—ON THE PICKET LINE—

City workers strike for wage raise in Oakland, California

OAKLAND, Calif. — City workers — members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — struck Dec. 5-11 shutting down all city-run buildings, including libraries and day care centers, as well as housing and parks and recreation departments. International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 members also walked out. The two unions organize 3,000 city workers. Electrical workers for the city, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, honored the picket lines.

After a session with a mediator, union officials agreed workers would go back to work while contract talks continue.

“Stop the abuse of part-time Oakland workers” was a popular sign when unionists protested outside a fundraiser for Mayor Libby Schaaf’s re-election campaign on the first day of the strike. SEIU officials say more than half of the city’s workers are part time.

Mayor Schaaf made much about past wage increases under her administration, which she claims more than kept up with the rise in the cost of living.

“No. We’re going backwards, not forwards,” Cleveland Etter, 43, a street sweeper operator with three years on the job, told the Militant Dec. 6. City officials claim inflation is only 2.68 percent, but they don’t take into account the skyrocketing cost of housing here.

Government negotiators initially offered a 4 percent raise for the first year. On Dec. 7 the city upped its offer to add a 1 percent pay raise the second year.

“We cannot spend money we do not have,” Schaaf claimed in a press statement.

“The city has the money,” said SEIU member and sewer worker Eddie Torres, 33. “Millions flow through the Port of Oakland.”

For years the city government has been cutting expenses for services, and cutting back on workers. Henry Battiste, an official of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said the city — with a population over 400,000 — currently employs just 36 workers on its entire road paving and repair crew.

“Oakland city workers seem hell-bent on killing the goose that lays their golden eggs,” the Dec. 6 East Bay Times editorial insisted.

The city has to stop the “huge debt for employee retirement plans” and “start paying down debts” to the bondholders, the editorial says. It complains about workers “fully paid health insurance” and too “generous pensions benefits.”

The anti-worker line of local media bosses did not kill support for the strike in Oakland’s working-class communities.

“You work overtime until your body can’t do it anymore,” SEIU chapter president Felipe Cuevas, a heavy-equipment mechanic told the San Francisco Chronicle as he returned to work. “We’re so understaffed.”

— Eric Simpson

Truckers in Russia set to strike as gov’t labels union ‘foreign agent’

Just two weeks before a planned national strike by long-haul truckers across Russia, the government of President Vladimir Putin, Dec. 1, declared their union, the Association of Carriers of Russia, a “foreign agent.” The move is aimed at isolating the drivers and weakening participation in the Dec. 15-25 walkout.

The truckers have fought the government since November 2015 over the onerous Platon system, a per-ton toll imposed on owners of trucks weighing more than 12 tons. They picked the Christmas holiday for their third national strike to maximize its impact.

Over a two-year period, tens of thousands of truckers across the country have been involved in the fight through work stoppages, rallies and other actions. They have broken through a blackout by government-controlled media, and the designation as “foreign agent” led to more coverage and attention.

In a Dec. 2 statement, the drivers say the strike will go ahead as planned and the association will challenge the designation in court.

“Now that we are foreign agents, we must justify that status,” Igor Rybsky, a driver from Krasnoyarsk, jokingly told a Siberian radio station. Rybsky is a veteran of earlier strikes.

The decision came after the Ministry of Justice seized the association’s books and claim they found it had received some 250,000 rubles ($4,000) from supporters in Germany.

Andrey Bazhutin, president of the truckers union, said they have received cash and other types of contributions to their fight both from Russia and elsewhere. A union delegation had made one trip to Germany to meet with unionists there.

Being designated as a foreign agent bars the union from nominating Bazhutin as their candidate for president in the 2018 Russian Federation elections. Bazhutin, who says he is running as the working-class candidate, is now gathering the required number of nominations from workers outside the ranks of the union.

— Emma Johnson