Lousy work, if you can get it

Published at Socialist Worker.

AT THEIR convention last week, the Democrats put their record on jobs front and center, claiming to have brought the economy back from the abyss of the economic crisis. They said they had a vision for the economy that will provide workers with a decent life while restoring American industry's competitiveness.

That's no surprise--after all, polls show that jobs and the economy are by far the most important issues for voters. But behind the back-patting and boasting lies the reality of a continuing jobs crisis--and a future in which whatever gains working people won in the past are discarded in a global race to the bottom, leaving U.S. workers to produce more for less.

The U.S. government's monthly report on employment underlined the problem. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employers added a net total of 96,000 jobs in August--barely enough to keep up with population growth, much less make up for the mass layoffs during the Great Recession. Long-term unemployment continues to plague more than 5 million workers--around 40 percent of the jobless--who have been without work for over 27 weeks.

As Socialistworker.org pointed out in an August editorial, more than three years into the weakest recovery in history, "[T]he U.S. economy still needs to generate about 10 million new jobs just to make up for losses from the 2007-09 recession and provide employment for young people entering the workforce."

A closer look at the BLS report reveals even worse news. The official unemployment rate declined in August to 8.1 percent--but that's only because more people dropped out of the labor force, and therefore weren't counted in the jobless rate. The BLS's U-6 measure gives a more accurate picture--it includes the unemployed, those employed part-time who would want full-time work, and discouraged workers and others "marginally attached" to the labor market. The U-6 measure stood at 14.7 percent in August.

Another statistic--the employment-population ratio, which measures the percentage of the population age 16 and over that has a job--is at its lowest level in three decades. Since reaching a high point of 63 percent in mid-2007, the figure fell to just over 60 percent as Barack Obama took office and continued to decline before leveling out around 58.3 percent, where it remains today.

African Americans and youth of all races--two groups who mobilized to vote for Obama in unprecedented numbers in 2008--are facing the highest rates of unemployment. Jobless rates for African Americans continue to run at about double the rate for white workers, and official unemployment for workers aged 20 to 24 is 13.9 percent, more than twice that for older workers.

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THIS IS one face of the economic crisis still plaguing workers: Three years into the economic "recovery," there is simply not enough work for millions of people who want it.

But there is another jobs crisis--one that gets less publicity. It was summed up aptly by the title of a report released this month by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR): Bad Jobs on the Rise.

The CEPR report defines a "bad job" as "one that pays less than $37,000 per year (in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars); lacks employer-provided health insurance; and has no employer-sponsored retirement plan." While these jobs are a step up from unemployment and abject poverty, workers with bad jobs still struggle to get by. They can't look forward to retirement, and without health insurance, they live under the threat that a chance illness or injury could mean financial ruin.

The CEPR found that the share of "bad jobs" in the U.S. economy has increased significantly--nearly one in four jobs were classified as bad in 2010, up from around one in six in 1979. By 2007, the figure for bad jobs was already 22.1 percent--so the trend predates the recession.

The decline was sharpest for those without a high school degree--more than half had a bad job in 2012, compared to one quarter in 1979. Workers aged 18 to 34 were also hard hit, going from 22.4 percent with a bad job in 1979 to 38.5 percent in 2010.

In the past, having a college degree offered significant protection for older workers. But young college-educated workers are increasing likely to find themselves in a bad job, according to the CEPR--plus they face the added burden of paying off increased student loans. More than 15 percent of workers aged 18 to 34 with at least a college degree had a bad job in 2010. Young workers with some college were more than three times as likely to have a bad job (43.5 percent) in 2010 as in 1979 (13.1 percent).

According to the CEPR, the increase in the proportion of bad jobs was primarily driven by a decline in the number of jobs that offer health insurance or retirement plans. And as researchers point out, their figures understate the actual decline in workers' living standards by not accounting for the marked deterioration in the quality of the employer-provided health care and retirement plans where they are still offered.

Over the last 10 years especially, a growing portion health care costs has been shifted onto workers. According to the Los Angeles Times, "The typical family of four with employer-based coverage saw its total monthly health care tab almost double between 1999 and 2009...[Rising] out-of-pocket medical bills...virtually wiped out income gains over the decade, leaving the typical family with just $95 more a month to spend on things other than health care in 2009, compared with 1999."

Today's employer-provided retirement plans have been hollowed out, as well. Over the past few decades, reliable "defined-benefit" plans that pay out a set amount for retirement have in most cases been replaced by "defined-contribution" plans, such as 401(k)s, where workers instead pay into a fund that is linked to financial markets. The percentage of private-sector workers with defined-benefit plans declined by half in the past 20 years, and 401(k)s have not picked up the slack: among those aged 50 to 64, three-quarters have average retirement savings of just $26,395. And half of them have no savings for retirement at all.

According to the CEPR report, "[T]he decline in the economy's ability to create good jobs, in our view, is related to a deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale." This is the inevitable result of the continued drop in the U.S. unionization rate, which has fallen below 12 percent, lower than it's been in over 70 years.

Corresponding to this has been a drop in labor militancy. In the 1970s, on average each year, nearly 1.5 million workers were part of a work stoppage involving more than 1,000 workers. In the 2000s, less than 130,000 workers participated in such a strike in the average year, less than one-tenth the previous level, even though the U.S. workforce is 50 percent bigger since the 1970s.

By attacking unions, employers have been able to chip away at workers' income and especially their benefits--thus capturing the lion's share of income gains over the last three decades, a major reason why inequality remains at levels not seen in the U.S. in 80 years.

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ALL THIS has taken place under both Democrats and Republicans--a bipartisan character to the bad jobs crisis that was underlined when the Democrats held their national convention in the anti-union, "right-to-work" state of North Carolina.

At the convention, former President Bill Clinton bragged that since 1961, nearly twice as many private-sector jobs were added under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. He said that Obama had created 4.5 million private-sector jobs and had "laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators."

As CNN points out, the claim about 4.5 million new jobs under Obama is misleading. There are not 4.5 million more people working than when Obama took office.

The 4.5 million figure is "is an accurate description of the growth of private-sector jobs since January 2010, when the long, steep slide in employment finally hit bottom," CNN reported. But when the job losses of the first year of the Obama administration are factored in, there is "only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date." And once the million jobs lost in the public sector are taken into account, there has actually been a net loss of jobs over the last four years.
For his part, Obama claimed in his speech:

We are making things again. I've met workers in Detroit and Toledo who feared they'd never build another American car. And today, they can't build them fast enough because we reinvented a dying auto industry that's back on the top of the world. I worked with business leaders who are bringing jobs back to America, not because our workers make less pay, but because we make better products--because we work harder and smarter than anyone else.

In reality, employers are relocating jobs to the U.S. in large part because workers in this country are being compelled--as a result of high unemployment, the ongoing erosion of living standards and the dismantling of the social safety net--to worker harder and longer for less.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reported that Caterpillar opened a new non-union plant in Indiana, where new hires make $12 an hour, after closing a plant in Ontario where union jobs paid twice as much. Other major corporations, such as Boeing, have shifted production within the U.S., from regions with higher rates of unionization and higher pay, to regions where workers can be forced to accept less.

According to an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group, the U.S. is "expected to experience a manufacturing renaissance as the wage gap with China shrinks and certain U.S. states become some of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world."

This begs the question: Who are these jobs really "good" for? While they may help workers scrape by and pay (some of) the bills, employers are the ones who truly benefit. And what is good for the 1 percent is bad for workers.

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THE FACT is that, on the whole, the jobs that are being created, in addition to not being plentiful enough, provide workers with an inferior standard of living, compared with the lost jobs they are replacing.

According to the National Employment Law Project:

In the two years since U.S. employment reached its lowest-point in February 2010, jobs in low-wage industries have grown significantly faster than employment as a whole. This trend...is expected to continue: the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7 out of the top 10 top growth occupations over the next decade are low wage ones."

Meanwhile, 92 percent of the top 50 low-wage employers made a profit last year, and 63 percent are more profitable now than they were before the recession.

According to the BLS, the professions that will experience the biggest growth by 2020 are registered nurses, retail salespersons, home health aides and personal care aides.

While nurses--who are skilled workers and disproportionately likely to belong to a union--are still able to make a relatively good living, the other jobs pay poverty wages. In 2010, median pay for retail sales workers averaged just $10.09 an hour ($20,990 a year for full-time work), while that home health and personal care aides averaged $9.70 an hour ($20,170 a year).

Then there's the auto industry. Obama, Clinton and all the Democrats tout the auto bailout as among the administration's greatest achievements.

As left-wing journalist Laura Flanders wrote, the bailout of the auto industry was, in fact, begun by George W. Bush before it was taken up by Obama. And the Obama administration used the bailout to demand concessions from autoworkers that "amounted to a slash in all-in labor costs from around $76 per worker-hour in 2006 to just over $50." After the two-tier wage structure the United Auto Workers conceded several years earlier, "[N]ew hires start at $14 per hour--roughly half the pay and benefits of more senior line workers," Flanders wrote.

In other words, rather than a Democratic plan to save good blue-collar jobs, the auto industry bailout was part of a bipartisan effort to use the economic crisis as a pretext to replace good jobs with bad ones.

The result of all of this is that household income has actually fallen more during the recovery that began six months after Obama's inauguration than it did during the recession that preceded it. The majority of working people are worse off today than they were three years ago.

Of course, the recovery hasn't been a complete failure. The rich have done just fine. More than 90 percent of total gains in income during the first year of the recovery went to the wealthiest 1 percent, and corporate profits as a share of the economy are at a record high, while wages are at a record low.
While Republicans are attacking Obama for his poor record on job creation and the economy, they are obviously doing so not out of concern for the plight of working people, but in an attempt to win the election--since their policies would be a disaster for working-class people, employed or unemployed.

The Republicans in Congress have opposed the extension of unemployment benefits, despite record levels of long-term joblessness. They call for tax cuts for the rich, paid for by slashing what remains of the social safety net, and Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker have been at the forefront of union-busting efforts aimed at eliminating public-sector workers' collective bargaining rights. Although not alone in pushing for austerity, some of the deepest budget cuts at the state and local level have been pushed by Republicans.

Still, Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the jobs crisis, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. The politicians of both parties have twisted the truth to paint themselves as champions of good jobs and their opponents as job killers. But neither Democrats nor Republicans have a solution to offer that would guarantee jobs providing comfort, dignity or security.

These will only be won by turning the tide and rebuilding a fighting labor movement.

College, Inc.

Published by Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

IMAGINE A business that rakes in billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, but provides its customers with a defective product that fails for more than half of them--though that track record hasn't stopped the business owners from enjoying ever-increasing profits.

Sounds like the parasites of Wall Street or the insurance industry, doesn't it?

But according to a U.S. Senate report, the same is true of a growing number of colleges and universities--the expanding sector of higher education that is run for profit.

The Senate report is a shocking exposé of a new growth industry that turns out to be another scheme for the 1 percent to make money at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

But anyone who investigates the for-profit college scam will be struck by something else, too--the abuses of College Inc. are extreme examples of a trend toward privatization and business-like operations throughout all of higher education, which threaten to undermine the system as a whole.

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FOR-PROFIT colleges are capturing a greater share of students nationwide. Over the past 10 years, the for-profit higher education industry has tripled in size, with fall enrollment growing to more than 2.4 million in 2010. That increase is seven and a half times faster than the 28.8 percent increase in enrollment at public colleges, according to the College Board.

This is despite the fact that for-profit colleges are more expensive than even the most prestigious public institutions. Bachelor's degrees average $62,702 at for-profit institutions, versus $52,522 at flagship state public universities. The average associate degree at a for-profit college costs $34,988, more than four times the $8,313 at the average public community college. Certificate programs at for-profit colleges average $19,806, compared with $4,249 at community colleges.

It's no surprise, then, that students at for-profit colleges are more likely to end up deeper in debt. Fully 96 percent of students at for-profit colleges borrow to pay for tuition, compared with 48 percent at four-year public and 13 percent at community colleges, according to the Senate report, titled "For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Access," the result of a two-year investigation by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Democrat Tom Harkin.

"Independent students, who make up most of the for-profit student body, leave for-profits schools with a median debt of $32,700, but leave public colleges with a median debt of $20,000 and private non-profit colleges with a median debt of $24,600," the Senate committee report found.

As a result, according to the New York Times, "Students at for-profit colleges make up 13 percent of the nation's college enrollment, but account for about 47 percent of the defaults on loans."

Although the profits generated by for-profit colleges end up in private hands, the vast majority of revenues come from the government, in the form of federal grants and federally guaranteed student loans. According to the Harkin report, the Apollo Group, the largest of the for-profit education companies and operator of the infamous University of Phoenix, "$3.1 billion in federal student aid, in addition to $46 million in military education benefits...86.8 percent of the company's revenue, and $925 million of their profit, is attributed to federal taxpayer sources."

At the same time that states, pleading poverty, are slashing public university budgets and the federal government now charges interest on loans to graduate students while they're in school, more than $30 billion are funneled each year to for-profit colleges from the federal government, in the form of grants and loans.

Despite paying (and borrowing) significantly more, students at for-profit schools are less likely than their counterparts at public four-year institutions to leave school with a degree. Of the nearly half a million students who enrolled in an associate degree program in 2008-09, the report found that nearly two-thirds (62.9 percent) had dropped out by the middle of 2010. Over half (54.3 percent) left their bachelor's degree programs by that point.

And studies show the benefits of a degree from a for-profit school are likely negligible. A study published in June by two Boston University economists found that while those who get degrees from public or private non-profit colleges and universities experience significant benefits, including higher wages and lower unemployment, students who attended for-profit universities don't. As Time magazine reported:

The [Boston University] researchers found that six years after they enter college, for-profit students are more likely to be unemployed--and to be unemployed for periods longer than three months. And, further, if they are able to find a job, students who attend for-profits make, on average, between $1,800 and $2,000 less annually than their peers who attended other institutions.

This isn't surprising given how little of their inflated tuition prices for-profit colleges actually spend on students' educations. The Senate report estimates average per-student spending at for-profit colleges to be just over $2,000 in 2009--and some spend much less.

For example, the Apollo Group, which "educated" over 500,000 students in 2010, spent just $892 per student on instruction. According to its own estimates--which the bosses at the University of Phoenix reserve the right to change at any time--a bachelor's of arts degree at the school will likely cost over $10,000 per year, while a bachelor's of science degree runs nearly $15,000 annually, well over 10 times the amount spent on teaching.

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FAR FROM being the most efficient way to deliver a service, as proponents of free enterprise like to claim, market-based, for-profit approaches to higher education result in massive waste. Instead of student instruction, the bulk of tuition money goes to marketing to bring in new students, multimillion-dollar salaries for top executives, lobbying politicians and, last but certainly not least, profits.

Marketing is a top priority to for-profit institutions. An investigative report by theVillage Voice revealed that recruitment is typically aimed at the most vulnerable--for example, veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries--and often involves outright fraud, such as encouraging under-age applicants to lie to their parents and the federal government about their eligibility for financial aid.

Last year, the Institute for Higher Education Policy released a report revealing that low-income students are four times as likely to attend a for-profit college as students from more well-off families. And low-income women are disproportionately likely to attend for-profit schools, enrolling at twice the rate of low-income men.

A number of these students would have attended public schools in the past--according to the report, the portion of students who grew up in poverty who enrolled at four-year public institutions dropped from 20 percent in 2000 to just 15 percent in 2008.

Students of color are also disproportionately represented at for-profit schools.According to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research: "African Americans account for 13 percent of all students in higher education, but they are 22 percent of those in the for-profit sector. Hispanics are 15 percent of those in the for-profit sector, yet 11.5 percent of all students."

For-profit colleges use student recruitment techniques similar to those used by the brokers who pushed sub-prime mortgages during the 2000s--the predatory housing loans that disproportionately targeted African Americans and Latinos, and poor and working-class borrowers. According to the Voice, for-profit colleges:

buy lists [of potential students] from companies like QuinStreet, which made its name providing leads to subprime-mortgage brokers...The idea is to prey on people's hopes and desires, offering that yellow brick road to the American dream: an education and a better job. [Recruitment workers] are trained to identify emotional weaknesses and exploit them.

In fact, a recruitment staffer quoted in the Village Voice article, who worked for Education Management Cop., an operator of for-profit colleges owned in large part by Goldman Sachs, said, "Half the people I worked with, their previous job was in the mortgage industry. They targeted people in that industry...They were the ones that did the best because they were so unscrupulous."

Like those who orchestrated the sub-prime mortgage crisis, top executives at for-profit education companies have been rewarded with multimillion-dollar compensation packages.

According to the Senate report, "[T]he CEOs of the large publicly traded for-profit education companies took home, on average, $7.3 million each in fiscal year 2009"--about seven times the amount earned by the highest-paid heads of the most prestigious public and private non-profit institutions. The best paid of all was Richard Silberman, CEO of Strayer Education, Inc., whose compensation totaled $41.5 million in 2009, placing him among the highest-paid corporate executives in the world.

And that's not to even mention profits. For-profit "education" is incredibly lucrative. Senate investigators say that "many of the companies had profit margins that topped most of Wall Street...the 30 companies examined by the committee generated $3.6 billion in profit, or 19.4 percent of revenue [in 2009]." ITT Educational Services Inc. and Strayer Education Inc. had profit margins of 37.1 percent and 33.7 percent, respectively. On average at these companies, a greater share of total revenues went to profits than to educating students.

And it's the usual suspects who are making money. The Senate report found that "by 2009, at least 76 percent of students attending for-profit colleges were enrolled in a college owned by either a company...traded on a major stock exchange or a college that is owned by a private equity firm."

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THE SENATE report paints a picture of the for-profit higher education industry that looks an awful lot like the sub-prime mortgage industry, whose collapse triggered the financial crisis of 2008.

Wall Street firms and other big-money investors are raking in billions backing companies that aggressively target low-income people, especially Blacks and Latinos, offering them an inferior product at higher costs. More often than not, students at for-profit schools end up in massive debt with little or nothing to show for it.

Even worse for those caught up in the scam is that student loans, unlike mortgages, cannot be discharged through bankruptcy--and lenders can even garnish Social Security payments to collect on outstanding debts. Without major reforms, student loan debt will cripple many of these borrowers for the rest of their lives.

And just like they let the banksters off the hook for the financial crisis, political leaders have refused thus far to do much of anything about the schemes of the for-profit education industry.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced new regulations that were supposed to identify education programs which burden students with high levels of debt--for example, by measuring how many attendees get "gainful employment." But the new rulers were full of enough holes that even the worst offenders among for-profit colleges could pass muster. According to Higher Ed Watch:

Responding to a massive lobbying campaign from the for-profit higher education industry, the administration watered down their proposed regulations to such an extent that only programs that flunk all three of the department's low-bar gainful employment tests are considered to be out of compliance. That means that only programs at which fewer than 35 percent of former students are repaying their loans and where the typical graduates have annual student loan payments that exceed 12 percent of their total earnings and 30 percent of their discretionary income would have eventually been in jeopardy of losing access to federal financial aid.

The for-profit college industry paid good money to avoid any trouble in Washington.According to the Village Voice, "The industry had discovered the value of paying protection money to Congress. It spent $16 million on lobbying last year alone, buying a dream team of former officials that includes former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) and no less than 14 former congressmen."

To add insult to injury, the bulk of the millions that for-profit colleges spend on lobbying comes from the federal government--the source of most of the industry's revenues. So they are essentially using government money to prevent the government from regulating them.

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THE ABUSES of for-profit colleges are an inevitable result of applying the profit motive to a public need like higher education.

In business, the drive for profit trumps every other consideration. For-profit colleges make their money by minimizing costs and maximizing revenues--in this case, spending as little as possible on educating students while charging them as much as possible; spending intensively on marketing to bring in new "customers," regardless of whether or not they actually finish their degree or receive a quality education; and extracting as much of the revenue as possible in the form of profits and lavish salaries and bonuses for top executives.

However, while for-profit colleges are responsible for the worst outrages, they are merely more grotesque examples of a broader trend toward the privatization of public higher education and a "business model" approach to education.

In recent decades, tuition and fees at public colleges has tripled, while grants are increasingly replaced with loans, leaving students drowning in debt. Instead of a public service provided by the state, higher education has been transformed into a prohibitively expensive product, paid for with debt.

Many of the loans students take out to attend public and private non-profit colleges generate massive profits for private lenders. For example, Sallie Mae, the largest lender to students, was privatized in 2004--it rakes in billions from its operations.

And an investigation by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo a few years ago found widespread evidence of unethical and often illegal relationships between lenders and college officials at hundreds of colleges, benefiting the student lending industry at the expense of students.

There are plenty of other examples of how higher education generally is following the privatization trends. Many public universities outsource aspects of their operations to private, for-profit corporations. Full-time professors are increasingly being replaced with lower-paid adjuncts, who lack benefits and job security.

Finally, although public universities and private non-profit colleges are not supposed to generate a profit, trustees and top administrators are often able to enrich themselves in various ways at the expense of students, staff and professors.

So while for-profit colleges are an extreme example of the failure of the market to meet human need, the threat to higher education posed by the pursuit of profit runs much deeper. Addressing this means building a movement that demands higher education--provided by full-time professors with union protection, job security, and good wages and benefits--as a human right.

Taking to NYC's streets against stop-and-frisk

Originally published at Socialist Worker. Also published at ZNET.


NEW YORKERS came out in the thousands for the "End Stop-and-Frisk Silent March Against Racial Profiling" on June 17. A multiracial procession of about 15,000 people stretched for nearly 25 blocks down New York City's Fifth Avenue.

Spearheaded by the NAACP and National Action Network, and endorsed by dozens of labor unions, activist groups, civil rights organizations, cultural groups, and community and religious organizations, the march brought together a diverse group united in its opposition to the racist policies and practices of the New York Police Department.

According to the NAACP, the march was silent "as an illustration of both the tragedy and serious threat that stop-and-frisk and other forms of racial profiling present to our society. The silent march was first used in 1917 by the NAACP--then just eight years old--to draw attention to race riots that tore through communities in East St. Louis, Illinois, and build national opposition to lynching."

Participants in the demonstration explained how this has become a civil rights issue of today. "I've been stopped and frisked for a case of mistaken identity," said Justin, a high school senior in Brooklyn. "The cops stopped and searched me without a warrant, without anything--and they just said, 'Mistaken identity.'" As Justin continued:

It's getting crazy. My little brother just got stopped the other day for no reason...He's only 11, but he's a big kid, so they thought he was older, and they searched him. He was scared, he went home crying to my mother. People are scared to come out of their home thinking they'll be searched by the cops. It shouldn't be like that.

Another marcher, Dina Adams, said she had a lot of personal experience with stop-and-frisk. "I have three teenage sons, and so this is a battle that I go through three times as hard," she said. "It impacted [my middle son] so much that where his schooling and everything--his whole life, seemed to have gone upside down."

"The NYPD has too much power," Adams said. "They need to stop focusing on Blacks and Latinos, stop focusing on our youth, stop screwing their lives up."

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STOP-AND-FRISK is the NYPD policy under which police annually stop and search hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and Latino youth, the overwhelming majority of them innocent of any crime. The policy has effectively criminalized a generation of New Yorkers of color.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, in 2011, the NYPD stopped and frisked New Yorkers 685,724 times. Of these, 88 percent of those detained were released without any action by the cops. A total of 87 percent--or seven out of every eight people stopped--were Black or Latino. Blacks and Latinos make up just over half of the population of New York City.

With over 200,000 stop-and-frisks in the first three months of 2012, according to the police's own statistics, the NYPD is on pace to surpass 800,000 this year, an increase of more than 16 percent last year, and more than eight times the number of stops in 2002.

Young Black men are especially targeted by stop-and-frisk policies. A recent NYCLU report found that "the number of stops of young Black men exceeded the entire city population of young Black men (168,126 as compared to 158,406)."

Stop-and-frisks hardly ever turn up evidence of a crime or a real danger to the community. The NYPD found just one gun for every 3,000 stops in 2011. Despite the fact that stop-and-frisks overwhelmingly target people of color, Blacks and Latinos who are searched are less than half as likely as whites to be found with a weapon.

Thousands of the arrests that do take place during stop-and-frisks are for possession of marijuana, which is only supposed to be an arrestable offense when it is in "public view"--and that only happens as a result of the officers' often illegal searches, say victims of the policy.

As NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told Democracy Now! earlier this month, "This is really the biggest, most aggressive racial profiling problem that we have in this country, and it just has to be stopped."

Beyond profiling, humiliating and terrorizing Blacks and Latinos, stop-and-frisks often lead to police misconduct and brutality--from NYPD Officer Michael Daragjati's boast that he "fried another nigger" after allegedly lying about a stop-and-frisk on a police report, to the beating of 19-year-old Jateik Reed and the murder of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham by the NYPD earlier this year.

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OVER THE past several months, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy has been subjected to heightened scrutiny by activists, lawyers and even politicians.

Last October, 32 activists, including author Cornel West, were arrested in a civil disobedience action against the racial profiling policy outside the NYPD's 28th Precinct in Harlem.

Since then, the spreading "Stop Stop-and-Frisk" movement has raised awareness and generated opposition through numerous protests against the policy and involvement in struggles against police brutality, including campaigns for justice for Jateik Reed, Ramarley Graham and Shantel Davis, an unarmed Black woman gunned down by the NYPD in Brooklyn last week. Activists have passed out thousands of "Stop Stop-and-Frisk" buttons, which are an increasingly common sight on the streets of New York.

This builds on years of efforts by community organizations and coalitions and the New York Civil Liberties Union to document statistics on stop-and-frisks, exposing the racist nature of the program. In addition, Jazz Hayden of the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow has documented stop-and-frisks for years, posting videos online at AllThingsHarlem.com, in spite of a retaliatory arrest by NYPD officers who Hayden was monitoring.

Pressure has also been building on the legal front. Last month, a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit against the NYPD for its stop-and-frisk policy. This will allow hundreds of thousands of victims of the policy to be represented in the suit collectively.

Also, the tireless efforts for justice on the part of family members of victims of stop-and-frisk-related police brutality--such as Rev. Bernard Walker, the father of Jateik Reed, and Constance Malcolm and Franclot Graham, the parents of Ramarley Graham--have provided the movement with further centers for organizing. These parents' calls for justice have gone beyond demanding accountability from the officers who brutalized or killed their children, indicting the stop-and-frisk policy as a whole.

Adding to the momentum were related anti-racist mobilizations of the past months, from the 1,000-plus New Yorkers who took to the streets after the execution of Troy Davis in September 2011 to the 5,000 people who marched from Union Square on March 21 as part of the nationwide "million hoodies" marches demanding justice for Trayvon Martin.

All this pressure has prompted local politicians to address the issue of stop-and-frisk. In February, City Council member Jumaane Williams and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer held a press conference calling for an end to the policy "as presently constituted," in the words of Stringer.
Then, earlier this month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana in public view, a pretext for thousands of stop-and-frisk-related arrests each year.
However, the movement has yet to force Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to back down.

One week before the march, Bloomberg had the nerve to defend stop-and-frisk at a Black church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, one of the hot spots for the policy, where there is roughly one stop-and-frisk per resident per year in a single eight-block area.

The mayor again defended the policy on Fathers' Day, even as marchers stopped by his apartment on the Upper East Side to express their outrage. However, he addressed the issue of police abuse and claimed that the number of stop-and-frisks would decline in the coming months--a sign that even Bloomberg may be yielding to pressure from activists.

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THE URGENCY of the marchers' feelings about racial profiling was clear from the first gatherings for the Sunday march.

Ramarley Graham's parents organized a feeder march that kicked off two hours before the main silent march. About 300 people rallied at 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to demand justice for Ramarley, before marching down Malcolm X Boulevard to 110th Street to join the bigger march, with Ramarley's parents in the lead.
As Constance Malcolm told the crowd:

This is not just about Ramarley. [It's] about the youth and the Black people in this community...We've been brutalized for so long. We have to stand up and let Mayor Bloomberga nd Kelly know that we are sick and tired of this! You can't keep killing our kids. They are the future, and we are going to stand up and let you all know we're going to fight back, no matter what it takes.

Malcolm encouraged the crowd to come to the 161st Street Courthouse in the Bronx on September 13 for the next court date for Richard Haste, the NYPD officer who was indicted last week for manslaughter for shooting her son. "We don't want [Haste] to get away with this," she said. Speaking about police support for Haste, she said, "They were glorifying this man, clapping and chanting...You take a young man's life, and you sit and laugh about it--what kind of man are you? This is an epidemic."

Garth Thomas Messiah, who only a few days before witnessed the killing of Shantel Davis, a 23-year-old Black woman, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, also spoke. "It was hurtful, how they've slain a young, 23-year-old-Black woman," he said. "That was not an accident, it was cold-blooded murder...After he murdered her, he put the gun back in his holster with blood all over him."

At the gathering point before the silent march, Heavy Dev, a junior in high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, spoke about his experience being stopped and frisked: "Just because I was walking down the street with two people, and we had hoods on...he said we were a gang looking for trouble. But when he got close to us he said, 'Oh, you don't look like troublemakers.'...So basically the way we look is how they judge us."

David Francis, of Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, explained why labor turned out for the silent march:

The youth as well as minorities have gotten involved in labor because that was our only means of getting some fairness, of having equality within society--and yes, it's all connected together. It's like a domino--you knock one down, and they're all going to fall. They're trying to divide us, and we're just at a point in time where we all need to come together.

Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke about the connections between stop-and-frisk and NYPD spying on Arabs and Muslims:

It all goes back to the same thing--it's religious and ethnic profiling, discriminatory policies by the NYPD, and the lack of accountability. So we're here to show the NYPD that it's not just Blacks and Latinos who are out in the streets screaming, it's Arabs and Muslims, and Caribbean people and immigrants, and white people of conscience...It's New Yorkers. We're here to show our solidarity and demand accountability from the NYPD.

One less-talked-about consequence of stop-and-frisk is its impact on transgender youth, particularly transgender youth of color. "The young people I work with, especially my trans clients of color, are targeted," said Raven Burgos. "This happens all of the time--they're exposed to violence, they're policed, they're moved."

Rachel Cholst said she saw the impact of stop-and-frisk as a student teacher of an eight-grade class in Brooklyn. "Some of these kids, by the time they're 13, it's a normal experience for them," Cholst said. "Especially if they happen to be larger or have gone through puberty, it's not unusual for them to be stopped by police and illegally searched. I think it gives them a sense of being criminalized. I can't imagine what it feels like as a child to walk around assuming that adults have it in for you."

Jose LaSalle, an activist with the "Stop Stop-and-Frisk" campaign talked about about the importance of struggle, both winning justice in individual cases like Ramarley Graham, and in the wider fight:

With stop-and-frisk, they racially profile people...That's the reason why they followed Ramarley--because they saw a young Black man around his own neighborhood, and they assume that he was out there dealing drugs. And then they follow him, and they thought they were going to get lucky and discover some guns or drugs in the house, but they didn't.

The human family is tired, and the more support that we get, and the more people we can have in these courts when the hearings are taking place, the more people are going to understand that we're not going to stop until we get real justice.

Adriano Contreras contributed to this article.

Deregulation and the Democrats

Published in "Readers' Views" at Socialist Worker.

I WAS happy to read about the victory for port truck drivers in Los Angeles employed by the Toll Group, who gained union recognition ("Union victory for port drivers").

This is an important victory for workers with a lot of social power given that by withdrawing their labor, port truckers are able to stop the transport of goods through one of the key ports in the country.

At the beginning of the interview, Leonardo Mejia stated that Ronald Reagan deregulated the trucking industry by signing the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, paving the way for trucking companies to bust unions at the ports (and elsewhere) by replacing unionized drivers with non-union "independent contractors." While Reagan did more than his share of union-busting, the Motor Carrier Act was actually signed into law by Reagan's Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter.

Reagan was an enemy of the working class, but it's important to understand that the assault on working-class living standards over the last three decades, a central component of neoliberalism, was a bipartisan effort from the beginning.

In fact, Jimmy Carter launched a number of policy initiatives beyond the anti-union deregulation of the trucking industry that were later taken up by the Republicans, policies that many attribute to that party even though Democrats were complicit and in many cases initiated them.

For example, Carter appointed Paul Volcker, Jr. as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker, who was later reappointed by Reagan in 1983. In 1979, Volcker said that "the standard of living of the average American has to decline." His solution to the crisis of the 1970s was to jack up interest rates, which triggered a recession that saw unemployment rise, laying the ground for big business to attack unions and drive workers' living standards down to increase the rate of profit.

The deregulation of the trucking industry and the "Volcker shock," along with Ronald Reagan's crushing of the PATCO air traffic controllers' strike, mark the beginnings of the neoliberal assault on workers' living standards and unions.

Finally, Carter announced in 1980 what became known as the "Carter Doctrine," where he declared control over Middle East oil to be of vital interest to the United States, and something to be defended by military force.

Rather than shifting course, Reagan continued and expanded upon Carter's Middle East policy, as did George H.W. Bush in launching the first war against Iraq, Bill Clinton in carrying out bombings and crippling sanctions, and George W. Bush in launching the second.

Every gain that the labor movement has won has been the result of the struggles of workers' themselves, in spite of the efforts of Republicans and Democrats, the two parties of American capitalism. That is why this victory for the Port truckers is so important.

What took him so long?

Published at Socialist Worker, with Alan Maass and Derron Thweatt.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY was back at the center stage of national politics last week when President Barack Obama said in an interview with ABC News that he thought "same-sex couples should be able to get married."

Obama's statement was greeted by a deluge of praise from organizations and individuals that support LGBT and civil rights, including the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, National Council of La Raza and ACLU.

According to the HRC's Joe Solomonese, "Thanks to President Obama's leadership, millions of young Americans have seen that their futures will not be limited by what makes them different." Playwright Tony Kushner told Democracy Now! "[I]t's incredibly moving to see the president of the United States--in my opinion, a great president--becoming the first president to say that same-sex couples...should have the legal right to marry. I'm very proud of him, if that's not a silly thing to say."

Obama's reelection campaign instantly moved into action to capitalize on the announcement, featuring a quote from the interview prominently on the front page of its website and posting ads to Facebook urging supporters to donate to "help President Obama keep fighting for LGBT rights."

The statement understandably energized many supporters of LGBT equality who hope this means the Democrats will finally get off the fence on this issue. And since one of the right's favorite myths about marriage equality is that African Americans are generally hostile to it, Obama's words may help fix that misconception.

But something more needs to be said: Barack Obama doesn't deserve the praise he's getting--nor the credit for "fighting for LGBT rights."

Obama isn't being a "leader" on the issue of marriage equality, as some supporters claim, but a latecomer. His position only "evolved" to an open statement of sympathy after opinion polls showed it was a politically safe position among a large majority of the population outside of conservative Republicans.

That sea change in public sentiment was driven not by politicians, but because masses of LGBT people and their supporters spoke up and took action. Their position on what ought to be considered an elementary right hasn't "evolved," and they have good reason to be frustrated when supporters of the Democrats claim that Obama is making a "courageous" statement.

Nor should we forget the damage that Obama did to the cause of marriage equality by remaining silent at best during his campaign for the presidency and his time in office so far--up to and including the successful effort that led to the passage of an anti-gay marriage referendum in North Carolina last week.

And supporters of LGBT civil rights and equality should also take a close look at how Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. He didn't vow to take any action on the issue. In fact, Obama insisted that he was only stating his personal beliefs, and that he still thinks same-sex marriage is an issue for states to decide--like North Carolina just did, apparently--not the federal government.

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OBAMA'S STATEMENT on national television that he personally supports same-sex marriage is, of course, historic. It represents a break from the attitudes and actions of the White House over many decades.

Ronald Reagan refused to even use the word AIDS until 1987, after thousands of mostly gay men had died in a crisis devastated the LGBT community. In 1989, George H.W. Bush refused to acknowledge the NAMES Project AIDS quilt laid out on the National Mall.

In 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, allowed states to ignore the validity of same-sex marriages performed in other states, and denied federal benefits to same-sex married couples. When Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to allow same-sex marriage in 2004, George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual institution.

And then there's Barack Obama, who, as a presidential candidate in 2008, said, "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman"--and whose Justice Department went to court to defend DOMA.

In fact, Obama's position on same-sex marriage has evolved...back to what he said he believed 15 years ago. In 1996, during his first campaign for state Senate in Illinois, Obama wrote in a letter to an LGBT magazine: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight any effort to prohibit such marriages."

But when he ran for U.S. senator in 2003, he changed his position, saying he would oppose repealing DOMA and believed marriage must be between a man and a woman. As his presidential campaign was getting underway in 2007, Obama "evolved" a little more, stating that he now thought DOMA should be repealed, but still opposed same-sex marriage.

Obama's decision to revert back to support for marriage equality today is an easier position to take given the vast shift in public opinion during Obama's political career. In 1996, national Gallup polls showed just 27 percent of people supported marriage equality. Last year, polls found for the first time that a majority of respondents believed same-sex couples deserve the right to marry.

More importantly for Obama and the Democrats, two-thirds of people who call themselves Democrats and 57 percent of self-described "independents" support marriage equality. In other words, among base supporters of the Democratic Party, and even among the "swing voters" that the Obama campaign obsesses over, there is strong support for marriage equality.

This shift in public opinion is the hard-won result of years of activism at the local, state and federal level--and, more broadly, the willingness of LGBT people and those who support them to speak up in all kinds of settings, personal and public, against discrimination and bigotry. In fact, the tide of support might be even greater if leading Democrats like Obama hadn't treated marriage equality as a political football, rather than the fundamental civil rights issue it is.

Obama and his advisers also know that his statement of support for same-sex marriage will energize supporters, despite the three-and-a-half years of disappointment about the behavior of the Democrats, even when they had a majority in both houses of Congress. For certain, the announcement resulted in a campaign donation bonanza.

The Obama campaign reportedly raised over $1 million in the first 90 minutes after news broke about his "change of heart" on marriage equality--and the day after the interview was broadcast, Obama raked in $15 million at a fundraiser hosted by George Clooney. Previously, many pro-LGBT funders had threatened to withhold donations when Obama refused recently to issue an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT employees.

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SUPPORTERS OF the Democrats shouldn't be so quick to forgive Obama. His previous anti-marriage equality position has had lasting consequences.

On the night Obama was elected in 2008, the Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban passed in California by a narrow margin. Supporters of Prop 8 used Obama's statement about marriage being between a man and a woman in advertisements promoting the ballot measure. Not only did the Obama campaign stay silent about the pro-Prop 8 propaganda, but the Democratic Party establishment failed to build opposition that could have shifted the vote.

The same thing happened in late 2009, when Maine voters passed a referendum repealing legalized same-sex marriage--and again this year with the anti-marriage equality referendum in North Carolina. In fact, Obama has already made several campaign appearances in North Carolina this year, but he didn't say a word against the anti-LGBT referendum.

After taking office in 2009, Obama did nothing to get DOMA overturned. On the contrary, the Justice Department defended the law in federal court--in a brief filed by federal lawyers compared same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia. The Justice Department only stopped defending DOMA last year.

This pattern showed up on other issues--like repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" ban on LGBT people serving openly in the military. Obama refused to use an executive order to end "don't ask, don't tell." Even after Congress passed a repeal bill at the end of 2010, the Pentagon, supposedly under Obama's command, continued to enforce the ban--only stopping when a federal judge ordered it to in the summer of 2011. When "don't ask, don't tell" was finally ended, more than 80 percent of people in the U.S. supported its repeal.

Supporters of the Democratic Party will credit Obama as a fighter for LGBT equality, but the real credit belongs to the tireless efforts of advocates and activists for LGBT rights over the years, as well as the bravery of millions of LGBT people who have come out to family, friends and coworkers, and who have spoken up against discrimination.

Obama might never have said a thing about marriage equality or DOMA or "don't ask, don't tell" if not for the tens of thousands of people who got active following the passage of Prop 8 and organized grassroots protests in California and around the country--culminating in more than 200,000 people descending on Washington, D.C. in October 2009 for the National Equality March to demand full federal equality for LGBT people.

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NOT ONLY is Obama late to the game when it comes to marriage equality, but he undercut his stand by saying it should still be the right of states to decide on the issue.

As columnist Dan Savage pointed out, the ABC News report about Obama's interview included a "straddle"--according to ABC, "The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own." "So," Savage wrote, "the president supports same-sex marriage while also supporting the right of states to ban the same-sex marriages that he supports."

The idea of state's rights, of course, has been used to defend many reactionary policies and institutions of the past--like Jim Crow segregation, which had to be overturned by the federal government over the opposition of the Southern states.

Until the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, for example, it was still legal for states to outlaw interracial marriages. No one would claim the struggle against this racist injustice was complete while states could still "decide" on the legality of such marriages. The same should be true about same-sex marriage.

Thus, Obama's statement that marriage equality should be left up to the states raises questions about the consequences of his "change of heart." For example, one of the main planks of DOMA is that states can choose to ignore the validity of same-sex marriages performed in other states. So what does Obama think now about repealing DOMA--something the Democrats promised in 2008, but failed to accomplish, even when they controlled both houses of Congress with strong majorities?

This position also puts Obama at odds with the current legal case against Proposition 8. Lawyers challenging the referendum say the right to marriage for same-sex couples is guaranteed by the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment, which states that "no state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Obama has taken a long-overdue step by returning to his previous position of personally supporting marriage equality. Activists may be right in hoping the statement will make it harder for Democrats to back away from future action in defense of equality.

Another positive consequence is that Obama's statement will help to challenge the myth that African Americans are generally hostile to same-sex marriage. Polls show that public opinion in the Black community has shifted from two-thirds opposed to roughly the same level of support as the U.S. population as a whole.

Still, we shouldn't forget that Obama left a loophole in his statement with his talk about the rights of states to decide the question.

And most important of all, we should challenge the idea that Obama led the way in this struggle. In reality, he was dragged into saying (mostly) the right thing--thanks to the actions and arguments of supporters of LGBT equality everywhere.

In the streets for May Day

Published at Socialist Worker, with Alan Maass.

MAY DAY--the international workers' holiday with its origins in the struggles of the U.S. labor movement more than a century ago--was marked by demonstrations and events in cities around the country this year.

The biggest single demonstration was in New York City, where as many as 30,000 people came out to a rally and march to Wall Street. But there were other actions in New York--and in cities around the country, people came together in their hundreds and thousands, surpassing the expectations of organizers in a number of cases.

This year was the largest mobilization for May Day since the hey day of the immigrant rights mega-marches starting in 2006. Immigrant rights and labor groups were in the thick of the organizing, but so were activists from the Occupy movement of last fall, who looked to May 1 as an opportunity to reassert the message of the 99 percent against the greed, power and corruption of the 1 percent.

That the Occupy movement, like many other struggles before it, looked to May Day as a celebration of solidarity is a signal of the depths of the radicalization. Whatever the size of the demonstrations, they represented an attempt to connect the organizing of today to the rich history of working-class struggle in the U.S.

Of course, May Day was preceded by calls for a general strike of the U.S. working class and mass, nationwide consumer boycotts, but few people expected anything like that to happen. Almost everywhere, activists were happy to report stronger-than-expected turnouts for marches and rallies.

Predictably, the corporate media focused on confrontations between police and demonstrators in a handful of cities. Unfortunately, as has become increasingly clear over this year, a section of the Occupy movement has drifted toward a strategy that seeks a face-off with police and the threat of mass arrest, even when there is no potential of mobilizing the much wider layers of support that the Occupy struggle enjoyed last fall at its height.

The May Day demonstrations this year show the potential for taking new steps forward--crucially, with the renewed connections between unions, immigrant rights organizations and Occupy. The question for activists now has to be how we can deepen these ties and take new steps to broaden participation in the effort to build a left alternative to the world of the 1 percent.

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-- In New York City, as many as 30,000 people gathered in Union Square on May 1 for the May Day 2012 Solidarity Rally and March to Wall Street. The event was the high point of a day of struggle to mark International Workers' Day and a test for Occupy Wall Street after a relative lull over the winter months.

The day began in the early morning rain in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, a staging area of sorts for protesters to meet before heading off to other events.

There were "99 Pickets" actions, including pickets at the Bank of America Tower, Chase bank headquarters and others. In addition to the banks, picket lines were organized to support of different groups of workers, including those demanding a decent contract at the Strand bookstore, protesting the mistreatment of workers at Hot & Crusty restaurants, and standing against the closure of post offices.

Some of the larger events during the day included the Immigrant Worker Justice Tour, a march of over 500 that made several stops, including at Wells Fargo to protest the bank's investment in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, which profit off the detention of immigrants.
The march also stopped by the Chipotle restaurant near Bryant Park in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which is trying to pressure the chain to require higher pay and better conditions for Florida farmworkers who pick tomatoes.

Outside the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, which houses the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, some 250 people gathered to protest the criminalization of immigrant workers. The picket, organized by Break the Chains, demanded an end to attacks on all workers organizing for their rights, the freedom to file complaint with government agencies without fear of retribution, and abolition of sanctions against employers for employing undocumented workers.

"We felt on this May Day we want to call out to workers--both immigrant and native born--to unite and come together, not just in word, but with a common demand," organizer Sarah Ahn said in an interview. "All workers, regardless of immigration status, have the right to file complaints with the government and organize."

Another highlight was guitarist Tom Morello, the "Nightwatchman," formerly of Rage Against the Machine, who led a "Guitarmy" march of hundreds of musicians from Bryant Park to Union Square. At Madison Square Park, at least 200 participated in a "Free University," with classes from colleges and universities from throughout the city taught in the park.

A few people were arrested throughout the day, including arrests at the "wildcat march" of over 200 people clad in black masks and hoodies, who took to the streets in lower Manhattan, throwing trash cans and traffic cones.

In New York, as in other cities, the media focused on these confrontations with police. But for activists, the May Day events demonstrated that Occupy Wall Street still has the potential to mobilize significant numbers.

That potential, even broader than Occupy, was clear at the afternoon solidarity march and rally. The 30,000 union members, unorganized workers, immigrants, Occupy activists, socialists, anarchists, radicals, students and youth who gathered in Union Square to listen to speeches and march on Wall Street showed the potential to build a real movement of, for and by the 99 percent.

The march was organized by the Alliance for Labor Rights, Immigrant Rights, Jobs for All; the May 1st Coalition for Immigrant and Worker Rights, immigrant and community groups, and Occupy Wall Street. With endorsements from dozens of union locals, among other groups, the march most of all succeeded in bringing together immigrants--whose mega-marches in 2006 reintroduced May Day as a day of mass action in the U.S.--and organized labor.

In recent years, immigrant rights groups and labor in New York City have held separate rallies, so it was a step forward that they marched together this year.

Some of the largest union turnouts came from the Laborers union and Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents workers in New York's mass transit system and was the first union to publicly support Occupy Wall Street.

Sandra, an immigrant from Grenada, was there with Families for Freedom. She said the group is "an organization that supports families who are facing deportation. A couple years ago, my son was picked up by Homeland Security and was facing deportation...It's because of Families for Freedom that my son was released." Sandra continued, "It's important for us to be out here to support each other, and for us to get freedom."

Constancia Romilly, a retired nurse from Bellevue Hospital with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), attended the rally with members of her union. She said, "The rich people are destroying our health care...we all have to be out here if you're part of the working class, if you're a teacher, a nurse, a construction worker. Today is May Day, we're all supposed to be out here."

Roberto Rodriguez, a retired postal worker, said that "the attack on the postal services is an example of the attack on so many public services. It's public schools versus charters, and now it's the public postal service versus the privatization of its activities."

Janice Walcott of Communications Workers of America Local 1180 attended the protest to stand up against the attack on women. "We're here to protest what's going on with women's rights, as far as birth control and what have you," she said, "and to let the mayor know we're against a lot of the things he's doing."

Ahmad Jarara, Joseph Baez and Gabriel Silver of Brooklyn Tech High School, attended the rally in Union Square. Their school, along with Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn, held walkouts for May Day, and in support of Tamon Robinson, a 27-year-old Black man who was a barista at a Connecticut Muffin store next to Brooklyn Tech in Fort Greene. Robinson was run over by an NYPD cruiser last month and died from his injuries. Police allegedly handcuffed a comatose Robinson to a hospital bed and denied his family access. Minor charges against him, which involved claims that Robinson stole paving stones, were dropped before he passed away April 18.

When the tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, the march at one point stretched all the way from Union Square to Canal Street, a distance of nearly 1.5 miles. The march passed Zucotti Park, the original site of Occupy Wall Street, which was cordoned off by barricades and dozens of police officers.

Hip-hop artist and Brooklyn native Yasiin Bey, also known as Mos Def, was on the march. "There are a lot of artists here in support, cause we're human beings," he said. "We thrive off one another's happiness and success, and prosperity and peace and not each other's misery, and a system that proposes that the only way to get ahead is to crush other people, or to make other people small so you can feel big, is anti-human."

He also spoke about recent police murders of Black men, including Ramarley Graham, the unarmed 18-year-old shot and killed by police in the Bronx just a two months ago: "There are so many, so many, Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin...let alone the hundreds and hundreds of youth unfairly imprisoned, tried as adults across the country."

Asked about the May Day protest, he said, "It's timely. It's not an isolated thing, it's happening all over the world...the world is smaller than it's ever been these days."

-- In Seattle, thousands of people took to the streets on May Day for a full day of actions and events.
The biggest demonstration was during the evening rush hour commute, when more than 5,000 people marched and rallied for immigrant and worker rights, despite rain showers. The diverse, multiracial and multi-generational crowd chanted against ICE raids and the federal E-verify system while demanding educational opportunities and better working conditions. Occupy chants against inequality and the greed and corruption of banks and the 1 percent were also popular.

Throughout the day, Occupy Seattle held a hip-hop showcase and rallies at Westlake Park downtown as part of the May Day "general strike." About 500 mostly young protesters took part, with student walkouts from Seattle Central Community College and a few local high schools swelling the numbers. From Westlake, several marches left at different points during the day.

Unfortunately, the broad mass immigration and labor march was overshadowed in the media and public awareness by clashes between protesters and the police during demonstrations earlier in the day.

A lunchtime anti-capitalist march of a few hundred wound through downtown, chanting "Hella hella Occupy, the system has got to die." Several dozen Black Bloc anarchists painted graffiti, slashed car tires and smashed windows at numerous stores, banks and a federal courthouse. Police responded with tear gas, pepper spray and batons as demonstrators ran back to Westlake, and the anarchists stripped off their black clothing and masks.

Following the noon march, Mayor Mike McGinn ordered police to use "swift and aggressive" force in response to "unruly" protesters, and banned any protest signs, sticks, and flags that could be used as "weapons." Many stores and businesses downtown closed early and boarded up their windows. In all, fewer than a dozen demonstrators were arrested, some charged with felony assault of police.
During a subsequent march against police brutality and racism, protesters clashed with police near Pike Place Market and Westlake as they tried to block intersections.

-- In Oakland, Calif., there were numerous demonstrations and events to mark International Workers Day.

The mainstream media's coverage of May Day focused on the battles between police and demonstrators who seemed ready to provoke a confrontation. There was much less coverage for what was by far the largest demonstration in the city and the Bay Area as a whole--a march starting in the afternoon in the immigrant neighborhood of Fruitvale and ending downtown for an evening rally. The speakers' list for the rally ranged from immigrant rights activists to hip-hop artist Boots Riley of The Coup to Oakland homeowners fighting against foreclosures on their homes.

The march was organized by a coalition of immigrant rights groups and Occupy and other activists, and was led by a banner declaring "Dignity and Resistance." The crowd grew to around 4,000.
The march was led by workers from the Pacific Steel Company in Berkeley and other immigrant workers. Union members at Pacific Steel have been fired due to the company's voluntary implementation of e-Verify, and have been fighting to regain their jobs. They have been in the forefront of the planning of this march and other struggles since the beginning of the year. Many other unions took part in this year's annual march.

Organizers attempted to reach out to undocumented workers and Latino families. The big turnout showed that the immigrant rights movement, though reeling from the heightened attacks in Arizona and elsewhere, is still alive. Muteado, a Latino activist, stated: "I'm here to protest and demand...that there needs to be change in immigration reform. My ancestors, my people, have been migrating through the Americas for centuries. These borders were created to criminalize our people."

Marchers know only too well that the economic recession has hit immigrant communities and communities of color the hardest. "I've been unemployed for a year," said Ricardo of the Street Level Health Project, an organization which provides health care for impoverished people in Latino communities. "There are few jobs available, and wages have gone down a lot. You need $15 an hour to survive in the Bay Area--we're getting $8.50 and doing outreach in those communities and to migrant workers and day laborers."

Also joining the march was the Million Hoodie and Hijab contingent, in solidarity with victims of racist murders, particularly Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi. Participants wore notes pinned to their sleeves asking, "Does this hijab make me look suspicious?"

Earlier in the day, activists gathered downtown for actions that quickly devolved into running confrontations with police. The Oakland cops were again quick to lash out, having mobilized other law enforcement around the area to be part of the May Day operation. Several personnel from he Alameda County Sheriff's Department spent the day driving a tank, provided by the Department of Homeland Security, around the streets of Oakland. Yes, you read that right: a tank.

The battles with police escalated in the evening after the main rallies and marches of the day were over. As many as 1,000 demonstrators remained in the downtown area around the former encampment site of Occupy Oakland. When police issued a dispersal order, according to reports, a group of several hundred demonstrators, equipped with homemade shields, faced off with police, who fired tear gas and other weapons. At least 25 people were arrested over the course of the day.

-- In the Bay Area, hundreds of nurses participated in pickets on May Day during a one-day strike against Sutter Health hospitals. The nurses, represented by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, have been fighting for a fair contract with Sutter Health for over a year.
Since June 2011, Sutter Health has been unwavering in its drive to cut benefits and standards.

Management has demanded over 100 concessions from the union, including eliminating paid sick leave for nurses, thousands of dollars a year in additional out-of-pocket costs for health care, reduced maternity leave, and elimination of health coverage for nurses who work less than 30 hours a week.
"This is the third time we've had a one day strike," said nurse Grace McGuiness. "We're fighting, and every time we do a strike, the company locks us out for a few days." This time, Sutter announced it would not allow the nurses to return to work until Sunday, May 6.

"It shows that they don't care," said Lisa, also a Sutter nurse. "Last time, they locked us out, a patient died because they would not allow us to return to work to take care of our patients."

Many on the picket line talked about the significance of striking on International Workers Day, pointing out a rich history of labor struggles and the need to continue the fight around the issues driving the health care crisis today. Millicent Borland, a nurse on the bargaining team, commented, "I'm here today because in nonunion hospitals, many nurses have [as many as 10 patients they must take care of]. Here at Sutter, we have [a ratio of one nurse to four or five patients] because of the union. I don't want the young nurses that come behind me to be worse off than I had it. We must fight."

-- In San Francisco, International Workers Day began bright and early with Golden Gate ferry workers picketing at the Larkspur and San Francisco ferry terminal, starting from 5:30 a.m.

The May Day strike was called earlier in the week by the Inlandboatmen's Union and was supported by the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition, comprised of various unions that represent 380 bridge, bus and ferry workers. Members of this coalition have been without a contract for over a year and are demanding a fair contract, including decent health care coverage.

Ferry workers are also fighting for their jobs as management tries to replace ferry worker assistants. Rene Alvarado, a terminal assistant at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal and member of the Inlandboatmen's Union, said in a press release, "Since they laid off the ticket agents, our work has quadrupled. We don't want management to lay us off, too. Everyone knows it's better to have a human being helping passengers than a machine.

Ferry service was essentially shut down until 2 p.m. To further escalate the fight for a fair contract, bus workers from Teamsters Local 665 said they would be going on strike in early May.

Labor protested the day before May Day as well. Inspired by the Capitol occupation in Madison, Wis., last year, more than 300 members of SEIU Local 1021 occupied City Hall to demand a fair contract and no increases on health care costs. The rotunda was decorated with beautiful handmade signs, each one sending a message to Mayor Ed Lee, "Downtown greed or the city we need."
Though the City Hall occupation did not turn into an overnight occupation, SEIU 1021 members were confident they delivered their message loud and clear.

On May Day itself, the action continued with a 10 a.m. march in the Mission, a well-known area in San Francisco with a large Latino and immigrant community. More than 200 people marched from 24th and Mission to 16th and Mission, where they took over the intersection and held a street theater, with different skits around issues the community faces on a daily basis.

After the march in the Mission, May Day participants made their way to Westfield Mall at around 11 a.m. to support the janitors of SEIU Local 87, who held a rally and a banner drop to highlight their ongoing dispute with building management. SEIU Local 87 and supporters picketed outside of Westfield Mall until around noon, when May Day demonstrators moved ahead to the financial district.

The noon protest was the biggest convergence of the day--hundreds of people took over the Montgomery and Market intersection and held a People's Street Festival to celebrate International Workers Day. People listened to music and speeches, and painted a mural on the street.

After the People's Street Festival, many people headed across the bay to a regional march in Oakland. Several hundred activists occupied a vacant building owned by the archdiocese of the Catholic Church. The building was previously taken over by Occupy activists. According to police accounts, two people on adjoining rooftops threw rocks and pipes onto police and other people gathered outside the occupied building. Police moved in before dawn to clear the building, arresting 26 people.

-- In Portland, Ore., activists were up early to celebrate International Workers' Day. Hours before the main march and rally for immigrant and workers rights had set up, hundreds of students assembled at the Portland Public School District Office to protest planned cuts to education. They took over streets, bridges and finally the rotunda in front of City Hall. Mayor Sam Adams made an appearance to address the students, thanking them for their protest and opening City Hall for small groups to use the facilities.

On the other side of town, hundreds more marched through the streets of North and Northeast Portland, a historically African American part of town which has been hit hard by the banksters' financial crisis.

Around 450 people participated in an action organized by the Occupy N/NE "Black Working Group," We Are Oregon and the Portland Liberation Organizing Council with the aim of defending Alicia Jackson as she moved back into her foreclosed home. After 45 minutes of rallying at Woodlawn Park, we marched in the streets for several blocks to Alicia's house.

The property had previously been illegally claimed by Wells Fargo, but after a year of vacancy, demonstrators cut a ribbon was cut, and the front door was opened to move the rightful residents back inside. A large group sang and danced around a May Pole made with red and black ribbons tied to the top of the sign advertising the property for rent. Volunteers moved Alicia's stuff out of vans, while others worked on cleaning up the inside of the house, and even more volunteers tore out the overgrowth in her back yard in order to build a garden.

The whole event resembled a neighborhood block party as folks stood in the street, laughing, eating donated food, talking politics, throwing foam balls to each other and generally celebrating the process of building community support networks for those facing eviction from foreclosure. The protest was the result of several weeks of activism leading up to May Day, with We Are Oregon going door to door on the blocks surrounding Alicia's home to build support.

Meanwhile, the main May Day demonstration, an annual event in this city, a crowd estimated at 2,000 people by the media marched through the streets in a demonstration for immigrant rights and jobs.

-- In Chicago, more than 3,000 people turned out for Chicago's May Day demonstration. The day's main march began with a rally at Union Park west of downtown, paused for a moment of silence in the middle of an intersection near what was once Haymarket Square, and concluded with a rally at Federal Plaza.

The march brought together immigrant rights groups, unions and Occupy Chicago in an inspiring display of solidarity in defense of workers' rights. Popular chants included, "Money for jobs and education, not for racist deportation," "How do we fix the deficit? End the wars, tax the rich!" and "Hey Rahm Emanuel, take your cuts, and go to hell!"

The march was generationally and racially diverse, with veteran activists marching alongside young people who've become active through Occupy Chicago. As the march approached the former site of Haymarket Square--the best-known symbol today of the eight-hour day struggle in 1886 that gave rise to Intenrational Workers Day--the entire crowd took a knee to pay their respects to everyone who paid with their lives in the struggle.

Along with immigrant rights and Occupy activists, the rally had the backing of several key unions, including UNITE HERE, Workers United, Teamsters Local 705 and the Chicago Teachers Union. Several unions sent small but visible contingents, including United Auto Workers Local 551, which represents workers at the Ford assembly plant on Chicago's South Side.

During the march, some 80 black-clad protesters made an attempt to take control at the front of the protest, chanting, "From Chicago to Greece, fuck the police!" and setting off firecrackers. But despite some tense moments, the march marshals gained control and maintained the ranks of the protest, heading off a confrontation with police that could have endangered undocumented workers on the march.

-- In Boston, despite pouring rain, over 1,000 people marched for immigrant rights in a demonstration that began in East Boston and marched through Chelsea to Everett--all parts of the city with the highest concentration of immigrants from Latin America.

Across the harbor, a smaller number of Occupy Boston protesters marched through the financial district and rallied at City Hall. "Today, I'm hoping just to get people aware of what May Day is, get people aware that there is an issue in this country and that they can do something about it," said Emerson College student Suzi Pietroluongo.

-- In Montpelier, Vt., more than 1,000 Vermonters came out to the annual Vermont Workers' Center May Day March and Rally. This year's actions drew together participants from dozens of groups--local unions and anti-sexist groups, climate justice organizations and immigrant rights organizers, leftists, anti-student debt campaigners and occupiers.

The most inspiring chants came from the Justica Migrante contingent, which filled the streets of Vermont's tiny capital city with the call "El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido!" This coalition of immigrant workers, the marginalized backbone of the profitable Vermont dairy industry, has been struggling for the right of immigrants to obtain drivers licenses in this rural state. It was an important reminder that the struggle for immigrant rights extends to every corner of the U.S.

Also present were members of local postal workers unions. One worker, John, expressed cautious optimism that recent developments in Congress could stave off draconian cuts. But more inspiring to him were postal workers themselves, who, supported by their communities, organized and demonstrated against plans to dismantle the post office.

-- In Rochester, N.Y., members of Occupy Rochester, the Rochester Labor Council (AFL-CIO), local unions and many local activists came out for a daylong celebration of International Workers Day. More than 100 people participated throughout the day in two separate rallies, a three-hour block of workshops and an evening picnic.

A noon rally outside Rochester City Hall demanded a living wage for all workers, a rise in the national minimum wage and a defense of public sector workers. Midday workshops, 10 in all, highlighted the history of May Day, immigrant rights, the history of the sit-down strike, and housing rights, among others. The 5 p.m. rally at the Liberty Pole in the middle of downtown featured the president of the Rochester Labor Council Jim Bertolone. The evening picnic had food provided by Occupy Rochester, labor songs and several performances of spoken word.

-- In Pittsburgh, around 200 people rallied in the Hill District and then followed up with a spirited march through downtown to decry high health care costs, cuts to mass transit, police brutality, economic disparities and other issues.

The march stopped at the Consol Energy Center, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Speakers revealed how the hockey team got sweetheart deals by schmoozing politicians at the expense of the people. The next stop was the headquarters of health care giant UPMC, where speakers described the crisis of the health care system and the need to organize for universal coverage. Then it was off to PNC Plaza, near the office of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett--better known to protesters as "Tom Corporate."

Along the way, police attempted to keep the crowd on the sidewalk, but gave up as marchers repeatedly took to the streets. The police finally obliged and blocked traffic for the protesters at key intersections.

A coalition of groups helped to organize the march, including Occupy Pittsburgh, Pittsburghers for Public Transit, the Thomas Merton Center, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Workers International League, and the ISO.

-- In Austin, Texas, nearly two hundred people gathered in front of the Capitol building to celebrate May Day. Speakers from the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition, Workers' Defense Project, International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice for Palestine, Occupy Austin, Activate Austin and UT Sweat Shop Free Coalition all spoke.

Speakers addressed issues ranging from anti-immigrant racism to the Lockheed Martin strike in Fort Worth. A lively march through downtown Austin followed as chants, like "What's disgusting? Union busting! What's outrageous? Sweat shop wages!" echoed off the buildings.

Adam Balogh, Sam Bernstein, Tahir Butt, Tim Gaughan, Thomas Grace, Charles Grand, Brian Lenzo, Danny Lucia, Diana Macasa, Amy Muldoon, Khury Petersen-Smith, Meredith Reese, Eric Ruder, Peter Rugh, Alessandro Tinonga and Camille White-Avian contributed to this article.