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layoffs
Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?
The frustration, the resentment, the anger about the rigged system was building long before Donald Trump came on the scene.
Jan 01, 2025
I just had a chat with an ATT office manager, a young Black man who is very attentive to his customers. After he learned that I worked with labor unions, he said, “I’ve always wanted to be in a union. My dad was a bus driver, and his earnings and benefits really took care of us. Our healthcare was amazing, $5 co-pay and that was it, no matter what the medical procedure.”
His comments both made me sad and angry. He took me back a few decades, when working people still earned a decent living. That’s the period before runaway inequality and job destruction basically wiped out the American Dream for the working class.
It’s not like we can’t afford to pay people decently. The money is there and then some. In 1980, there were 13 billionaires in the U.S. In 2023 there were 801. The top one-tenth of 1% saw their collective wealth jump from $1.8 trillion in 1990, to $22.1 trillion in 2024. For some context, the U.S. federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion. Or consider that there are 197,500 bus drivers in the U.S. One trillion dollars could pay them $100,000 a year for 57 years.
Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?
Meanwhile the average income after inflation of the average worker did not rise at all from 1980 to 2024. And as we all know, during that time healthcare costs have gone through the roof for nearly all of us.
To add to working-class misery there is never ending job insecurity. One in four employed workers fear they will lose their jobs within the next year, according to polling done by Colorado State University.
And there’s a very powerful connection between job loss and enriching the super-rich. In many, if not most, cases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash for companies to pour into stock buybacks—buying back the corporation’s own shares to artificially boost its price. This moves money into the pockets of the largest Wall Street stock-sellers and the companies’ CEOs, who are mostly paid with stock incentives. In a very real way workers are sacrificing their jobs to enrich the richest of the rich. (To see why mass layoffs have little or nothing to do with AI and other new technologies please see my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
In our capitalist economy there has always been a fierce struggle between corporate power and worker power. But when unions represented 25-35% of the private sector, during the post-WWII era, working people had sufficient clout, like that bus driver dad, to provide a good standard of living for their families. Today, with only 6% of the private sector workforce represented by labor unions, the balance has shifted strongly toward corporate power, and wages, benefits, and job security have gone backward.
The power imbalance is so great that our conventional wisdom has changed. Our minds have been warped by corporate power. When unions were strong, runaway inequality was viewed as out and out greed. Today, we are told it’s just the result of entrepreneurial brilliance, that we all benefit from the creation of more and more billionaires, that those left behind simply lack the skills to succeed in our modern economy.
But that bus driver still drives a bus, taking people to work and the doctor or shopping, using much the same skills as generations ago. The difference today is that instead of earning a living wage, as the bus driver once did, workers don’t have sufficient power to gain a decent standard of living. Relegated to gig work or jobs under threat of layoffs, the system is rigged against them.
Historically, working people saw the Democratic Party as the defender of the working-class. Not so today. Instead, they see politicians of both parties as just another group of elites feathering their own nests and protecting the establishment. Very few representatives are seen as willing to take on Wall Street and stop needless mass layoffs, because apart from some occasional rhetoric we don’t see politicians fighting for workers.
The frustration, the resentment, the anger about the rigged system was building long before Donald Trump came on the scene. But there he is, a giant wrecking ball, slamming away at the established order. For those left behind, smashing the establishment feels long overdue.
Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?
Looking at the Democrats’ post-election discussions, it could be a long wait until our ATT union-supporter gets a chance to join a union.
Let’s try to have a happy new year, but it is likely to be a tough one for the working class.
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Thousands of Autoworkers Protest in Brussels Amid Likely Audi Layoffs
"Their anger is very legitimate, very understandable, especially since Audi is not very clear on its plans," a local employment minister said.
Sep 16, 2024
Thousands of autoworkers protested in Brussels on Monday following recent news that Audi, a subsidiary of the German automaker Volkswagen, would phase out production at its plant there, which is expected to mean layoffs for its roughly 3,000 employees by the end of 2025.
The phase-out announcement led to a labor dispute that's shuttered the plant for the last two weeks, with some employees forming an encampment protest outside. The plant is expected to resume operations on Tuesday even though the core issues underlying the labor dispute, which some unions have characterized as a lockout by management, haven't been resolved.
Between 5,500 and 11,000 demonstrators marched toward the European Parliament on Monday, bringing "chaos" to Brussels, where public transport was largely shut down. Unions not directly affected by the Audi plant's likely closure participated in solidarity.
"Their anger is very legitimate, very understandable, especially since Audi is not very clear on its plans," Bernard Clerfayt, a local employment minister, toldAFP.
Charlie Le Paige of Belgium's worker's party, Parti du Travail de Belgique, wrote on social media that there were "lots and lots of people in the streets of Brussels in support of Audi workers and subcontractors."
Le Paige said that the company was treating employees as disposable while distributing huge amounts of money to shareholders, and declared that "workers are not adjustment variables!"
Beaucoup beaucoup de monde dans les rues de Bruxelles en soutien aux travailleurs et aux sous-traitants d'#Audi 🔥 Le groupe VW-Audi a distribué près de 12 milliards de dividendes l'année passée, les travailleurs ne sont pas des variables ajustement! pic.twitter.com/aUEgbCNZsl
— Charlie Le Paige (@charlielepaige) September 16, 2024
The state-of-the-art Audi plant in southern Brussels produces the Q8 e-Tron, an electric sport utility vehicle. Audi received about 27 million euros ($30 million) in public funding to retrain workers when it converted to electric vehicle production.
Audi announced in July that it was considering discontinuing production of the commercially unsuccessful Q8 e-Tron and closing the Brussels plant, and said earlier this month that it still hadn't found an alternative vehicle that it could produce there.
The following day, September 4, the plant's workers "downed tools" and set up protest camps on the premises, according toWorld Socialist Web Site.
On September 6, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a leading U.S. unionist, visited the plant in solidarity with the workers there.
About 1,500 Audi workers at the plant face the prospect of layoffs as early as next month, another 1,100 by May, and the remainder by the end of 2025. There are also many hundreds of subcontractor workers that would be impacted by a closure, unions have said.
Last week, workers took about 200 car keys from vehicles at the plant as an act of protest, prompting warnings of legal action by the company. The workers later returned the keys to try to facilitate discussions with management.
The plant's likely closure is seen as part of E.V. failures at Volkswagen and European carmakers more generally, prompting calls for the European Union to invest in and protect the industry. Audi reportedly plans to make the successor to the Q8 e-Tron in Mexico.
Many of the demonstrators on Monday spoke harshly about E.U. policy.
"We also want to send a strong signal to European authorities, which are making things difficult for Belgian industry, but also for European industry," Patrick Van Belle, a leading union official at Audi Brussels, toldReuters, in explaining the reasons for Monday's demonstration. "The manufacturing industry is mainly migrating away from our countries."
Volkswagen's layoffs may in fact extend beyond Belgium. The company made the surprising announcement earlier this month that it may shutter factories in Germany, drawing fierce opposition from unions there. The closures would be the first in Germany in the company's 87-year history.
Former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi last week issued a report, commissioned by the E.U., calling for stronger industrial policy and a degree of trade protectionism, including in the auto industry, which is struggling to compete with heavily subsidized Chinese vehicles. Draghi, hardly considered a radical political thinker, drew criticism from neoliberal institutions for the proposals.
Local police said about 5,500 people attended the demonstration on Monday while unions put the figure at 11,000.
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Workers Get Boot as Boar's Head Plant Behind Listeria Deaths Shuts Down
A union statement said the closure was "especially unfortunate" because workers shouldn't be punished for the deadly outbreak, but a deal protecting employees' livelihoods was reached.
Sep 13, 2024
About 500 workers lost their current jobs when Boar's Head on Friday announced the closure of the Virginia meatpacking plant behind a deadly listeria outbreak.
A chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which represents the workers, said in a statement that the closure was "especially unfortunate" given that the workforce was not to blame for the outbreak, which killed at least nine people nationwide.
The UFCW announced that it had reached a deal with the company to allow the workers to transfer to another Boar's Head facility or receive a severance package "above and beyond" what's required by law.
"Thankfully these workers have a union they can count on to always have their backs," the union statement said.We received some unfortunate news – the Boar's Head plant located in Jarratt, Va. is closing indefinitely, impacting hundreds of workers at the facility. Read our statement: https://t.co/h551b80cF0
— UFCW Local 400 (@UFCW400) September 13, 2024
The outbreak caused nine deaths and 57 hospitalizations, and led to the recall of millions of pounds of Boar's Head deli meat. The company has already been targeted in a number of wrongful death and other lawsuits.
Listeria, a bacterial illness, originated from the Boar's Head plant in the small town of Jarratt, Virginia, as genome sequencing tests confirmed in late July. The company said this week that the contamination had come from liverwurst processing and announced it would discontinue the product.
A 2022 inspection of the plant found that it posed an "imminent threat" to public health, according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) records released this week. At the time, the plant already had "rust, mold, garbage, and insects on the plant floors and walls," The New York Timesreported.
Sarah Sorscher, a food safety expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Times that "they shouldn't have allowed this company to keep producing ready-to-eat products, lunch meat that's going to go on people’s tables, when they're seeing this level of violation. Consumers had to die before this plant got shut down, really is the bottom line."
More recent USDA records, which were released in late August, also showed wretched conditions at the plant.
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