Thousands protest police violence in Cincinnati

Compiled by Shawn Gaynor

June 2— Despite intermittent rain, more than 2,000 protesters marched in Cincinnati to protest the police treatment of black communities and the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas by police in April. Thomas’ mother, Angela Leisure, led the procession that stretched five city blocks.

Before the march began, Leisure thanked the demonstrators gathered at Fountain Square for “standing up for what is right and just.”

“I pray every day. I pray my son will be the last one to die. But I don’t think he will be. They have not made any changes to ensure that this will not happen again,” she said. “Who will be the next parent to lose their child?”

The multiracial crowd made its way through the Cincinnati streets chanting, “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” Banners were carried on the edges of the crowd reading, “Amnesty! Release all prisoners from the mutha fuckin’ rebellion!” and “Stop police brutality, Shoot back!”.

Willard Clark, 41, of Cincinnati, watched the protesters as he waited for a bus outside the public library. “This ain’t gonna change nothing. It’s a joke. It’s a circus,” he said, shaking his head. “What we need is a different system to live under, and this is not going to make that happen.”

As the protest passed through the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood that was the center of the April riots, many residents joined in, doubling the size of the march.

Later, as the march passed the vacant lot where Thomas was shot, the procession fell silent, lowering protest signs and banners. Only the drone of a hovering police helicopter broke the silence as wreaths were laid at a makeshift memorial to the fallen youth.

Thomas, the sixth black man to be shot dead by police in Cincinnati in seven months, was killed after being pursued on outstanding traffic violation warrants. In the riots that followed the shooting, some 800 people were arrested and dozens injured by the police. Officer Roach faces trial for the shooting later this year on misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and obstructing official business. Protesters, meanwhile, face felony riot charges.

According to members of Cincinnati Anti-Racist Action, protesters are demanding that all charges against those arrested during the April uprising be dropped. Criticizing the Cincinnati Police Department for its long-standing connections to hate groups such as the National Alliance, they also demanded that Keith Fangman, head of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police, apologize to the community for his racism and alliances with white supremacists, and step down without compensation or pension.

Cheryl LaBash, 51, of Detroit, took time off from her job as a construction inspector to attend the march. She was impressed to see “tremendous unity” between the blacks and whites in the crowd. “It signifies the reality that there is and can be unity against racism and that there are many, many white people who are willing to come out to defend the black community.”

Despite the presence of riot police and mounted patrols, no arrests or disruptions were reported during the march.

After the end of the march, some 75 protesters proceeded to the Mt. Adams neighborhood on an unpermitted march, to protest the preferential treatment that this affluent area received during the April riots. The Cincinnati Radical Action Collective (CRACk!), which called for the Mt. Adams action, said they intended “to place active pressure on spaces and institutions of privilege.”

Some critics claim that police selectively enforced the curfew during the riots, arresting violators in the largely African American Over-the-Rhine neighborhood while ignoring those who patronized the Mt. Adams bars. Disobeying the curfew order typically carries a six-month jail sentence.

The protesters blocked the intersection at St. Gregory and Hatch. About fifty officers quickly surrounded the protesters on all sides, several armed with rifles.

Police warned that arrests would be made unless protesters cleared the intersection. Arrests occurred after people had moved onto the sidewalks, when a journalist for Street Vibes began loudly criticizing the police actions. Some 15 people were pulled from the sidewalk and arrested.

According to one protester who would only identify himself as Fluffy, “Two or three protesters were cuffed and subdued before police used pepper spray on them, spraying it in their faces from a distance of less than a foot.”

This treatment was reminiscent of that of Roger Ownesbury, an unarmed black man who was killed earlier this year, when officers thought he “looked like someone they were looking for.” Witnesses to this case reported that the officers handcuffed Roger, picked him up by his arms, and slammed his head and neck into the concrete. Reports say that chemical irritants were used, but that he died of asphyxiation of unknown causes.

When Assistant Chief Janke was asked why he ordered the arrest of nonviolent protesters on the sidewalks, he responded, “People were arrested for disorderly conduct and blocking streets.”

Protester Julia Reichert, a professor at Wright State University, said the march was an act of civil disobedience to stop traffic and draw attention to the inequalities that exist between the white upper class and blacks in Cincinnati. “Curfew violators in black neighborhoods were roughed up and hauled off to jail,” said Reichert, 54, of Yellow Springs. “But nothing happened to curfew violators in Mt. Adams.”

A solidarity action is ongoing outside of the Cincinnati jail for the 12 activists arrested this weekend, and the prisoners still in jail since the April riots.

Meanwhile, inside the jail there have been reports of further brutality against those jailed in the Mount Adams action. Ora, a woman arrested, has reported head injuries and another woman reported eye injuries after the police used a chemical irritant. One of the male prisoners reported that David Mitchell, a jailed protester, was choked and shocked with a “stun gun.” Mitchell has been moved to the prison infirmary, according to reports from jailed protesters.

Attorney Ken Lawson, and some of the protesters outside the jail, said that initial bonds — from $5,000 to $50,000 each — were too high for misdemeanor charges such as disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. “The bonds were unreasonably high, especially for people engaging in a peaceful protest,” Lawson said.

Sources: Associated Press, Cincinnati Enquirer, Independent Media Center, AGR staff

Layoffs at NC plant shock union members
Landmark victory loses some effect as 590 are laid off

By Stan Choe

Charlotte, North Carolina, June 4— When union organizers scored a stunning victory at Fieldcrest Cannon plants in Rowan and Cabarrus counties in 1999, a spontaneous celebration erupted.

Now, local members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees have little to cheer.

Pillowtex Corp., which owns the plants, says it will lay off 590 of those workers -- 11 percent of the union’s bargaining unit -- by July 15.

Plant 4, which makes sheets, will be shut down, eliminating 200 jobs. An additional 390 will be cut from Plant 1, which makes towels and sheets.

Pillowtex officials said the cuts are in response to slow sales and mountains of unsold inventory.

But for union supporters like Janet Patterson, the news, coming so soon after the union’s victory, is stinging.

Sitting in the local union hall after a recent shift change, Patterson, a 53-year-old sheet hemmer in Plant 6, said she probably won’t lose her job, but knows others who will. “It’s so distressing to see the jobs go,” she said, “especially after it was so hard to get people to come aboard to vote.”

Patterson, who has worked in the textile mills since high school, went door to door encouraging coworkers to support the union. Inside Plant 6, she taught lyrics to union anthems. She even held impromptu meetings inside the plant to counter the company’s anti-union message.

Today Patterson gets tension headaches from watching her coworkers and fellow union members lose their jobs.

Less than two years ago, many of those same workers voted 2,270-2,102 for union representation. The victory made national headlines, ending a battle that began during the Ford administration. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney called it the greatest union victory in a Southern textile mill.

Today, some union officials are reluctant to discuss the layoffs and how they might affect the union.

Mark Pitt, Southern regional director for UNITE, said the layoffs show why unions are important. Because they have a union contract, he said, the laid-off workers will get better severance packages than nonunion mill workers. The union also is discussing ways to assist the laid-off workers.

“The irony is that workers need a union more in hard times than they do in good times,” Pitt said.

The union had tried for months to convince Pillowtex to spare union jobs as it reorganizes under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In a letter-writing campaign, it recruited dozens of local clergy and small-business owners to lobby Pillowtex in support of the union. It also met with Bank of America, Pillowtex’s lead creditor, to ask the Charlotte bank to consider jobs as Pillowtex went through bankruptcy court.

In the end, the company said it could not avoid layoffs.

Some Pillowtex workers whisper that union demands for higher pay and better benefits may have helped drive Pillowtex further into debt, and ultimately into job cuts.

“Just stand in the unemployment line and see how much of a victory they’ve got,” said John Lancaster, who voted against the union in 1999 and left the company a month after UNITE’s win. “I don’t call it a victory; it looks to me like they’ve got over 100 years of history in Kannapolis coming to an end.”

Lancaster doesn’t put all the blame on the union for the layoffs, but it helped push the company already teetering with heavy debt, he said.

Pillowtex officials, though, say a slowing American economy, not the union, forced it to lay off workers. The company needs to cut some jobs now to ensure jobs will exist in the future, said Don Mallo, company vice president of human resources.

“We believe that shifting blame is not productive and detracts from the vision that we all share for the future,” he said, “which is to preserve as many jobs as possible.”

Tommy Davis, a 56-year-old loom fixer in Plant 4 who voted for the union and will be laid off by July 15, also refuses to blame the union. Before the union, he said, the workers had no guaranteed pay raises or paid sick days.

Davis counts the 1999 victory among his life’s highlights. He was so energized by the vote that he helped UNITE organize Pillowtex workers the next year at a Scottsboro, Ala., plant.

Two and a half weeks ago, Davis learned in Plant 4’s supply room that he would be laid off after 29 years. “You hear people say the union ruined the jobs,” he said. “But the union can’t do that; only the company can do that.”

Davis, who worries about finding health insurance to cover his wife’s breast-cancer battle, said he would never take another textile job.

Union members say that, despite the layoffs, they have no regrets. The 1999 win was a real victory, they say. Some suspect it may even open the doors to further organizing in the South.

Cynthia Hanes, a clerk at Plant 6 and a third-generation worker at Cannon mills, said she voted for the union but wasn’t at the forefront of the organizing drive. Still, when a celebration erupted after the union’s 1999 victory, Hanes joined some of her coworkers in partying past midnight.

“When we won, I never thought this would happen,” Hanes said of the layoffs. “This is just terrible.”

Even some Pillowtex workers unaffected by the announced cuts say it’s only a matter of time before their jobs are lost as well.

Over the past five years, NC textile employment fell 26.8 percent, a loss of 49,700 jobs, according to the NC Employment Security Commission. About 10,600 came just in the last year. South Carolina has lost 18 percent of its textile jobs in the last five years.

“The future of textiles is not very good at all,” said Davis. Richard Mckinley Sr., who has worked 36 years in Plant 1, doesn’t know if he will have a job after July 15. He said some of his coworkers have already started looking for jobs in other area Pillowtex plants. Mckinley said he would wait and see.

“The fight is going to continue,” he said. “It’s been a victory even though they’re closing. We showed it can be done.”

Source: Charlotte Observer

World Bank would eliminate labor rights in Mexico

June 4— A new World Bank report on Mexico, entitled “An Integral Agenda of Development for the New Era,” was formally presented in Mexico on May 21.

The report includes specific recommendations on labor policy for the government of President Vicente Fox, most notably proposals for increasing the “flexibility” of Mexican labor.

Concretely, the report recommends that current regulations mandating severance pay, collective bargaining, exclusion contracts, obligatory benefits, restrictions on contracts for temporary employment and apprenticeships, antiquity-based promotion schemes, company-sponsored training programs, and company payments to social security and housing plans, should all be eliminated.

The report suggested that North American investors attracted to Mexico under NAFTA are put off by domestic labor regulations, and that without making salaries more flexible, reducing company obligations toward workers and essentially repealing the federal labor law, investors will continue to have doubts about Mexico’s economic future, while the poor will continue to be “impeded” by pro-labor laws from “obtaining the greatest benefit from their human capital.”

While the World Bank recommendations created a good deal of controversy in the press and among labor groups, they were solidly backed by the PAN party and the Fox administration.

President Fox said that all the suggestions and recommendations made by the World Bank “are very much in line with what we have contemplated,” and that indeed they are essential for Mexico to “really enter into a process of sustainable development.”

Managerial Coordinating Council (CCE) president Claudio X. González, however, took a different view. The leader of Mexico’s most influential business organization affirmed that the World Bank recommendations went “over the top,” and that business leaders in Mexico have no intention of eliminating elements such as severance pay, collective bargaining contracts, or payment of benefits to workers.

“We are in the process of modernizing our [labor] law,” said González, “but some of these proposals of the World Bank are not made even to the most developed nations. Why are they then being recommended for the emerging countries?”

Source: Mexico Solidarity Network: www.mexicosolidarity.org