what all capitalist organizations eventually do when faced with an economic decline; mergers and acquisitions. The result was the IWA has merged with the USWA the Steelworkers.

THE DIRT ON K-BRO
Workers Air Boston's Dirty Laundry... Until September 1995 when Royal purchased K-Bro, another industrial laundry offeringhigher wages and benefits, Royal workers received no sick days, holidays ...

M & A Divestitures Advisory Services

BG Affiliates LLC is a private equity investment firm that provides capital to high quality, middle-market operating companies.

Berkshire's no tortoise, but slow and steady wins the day

Edgar Search of SEC on Berkshire Reality co.

Canadian Corportation Profile K-Bro, Industry Canada

City of Toronto Report on K-Bro In September 1998, K-Bro terminated its agreement with the City of Toronto. As a result of the circumstances surrounding the termination, the parties have exchanged correspondence identifying areas of financial dispute. In addition, when K-Bro terminated the agreement, their unions filed complaints with the Ontario Labour Relations Board. The City of Toronto is a respondent to these proceedings.

City of Toronto-The Community and Neighbourhood Services Committee recommends the adoption of the following report (July 16, 1998) on K-Bro


ALBERTA

1995 Health Care Reform in Alberta by the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA)

Laundry: Where are we at? Calgary Health Region 1998

B.C. GOVERNMENT PRIVATIZES HOSPITAL SUPPORT STAFF SERVICES

CUPE on Privatization of Laundry Services in B.C. 2002

BC Legislature Hansard Debate on Privatization of Laundry Services

BCNU on contracting out laundry work to K-Bro

Health Authority short-sheets laundry workers Chilliwack Times

THREATENING OUR RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE: Contracting Out Support Services

Swept away Vancouver Courier

Health care: American connection in hospital laundering

Formal FOI appeal launched to force release of laundry privatization deal

Vancouver Sun: Sodexho Blacklisting Union Members? - 5/4/02

This story comes from a Colorado university student labour web site where the French company Sodexho is attempting to take over laundry services. Sodexho is another large scale privateer who provides support staff services, custodial and laundry, etc., for universities, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. and have been the beneficiaries of State funded contracts thus allowing workers as taxpayers to pay for the contracting out of their jobs and for the use of worker/taxpayer funds to promote low wage work...makes a lot of sense.... to capitalists and their right wing think tanks........to the rest of us working folks we are being asked to pay and pay and pay while watching our jobs be privatized. The New Deal: public funding of private profit.

Hospital workers deserve higher pay than hotel employees: economist

Do comparisons between hospital support workers and hospitality workers make sense?by Marjorie Cohen

Destroying Pay Equity: The effects of privatizing health care in British Columbia by Marjorie Cohen

Council of Canadians AGM October 25, 2003 BC's Experience in Privatization

Taped phone calls reveal health service contractors vowing to fire, blacklist thousands of health workers in first wave of Liberals' hospital privatization

BC Privatization Agenda Exposed -Working TV reveals online the taped phone calls

Pink slips and gin and tonics

Breaking Contracts

Environmentalists slam FHA scheme to ship four million pounds of hospital laundry to Calgary

Privatizing hospital support services B.C. Teacher Magazine

Northern Directions Health Care contracting out support staff

Despite critical nursing shortage Filipino Health Workers in Canada May Lose Jobs

The Real Story (sic) on the Hospital Employees' Union Strike BC Liberal Government Caucus Briefing Notes


Quality Reports from Vancouver Hospital Authorities 2004
As part of managment strategies around privatization is their counterpart in the Team concept of TQM, Total Qaulity Management, that is doing quality reports on the contractors. However they have no base data to go from, that is they DID NOT do quality reports prior to privatization. Here are the reports on K-Bro for Laundry services and Aramark for custodial services. Aramark is a large American service contractor, orginally owning hotels and operating hospitality services- see Marjorie Cohens work above on the difference between cleaning hospitals and cleaning in the hospitality industry.

Satisfaction is always a subjective matter, what is clean to one person is not clean to another. Whether cleaning a room or laundry. What these stats show is that cleaning times have decreased, thus saving money, and any savings made has been only because the hospitals no longer have to pay wages, benefits etc. directly. The savings end up being reletevaly small while the reduction in work time for cleaning clearly will have a long term impact of leaving rooms dirtier and dirtier.


Clean Hospitals Prevent Disease

Health Reform Cutting costs at patients' and workers' expense

Workers Who Care A Health Care Workers' Roundtable Our Times Fall/Winter 2002

SARS & NEW NORMALS Health and Hospitality Workers Fight Back Our Times Summer 2003

SARS spread aided by contracting out hospital cleaning and laundry, says head of Taiwan's disease control agency


ONTARIO & QUEBEC
Follow Alberta and B.C.
Liberal government plan to slash hospital workers' wages and contract-out jobs will hurt patient care CUPE PRESS RELEASE November 26, 2004

Anybody but the ADQ: unions

SASKATCHEWAN
Does NOT follow the privateers lead
Union commends government for laundry decision


USA

Among the Most Exploited?: Fair Labor Standards Act and Laundry Workers
Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage

Field Service Company Soldiers take pride in their work In Iraq soldiers who support combat troops in the field find themselves working beside private contractors doing laundry work. In this forthcoming article from the US Field Infantry the soldiers who do the laundry raise the same issue as their counterparts in civilan life: they provide better services and quality than the private contractors. This report from troops in Iraq show the extent of the privatization of war that the US government has engaged in. See my article on the privatization of war.

When the boss is Uncle Sam

State WORKERS /State WAGES: North Carolina

Think Big about the Living Wage

Alameda County Superior Court rules that laundry workers claims for unpaid wages may go forward

California Government Code SECTION 19130-19134 Contracting Out

"Privatization, Labor-Management Relations, and Working Conditions for Lower-Skilled Workers of Color" by Immanuel Ness & Roland Zullo July/August 2003 issue of Poverty & Race

Hotel Laundry Lockout Ends December 2004

GAO report on Contracting out Support Services for Veterans Affairs

THE STATE OF THE VETERANS HEALTH CARE SYSTEM AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, AFL-CIO

Bring It BACK!
Privatized jobs return to the public sector as governments discover the flaws of contracting out.

Clean Sweep Laundry Workers Win Union Recognition, Contract

Subcontracting Med Center duties is dirty business

Dirty Laundry Literally and figuratively, the UCSF-Stanford hospital merger gets fouler every day


UK
The two-tier workforce: an IPPR briefing

The textile maintenance markets UK Competition Commission

Information on assessment of Government contracts

CONTRACTED OUT SERVICES IN THE NHS SOUTH EAST

NEW ZEALAND
Union welcomes Greens ERB Paper on contracting-out

Sue Bradford Speech on Employment Relations Bill Tuesday, 8 August 2000, 5 Speech: Green Party


AUSTRALIA
Government hospital support workers in Western Australia have borne the brunt of cuts to the health system over the past 8 years.

ASIA
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND HOTEL, RESTAURANT, CATERING AND TOURISM WORKERS
This paper was written by Gerard Greenfield for the 6th IUF Asia Pacific Conference for unions organising in the hotel, restaurant, catering and tourism (HRCT) sector, held in Manila in May 1999.

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