Labor Wins Verizon Strike + Slaves vs. Robots?

Verizon workers who have been out on strike since April are going back to work today. From what I can tell they won big.

Verizon has a growing wireless business with a shrinking number of landline customers. The wireless side of the business is non-union and highly profitable; the wireline side -- landlines, video and Internet -- is union and not as profitable. Verizon's wireline business also includes the high-speed fiber optic Fios network, which is well regarded and lucrative.

Noam Scheiber had an informative piece yesterday, "Verizon Strike to End as Both Sides Claim Victories on Key Points." The one area the company has tried to claim victory is in its newly-bargained ability to route calls away their state of origin. But the Communication Workers of America (CWA) counters that since the calls stay within the scope of a unionized workforce, it is no victory for Verizon at all:

Perhaps the most consequential issue at stake in the standoff was Verizon’s ability to outsource work. The previous contracts included a provision requiring that a certain percentage of customer calls originating in a state be answered by workers in that state — ranging from just over 50 percent for some types of calls in some states to more than 80 percent in others. Verizon sought to significantly lower those numbers.

Under the tentative new contracts, a similar percentage of calls must be answered by a unionized worker somewhere in Verizon’s wireline footprint, which runs from Virginia to Massachusetts, rather than the particular state from which the call originates.

Both sides claimed victory in the change.

“We only care that our members somewhere in the footprint are doing the work,” said Robert Master, assistant to the District 1 vice president of the Communications Workers of America. “The push to outsource call center work was rebuffed.”

Lending partial vindication to this claim was a commitment by the company to create over 1,000 unionized call center jobs over the next four years to accommodate new demand from customers. The company also agreed to reduce the number of call center closings.

CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers protected their pensions, will receive an 11% pay increase over the four-year period of the collective bargaining agreement, and Verizon even agreed to allow unionization of the previously unorganized retail wireless workers:

The unions managed to beat back proposed pension cuts, including a cap on the accrual of pension benefits after 30 years of service. 

The company also agreed to withdraw a proposal that would have allowed it to relocate workers for up to two months anywhere in its geographic coverage area, although it had already expressed an openness to withdrawing the proposal before the strike. 

Proposals to change seniority rules and to make the company’s sickness and disability policy more strict were also withdrawn, and the company agreed to change a performance review program in New York City that many workers considered abusive. 

Significantly, the new contracts also cover some 65 unionized workers at Verizon Wireless stores, signaling the first time that retail wireless workers at the company have been included in a union contract, a potentially important precedent.

While the victory for Verizon workers is being hailed as potentially precedent setting for a unionized workforce that has been declared an anachronism, a report from Rachel Abrams, "Retailers Like H&M and Walmart Fall Short of Pledges to Overseas Workers," reminds us that working conditions akin to slavery are still a global norm.

Three years ago, following the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh and the deaths of 1,100 workers, multinational retail giants like GAP, Walmart and H&M were shamed into establishing pro-worker protocols with which their suppliers were supposed to adhere. Well, no surprise, it turns out these efforts have been underwhelming:

After more than 1,100 deaths exposed dangerous labor conditions in Bangladesh in 2013, brands like H&M, Walmart and Gap were among the most powerful companies that pledged to improve the safety of some of the country’s poorest workers.

But human rights groups say that three years later, those promises are still unfulfilled, and that safety, labor and other issues persist in Bangladesh and other countries where global retailers benefit from an inexpensive work force.

A series of new reports by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a coalition of trade unions and other research and advocacy groups, has put a new spotlight on the conditions. In Bangladesh, the group says, tens of thousands of workers sew garments in buildings without proper fire exits. In Indonesia, India and elsewhere, pregnant women are vulnerable to reduced wages and discrimination. In Cambodia, workers who protested for an extra $20 a month were shot and killed.

The brands say that in recent years they have aggressively pushed stronger labor protections and vastly increased their monitoring of the factories that make their products. They have also made significant structural and fire repairs at many factories in Bangladesh.

But even the retail groups say that more improvement is needed, a message underscored in the new reports. Worker advocates say that progress on improving conditions at the factories has been too slow, and that some of the world’s biggest companies continue to benefit from unfair and dangerous labor practices.

“There have been substantial safety renovations in factories that have unquestionably made those factories substantially safer,” Scott Nova, the executive director of the labor monitoring group Worker Rights Consortium, said of the work in Bangladesh. “At the same time, it’s also true that there have been unacceptable delays.”

On Tuesday, the Wage Alliance released its latest report, which accuses Walmart of benefiting from forced labor and other abusive practices in a number of Asian countries. In Cambodia, for instance, workers at factories who make products sold at the company are required to work 10 to 14 hours a day in sweltering heat, without access to clean drinking water or breaks — conditions that have contributed to “mass fainting episodes,” the report said.

As more work is automated, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that the robot will have a competitor in the slave. Maybe that will be a regular post for the future -- Slaves vs. Robots.

The Logic of U.S. Support for the Khmer Rouge

This morning the Gray Lady offers a story by Julia Wallace, "Genocide Trial Begins for Khmer Rouge Leaders," about the trial for genocide and war crimes of two top Khmer Rouge officials:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Hearings began on Friday into the most far-reaching charges, including genocide, against two former leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in what is likely to be the last chance to seek justice for 1.7 million deaths during their disastrous 1970s rule. 

The defendants, Nuon Chea, 88, and Khieu Samphan, 83, the most senior surviving leaders of the group, were sentenced to life in prison in August for masterminding mass evacuations of Cambodians from their homes. They have appealed those convictions. 

The trial that began Friday, expected to last until 2017, covers a broader range of crimes against humanity, as well as genocide and war crimes. It will address accusations that the Khmer Rouge ran work camps that enlisted Cambodians as slave laborers to build dams and airports and ran execution sites where those who fell afoul of the government’s policies were slaughtered, and will consider charges of genocide committed against Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese minorities.

“Of all the crimes in Democratic Kampuchea, there were none graver than the relentless and systematic effort of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders to identify and smash those they feared could one day oppose them,” said Chea Leang, one of the prosecutors. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state headed by the Khmer Rouge during their rule from 1975 to 1979. 

The first witnesses will appear later this month to testify about work sites in Tram Kak, the “ideological center” of the Khmer Rouge movement, where collectivized labor and communal living, the hallmarks of the rule, were enforced with extreme brutality. 

Mr. Nuon Chea is often described as the Khmer Rouge movement’s chief ideologue and was second-in-command to Pol Pot, the leader of the movement who died in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia in 1998. Mr. Khieu Samphan, a former teacher and Parliament member, joined the revolutionary Communist movement out of frustration with the corruption and decadence of 1960s-era Cambodia and became the Khmer Rouge’s head of state in 1976.

The tribunal, a joint effort of the Cambodian government and the United Nations, had split the case against the men into two trials to expedite a verdict. 

Both defendants said in court Friday that they would boycott the second trial because they were unhappy over the way it had been split. Mr. Nuon Chea rose to criticize judges for what he said was a lingering bias against him. He said he had been “hurt” by the court’s refusal to acknowledge the role that aggression by neighboring Vietnam played in the Khmer Rouge killings, and vowed that he would not come back to court until his motion for their disqualification had been heard.

For those of you like myself who have been aware of longstanding allegations by critics of U.S. hegemony, like Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky, that the  United States actually supported the Khmer Rouge, but you weren't exactly clear about the dialectics of that support there was an excellent article that appeared yesterday on the Counterpunch web site by Gregory Elich, "Who Supported the Khmer Rouge? How the US Backed a Regime of Unrivaled Barbarism," that is well written and lays it all bare.

Nuon Chea wants to be able to use the purported aggression of Vietnam in his defense because that was the main reason the United States along with China, for decades no less, backed the uber-Maoist butchers of the Khmer once they were toppled -- they were a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese. As Elich explains,

With the conviction last summer of former Khmer Rouge officials Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea for crimes against humanity, the subject of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 received a small amount of attention in the Western mass media. What the media failed to mention was how the Khmer Rouge was maintained as a military and political force long after its fall from power. Nor has it been suggested why, at Western insistence, the scope of investigations at the tribunal would exclude the period after 1979.

*** 

Khmer Rouge leaders had a manic hatred for the Vietnamese and expended considerable effort in trying to whip up anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Claiming Southern Vietnam as their territory, the Khmer Rouge launched numerous cross-border raids, burning down villages and massacring their inhabitants. In all, around 30,000 Vietnamese civilians lost their lives in the attacks. 

No nation could long countenance the murder of its citizens by marauders from a neighboring nation, nor was it easy to remain blind to the ongoing genocide in Cambodia. On December 25, 1978, following repeated refusals by the Khmer Rouge to negotiate, Vietnamese armed forces in conjunction with Cambodian rebel forces, struck back. Such was the level of hatred the population felt for their rulers that uprisings spread throughout the nation and it took only two weeks to drive the Khmer Rouge from power.

The campaign by Vietnamese armed forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation was one of history’s great liberations. The United States and China did not see it that way, however. Both shared an antipathy for Vietnam’s alliance with the Soviet Union and sought a way to overturn the recent turn of events. U.S. Secretary of State Harold Brown denounced Vietnam for its “minor league hegemonism,” and China sent troops into northern Vietnam to fight a two-week war to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” 

According to journalist Elizabeth Becker, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “himself claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge.” Brzezinski said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Khmer Rouge government-in-exile of Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” In fact, U.S. support went well beyond encouraging others to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. 

In neighboring Thailand, the Khmer Rouge formed a large guerrilla army, while Cambodian politician Son Sann established an army that would be ultimately named the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF). Prince Norodom Sihanouk launched his private army, the Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste (ANS). 

On the political front, in 1979 the United States and China wielded their influence and pushed through a vote in the UN General Assembly in favor of granting Cambodia’s UN seat to the ousted Khmer Rouge regime, and terminated a UN investigation into Khmer Rouge crimes. The following year, the United States again supported the Khmer Rouge in the UN as the “legitimate” representative of the Cambodian people. With U.S. backing, Cambodia would continue to be represented in the United Nations by a Khmer Rouge diplomat until 1993.

Elich's story goes on, providing layer upon layer of detail about the multitudinous ways the U.S. hijacked peace talks and funneled aid to the Khmer Rouge.  For anyone unconvinced that the U.S. could play a double game of supporting Islamic State at the same time marshaling an international coalition to degrade and destroy it, the American experience with the Khmer Rouge should be very illumininating.

John Pilger in a story last week, "From Pol Pot to ISIS: 'Anything That Flies on Everything that Moves.' " explores the connection from another angle. The exercise of U.S. military supremacy does not solve problems, it creates new ones. In the case of the Nixon administration's "Operation Menu," the saturation bombing of Cambodia to eradicate the North Vietnamese bases there led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the specious claim that Saddam Hussein was collaborating with jihadis to attack America, actually becomes self-fulfilling with the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

What is interesting is that I think we in the U.S. are closer now to understanding the nature of Great Power conflict -- that a hegemonic state will foster adversaries in order to maintain a state of war -- than we have been since the Vietnam era. The failure of Obama's putative anti-war presidency is the prime mover here. But what is different now from 40 years ago is that democracy -- the feedback mechanism between ruled and rulers -- is far weaker in the U.S. People are beginning to realize that war is permanent and that there is nothing, absent a mass uprising, that we can do about it.

My prediction is that over the next several elections cycles a pronounced rejection of the two-party system will emerge.

Sihanouk + High School Speech & Debate

I've been paying attention to politics since the late 1970s when I enrolled in high school debate.  Here's a tale from that time written in an October email to a college friend.  I am thanking him for the PDF of two chapters he sent me from the Jung Chang and Jon Halliday biography of Mao:

Thank you.  I've printed out and will read this week.

Interesting that you should send me since, with the death of Norodom Sihanouk last week, I started thinking about the Khmer Rouge again and the
idea that if one could understand the power politics of Cambodia of the
1970s and early 1980s one could understand a lot about how the U.S. sought
to reformulate itself after abandoning Vietnam in 1975 (part of which was
championing the Khmer Rouge government in the U.N. following Vietnam's
invasion of Cambodia in late '78).

In high school I debated.  In addition to debating you could also do
individual speech events.  Before going on in my junior and senior years 
to the more prestigious and stressful "Extemp" (Extemporaneous Speech --
you'd get a half hour to prepare a seven minute speech on a specified
current event topic) and Impromptu (for the truly gnarly -- you'd enter
the room and select one of three current topics presented to you and
immediately deliver I think it was a five-minute speech; it could've been
six), I did, my sophomore year, a "radio" speech (you'd just sit at a desk
and read your speech like you were a radio announcer) devoted to Pol Pot,
Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.

I didn't even write it.  I think I got the speech from a guy on the team
who had written it mostly by cribbing one Newsweek article and I think he
had done it once but then wanted to do another event so the debate coach,
I think, asked me to do it on short notice (probably because he had
already registered the slot at the upcoming tournament and didn't want to
eat the entry fee).  I ended up getting a trophy for the speech at that
tournament, something like third or fourth place.  This would've been the
fall of 1979.  So I ended up doing it into the new year and having some
more success with it.  Not because I was a great radio speaker or the
speech was hot shit but because Pol Pot, I think, had captured the public
imagination at that point.  There is always a fascination with slaughter.

I flamed out spectacularly in the spring of '80 at the University of
Oregon tournament, the final big competition of the year before the State
and National qualifying tournaments.  At the debate coach's insistence I
expanded the radio speech on Pol Pot into an eight-minute oratory, which
is a memorized rather than read speech where you take a strong stance on
your topic.

In the first round I got up in the room before the judge and all my
competitors, one of whom was a good guy, a guy from Medford for whom I had
a lot of respect and who I had played soccer against, and I got about a
minute into the speech and I totally froze.  I couldn't remember a thing.
After a little bit of struggle I said, "I can't do this."  And I walked
out of the room.

This is known derisively and ominously in high school debate circles as a
"walk out," the ultimate in failure.  I think I told some of my buddies on
the team, but I didn't until later in the tournament -- I think he had
already heard from the oratory judge in that round -- tell the debate
coach.  He was not pleased.

But what still burns, what I can still see and feel clearly, is the look
on the guy's face who I played soccer against.  I looked at him when I
said "I can't do this."  And he looked back at me -- because he was a good
guy, a star, and he was being empathetic, you know -- and he was confused,
panicked and ashamed.

Anyhow, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978 were a hyperreal
version of Mao's cultural revolution, no?

Your buddy,