Brenda Stokely is president of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) District Council 1707 in New York, which represents 23,000 day-care and home-care workers. Her fierce pride in the rank and file of her union is embodied in the South African saying, "When you have struck a woman, you have struck a rock."
"Our union represents the lowest-paid public-service workers in the service industry, the day-care workers and home health aides", she told Workers World. "The major source of funding for their work is the federal government. The majority of the workers in these jobs are women, women of colour and immigrant women."
Now these workers face a vicious campaign of privatisation and union busting.
Cutbacks under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior were serious, she said, but it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who in 1996 "ended welfare as we know it". Clinton signed the law that created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
TANF is a monthly cash assistance program for poor families with children under age 18. TANF demolished most of the welfare net provisions won 60 years before through the struggles of the 1930s. TANF includes a four-year lifetime limit on assistance. Many families reached that limit by 2000.
Now, President George W. Bush is mounting a full-court press to scale back or eliminate public programs such as day care, health care and even what's left of welfare. The government works in tandem with capitalists devouring the public sector in the mad rush toward privatisation and profit.
Stokely notes that the "move toward privatisation of home health care began with the privatisation of the agencies, making this a profit-making sector. The same thing has happened with prisons. And now Lockheed is bidding for the food stamp program."
To guarantee that they can make profits from previously public services, the capitalist privatisers are simultaneously attacking the unions that represent public-service workers. While 37.5% of public-sector workers are union members, only 9.5% of private-sector workers are.
Unionised public-service workers get higher wages and better benefits. So big business has taken aim at public-employee unions and benefits.
Stokely sees these attacks on labour as an "assault on the right to organise, the right to collective bargaining, the right to pensions". The state and the capitalist class are coordinating a violent campaign against workers that "allows for a rampage of layoffs. Collective bargaining narrows the arbitrary and capricious behaviour of the bosses, and allows more equitable pay and workers' right to due process. That is why the states are going after unions."
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has refused to negotiate with public-sector workers, ignoring collective-bargaining agreements. In a contract yet to be formally ratified with District Council 1707, the mayor has frozen wages for day-care workers.
Stokely points out: "The average day-care worker makes $26,000 a year or less. They make about $6.48 an hour compared to the $12 million spent an hour for war. If this same day-care worker is asking for only a 4% raise on their $26,000 annual salary, they would get only 25 cents more added to their hourly wage."
Stokely said that New York City is closing 67 of 90 day-care centres. The city is not enforcing the teacher-child ratio because of cutbacks. And after-school programs for school-age children have been cut. The city refuses to pay for the building leases of after-school programs. Bloomberg is putting all these programs out to bid to private companies.
"When TANF was cut, mothers receiving public assistance were forced to go to work. Now, if they get wage increases of as little as $2 a month, they are denied day care. What are they to do?" Stokely asked.
Last June in New York it was the women of District Council 1707, the only public employees working without a contract at the time, who struck. Their three-day work stoppage demonstrated their militancy. And when 1707 walked, the children, parents and grandparents did too — walking the picket lines alongside their day-care teachers and staffers.
Stokely criticised union leaders who call for "class peace" when conditions facing public workers call for militancy and struggle.
A leading organiser for the Million Worker March, which tied the US war on Iraq to the cutbacks in social spending, Stokely says: "While this government doesn't blink an eye as it spends $300 million a day in its quest to subjugate another people and their resources, it turns a deaf ear to the cries of the day-care workers and other working families in need of a livable wage.
"It is therefore necessary for working people to connect the attacks on their right to just wages and to organise with the cutbacks in government spending for education, health care, and safe and affordable housing."
Heather Cottin
[Abridged from Workers World, weekly paper of the US Workers World Party. Visit .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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