X-WebTV-Signature: 1 ETAtAhR10i6CTVHQFZFOL6Z5uQkB/tf6zgIVAKrp7feKAeVz44VqR+VGJkBXeEs1 From: xcruz@webtv.net (Robert Chavez) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 09:13:39 -0600 (MDT) To: Labor-Rap@csf.colorado.edu Subject: March on NY City Hall(fwd) From:    ww@wwpublish.com                 To:    "Workers World News Service" Subject: March on NY City Hall Aug. 22 Date:    Wed, Aug 5, 1998, 12:34pm (MDT+1)                                       Sender:    listserv@wwpublish.com X-listname:    Organization:    WW Publishers ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 6, 1998 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- MARCH ON N.Y. CITY HALL AUG.22: TIME FOR LABOR'S RESPONSE TO MAYOR'S WORKFARE ATTACK By Greg Butterfield New York In a July 20 speech, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced his intent to "end welfare by the end of the century." Giuliani said that every adult receiving public assistance in New York will be required to work--regardless of disability, poor health or family circumstances. Speaking to bankers, the mayor departed from his speech's prepared text to also challenge the use of methadone to treat people trying to overcome heroin addiction. Giuliani called methadone "a terrible perversion of drug treatment" and said he would end it in two to three years. He said recipients receiving medical treatment for drug addiction will be forced to work for their benefits. The mayor's latest attack met with an immediate, angry response from workfare workers, who have been fighting to win real jobs and union rights. In a statement, Workfairness--an organization of more than 5,000 workfare workers forced into the city's "Work Experience Program"--condemned the speech as "a declaration of war on the unemployed, the poor, people of color and the unions in New York City." AUG. 22 MARCH ON CITY HALL Workfairness Co-chair William Mason said: "The mayor's diabolical intent is hidden under phony rhetoric about the virtues of work. His remarks are similar to those of Jason Turner, the new commissioner of Human Resources, who last month echoed the infamous inscription on the gates of Nazi slave-labor camps: `Work makes you free.´ "What does the mayor´s speech really mean? What is he signaling to his friends and benefactors on Wall Street and in the corporate boardrooms?" asked Mason. "He's saying that slave-labor workfare is going to expand 10-fold. It's going to move into the private sector in a big way, threatening the jobs of even more workers. The effect will be to lower everyone's wages." Mason listed Giuliani's recent targets: "Eliminate welfare by the year 2000. Eliminate methadone and drug treatment for heroin addicts. Eliminate remedial education and open admissions for CUNY students. Eliminate vendors. Crush the taxi drivers. "This is part of an open declaration of war on all of us. Isn't it time for New Yorkers to stand up and say no to Giuliani? Isn't it time to hit the streets in a big way?" Workfairness has called a rally and march to City Hall for 1 p.m. on Aug. 22. That day marks two years since President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed the so-called welfare reform law--a Republican document that was the centerpiece of the 1995 Contract with America. The law ended a 60-year guarantee of minimal government assistance to the poorest of the poor. The giant labor struggles of the 1930s had forced the government to enact a social contract between labor and bosses, guaranteeing a minimum living standard for the millions the profit system cannot employ even in the best economic times. Welfare was the real minimum wage. But with the 1996 law, the ruling class tore up that contract and said to unions, the unemployed, the disabled, and unemployed women workers and their children, "Go to hell." JOB CUTS Drug-treatment experts condemned Giuliani for seeking to ban methadone. "We believe it's a medical treatment for the medical condition of opiate addiction," Dr. Edwin Salsitz, director of methadone maintenance for Beth Israel Medical Center, the nation's largest program, told Newsday. "It certainly doesn't make sense for a politician to make time limits or decide who should or shouldn't be treated." Giuliani's declaration of war against welfare recipients and those suffering from drug addiction was calculated to put him back in the national spotlight. The mayor makes no secret of his national political ambitions. Some analysts call him a long-shot candidate for the White House in 2000. The fact that he wants to eliminate welfare altogether was no secret either, even before his July 20 speech. Today in New York about 50,000 welfare recipients are working in forced WEP assignments. Increasingly, these workers are women with young children at home. WEP workers clean the city's parks, sweep the streets, aid in hospitals, and administer offices. They are doing jobs that used to be performed by unionized city workers. But WEP workers receive no wages, only meager--and shrinking-- public assistance checks. Giuliani has cut more than 30,000 city jobs since 1994. A new round of cuts began in June. Public hospital workers are at the top of Giuliani's hit list. Their union, AFSCME Local 420, has been the mayor's most dogged opponent in the labor movement. So far, most other unions have backed away from a serious struggle against the job slashing. Last year, a New York state judge ruled that the state's prevailing-wage law applies to WEP workers and the city must pay these workers comparably with city employees. Had Giuliani implemented this court order, it would have effectively ended the slave-labor program he champions. Instead this former federal prosecutor, who brags of his "law and order" record, is breaking the law on a mammoth scale. TURNING AWAY THE POOR Earlier this year, Giuliani appointed Jason Turner to head the Human Resources Administration, which runs WEP. Turner was the architect of Wisconsin's "Wisconsin Works" program. Known as W2, the first comprehensive workfare program in the nation was a model developed and paid for by the far right. W2 forced single mothers in Milwaukee and other heavily Black areas of the state into sweatshop-type jobs administered by Goodwill Industries and other private, non- profit institutions. Turner and Giuliani want to impose the Wisconsin experiment on the huge New York working class. Since Turner's arrival, disabled people have been forced into WEP. Women are forced to work even when they can't find qualified child care providers. Poor people are being turned away from welfare offices before they can even apply for benefits. The New York Daily News recently reported that the city's new pre-application form for welfare benefits is deliberately designed to trick people into withdrawing their request for benefits. "The document, which must be completed to get a formal application for welfare, has two lines for signatures right next to each other--one to complete the form, and the other to withdraw it," according to the News. Giuliani says welfare offices will be replaced by "job centers" that focus on helping applicants get private-sector jobs. But the July 21 Newsday wrote that the "primary goal is to keep people off welfare using stricter standards; helping them find employment is secondary, a recent employees' manual says." In his July 20 speech, Giuliani bragged to the bankers that only 28 percent of those seeking welfare benefits have been approved at two new "job centers." That's down from a 54-percent approval rate last year. The next step is the centerpiece of the Wisconsin program: privatization. Republic National Bank, which hosted the mayor's speech, is one of those already benefiting from low- cost, forced labor. Republic, like the Gap, K-mart and others, is getting generous government handouts to place welfare recipients in low-wage, part-time, and temporary jobs. SLAVE LABOR FOR PROFIT New York ended its 1997-98 fiscal year June 30 with a budget surplus of more than $2 billion. City Comptroller Alan Hevesi reported in January that the surplus is directly attributable to the cuts in welfare and the free labor the city gets from WEP workers. The city's creditors--giant Wall Street bond holders, Citibank and Chase, the real-estate barons--are urging Giuliani to put that money toward the multi-billion-dollar debt service that the city pays yearly. They want a new multi-million-dollar sports stadium and light-rail service between midtown and Wall Street as part of the ongoing gentrification of Manhattan. And Giuliani is only too happy to comply. He vetoed the very modest budget passed by the City Council, which would have used a portion of the surplus to restore cuts to some services and community groups. That money could go a long way toward creating real jobs for WEP workers, organizers say. "It's not hard to see what the impact of the mayor's plan will be on the poor," says William Mason, "or its effect on the status of labor in New York. "This city has one of the highest unemployment rates of any major city in the United States, hovering just below 10 percent. In the Bronx, in parts of Brooklyn and in other poor neighborhoods it is double that or worse. The jobs aren't there." When all is said and done, Mason adds, hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who have no prospects for real jobs or public assistance may be forced to leave the city. "Mayor Giuliani might as well blow up the Statue of Liberty and put up a sign on the George Washington Bridge reading `NYC: off limits to the poor and jobless.´" UNITE TO FIGHT BACK AUG. 22 Mason told Workers World: "The mayor's speech makes it all the more important that the people of this city join the Aug. 22 `Welfare Rights Day´ march on City Hall. "It's not only WEP workers and people on welfare who are under attack. Giuliani is trying to push all of us back to the last century--before social services, before union rights, before civil rights. "Our battle cry will be `Real jobs, not slave labor workfare.´ Public pressure must be brought to bear on city hall until Giuliani is forced to enact a serious jobs program." A planning meeting for the march is scheduled for Aug. 1 at 1 p.m., in the Workfairness headquarters at 39 West 14 St., Suite 206 in Manhattan. More information is available at (212) 633-6646.                                                  - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://workers.org)