From labour to hip-hop

Susan Webb

Eight thousand Pillowtex workers were thrown out of work a year 
ago when the textile giant shut its doors. Most are still out of 
work and will soon lose their unemployment benefits. Forty-three 
percent of them were behind in their rent or mortgage as of last 
autumn, and a tenth had received foreclosure or eviction notices. 
Ninety-three percent say they can't find affordable health 
care.

Joan Moton of Eden, North Carolina, the former president of the 
Pillowtex UNITE local, was one of several workers who told their 
stories to Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards at 
the peak union body AFL-CIO's Executive Council meeting in 
Chicago.

The government's latest job reports only confirmed what Moton and 
other ordinary Americans already knew: under George W Bush's CEO-
friendly policies, conditions are getting worse, not better, for 
working families. "Bush has made a mess of this", AFSCME 
President Gerald McEntee said in Chicago.

In response, the nation's unions have suspended business-as-
usual, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told reporters at the 
Executive Council meeting. Hundreds of AFL-CIO staff have headed 
out into the field, joining thousands of rank-and-filers knocking 
on doors across the country to turn out the vote.

The Labor Department's July figures show job creation is 
stagnant, and long-time workers are losing their jobs at the 
highest rate on record.

There were 1.7 million long-term unemployed workers in July, up 
from 660,000 in January 2001. For those laid-off workers lucky 
enough to land a new full-time job, 57 percent earned less in 
their new job  their median weekly pay was 16 percent lower than 
at their old job.

Nationally only 32,000 new jobs were reported in July, following 
a skimpy 78,000 increase in June. These make a mockery of Bush's 
claim that his 2003 tax-cuts for the rich would create 5.5 
million jobs by the end of this year (306,000 a month). The 
largest growth was in low-paying jobs with few or no benefits.

Joblessness among African Americans and Latinos has increased  
more than one in 10 African Americans and one in 14 Latinos are 
jobless. Overall unemployment remains essentially unchanged at 
5.5 percent.

For those with jobs, pay cheques have not kept up with inflation. 
Workers' real weekly and hourly wages are lower now than they 
were in November 2001, when the so-called economic "recovery" 
began, the Economic Policy Institute reports.

Economic insecurity, the health care crisis, and deepening 
discontent over the Iraq war are fuelling frustration and anger 
that is sparking grassroots anti-Bush voter activity across the 
country.

"It's not just one thing", Arizona AFL-CIO Community Services 
Director Jim Watson said. "It's people's right to protect 
overtime, it's cuts in funding for first responders, it's 'No 
Child Left Behind',  there's a lot of doublespeak by this 
administration."

Arizona's manufacturing base in mining has taken "a big hit," and 
the low-paid call centre jobs that have come into the area are 
"modern-day sweatshops", Watson said.

Can't pay the bills

Working families, the unemployed and under-employed, "just can't 
pay the light bills, don't know where to turn when they can't pay 
their mortgage", he told the People's Weekly World Newspaper. The 
government's jobless figures don't report people who have given 
up, whose unemployment insurance ran out, who just don't report 
in, he said.

Tucson neighbourhoods are being saturated with voter registration 
and mail-in ballot canvassers from a variety of progressive 
groups, local activist Joe Bernick told the World.

Undeterred by Tucson's 100-plus degree August heat, union members 
have kicked off neighbourhood "labour walks", knocking on union 
households' doors, talking to them about issues, educating them 
about what's at stake in the November 2 vote. On August 21, area 
union leaders and Congressman Raul Grijalva will headline a 
Working Families Boot Camp to mobilise rank-and-file involvement.

Watson, the 2004 Tucson labour coordinator, sees a "very 
increased level of interest" in the presidential elections this 
year, with more volunteers coming out. People are "sick and 
tired", he said. "They don't believe this administration has 
lived up to its promises." The election of Grijalva and 
Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano in 2002 showed people their 
votes can bring results, Watson said. "They think their vote 
matters."

In Ohio, young hip-hop activists are organising an autumn bus 
tour to small colleges in isolated spots around the state. The 
hip-hoppers will tell students why they need to get out to vote.

One thing that stands out for this generation, Ohio Hip-Hop 
Political Assembly coordinator Angie Woodson said, is the Iraq 
war. They see the cost of the war leading to cuts in education 
funding and tuition increases, and they're nervous about possible 
reintroduction of the draft.

"They are staying in school because there are no jobs. They don't 
know how they are going to pay back their student loans. They are 
frightened and angry", she told the World.

The hip-hop generation is "anywhere from 18 to 40, but goes 
beyond", said Woodson. "It's a rainbow effect. The music pulls 
everyone under one umbrella, colour-blind, all social classes, 
people who have been incarcerated, high school dropouts, college 
students."

The multi-racial Ohio group has 68 members organising in every 
city in the state, she said. It is part of a growing hip-hop 
political activist movement that drew wide attention with a 
National Hip-Hop Political Convention this June in Newark, New 
Jersey. It will announce a national agenda at the Washington 
Press Club on August 19.

"The level of motivation, the energy, is phenomenal", Woodson 
said.

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People's Weekly World