Some Call for Jobs, Others for a Post-Jobs Economy
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTO: Floyd Morrow
and Bob Filner (center)
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“It’s jobs,
jobs, jobs,” said U.S. Congressmember and mayoral candidate Bob Filner at the
start of San Diego’s Labor Day rally September 5, which drew over 100 people to
Horton Plaza Park downtown at noon following a march from the downtown Ralph’s
supermarket. “We’re the richest country in the world, and we’ve got 48.6
million people out of work [or underemployed]. We’ve got a Congress run by the
Tea Party that has not produced jobs. President Obama has not produced enough
jobs.”
Most of the
speakers — many of whom were either current or former elected officials or
candidates for elective office — echoed the “jobs, jobs, jobs” theme. “Are
there jobs to be done in this city, this county, this state? Yes,” said
Filner’s colleague, Congressmember Susan Davis. “Are there people who want to
do them? Yes. There are so many ways we can put together a package that works
for all of us. … We had a job fair the other day, and it was sad to see so many
people who wanted to work.”
Assemblymember
Lori Saldaña, who in 2012 is planning to run against Republican Congressmember
Brian Bilbray in hopes that the California Redistricting Commission has made
the seat more competitive for a Democrat, said, “I want to join Susan in
Congress to help working people. … I want to make sure we have the kinds of
jobs that will get this country going again. We will succeed because when
united, we will never be defeated.”
“I think we’re
going to have pro-worker elected officials supporting each other and fighting
for the same things,” said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the San Diego-Imperial
Counties Central Labor Council and herself a former candidate for the San Diego
City Council. “We have 25 million Americans who are trying to find work, and
corporations who are hoarding cash. Between them, just four companies — General
Electric, Pfizer, CVS Pharmacies and Apple — are holding on to $1.2 trillion in cash. That is not property value or income, but
cash that could be used to create jobs.”
California State
Senator Juan Vargas, who took a leadership role pushing for SB 469 a
union-backed state law requiring “economic impact reports” before any big-box
“supercenters” (essentially Wal-Marts and other giant stores that sell
groceries) are built, announced that Sempra Energy, parent company of San Diego
Gas & Electric (SDG&E), “is going to Mexico because they want to pay
people very little and they don’t want to abide by environmental laws.” He
urged people at the rally to write Governor Jerry Brown and ask him to sign SB
469, which at press time is still pending on his desk.
Other speakers
at the rally took a more radical line. Former San Diego City Councilmember
Floyd Morrow, defeated in 1977 by an early manifestation of what later became
the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, recalled that his first
political involvement was in John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign in 1960. He
questioned why the U.S. Labor Day is in early September while the rest of the
world celebrates it on May 1 — ironically, the May Day holiday was first
proclaimed by a U.S. labor leader, Terrence V. Powderly of the Knights of
Labor, in 1886, but it didn’t become the “official” Labor Day because in most
of Europe and the rest of the world May Day celebrations are openly socialist —
and he also attacked the legal status of corporations as “persons,” the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the idea that corporations and the people who run
them are the sources of a country’s wealth.
“People who work
produce the wealth, not corporations,” Morrow said. “We need to take away their
monopoly of oil, resources, air. We’ve got to end the insanity of ‘corporate
personhood’ and make them pony up.” He called for an end to the U.S. wars and
use of the money to create jobs at home, and said that contrary to Right-wing
propaganda and media reports of a “crisis” in Social Security, “there is $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund. It’s funded
through 2030 at minimum. Let’s not let them get away with the lies.”
Frank Gormlie,
editor/publisher of the online newspaper O.B. Rag, MC’d the rally and called for the government to hire
people and put them to work directly rather than waiting for the private sector
to spend some of their hoards of cash on employees. He cited the Works Project
Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the Franklin
Roosevelt administration, and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act
(CETA) of the 1960’s, as examples.
“We need public
jobs and a government that actively creates them,” Gormlie said. “The
mainstream media want you to believe that workers are the problem. We have to
outlaw these capitalist assaults on the basic right to unionize. Those who do
not support workers’ rights and collective bargaining for public employees are
un-American. We’re much closer to the Founding Fathers than the Tea Party
people.”
Greg Robinson,
vice-president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT), joked about how many of the other speakers were either members of
Congress or candidates for Congressional seats. “There are a lot of people here
who want to go to Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Why? To hang out with Republicans?
The party of Lincoln has become the Party of Bozo. Texas Governor Rick Perry”
— the current front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination —
“doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming, but he does believe President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim
socialist.”
According to
Robinson, Bank of America received over $3 trillion in government loans from the bank bailout, “yet they
tell homeowners there’s no money to bail them out.” (Less than a week after the rally, Bank of
America announced they were eliminating 40,000 jobs, most of them in
California, to cover their losses from acquiring troubled subprime lender
Countrywide Financial in 2008.)
“We have
billionaire hedge-fund operators telling the rest of us we can’t tax them
because they ‘create jobs,’” Robinson said. “Where are the jobs? They’re
sitting on the biggest pile of corporate profits in history. The money is
there; it’s just in the wrong pockets.” Like Gormlie, Robinson called for a
revival of the Depression-era WPA, saying that the U.S. infrastructure largely
built by the WPA in the 1930’s is “crumbling” and a new WPA is needed to
rebuild it.
While the other
speakers on the program called for jobs, Jeeni Criscenzo, president of Activist
San Diego (and, ironically, also a former Congressional candidate), questioned
the whole concept of the “job” and the ideology behind it. “Jobs are lopsided
trade agreements,” she said. “We’ve been conditioned to believe we need a job.
We used to believe we could jump into a job from high school. We were
encouraged to get a good education, and our reward would be a job where we
could use our brains to make other people more money.”
Criscenzo said
that the whole concept of a job — of having to beg an employer for the chance
to make him/her money — constitutes servitude and needs to be ended. “What if
we change the rules and, instead of a ‘job,’ everyone had a right to a livable
life and we could do what we love? What if we didn’t call it a ‘job,’ and we
did it for each other and not to make foreign investors profits? A ‘job’ is
something we beg for from others; a living is something we make for ourselves.”
Many of the
participants in the Labor Day rally wore T-shirts expressing solidarity with
the United Food and Commercial Workers local 135, currently embroiled in
negotiations with the three largest supermarket chains, Kroger (Ralph’s),
Safeway (Vons) and Supervalu (Albertson’s). The workers’ contract expired in
March and for the last six months employees have been working under the old
contract, while the chains have demanded givebacks that would jeopardize the
workers’ access to health insurance.
The workers have
responded by voting twice to authorize a strike, and at press time the only
thing that is holding back the strike is the presence of federal mediators in
the negotiations. The union can call a strike any time by giving 72 hours’
notice to the chains. The last supermarket strike in the area, in 2003-2004,
ended in a defeat for the union — and also hurt the chains; Albertson’s in
particular has never regained the market share it lost during the strike.
