The sacrifice of workers

As conservatives attempt to vilify working people across America, it's important to remember what happened 100 years ago today. On that day, at around 4:45 p.m., fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan. Workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, were trapped because the doors were locked.

Burns and smoke inhalation killed those who couldn't escape; blunt force killed others who jumped from the ninth floor. The death toll was 146.

The event spurred the enactment of workplace laws and the inspection of other death traps. The owners of the building were found not guilty of second-degree manslaughter, though one of them was fined $20 for locking the doors.

This would be a good time to consider Bertolt Brecht's poem "A Worker Reads History":

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
 The books are filled with names of kings.
 Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
 And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
 Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
 That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
 In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
 Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
 Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
 Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
 Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
 The night the seas rushed in,
 The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

 Young Alexander conquered India.
 He alone?
 Caesar beat the Gauls.
 Was there not even a cook in his army?
 Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
 was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
 Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
 Who triumphed with him?

 Each page a victory
 At whose expense the victory ball?
 Every ten years a great man,
 Who paid the piper?

 So many particulars.
 So many questions.

Supporting workers in the Midwest

We like to say that America is a classless society, but that simply is not true. It's always been to the benefit of the wealthy in this country to dismiss the idea of class while rigging the system to keep them and their heirs on top. The current attempts of state governments in the Midwest to undo the progress that working people have made in the past 150 years in the US are the latest battle on this front, and it is a blatant and outrageous  attack.

Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker, is using his state's budget shortfall to take away the right of collective bargaining from most public-sector unions -- a right that Americans fought, and died, to establish. This is completely unacceptable. What is a union if not a group of workers who have the ability to bargain as a unit?

Wisconsin and Ohio -- the second state to declare war on unions -- have real fiscal issues, and so do most states, but these have been caused by a decrease in revenue due to the deep recession that the country was plunged into by Wall Street and by insufficient tax rates on millionaires. In both instances, the wealthy have benefited greatly and now those gains are going to be solidified on the backs of teachers, firefighters, police officers, garbage men and other state and municipal workers -- middle-class Americans who, as George Bailey says in It's A Wonderful Life, "do most of the working and paying and living and dying" in this country.

These are not desperate maneuvers in a time of fiscal emergency, but it is rather a strategy by the wealthy to increase the gold in their overflowing coffers: cut taxes for the rich; cut programs for the needy because there is suddenly less money to pay for them; and vilify public-sector unions.

The wealthy have fought labor unions as long as they have existed, using massive amounts of violence that is left out of the textbooks we use in our history classes. Many people were intimidated, fired, beaten and killed, but it was the courage of working men and women that won every battle against the more powerful forces that tried to keep them down. That struggle never ended; it only changed forms, so that companies like Wal-Mart are much more sophisticated in their anti-unions actions.

With the loss of most of America's manufacturing jobs and with the ever-present animosity of big business and the wealthy, private-sector unions are a much smaller player today. Of course, corruption is a part of that story, but so is a string of successes that includes not only a multitude of codified rights, but a national economy that outgrew all others even as union workers made decent wages, making the US economy the envy of others in the 20th century.

People in public-sector jobs deserve respect and a decent wage. They also deserve the right to bargain collectively with their employers. Taking away that right would be antithetical to everything America stands for. All working people should be aligned with the workers in Wisconsin and Ohio as they fight the latest battle in America's class war.

Photo courtesy of csmonitor.com.

Heights notes

***The sign is up today that indicates that street cleaning starts on my block in the spring. Actually, the street cleaner has been coming by regularly during the warmer months, but up here on Bennington Street we didn't have to move our cars at a certain day and time, which worked out fine because most of the street was empty with people off at work. I know I am whining about an insignificant matter, but now I have to worry about where I park the night before, which is annoying.

***I've seen some men recently picketing the bank construction sight at the intersection of Bennington, Saratoga and Swift streets. Their placards, I believe, said something about non-union labor at that job. Anyone have any details?

***One block from there, at the corner of Bennington and Harmony, is a one story building with brown paper covering all the windows and the door. A couple months ago I saw a sign in one of the windows that said a convenience store was coming soon, but that sign is gone and I haven't seen any activity there.

***Finally, there is a nice-looking storefront one block over at the corner of Saratoga and Curtis. Someone did some work there to make the building attractive, but the "For rent" signs have been sitting in the windows for a while. I'm not sure what kind of business would succeed there.

The truth on auto workers

Last evening during a story on the proposed auto industry bailout, CBS reported that workers for the Big Three make more than $70 an hour. Having read a story two days earlier that explained that this figure is not true, I started shouting at the TV. (I do that sometimes.)

This morning I tried to remember where I saw the story that actually broke down what auto workers get paid, and I searched on Google. There are many web sites that are running the story, including the CBS web site! Are these people morons?

The average salary for a worker at GM, Ford and Chrysler is $28 an hour, and the benefits they receive work out to less than $10. The $70 figure is taken from including all medical and retirements benefits that those companies pay to all former employees as well as current ones and then diving them by the number of current employees. That isn't fair and it isn't truthful.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the auto industry, but vilifying blue-collar workers is certainly not a solution.

Hub of the Hub

Did you know that one of the world's leading political activists works out of his home here in East Boston? Or that a foreign country has its local consulate in this neighborhood? I recently started taking note of some of the regional, national and even international organizations located in Eastie and here is what I found:

*The Albert Einstein Institution, led by Dr. Gene Sharp, advises political movements around the world from his office in Eastie. The mailing address for the organization is AEI, P.O. Box 455, East Boston, MA, 02128.

*The El Salvadoran Consulate for New England is located at 143 Border Street.

*Project Bread, the group that organizes the annual Walk for Hunger, has its headquarters at 145 Border Street.

*Hip hop record label Amalgam Digital operates out of 2 Neptune Road.

*The New England Gallery of Latin American Art opened last year at 184 Cottage Street.

*The Militant Labor Forum Hall hosts speakers and films on workers' issues and human rights on the second floor at 13 Bennington Street.

Those of us who live here, of course, have always known that Eastie is the center of the world.

Labor is wrong to support casino at Suffolk

While organized labor has generally been quite supportive of Gov. Patrick's plan to bring a casino to Suffolk Downs, members of a newly-formed union at the racetrack say that owner Richard Fields has not been very union-friendly.

The Herald reports that security guards have been treated poorly at Suffolk Downs, and some of those who fought to form Local 546 had their hours cut back or were laid off altogether. Last year there was a story in the Patriot Ledger about the lack of health care for jockeys at the East Boston oval. Most earn a few hundred bucks a week with no benefits and rely on the volunteer efforts of a doctor who visits the track.

Some want to reward millionaire Richard Fields for the way he treats his employees by allowing him to open a casino in this neighborhood so he can fill his bank account with more bags of money. Does anyone really believe that he will create good jobs for the average Joe in Eastie?