1,100 coal miners in Alabama are still on strike after more than 10 months making it the longest in Alabama’s history.

Workers started the unfair labor practice strike over claims of bad faith bargaining by Warrior Met Coal over a new union contract. In the previous contract settled in 2016, miners accepted several concessions, including a $6-an-hour pay cut and reductions in health insurance and other benefits as the mines switched employers in the wake of a bankruptcy. Since Warrior Met Coal took over the mines, the company has reported billions of dollars in revenue. A tentative agreement was reached in the first week of the strike, but overwhelmingly rejected by workers, and a new agreement has yet to be reached.

Over the past 10 months, they have held rallies and extended protests to the Alabama state capitol to criticize the use of public resources for state troopers escorting strikebreaking replacement workers to the mines throughout the strike. Miners have also held rallies in New York City outside the offices of BlackRock Investment Group, the largest shareholder of Warrior Met Coal. 

“What they’ve said openly in negotiations is that they’re just going to starve us out. They’ve said … and this on record, that ‘we have the money to pay what you’re asking, we do not have the desire to.’ That’s the kind of company these guys have been working for,” said Haeden Wright, president of the United Mine Workers of America auxiliary for two of the striking locals and the wife of a striking miner. “Though the journey, most of us are still holding out and trying to hold on, but it is hard… For it to last this long and to have state troopers and to watch your tax dollars escort scabs into your job, that’s a hard pill to swallow,” added Wright. “That’s hard to watch and not be able to do anything about.”

The unions’ auxiliary has focused on receiving and distributing weekly groceries to miners and their families throughout the strike and assisting families with needs such as bills. It recently organized a Christmas gift drive for miners’ families to ensure their children were taken care of over the holidays.

 Warrior Met Coal has filed several court injunctions throughout the strike to severely limit or prevent striking miners from picketing outside the mines. Several union members and supporters have reported incidents where vehicles have hit or nearly missed individuals on the picket lines. The injunctions have been characterized as a rare move, an attempt by Warrior Met Coal to circumvent the NLRB and instead seek rulings from favorable local courts.

Alabama coalminers on strike for 10 months vow not to be ‘starved out’ | Labour | The Guardian

“We did not leave our country in search of happiness,”  a Syrian asylum seeker, who fled war, imprisonment and torture in his homeland before travelling through several countries and reaching the UK, explained to the Guardian. “Rather, we went out to save our family from a war that does not know the young or the old and does not differentiate between the strong or the weak, in which no one can survive. We walked in the most dangerous country, crossed the desert and crossed the English Channel in a rubber boat, knowing we may die in the sea. Has any official asked themselves what motivated us to risk ourselves … I was ready to die in order to save my family. What Priti Patel is thinking now is to eliminate our families by depriving us of family reunion.” 

It is often male refugees fleeing conflict zones who make hazardous journeys through several countries on foot, in lorries and in small boats across the Channel in the hope of reaching safety in the UK.

They hope to be granted protection and under current rules, they then have the right to bring close family members to join them, such as their partners and children. The family members can travel safely to the UK by plane and can avoid repeating the dangerous journey made by the first family member.  

However, according to Enver Solomon, the CEO of the Refugee Council, new government plans in the nationality and borders bill, currently being debated in the Lords, will severely restrict family reunion and “all but destroy” the main safe route used by refugee families to reunite with loved ones. The government’s New Plan for Immigration aims to restrict family reunion rights for refugees who travelled through a safe third country before reaching the UK. Solomon told the Guardian that the new government proposals will lead to thousands of women and children having no other option but to pay smugglers to board dangerous dinghies to cross the Channel. The plans will reduce rather than enhance the safe and legal routes Patel has been advocating, according to Solomon. 

17,500 refugees, mainly women and children, could be prevented from reuniting with close family members in the UK due to new rules the Home Office plans to introduce, according to analysis by the Refugee Council. Government data shows that over the last five years 29,000 people, over 90% of them women and children, have been able to come to the UK safely under family reunion rules to join a close family member already here and granted protection in the UK.

The Refugee Council has calculated, using this government data, that as many as 3,500 people a year could be prevented from joining loved ones if the proposals in the bill become law – 17,500 people in the next five years.

New rules could prevent thousands of refugees from joining close family in UK | Home Office | The Guardian

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” Martin Luther King Jnr is widely quoted as asking, ​“if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” 

As Black History Month approaches, the blog is not trying to claim MLK as one of its own. We merely wish to draw attention to the fact that he recognised that socialism is required for the deeper solutions to the inequalities facing working people, especially the African-Americans of the United States. 

In 1952 a 23-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as a first-year undergraduate at Boston University of Theology described his views toward America’s economic system. ​“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he admitted to his then-girlfriend, concluding that ​“capitalism has outlived its usefulness.” He explained capitalism ​“has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

 15 years later in his  book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, his opinion remained the same: ​“Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty and has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech, King included in his sermon the observation: ​“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Speaking to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  in 1966, King said that ​“something is wrong … with capitalism” and ​“there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. ​“Maybe,” he suggested, ​“America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

 In an interview with the New York Times in 1968, King described his work with the SCLC as ​“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”

In Where Do We Go From Here, he outlines how economic inequality can circumscribe civil rights. While the wealthy enjoy easy access to lawyers and the courts, ​“the poor, however, are helpless.” 

 In Where Do We Go From Here, MLK called the victories of the movement up that point in 1967 ​“a foothold, no more” in the struggle for freedom. Only a campaign to realize economic, as well as racial justice, could win true equality for African-Americans. In naming his goal, King was unflinching: the ​“total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”

 He pointed out that in the USA, we ​“compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity,” 

MLK’s project, the Poor People’s Campaign, shows his dream included a future of both racial and economic equality. In King’s words, as soon as he demanded ​“the realization of equality” — the second phase of the civil rights movement — he discovered white liberal ‘middle class’ suddenly indifferent.

For King, the only solution to America’s crisis of poverty was the redistribution of wealth. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King declared, ​“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

From 

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr. – In These Times

 Of the nearly one million child care workers in the United States, in a recent white paper, 31.2% – basically 1 out of every 3 – experienced food insecurity in 2020, the latest year for which data was analyzed.

 Food insecurity means there is a lack of consistent access to enough food. This rate of food insecurity is anywhere from 8 to 20 percentage points higher than the national average.  High food insecurity is when a person reports reduced quality and variety of diet. Very high food insecurity occurs when a person reports disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

In Washington state and Texas, one study found 42% of child care workers experienced food insecurity, with 20% of child care workers experiencing very high food insecurity.

Another study in Arkansas found that 40% of child care workers experienced food insecurity.

People who are food insecure are at increased chances of being poor health, with conditions like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression, among other chronic diseases and health conditions.

This workforce is central to providing high-quality early childhood education to children up to 5 years old.  Despite the fact that the more education child care workers have the higher-quality care they deliver, many states require only a high school diploma or equivalent, and some states do not have any education requirements for entry-level positions.

Low wages and food insecurity may contribute to child care workers’ high-stress levels. When child care workers experience stress, they tend to reduce the amount of positive attention to children and increase their punitive responses to children’s challenging behavior.

Overall, child care workers’ wages are low, with the median hourly wage being $12.24 per hour. This means child care workers make little more than fast-food workers, whose median pay is $11.64 per hour. What child care workers make is not considered a living wage.  Child care workers with a bachelor’s degree average $14.70 per hour, which is just under half the average earnings overall of those with a bachelor’s degree – $27 per hour.

As a result of low wages, more than 53% of child care workers received public assistance, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from 2014 to 2016.

When so many child care workers rely on public assistance, it reveals how many of them don’t make enough money to get by.

Nearly all U.S. child care workers are women, and half are people of color.

Opinion | Around 1 in 3 Child Care Workers Are Going Hungry | Colin Page McGinnis (commondreams.org)

 UK dividends jumped by 46.1% last year to a staggering £94.1bn on the back of bumper payouts from mining companies, according to the latest figures.

Payouts from companies in the UK is now at 2017 levels. 

UK dividend income rises to £94bn in 2021 (yahoo.com)

 In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, Iceland’s managing director Richard Walker said, “I think there are more food banks now than there are branches of MacDonalds.” and added. “This is no exaggeration: there are people out there facing the choice between eating and heating, and we are losing customers to hunger.”

Not to rival supermarkets but to poverty. 

 In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, Iceland’s managing director Richard Walker said, “I think there are more food banks now than there are branches of MacDonalds.” and added. “This is no exaggeration: there are people out there facing the choice between eating and heating, and we are losing customers to hunger.”

Not to rival supermarkets but to poverty. 

Americans for Tax Fairness on Friday published a report showing that U.S. billionaires donated a staggering $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections.

ATF’s analysis, the distribution of billionaire cash between Republican and Democratic candidates was pretty evenly split in 2020, with 55% of the total going to GOP campaigns.

“In the 2010 election cycle, billionaires gave $19 million to Republicans and $11 million to Democrats,” ATF noted. “By the 2020 cycle, those respective figures were $656 million and $539 million.”

Nearly a third of the billionaire campaign funding in 2020 came from the mega-rich couple Sheldon and Miriam Adelson—former President Donald Trump’s top donors—and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who doled out $152.5 million during the 2020 election cycle, not including the $1.1 billion he spent on his own short-lived White House bid.

Democratic businessman Tom Steyer, his wife Kathryn Taylor, and Republican hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also spent big in 2020, collectively donating over $400 million.

Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement that the findings lay bare the “disastrous” consequences of the high court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which toppled longstanding campaign finance restrictions and opened the floodgates to unlimited election spending by corporations and rich individuals.

And the reason billionaires have so much cash to give to political campaigns, Clemente stressed, is that they’ve been able to accumulate vast fortunes without any real threat of higher taxes. 

ATF argued that such campaign donations “are a profitable investment: they buy access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save tycoons billions of dollars.”

“While that $1.2 billion ‘investment’ in 2020 was massive, it totalled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending,” the group warned.

‘Time for Citizens United to Go’: US Oligarchs Poured $1.2 Billion Into 2020 Elections (commondreams.org)

 It is a truism of moralists that when bad things are done to people it is not only the perpetrators who are to blame but also the bystanders – those wretches who watch and do nothing.

A shocking example of such callousness and passivity was reported by The New York Times on March 27, 1964. Two weeks earlier, according to the report, a young woman had been murdered in the middle of the night in Kew Gardens, a neighborhood of Queens in New York City. For over half an hour, 38 neighbors had peered through their windows as the killer stalked and stabbed her. Despite her cries and screams, no one came to her aid. No one even called the police.

Ten years later, an amateur historian named Joseph DeMay moved into the neighborhood and decided to investigate what had really happened that night.

He found that 38 neighbors had indeed been questioned by the police. That was where the suspiciously exact figure of 38 came from. But only two of the 38 had seen the stabbing and only one of those two could reasonably be accused of ‘watching and doing nothing.’ Some of the 38 had not woken up at all. Others had heard something, looked out, and seen a woman lurching down the street, but assumed she was drunk. There was a bar up the street and drunkards were not an unusual sight. 

Two residents, in fact, had called the police. The police hadn’t come. DeMay was unable to find out why not. A third resident, the second of the two eyewitnesses, had wanted the police to come, but was afraid of drawing their attention to himself because he was gay (homosexuality being still illegal at the time). However, he did alert the people next door and one of those ran out, found the victim, and was able to comfort her as she lay dying. 

The article in The New York Times set off a storm of publicity. Dozens of residents were interviewed by journalists but complained afterwards that the press had twisted their words. One journalist concluded that the published account was mostly untrue, but kept this knowledge to himself out of fear of losing his job. 

The corporate media systematically portray ordinary people as worse than we really are – as more competitive, more aggressive, more selfish, less willing to cooperate and help others. That helps to explain why most of us continue to think that socialism is impossible because, after all, ‘you can’t change human nature.’

Source: Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Little, Brown & Co., 2021), Ch. 9 (The Death of Catherine Susan Genovese)

Stephen Shenfield

World Socialist Party of the United States

No one helped — or did they? | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)

 Elon Musk is asked to prove Tesla vehicles aren’t manufactured with forced labour of Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region Democrat lawmakers have joined Republicans in scolding Elon Musk for opening a Tesla showroom in Xinjiang, where China is accused of slavery and genocide against Uighur Muslims. Two Democratic congressmen who oversee trade wrote to Musk demanding to know whether Tesla sourced its materials and products from forced-labour camps in Xinjiang.

Perhaps the American politicians should also examine their own backyard and the forced labour carried out within the United States

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prisoner-speak-out-american-slave-labor-strike