kerkko.fi

There has not been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in the United States for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase? [...] I recently argued that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.

Read the rest of this post »

The ground started to buck at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and Masayuki Ishizawa could scarcely stay on his feet. Helmet in hand, he ran from a workers’ standby room outside the plant’s third reactor, near where he and a group of workers had been doing repair work. He saw a chimney and crane swaying like weeds. Everybody was shouting in a panic, he recalled.

Mr Ishizawa, 55, raced to the plant’s central gate. But a security guard would not let him out of the complex. A long line of cars had formed at the gate, and some drivers were blaring their horns. "Show me your IDs," Mr Ishizawa remembered the guard saying, insisting that he follow the correct sign-out procedure. And where, the guard demanded, were his supervisors?

“What are you saying?” Mr. Ishizawa said he shouted at the guard. He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow on the horizon, out at sea, he said. He shouted again: “Don’t you know a tsunami is coming?” Mr Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he is not even an employee of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company.

Mr Ishkikawa is one of thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. These workers remain vital to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants.

They are emblematic of Japan’s two-tiered work force, with an elite class of highly paid employees at top companies and a subclass of laborers who work for less pay, have less job security and receive fewer benefits. Such labor practices have both endangered the health of these workers and undermined safety at Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors, critics charge.

In the US, right-wing legislators continue their attack on labor unions. These politicians ignore one simple fact: unions were a major force in building and sustaining the great American middle class, and as they declined, so has the middle class. CAP’s Karla Waters and David Madland showed in a report first published in January 2011 that as union membership has steadily declined since 1967, so too has the middle class’s share of national income, as the super-rich have taken a larger share of national income than any time since the 1920s.

Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2010/12/08/we-are-all-tom-buffenbarger-now.aspx

How many Americans actually know what labor laws are like in the rest of the developed world, and how many non-Americans know how bad it is here? Here are some details of the rampant unfairness in the American system:

1. Employers are not required to give any notice or any severance pay. Some do provide severance, but that is purely at their discretion and often accompanied with "sign or you don't get your money" waivers of corporate liability.

2. Employers are not required to provide any paid time off. No paid sick days, no paid vacation time, no paid maternity leave, no paid federal holidays. Many employers, even most, provide one or more of these things as a courtesy.

3. A company with fewer than 15 employees is allowed (in most states) to discriminate against employees on the basis of race, sex, national origin, pregnancy, etc. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act exempts small businesses.

4. Many, many jobs are not required to pay any overtime wage regardless of how many hours you work. This applies not just to executives and managers but to projectionists, carnies, cab drivers, and a host of other occupations.

5. Only 21 of 50 states require any meal or rest break time for adult employees (including both paid and unpaid breaks). Four more require breaks for minors but not adults. There is also no federal restriction on working hours.

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who do not live by the country's infamous omertà code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mafia book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard.

Saviano says the rioters are among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught up in a brutal cheap-labor system the Mafia runs for legitimate businesses from Milan to Naples. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated. If they complain, they get killed.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1953619,00.html