Something to think about... the Crooks are in control.
Ford may review truck plant closure plans, Coleman says
By KEVIN DIAZ, Star Tribune
June 6, 2008
WASHINGTON - Sen. Norm Coleman left a meeting with Ford Motor Co. officials Friday expressing optimism that the automaker will review its decision to close the plant in St. Paul that makes the Ranger pickup.
"I'm not raising any false expectations; all I've done is raise the curtain," Coleman told reporters during a conference call from Detroit.
"We'll see if it's fruitful or not."
The Minnesota Republican said he was given no time frame for the review. Ford plans to shutter the plant in September 2009, and Coleman acknowledged that "nothing's been changed, as of right now."
But he said that Ford officials told him that the changing vehicle market responding to $4-a-gallon gasoline is prompting sweeping reviews of operations, including the future of the Ranger, a medium-size pickup that is made exclusively at the plant in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood.
"It was clearly expressed to me that Ford is looking at all aspects of their operations," including the company's plans to close the plant, Coleman said. "That decision is being looked at. It is being reviewed."
Ford spokeswoman Angie Kozleski said Friday that the plan to close the plant has not changed, but that all operations are under review. "We are aggressive in lining up our capacity with demand, and are examining all areas of our business," she said.
Coleman flew to Detroit on Thursday, a day after he wrote Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally, asking that the company review its decision about the truck plant. Coleman noted that Ranger sales have increased this year, as car buyers move away from bigger and heavier sport-utility vehicles and pickups.
Coleman met Friday with Joseph Hinrichs, Ford's vice president for global manufacturing, and Curt Magleby, the company's director of government relations. He said the meeting came at "an opportune time," in light of two recent industry reports praising the Ranger and the plant where it is built.
On Wednesday, a J.D. Power survey ranked the Ranger second in its market segment for quality. On Thursday, a Harbour report ranked the St. Paul plant first in productivity.
"The [1,000] workers of the Ford plant should feel very proud of what they're doing," Coleman said.
Coleman, who has been criticized for not including other Minnesota politicians in his overtures to Ford, said he would talk Friday with Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a fellow Republican. He also said that he plans to talk with some Democrats.
"There are internal things that Ford has to do," Coleman said. "The good news is that all options are on the table."
CAW boss disappointed after meeting with GM on plant closure, considers strike, other options
By TOM KRISHER , Associated Press
June 6, 2008
DETROIT - The Canadian Auto Workers could strike or take other action against General Motors Corp. because the company won't budge on plans to close an Ontario pickup truck factory, the union's president said Friday.
Buzz Hargrove said the automaker committed to keeping the Oshawa plant open in a contract agreement on May 15. But earlier this week, GM said it would close the plant in 2009. It employs 2,600 hourly and 300 salaried workers.
After meeting with GM CEO Rick Wagoner on Friday in Detroit, Hargrove said the company wouldn't change its latest stance.
"We're walking away incredibly disappointed," he said. "We still feel betrayed."
GM said it can idle factories if market conditions warrant. In May, U.S. pickup sales fell more than 38 percent, and the company has said the market declined more rapidly than expected last month.
Detroit-based GM announced Tuesday it was closing Oshawa and three other pickup truck and sport utility vehicle factories as $4 per gallon gas has caused sales to tumble.
Union officials described the 90-minute meeting as tense. Hargrove said the CAW would decide its next move after its national convention later this month. Other moves could include arbitration, legal action or filing a complaint with Canada's labor board, he said.
A union blockade of GM's Oshawa offices will continue, union officials said.
Hargrove said market conditions haven't changed in the 2 1/2 weeks since GM agreed to the new three-year deal with the CAW.
"We haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever," he said, adding that gasoline prices haven't changed since then.
Hargrove said the union has time to decide its next move because the plant isn't scheduled to close until 2009.
"They made a clear-cut commitment on the truck plant" to keep it open and invest in it, he said.
Wagoner told Hargrove and other union officials there was some promise of new products for the Oshawa car plant, Hargrove said. But the CAW president said that wasn't good enough.
Chris Buckley, president of the union local at the truck plant, said GM wrecked any trust it had with the union.
"They fractured the relationship severely," he said.
GM spokesman Stew Low said the factory commitments in the CAW contract are contingent upon board approval, market conditions and making a viable business case.
At the time of negotiations, GM still believed that the slumping pickup market could recover, Low said. Since then, the the trend away from trucks to cars has accelerated, he said.
"We're not in a situation where this is a cyclical type of economic condition where we can wait it out," he said. "We think it's a fundamental shift."
The decision to cease production at the four plants, including Oshawa truck, was made just a few days before Tuesday's announcement and after the bargaining was concluded, he said.
"We absolutely bargained in good faith," Low said.
Oshawa truck was picked for idling because it makes high-end pickups with more expensive options, a segment of the market affected severely by the sales decline, Low said.
Low said GM committed during contract talks to build a second car at the Oshawa car plant, and is looking at a third because the plant is flexible enough to build several models. He would not say what models.
The union's office blockade has forced GM employees to work from their homes, Low said.
GM shares fell 83 cents, or 4.9 percent, to $16.22 Friday after sinking to a 52-week low of $16.20 earlier in the session.
A comment: Mr. Kelly has a right to be angry.
A question: Why haven't we heard similar anger coming from Obama, the Democratic Party and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party?
Is this kind of police behavior part of what we can expect from an Obama Presidency?
Taking the Train to a Clean Environment, a Sustainable
Economy & Jobs
There was once a train that ran straight from downtown
Los Angeles to Santa Monica on the coast. I think it
was painted red - memory being what it is and being
that is was when I was a kid. My family would leave
home in South Central and be at the amusement pier or
the beach in about an hour. It was part of the Pacific
Electric Railway, at the time the largest trolley
system in the world, running 1,100 miles around
Southern California. Unfortunately, it went the way of
so many rail lines in the country as LA yielded to the
oil industry and the auto companies in their desire to
put everybody into a car (or cars; there are two and a
half cars for every family in the state.) or an
exhaust-spewing bus. Now the only way to traverse that
distance is on a thick maze of congested freeways.
I got to thinking about the red train the other day
when I came across Paul Krugman's May 19 column,
"Stranded in Suburbia," in the New York Times. Noting
that oil prices continue to soar, and the idea that oil
production will soon peak and go no higher is being
widely assumed, Krugman noted that Europeans "who have
achieved a high standard of living in spite of very
high energy prices - gas in Germany costs more than $8
a gallon - have a lot to teach us about how to deal
with that world." He was writing from Berlin.
"If Europe's example is any guide, here are the two
secrets of coping with expensive oil: own
fuel-efficient cars, and don't drive them too much."
"I have seen the future, and it works," Krugman wrote.
Those words immediately recalled to mind the feeling I
had in making my way around Berlin last summer. My
feeling was not so much that I had seen the future but
rather that I was experiencing the present and my
homeland was so far in the past.
Krugman might have also mentioned Berlin's advances in
environmentally-friendly building construction methods
or the provision of other alternative transportation
means such as widespread safe bike lanes and provisions
for the physically challenged to get around.
The day after the Times column appeared, columnist
Derrick Jackson took up the subject in the Boston
Globe. He noted that over lunch with an Amtrak
machinist, Presidential candidate Barack Obama
commented, "The irony is, with the gas prices what they
are, we should be expanding rail service." The previous
week in Michigan, Obama had raised the question of fuel
efficiency standards, concluding "We are taking steps
in the right direction. American automakers are on the
move. But we have to do more."
We can expect a lot of pandering to the auto industry
between now and November, wrote Jackson. "Everyone
knows that whatever Obama says about the US auto
industry is subject to the obvious. American automakers
are on the move all right, but to Washington, to lobby
against higher fuel efficiency. Any steps in the right
direction have been baby steps. High-speed rail could
use some of this pampering and pandering."
Higher fuel efficiency standards are a given. The
European Parliament is right now taking up a proposal
to have every car sold on the continent in 2020 use
less fuel than nearly all autos sold there today. And
Jackson is quite right that right now in Washington
fuel efficiency is the political battlefield. But
that's a far cry from sane and sensible national
transportation and environmental policies that will
bring Americans even close to the Europeans. That's
where his comments on Amtrak come in.
"It is obvious that the pressure will mount on Obama,
the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for
president, to bow to the interests of the auto and
airline industries," wrote Jackson. "In 2000 and 2004,
two-thirds of campaign contributions from both those
industries went to Republican causes, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics. In the 2008 cycle, the
Democrats are getting about half of the money from both
industries."
"It is one thing to meet with an Amtrak worker for a
photo-op," wrote Jackson. "It is another to get on
board for the rail service America needs for a green
economy, less urban congestion, and a more civilized
future. Obama says, 'Detroit won't find a better
partner than me in the White House.' In the past, that
has also meant making a pariah out of Amtrak. Nothing
would symbolize a break from this past more than a
whistle-stop tour in the presidential campaign, to
promote trains themselves."
Both Krugman and Jackson cite some reasons for
optimism. Jackson notes that rail travel is sharply on
the rise in response to soaring gas prices. The problem
is that it is a drop in the bucket. And Amtrak doesn't
go everywhere people want - or sometimes need - to go.
And it's expensive. It still cost more to go from one
region of the country to another on the train than it
does by air - even with the extra $15 a bag.
"There have been many news stories in recent weeks
about Americans who are changing their behavior in
response to expensive gasoline - they're trying to shop
locally, they're canceling vacations that involve a lot
of driving, and they're switching to public transit,"
says Krugman. "But none of it amounts to much. For
example, some major public transit systems are excited
about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer
than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to
work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative
handful of drivers off the road."
It was reported last week that many working people in
the country are deciding to give up on trying to meet
their mortgage payments in order to be able to pay off
their car loans - having no other way to get to their
jobs.
Krugman speaks of the need to retreat from suburbia and
learn to live in more compact areas, saying "Any
serious reduction in American driving will require more
than this - it will mean changing how and where many of
us live." While that's not exactly utopian it's not
likely to happen soon.
Jackson is quite right that the country needs greatly
expanded rail service "for a green economy, less urban
congestion, and a more civilized future."
However, there is one thing glaringly left out of these
recent commentaries on the cost of fuel and the need
for an improved public transportation system at all
levels.
Jackson suggests that Obama and others are pandering
not just to the auto industry as such but to auto
workers as well. There's a reason for that.
Unemployment rates are increasing and the ability to
secure good, adequately remunerated jobs has to be one
of the principle challenges before the nation.
There's been a lot of talk recently about the need to
do something about repairing and upgrading the
country's infrastructure, including roads, bridges and
levees (another area where the Europeans and Asians are
way out ahead). But mostly it's lip service. What we
need is a massive public works program to create a
physical environment suitable for the rest of the 21st
Century. Any program to create a "green" economy or
reducing dependency on petroleum must include the
project of getting us out of the present cul-de-sac of
over dependence on the automobile. There are new rail
cars to be built, tracks to be laid, computer networks
to be constructed and power lines to be erected. What
better way to create meaningful work for those who can
no longer depend on machinery production to fully meet
the need and the urban youth increasingly faced with a
dismal economic future?
Given the dismal depths to which the current electoral
campaign has fallen, it would be hard to generate a
sensible, comprehensive discussion of the country's
future transportation policies. But it would be a good
thing if it were somehow injected into the debate. It's
a tall order but one that has to be faced up to if we
are to avoid falling further behind. The future of
train travel would be a good place to start.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
worked for a healthcare union.
Note: This is my response to "twisted nelly" (above) who responded the blog on the “Conference on Dis-investment” being sponsored and initiated by the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota Carlton School
First, who are you? I assume by what you write, the name “twisted nelly” is an appropriate description of you… but, come on, is this really your name?
Second, it is you who “does not get it.”
In fact, the tax-payers of Minnesota have a tremendous investment in the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant… more so than in many infrastructure projects.
The UAW-Ford-MnScu Training Center certainly qualifies as “infrastructure.” I am glad you take such a cavalier attitude of having to continue paying some thirty-million dollars plus interest for a brand new training center which will be relegated to a pile of debris.
Furthermore, the hydro dam powering the Ford Plant since the day it opened providing free electricity for Ford’s manufacturing operation is “public infrastructure” by any definition of the word no matter what dictionary you use.
I resent receiving an e-mail like this which is unsigned. You certainly are not only a “twisted nelly,” you are also very ignorant.
I work in the very real world… a world presently dominated by a capitalist system which is rotten to the core just like its “infrastructure.”
I will tell you what is really “twisted;” spending trillions of dollars bombing bridges in Iraq as the I-35W Bridge collapses and a bunch of worthless politicians don’t even want to compensate the victims even though it is quite apparent everyone in government knew it was a tragedy waiting to happen and then proceeded to cover up the problem. The same politicians, by the way, who have refused to pass S.F. 607 which would save the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant… and two-thousand UNION jobs along with the hydro dam.
If you would have read what I sent out, I am suggesting the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant become a “public entity” and taken out of the hands of private capital so we can save it… all else has failed according to the Governor and both Mayors of the Twin Cities and the State Legislators.
Is there something that makes a Plant so special that it cannot become a “public entity” just like a bridge or school or library or the Green Bay Packers or the Bank of North Dakota or operated on the basis of a cooperative like any of the many cooperatives in the Twin Cities? Tax-payers already own the UAW-Ford-MnScu Training Center connected to the Plant… why didn’t this “private entity,” the Ford Motor Company, pay for its own Training Center rather than come crying to tax-payers to fund it?
Tax-payers have been footing the bill to construct and maintain the hydro dam to power this “private entity” for free for over eighty years. You take a look at the hydro dam and how it is situated as part of the locks and tell me this hydro dam is not public infrastructure.
Tax-payers have even paid a substantial share of the wages of Ford employees at this Plant, and tax-payers have paid higher taxes because the politicians let the Ford Motor Company pay less than their fair share of taxes.
None of what I have “spewed out” is “rhetoric,” it is all facts… if you don’t believe me go ask the Governor or Mayor Coleman or R.T. or any state legislator. While you are at it, ask them to see the complete figures for what tax-payers have sunk into this “private entity,” the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant.
It is the Ford Motor Company and the Wall Street coupon clippers and the Summit Hill Club of real estate speculators along with the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce spewing out dirty lies in order to try to hoodwink everyone into having the tax-payers now pay for the demolition of this very usable Plant and then they will expect tax-payers to pay for the “infrastructure” required for the new “green” yuppie community of high rent segregated housing and cute little boutiques they want to create on the ruins of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant.
Mayor Coleman wants to create this quaint little “green” yuppie community on the Ford Site and he can’t even afford to take care of the parks in the City as it is; not to mention fill the potholes in the roads.
Did you ever consider how much tax-payers have subsidized “infrastructure” as far as the roads, bridges, highways and rail lines the Ford Motor Company has been using as part of their “private entity” manufacturing operation for the last eighty years? Consider the barge operation and the locks the Ford Motor Company has used, too. Consider the mining operation for manufacturing glass. Ford has used and abused the natural resources--- including the waters of the Mighty Mississippi together with an entire network of public “infrastructure” for over eighty years.
Or, did you ever consider that the Ford Motor Company helped to destroy public transportation system in this country, including in the Twin Cities? These street cars were “public infrastructure,” eh?
I find it amazing that the university community would see “disinvestment” in such a narrow way. I find it even more amazing that the university community has sat on its hands as the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant is relegated to a pile of rubble.
I do think it is just as relevant to talk about the future of the UAW-Ford-MnScu Training Center as it is to talk about the future of public education in New Orleans… in fact, I, unlike you, see a direct relationship between what happened in New Orleans and what is going on with the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant.
Hey, here is an idea… why not just do away with all “public infrastructure” and privatize everything from our roads to our schools and universities to our libraries and public parks and let the Wall Street coupon clippers manage it all by charging us “user fees”… then you wouldn’t have to have a conference on “disinvestment” at a tax-payer supported university.
By the way… the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant could play a major role in developing the kind of equipment needed to create the kind of “infrastructure” required for “greening” our world.
Wait until you don’t have two-thousand Ford workers paying taxes to fund your “infrastructure” projects… then you will see another aspect of how important this Plant is to life here in Minnesota.
As far as my living up here in northern Minnesota and commenting on what goes on down there in the Cities… have you ever asked your legislators where the contractors doing all this work on “our public infrastructure” are coming from and where they carry the profits off to? In your twisted way of thinking it is okay for these contractors to come into our state looking to profit off rebuilding a bridge that was allowed to collapse and wasn’t built right to start with, but I am supposed to keep my mouth shut… perhaps you should offer the same advice to the Ford Motor Company running things from Detroit and suggest the future of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant should be left to the decision making of the Ford workers and the people residing in the local community.
Maybe you should also offer the same advice to 90% of the State Legislators.
Hey, why take kids from up here in northern Minnesota to fight your dirty wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
As far as what I do for a living which you seem to be so concerned about--- I travel around talking to people about how unjust it is that thirty-thousand Minnesotans go to work in loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages without any rights under state or federal labor laws as public “infrastructure” is maintained by tax-payers to get the suckers into these casinos.
Hey, why don’t you keep your mouth shut when I say we need to renegotiate the “Compacts” which created all these casinos to include protecting the rights of workers? Better yet, why don’t you open your mouth and speak out against these injustices?
Alan L. Maki
Hi Alan, please take me off your email list. Thanks, Connie Wanberg-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Maki [mailto:amaki000@centurytel.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:31 AM
To: 'Connie Wanberg'
Cc: 'Robert Killeen'; 'rgettel@uaw.net'; 'gdubovich@usw.org'
Subject: RE: You really don't get it do you? A response to Professor
Dear Professor Connie Wanberg, Chair and Departmental Director of the Labor Education Service of the University Of Minnesota;
I am complying with your request to be taken off my list in voicing my concerns about your upcoming “Conference on Dis-investment.”
However, I find it very strange that I would receive notice of this Conference inviting my attendance and participation, and then when I voice my concerns that the university community in the Twin Cities has failed to become involved in the struggle to save the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, two-thousand jobs AND a very important component of the Twin Cities and our State’s infrastructure, the hydro dam which tax-payers financed, built and provided for Henry Ford to power--- for free--- this very profitable manufacturing operation for so many years including profiting from this operation from war production during World War II even while he threw his political support behind the fascist Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini and Spain’s fascist Franco as my father, my aunts and uncles and most of humanity was engaged in the struggle to defeat these fascists, the Ford Motor Company raked in fabulous profits off the war including from the manufacture of armaments at the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant.
Even now, the Ford Motor Company sells its Rangers to the Blackwater Agency and the other “contractors” in Iraq who are trying to put down the Iraqi resistance to having their oil stolen from them.
Now the Labor Education Service organizes a conference on “Dis-investment” and you invite the participation of all working people to pay an unusually high fee to attend your conference which uses the problems workers at the other end of the Mighty Mississippi River are experiencing to intentionally take the focus away from the issues surrounding the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, two-thousand jobs and two very important components of Minnesota’s infrastructure: the hydro dam and the UAW-Ford-MnScu Training Center. When, what you should be doing is explaining how the problems in New Orleans and what is taking place with the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, the loss of two-thousand jobs, the hydro dam and the Training Center are all related problems.
As is very apparent from the e-mail I received below, there is tremendous ignorance concerning how what is going on in New Orleans and here in Minnesota is related… in fact, this e-mail clearly demonstrates the complete failure of educational institutions including the Labor Education Service when it comes to issues like this.
In fact, for many decades the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota has been intentionally mis-educating working people when it comes to providing the real history of the labor movement, the facts about this rotten capitalist system being the source of the problems working people are experiencing, and the need for a socialist solution as articulated by our State's late great socialist governors, Floyd Olson and Elmer Benson.
If in fact the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota was doing a legitimate job of education working people, rank-and-file activists, elected labor leaders and union staff, organized labor would have come out swinging in response to Ford’s intent to close, then demolish, the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant.
Obviously, the members of UAW Local 879 and their Local leadership did not even know how to effectively lobby for passage of S.F. 607. Why not? Because your Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota which is part of the Carlson School of Management has not taught these strategies, tactics and techniques that workers need to fight back in this very mean, dirty and nasty period of “neoliberalism;” or, more appropriately, in the era of US imperialist domination of the world which has the military-financial-industrial complex of U.S. state monopoly capitalism trying to run the entire world in quest of squeezing greater profits from working people.
Professor Wanberg, your Labor Education Service is not teaching working people what they need to know to participate in the class struggle… in fact, your Labor Education Service still sees labor as “the middle class,” because talking about the “working class” implies that there is something inherently wrong with a social and economic system which has a working class creating all the wealth while the capitalist class is stealing all the wealth the working class creates through a very simple to explain system of exploitation of labor; a very simple concept that the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota intentionally chooses not to explain to working people.
Professor Wanberg, I always thought the objective of education was to teach the truth.
By failing to link the situation surrounding the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, the lives of two-thousand workers and the future of infrastructure like the hydro dam and the UAW-Ford-MnScu Training Center to the problems in New Orleans and collapsing bridges and the attempts being made to privatize public education you are doing a great “dis-service” to the discussion needed on “dis-investment” and the “neoliberal agenda.”
Quite frankly, I think it is by intent that the Labor Education Service has refused to acknowledge the problems surrounding the declared closing of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant because the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota is afraid to acknowledge what Floyd Olson, Elmer Benson, John Bernard and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and its coalition partner the Communist Party USA pointed out long ago: capitalism has failed.
The Labor Education Service fears acknowledging that it is only through public ownership that the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, the hydro dam, the UAW-Ford-MnScu Training center AND the livelihoods of two-thousand workers will be saved.
Professor Wanberg, your pay-check comes from a public institution… why shouldn’t the workers at the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant draw their pay-checks from a publicly owned enterprise, too?
In closing, I will just note that thirty-thousand Minnesotans are going to their jobs in loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages without any rights under state or federal labor laws because the staff and faculty of the Labor Education Service of the University of Minnesota refused to warn State Legislators that they were approving “Compacts” that specifically were drafted to place Minnesota workers into a Draconian situation at the hands of very mean, ruthless and violent managements. The Labor Program Service refused to educate the labor movement here in Minnesota that creating a network of “right-to-work-for-less without-any-rights” colonies strung out across this state would be used as a club over the heads of all workers and wielded as viciously as any policeman’s billy-club by the capitalist class.
As you know, many miners, forestry workers, and auto workers are now employed in the Indian Gaming Industry under these atrocious conditions… if you don’t believe me perhaps you would like me to take your staff and faculty on a tour of each of the casinos operating in Minnesota.
I find it ironic the infrastructure in our state--- the roads and bridges of our state, when they are not collapsing, buckling and filling with potholes--- can carry workers to poverty wage jobs employed under the most disgraceful Draconian conditions in casinos, but will not be carrying workers to good paying union jobs at the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant largely because you and your Labor Program Service arrogantly try to saddle working people with the outmoded way of thinking that ownership of the manufacturing industry is some how the exclusive right of the corrupt, completely incompetent and parasitic class of Wall Street coupon clippers, real estate vultures and the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce representing them all through their control of both the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party and the Republican Party.
Please don’t think I am just picking on the Labor Education Service… I attended several functions at McAllister College including the national conference of the Labor Educators and a play by Howard Zinn brilliantly performed by the actor about the life of Karl Marx in which he presented, in general terms, every issue under the sun confronting working people but refused to address the issue of the closing of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant. This may not be a “conspiracy” among academia to ignore the plight of two-thousand workers at the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, but academia certainly seems to understand the “limits” imposed by that “class in control.”
By the way, I am still wondering who this cowardly “twisted nelly” is… you wouldn’t happen to know, would you?
Alan L. Maki
Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council
What the heck is "neoliberalism" anyways? The topic of a future blog.
Three important working class concepts:
Education
Organization
United Working Class Action
Note: Click on any picture to see labels and greater detail.
Sponsors
MN Association of Professional Employees
IBT Joint Council 32
AFSCME MN
Steelworkers District 11
UAW Local 879
Saint Paul Federation of Teachers Local 28
Planning Committee
Labor Education Service
Minnesota AFL-CIO
SEIU Local 113
IOE Local 49
AFTRA
MN School Employees Association
MN Nurses Association
HERE Local 21
Minneapolis Building Trades
Saint Paul Building Trades
Saint Paul Trades and Labor
Southeast Area Labor Council
IBEW Local 110
Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees
Education Minnesota
Carpenters
Growth and Justice
UFCW Local 789
Why not?
How can such a conference take place in St. Paul, Minnesota at the state's most prestigious university, the University of Minnesota; initiated under the auspices of the University of Minnesota's outreach program to labor, the Labor Education Service--- and there is not a mention of the pending closing of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant... not even brought forward by United Auto Workers Local 879.
People in Michigan say, "We want jobs, not war!"
Friday, April 4, 2008
Resolution on Saving Manufacturing Jobs
Note: As I recently traveled through Wisconsin and Michigan many people wanted to know about our struggle to save the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant through public ownership.
This resolution aimed at Presidential candidates is excellent and should be circulated at campaign rallies and meetings everywhere. This resolution should be posted in every union hall all over the United States... please feel free to copy and post widely... you might want to copy and post this to your blog and ask friends to do the same.
For additional resolutions checkout:
http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/2008_02_15_archive.html
With the continued attacks on workers and the endless layoffs and closings of plants, people in Michigan have followed the example of Minnesotans trying to save the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant through public ownership and put together this resolution to use during this election season:
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Support Manufacturing Jobs!
Resolution on Saving Manufacturing Jobs
Whereas our manufacturing base is steadily being eroded and
Whereas this loss of jobs is harmful to our nation and the communities we live in and
Whereas those good paying jobs are frequently replaced with lower paying non-union ones that are driving down the standard of living for all working families and
Whereas the loss of our core manufacturing industry will mean the
loss of our technological edge and vital skills and reduced tax revenues for schools and public services and
Whereas every manufacturing job creates seven others and supports small business, directly and indirectly related to manufacturing and
Whereas the $170 billion we are annually spending on the war in Iraq takes away money that could be better used to rebuild our industrial base and retrain workers
Therefore in rebuilding our industrial base primary attention needs to be placed on locating these new facilities in communities with high unemployment and historic manufacturing centers, such as Detroit, Pontiac, Grand Rapids and Flint and
Therefore by rebuilding our industrial base and with it the construction of mass transit, environmentally friendly autos, affordable and energy efficient housing, and the modernization of our infrastructure, we will create jobs, provide cleaner air for all of us, lower individual family's energy bills, and allow greater energy independence for America
Therefore be it resolved that we call on the Presidential candidates to state their support for taking one-half of the money currently being spent in Iraq to be used instead to rebuild industry and provide jobs in the United States.
Taken From: Labor Up Front
Length: 00:48:55
