NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2007
Waste Management lockout is first battle
By Htun Lin
Waste Management locked out 500 workers after their contract expired on June
30. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 70, collect garbage in Oakland and
several other northern California cities. They had not voted to strike, and had
pledged to stay on the job under the old contract.
As garbage started piling up after a week, alarm spread through Oakland over
the growing health hazard. City officials have taken Waste Management to court
over its failure to meet its contractual obligations. The company resumed some
garbage collection, especially in wealthier neighborhoods, by recruiting 200
scabs.
Many from the community have come out to support the locked out workers, as
have other unions in a 24-hour picket line.
Waste Management waged this pre-emptive strike in order to try to set an
example for southern California. They hoped to come in with a precedent-setting
settlement to present as a fait accompli for even larger contracts coming up
there. The company is hell bent on forcing workers to pay for more of their
health care expenses and imposing new disciplinary measures for safety and
health violations.
Despite the real health risks they have caused, Waste Management had the gall
to declare, "We want nothing more than to get an agreement with the union that
will keep our drivers and our communities safe." Using words to deceive, for the
capitalists "public health and safety" is nothing more than public relations.
Waste Management's first priority, in its concern for health and safety, is
to blame individual employees for all health and safety violations. The people
who genuinely care about health and safety and public welfare are those who
actually do the work, the garbage workers -- just as in other workplaces it is
housekeepers, nurses or teachers.
I've worked in a hospital for 20 years. I've seen many nurses and service
workers blamed every time something goes wrong with a patient. If it weren't for
the strong nurses' union, standing up to management's deceptive use of the
quality-care concept, and if it weren't for our contracts which spell out formal
disciplinary procedures which guarantee workers a modicum of union rights and a
proper investigation, many more of us would not be working here today.
That's because the first thing managers do whenever a patient is harmed is to
blame individual workers, even though we workers have been pointing out problems
and risk patterns leading to deficient care for years, warnings which went
unheeded.
Waste Management is out to scapegoat individual workers for health and safety
violations while simultaneously trying to cut back on workers' healthcare. For
management, workers' health care is nothing more than a cost. They see nothing
immoral about their "cost-shifting" or "cost-cutting" which has resulted in the
deterioration of many a worker's health. But once there's a particular "health
and safety violation" supposedly by an individual worker, he is to be punished.
Waste Management's twisted logic includes a demand for a no-strike clause.
Their logic is that strikes harm customers and cause unnecessary inconvenience
and headaches. That's why they want a no-strike clause for the new contract.
They intend to do anything to get it, including locking out workers. If the
lockout causes tons of garbage to pile up, it is because they dont really care
about community health.
Employers are sensing a total retreat when there are labor mis-leaders like
Andy Stern of the Service Employees actively promoting no-strike clauses in
sweetheart deals with nursing home mega chains.
Stern parrots the capitalists' own banalities about globalization, calling
for a global union movement -- but by surrendering to capital. His idea is to give
capital what it wants, including exporting jobs. All this twisted logic -- through
which Stern subscribes to health take-backs, concessions on working conditions,
and the erosion of job security -- is just part of capital's ongoing war on labor.
The only effective way out of this is through thoughtful rank-and-file
self-activity. This includes holding firm to labor's key leverage, the right to
strike. It also means working out our own concept of cooperation and community
well being that doesn't tail-end capital's logic.
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