Today's Stories

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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A Tough Union Battle

The UAW Strike Against American Axle

By DAVID MACARAY

On Friday, May 16, negotiators for the United Auto Workers (UAW) reached tentative agreement on a contract with American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc., which, if ratified (the membership votes on it later this week), would end the UAW’s 80-day strike against the company.  The union negotiating team has formally recommended the agreement.

The strike began at one minute after midnight on February 26, when approximately 3,600 employees from five U.S. factories walked off their jobs in protest of AAM’s plan to impose drastic, across-the-board pay cuts.  The company initially wanted to reduce non-production workers wages from $23 per hour to $14, production workers from $28 to $17, and skilled workers (e.g., electricians and mechanics) from about $32 to $25. 

Following two decades of give-backs and takeaways that steadily eroded the UAW’s core package (while executive compensation continued to soar), these staggering pay cuts were the final straw.  Even though it’s a risky time be out of work—in the midst of a recession and creeping inflation—the membership nonetheless voted overwhelmingly to hit the bricks. 

As far as work stoppages go, given its length, level of rancor, and overall scope, on a scale of 1 to 10 the American Axle strike was probably a 6 or 7.  During the shutdown, the company’s CEO, Richard Dauch, ominously threatened to move its entire U.S. operation to foreign countries; and the UAW was accused of orchestrating a couple of “extraneous” strikes against General Motors plants, AAM’s primary customer, in hopes of drawing GM into the fray and thereby raising the sperm count.  The union denies the accusation. 

The 11-week strike has affected more than 30 GM plants nationwide, resulting in the loss of production, as of April 30, of approximately 230,000 vehicles.  According to GM, the strike had cost the company $800 million in the first quarter. 

AAM supplies GM with axles, drive shafts and other components for its SUVs and pickup trucks, the sales of which, in response to high fuel costs and a shaky economy, have declined dramatically in 2008. 

In fact, it’s been alleged that this drop in sales was partly responsible for the length of the strike.  Some union officials have suggested that AAM and GM not only were in no hurry to settle, but that they saw the shutdown as a convenient means of reducing inventory, and intentionally dragged it out.  The companies deny the accusation.

In regard to hourly wages, it’s confounding and a bit frustrating to note how readily an hourly rate is misinterpreted by disinterested salaried (non-hourly) people.  Maybe it’s just the way the numbers roll off the tongue, or the fact that most folks don’t take time to do the math, but whatever it is, an hourly wage almost always sounds “richer” than the annual figure it yields.

For example, salaried people who hear of a factory worker making, say, $14, often think that’s decent money, especially with the federal minimum wage being only $5.85.   You tell someone that so-and-so makes $14 per hour, and they’re apt to say, Hey, okay, that’s not too bad.

But if a person works 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and never misses a day, his $14 dollars per hour computes to only $29, 120.  And if you tell people you make $29 K a year, you get a different response.  Somehow, that figure seems less than $14/hour.  In fact, they privately wonder how you can support yourself, much less a family, on it. 

And when you tell someone you make $17 per hour, that sounds even more promising.  Hey, $17 bucks an hour, not too shabby.  But $17/hour is $35, 360 a year.  That’s barely above the poverty line.  Other than the guy making $14/hour, who’s going to gush when he hears that a full-time worker and head of household makes $35 K a year? 

Another misreading of hourly wages relates to management’s “device” of taking every conceivable employee cost—not only base wages, but overtime, pensions, health insurance, retirees’ medical insurance, vacations, holiday pay, workers compensation, sick leave (even the price of company safety shoes and laundry)— lumping them all together and expressing the figure as an hourly sum.  This is what American Axle did.  It came up with an amount in excess of $73 per hour, a figure, incidentally, which the UAW president Ron Gettelfinger has challenged.

Besides scoring a public relations coup by making workers appear wildly overpaid, these “aggregate” hourly wage figures are going to appear bitterly ironic to anyone who’s been paying attention.  With health care costs having sky-rocketed over the last 25 years (some companies spend 35% of its payroll on employee medical costs), we’re painfully reminded that it was American businesses who most resisted adopting a national health care plan, scaring everyone away by labeling it “socialized medicine.” 

If the U.S. had adopted a national health care plan in the late 1940s or early ‘50s, when the idea was first seriously lobbied for, we could have eased into the system, grown with it.  Like other countries with national health care, we could have weathered the subsequent increases in medical costs driven my new technology and procedures.  Now, however, even with Clinton and Obama’s modest plans for reform, overhauling our health care system is going to be a killer assignment.

Meanwhile, GM, Ford and Chrysler continue to compete with European and Canadian businesses whose governments underwrite their health care.  Not having to worry about the expense of workers’ medical insurance??  Talk about a competitive edge. 

And because these cost differentials put American companies at an enormous disadvantage, what have American companies done in response?   Have they lobbied the Bush administration and Republican party to immediately restructure our health care system?  Have they acknowledged that, all that hysterical “socialist” propaganda aside, the system is begging to be nationalized? 

While a few companies have tentatively endorsed these approaches, most have not.  Most see these radical notions as running counter to free market fundamentalism.  Instead, their idea of a “fix” is to pass on increased medical costs to the people who can least afford them . . . the workers themselves. 

As for this American Axle strike, it’s going to end hideously, no matter what the final vote, or how bravely the workers fight.  There’s simply too much bad news packed into it, and management has too large an advantage.

There’s a growing sense that Big Business is looking to harvest as much short-term profit as possible, with little or no concern for the future of working people.  Whether it’s “globalization,” the natural fallout of a post-industrial society, or a crude example of runaway greed is a moot point.  But it’s no wonder that polls show that upwards of 80% of Americans believe the country is somehow “headed in the wrong direction.” 

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and writer, was a former labor union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

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