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There
was a period of several months after Hitler invaded Poland of relative inactivity on
the World War II European battlefield. Pundits called this the Phony
War or, in a play on words with the strategy of blitzkrieg, sitzkrieg—a sitting down war. But there is nothing
phony about the growing use of the tactic of sitzkrieg
by workers on four continents. You don’t need lightning mobility to take
control of a plant—just sit down and don’t allow any work to be done.
Here
are some examples of this and other militant tactics recently used:
•
Workers staged an 18-day sit-in at Britain’s only wind turbine factory
to save it from closure. As bailiffs came to evict them on Aug. 7,
crowds of supporters gathered and a new banner was unfurled from atop
the plant. “Vestas, this is only the start.
You will lose,” it read. The crowd was told that the fight to
nationalize the plant and save over 600 jobs was not over. Vestas workers will go on a countrywide speaking
tour.
Jonathan
Neale, of the Campaign Against Climate
Change, told them: “This is about these men’s jobs, this is about jobs
all over the UK, and this is about the
planet. What these people have done has changed the whole argument
about wind power in this country. That’s a massive achievement.”
• Vestas workers took inspiration from the March
occupation by hundreds of workers at Visteon
car-parts plants in West Belfast and Essex. Workers said they were
given an hour’s notice that they would be laid off. After six weeks,
management offered an improved pay-off deal.
•
When the owners of the Thomas Cook travel agency announced that, after
125 years of doing business in Ireland, they were closing down at
the end of August, workers threatened to strike. Cook then sent English
managers in to close the offices, and workers responded with a
sit-down. They were joined by two socialist city council members. (They
were not joined by Sinn Fein.)
Workers,
including a pregnant woman, were forcibly removed in a pre-dawn raid. A
large number of supporters staged a protest outside the courthouse
where they were to be charged. The judge who had ordered their arrest
decided to release the strikers with no fine. In the end their
severance package was slightly improved.
•
At a plant in southern France owned by Molex, a
U.S.-based car-parts maker, workers pelted with eggs an American
manager sent to end protests against closure plans. The workers, on
strike since July 7, were outraged to learn that Molex wasn’t looking
for a new owner to buy the plant and keep it open. Two of the company’s
French managers were “bossnapped,” or
detained on the factory site, by employees this year.
In
July, New Fabris employees in west-central France threatened to blow up their
factory using gas-filled canisters unless they were given an extra
30,000 euros ($42,000) in severance. They received about one-third of
that, in addition to the statutory 17,500 euros ($25,000) they were to
get.
In
April workers at a Continental tire plant in northern France ransacked police
headquarters, blocked the work site, and burned tires. The workers won
50,000 euros ($70,000) in severance pay, plus their annual salaries
until 2011, along with standard unemployment benefits.
• Ssangyong Motor: Workers occupied the plant of this
South Korean car company for 77 days to protest plans to lay off over a
third of the workforce, regularly battling police and commandoes trying
to retake the plants. Workers used giant catapults, firebombs, and
steel pipes. After being forced to retreat building by building, they
made their last stand in the paintshop and
threatened to set it afire, which would have caused massive explosions.
One last police/commando charge drove them out. The fate of the
bankrupt company and its jobs remains up in the air. Ssangyong workers sent a message of solidarity to
the workers occupying the Vestas plant.
•
In August a Chinese provincial government halted the privatization of a
state-owned steel mill in Henan Province, capitulating to thousands
of workers who protested and took an official hostage. Three weeks
earlier, rioting workers beat to death an executive who had been
overseeing the sale of another state-owned steel company in Jilin Province. The privatization was postponed.
•
On July 9, a dozen were arrested as workers from Quad Cities Die
Casting plant in Moline, Ill., blocked the street in
front of a Wells Fargo bank to protest the closing of their plant. The
UE-organized workers were exposing the role of the bank in denying
credit needed to keep the plant operating, despite its having received
$25 billion in federal bailout funds. Their action was inspired by the
successful sit-in of Republic Windows workers in Chicago last December.
Most
of these actions were initiated spontaneously by workers on the shop
floor. They show the ranks are often way out in front of those paid to
lead. Whether they prove to be the beginning of a reversal of labor’s
long, costly retreat, or heroic last stands in a rout, remains to be
determined. If such struggles remain isolated, most will eventually be
defeated as the whole weight of employer and state power is brought to
bear. Without some nourishing victories sitzkrieg
will whither on the vine. To win at least some will take wide
mobilization of working class solidarity.
This
means more than e-mail campaigns or passing resolutions, though such
activities can often be a useful beginning. Ultimately, there must be
mass mobilizations on the outside to protect those sitting down inside,
sympathy strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience on a scale to make
crushing the strikes too costly for the bosses and politicians.
No letup in layoffs
Such
mobilizations take on even more importance given the worsening jobs
crisis and signs that the supposed recovery from the Great Recession is
a fraud. “A Recovery Only a Statistician Can Love” was the title of a
recent Washington Post article deflating the hype driving the
stock market into a frenzied surge.
The
U.S. unemployment rate fell to
9.4% in July, from 9.5% in June, and employers cut 247,000 jobs, the
fewest cut in nearly a year. This led Washington and Wall Street to
claim that the economy had bottomed out. Yet economists admitted that
the unemployment rate would still rise in coming months to at least
10%.
But
even the July dip came only because 422,000 people gave up looking for
work. The number of the long-term unemployed—those who have been out of
a job but looking for more than 26 weeks—rose by another 584,000. And
the number of workers facing the expiration of unemployment benefits
keeps growing. Some 30 million Americans—19% of the overall work
force—are either unemployed, working part-time but wanting full-time
work, or have given up looking for work.
Bob
Herbert, in a New York Times op-ed titled “A Scary Reality,”
noted, “The American economy does not seem able to provide enough
jobs—and nowhere near enough good jobs—to maintain the standard of
living most Americans have come to expect. The country has lost 6.7
million jobs since the Great Recession began in December 2007. No one
is predicting a recovery powerful enough to replace the millions of
jobs that have vanished.
The
economy has fewer jobs now than in 2000, Herbert reported, “even though
the labor force has grown by around 12 million workers. The percentage
of young American men actually working is the lowest in the 61 years of
record-keeping.
“This
should be the biggest story in the United States. When joblessness reaches
these extremes, it doesn’t just damage individual families; it corrodes
entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and leads to
disorder.”
The
unemployment that has wrought devastation in Black communities for
decades is now being experienced by a much wider swath of the
population. Yet the majority of economists surveyed in August by The
Wall Street Journal had convinced themselves that the recession is
over.
But
The Journal itself reported that “the economy is still deep in
the woods, not strong enough to support a long-running stock and bond
recovery.” While financial doom has been staved off, said The Journal,
“the market needs a sign of real economic recovery, and that requires a
surge in consumer spending, business investment and home buying.” And,
they conclude, that won’t happen because consumer debt levels have
barely changed.
The
Wall Street Journal also revealed the dirty little secret behind rising corporate
profits in the face of job losses and weak consumer spending.
Productivity has been rising, not because more is being produced; in
fact the GDP shrank in the second quarter. Despite little new capital
investment, U.S. worker productivity grew in
the second quarter at the fastest pace in almost six years as labor
costs decreased 5.8%, the biggest drop in eight years.
“Businesses
squeezed worker input by cutting payrolls and hours. The net result:
rising unemployment, stagnant wages, sagging consumer confidence—and
better than expected corporate costs.”
The
impact on workers was detailed in an excellent article by Labor
Note’s Jane Slaughter, “Harassment: The Recession’s Hidden
Byproduct.” Slaughter shows how the bosses are using the tanking
economy to step up harassment and speed-up. As long as the employers
can continue to squeeze more out of present workers they have no need
to recall or hire.
This
is typical of how capital gets out of normal recessions. But, as we’ve
noted in past articles, this is no normal recession. And, in The
Journal’s words, “what is still in doubt is whether this is a
classic recovery.”
Meanwhile
unemployment is overtaking subprime mortgages
as the main driver of foreclosures. (This was predicted months ago by
most economists, but quickly forgotten amidst alleged recovery
sightings.) Economists estimate 1.8 million borrowers will lose their
homes this year, up from 1.4 million last year.
The
jobs crisis is also keeping consumer spending down, and even mainstream
economists admit that without an increase in such spending, which
accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, no
recovery is possible. Personal bankruptcy filings reached 1.25 million
in the year ending June 30, up 34% from the year before. These
bankruptcies are a product of the loss of jobs and home equity.
Meanwhile, the unemployed increasingly are turned down for jobs because
of credit checks revealing difficulties encountered because of job
loss.
Personal
income took its steepest dive in four years in June. The 1.3% drop
reflected both the jobs and hour cuts
discussed above, as well as the diminishing impact of the federal
stimulus. All of this adds up to a vicious cycle of joblessness,
foreclosures, and declining spending.
Neither
the capitalist market, nor stimulus incentives, will produce stable,
decent paying jobs, nor solve the crisis in housing or credit. We need
government intervention on a more fundamental and massive scale. And it
won’t come from a government beholden to the monied
elite who prosper from our misery. We need a government that serves the
interest of working people, one prepared to take over entire sectors of
the economy and put them to work on things we need.
If
we don’t start moving in that direction we will see more and more
desperate people looking at the “populists” of the far-right for
guidance. It’s high time for American workers to organize as a class
once more.
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