JERUSALEM, JULY 21 — Over 700 striking daycare workers — who have recently unionized in the “Workers’ Power” union federation — demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The workers, Jewish and Palestinian women from all parts of Israel/Palestine, fought for workers’ control over regulations, a living wage and normal working conditions.

The “family” daycare system, first created in the 1980’s, was an attempt by the Israeli government to provide subsidized daycare facilities for children up to the age of 3, using small groups hosted at the workers’ homes rather than in an ordinary kindergarten. This service is especially valuable for impoverished families where both parents work but cannot pay the steep prices of private daycare.

However, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, which operates this system, has essentially privatized it, transferring its funds to the hands of local operators instead of paying the workers directly. The Ministry, as well as the local operators, have found a way to super-exploit these daycare workers: instead of being employed directly by either the Ministry or the operators, and thus entitled to a full wage and benefits, they are technically treated as “freelance contractors” and paid a flat monthly sum.

Capitalist Sexist Exploitation

These women work up to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, yet earn less than 4,000 NIS (about $1,000) a month! And even that low wage is subject to payment delays. Additionally, these workers have to pay their operational costs out of their own pockets, and are constantly harassed by new regulations by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, regulations that often require them to spend more of their meager income on various safety features.

Faced with such brutal exploitation, the daycare workers decided to unionize in 2008 as part of the “Workers’ Power” union federation. Today, after two years of organizing, the union includes approximately 1,000 out of the 2,400 “family” daycare workers in Israel/Palestine. The workers, both Jewish and Palestinian women, are fighting for direct employment by the Ministry rather than the exploitative “freelancer” scam, for a living wage and benefits, for the payment of operation costs by the Ministry, and for workers’ control over the various regulations.

The Ministry and the local bosses first tried to ignore the union, and then moved to more aggressive methods against it, including the delaying of pay and the firing of several workers. Additionally, in the town of Elad, some women who were religious Jews were threatened with excommunication unless they leave the union; this has led several workers to withdraw from the union. This is a classic example of the role of religion as one of the bosses’ weapons against the working class.

Faced with these repressive steps, workers are fighting back nonetheless, demonstrating and striking against the bosses, and are trying to expand their union.

However, even if this reform struggle is won by the workers, the capitalist Israeli government will undoubtedly try to erode its achievements and rob the workers once again. Only a workers’ communist revolution and the seizure of state power by the working class will ensure good working conditions for all workers as well as free, high-quality daycare and education for all children. PLP is spreading our ideas among these workers, as well as building a base for our Party. 

In the coming school year thousands of high school students will be debating the pros and cons of removing U.S. troops from bases in South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

But don’t be fooled: nobody in the ruling class is debating troop withdrawals. They’re debating
re-deployments. There’s a long-lasting and broad consensus among political and military elites that U.S. imperialism must remain dominant in the Middle East. This consensus, persisting since World War II, was boldly and publicly expressed in president Jimmy Carter’s warning to the USSR when the latter entered Afghanistan in 1979:

The U.S. Case for Control of Oil

“The region…now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil.…Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and…will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

This is the Carter Doctrine. No president since Carter has renounced it, and none ever will. Those U.S. troops who’ve departed Iraq have headed to Afghanistan. Air strikes have killed untold numbers in Pakistan and Yemen, both of which (along with Somalia) are repeatedly announced as the “next” targets in an ongoing “long war” against “terror.”

There are no withdrawals, only shifts from one target to the next and back again in a treadmill of invasion, occupation and escalation. This is the general trend of inter-imperialist rivalry in the Middle East.

“Terrorism” constantly emerges in high school debates but, as in the general U.S. population, is poorly understood and riddled with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. U.S. imperialism is the world’s greatest terrorist threat. The British medical journal Lancet placed invasion-caused Iraqi casualties at a conservative 600,000. Remote-controlled drone missile strikes and commando Special Forces raids have slaughtered thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is terrorism.

However, the so-called “insurgents” who resist U.S. invasion are hardly better than the invaders. Local bosses, cloaked in the guise of radical Islam, simply want Arab control of Arab oil profits, wrenched from the exploitation of “their” workers.

Turn the Guns on the Exploiters

The young men (and increasingly young women) pointing weapons at each other in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond have much more in common with each other than with the bosses and generals who send them off to die. From the Middle East to the U.S., unemployment forces the youth into the military. These young people need to turn their guns on their exploiters as revolutionary soldiers did in Russia and then in China, in a communist seizure of power.

Currently, imperialists, whether U.S., European, Russian or Chinese, tend to pick on smaller powers. But rivalry between the imperialists will intensify and sooner or later will erupt in open conflict, leading to world war. Only communist revolution can chase the imperialists from power. Workers’ power abolishes capitalist competition for profits which lies behind inter-imperialist rivalry and war.

This coming school year thousands of student debaters will join tens of millions of their peers in facing the most vicious budget cuts public schools have suffered in our time. Unemployment continues at sky-high levels for tens of millions of workers. Meanwhile, profits climb; corporations sit on over a trillion dollars, waiting for the most profitable time to invest. They refuse to rehire the workers they discarded like so much trash in recent years.

The money from corporate profiteering and imperialist war expenses could restore every single budget cut to every school, send everyone to college and provide everybody with a job and a home. But that’s not how capitalism operates. The “National Priorities Project” website, totally lacking in class analysis, can provide a sense of the dollar amounts involved.

Connect the Dots

The challenge now for all students, teachers and parents is to organize fight-back, not merely to restore school funding (though a start) but must connect the cuts to the wars. After all, even fully-funded schools will still only lie to us about the wars. U.S. capitalism, partly to help pay the trillions of dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is moving to squeeze ever more profits out of the working class.

But awareness alone, while important, is insufficient. We need to build a movement to smash the system that makes these cuts and these wars increasingly intense. We must smash racist notions that place more value on the lives of U.S. soldiers than on our working-class brothers and sisters overseas. CHALLENGE will continue as a resource of timely, accurate and class-conscious news about world events and class struggles against the bosses and their system. Student debaters should use CHALLENGE articles for discussion in team practices.  Building a stronger communist movement is winning the “insurgency” to capitalism’s endless chamber of horrors. Join PLP!  

The Foxconn plant in China, which assembles iPads among other things, has made headlines recently with its incredibly high rate of worker suicides. Working for $132 per month, Foxconn workers are on their feet on the job for 12 hours a day, six days a week. Conversing with coworkers is strictly forbidden and bathroom breaks are relegated to ten minutes every two hours.¹

One worker described how his favorite activity was dropping stuff because squatting down to pick up the object is the only way to get any rest.² Another worker said of his job, “Every day, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time… Life is meaningless.” A worker suffering from insomnia simply stated, “I feel no sense of achievement, I’ve become a machine.”³

Foxconn employs nearly 600,000 workers at its Shenzhen facility, almost all of which are young migrants from the Chinese countryside.⁴ “Hukou” (Household Registration System) laws make internal migration in China illegal. These laws deny migrant workers access to any social services and the risk of deportation back to the countryside makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation.⁵ In the city of Shenzhen super-exploited migrant workers make up over 80% of the population.⁶

As tragic as the story at Foxconn is it is hardly unique in the new China. A 2007 article in the China Daily noted that 287,000 people kill themselves in China each year. It has become the leading cause of death for people between ages 15 and 34. A study done by Peking University found that 20% of Chinese high school students considered committing suicide and 6.5% had made plans to do so.⁷

The current economic downturn has only exacerbated the issue. In 2009 the London Telegraph reported that suicides were surging among Chinese college graduates. They connected this rise in suicides to the fact that one-third of graduates are unable to find work after graduation.⁸

Suicide and Capitalist Economy
are Connected

The link between suicides and the capitalist economic system has long been acknowledged. A 1976 Congressional report in the U.S. even commented that, “The national rate of suicide in the U.S. can be viewed as an economic indicator.”⁹ A recent study from Oxford University confirmed this finding that a 3% raise in unemployment resulted in a 4.5% raise in the suicide rate.¹⁰

Indeed in the U.S. the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported an 18% increase in phone calls in early 2010.¹¹ And the BP Gulf oil spill that destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people has also now seen a corresponding increase in suicides on the Gulf Coast.¹²

The linkage between suicide and capitalism seems to be a universal one. The Aokigahara Forest in Japan has become known as the “suicide forest” due to the large numbers of people who have gone there to kill themselves. In 2009 Japan saw a 15% increase in suicides over the previous year. One man who attempted to kill himself in the forest after losing his job stated, “My will to live disappeared. I’d lost my identity, so I didn’t want to live on this earth. That’s why I went here.”¹³

Fall of Communism Leads Workers to Despair

The harsh working conditions, long hours, and terrible wages brought on by China’s reversion to capitalism are only part of the suicide puzzle there. Another factor not discussed by the Western news media is the despair brought on by the fall of communism in China.

The connection between the collapse of communism and worker suicides is most evident in the former Soviet Union. According to the World Health Organization the five highest suicide rates in the world all belong to former Soviet states (Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Hungary).¹⁴ The dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a surge in suicides in Russia that began in the mid-1980s leading one World Health Organization official to state, “The reasons are complex but the suicide rate is obviously linked to social and economic disintegration.”¹⁵

Along with having the third highest suicide rate in the world, Russia also has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. Recently the Russian Public Chamber reported that 500,000 Russians die every year from alcohol abuse.¹⁶ The combination of alcohol abuse and suicide has helped to lower the life expectancy of Russian men to 59, causing Pravda to remark that Russian men are becoming “extinct.”¹⁷

Nets Won’t Save Chinese
Workers

Embarrassed by the suicide scandal Foxconn has devised a plan to increase pay by 20% and has begun installing anti-suicide nets around all the worker dormitories (most workers have committed suicide by jumping from buildings).¹⁸ Workers have even been forced by management to sign pledges not to kill themselves.¹⁹

Despite these measures the suicides at Foxconn continue.²⁰ One worker who admitted to contemplating suicide, and already made well above the proposed pay raise, summed up the real problem, “I do the same thing every day; I feel empty inside. I have no future.”²¹

The half-measures taken by Foxconn bosses to stop the worker suicides are all window dressing. The real problem at Foxconn, and in China and the world as a whole, is the alienation and despair caused by the capitalist system. Workers do not want to toil as slaves for the bosses’ profits while only getting crumbs for themselves. The only solution to the suicide problem in China is the overthrow of the capitalist class and the victory of communist revolution. Until that point, anti-suicide safety nets won’t solve anything. J

Sources:

1 Business Week, “Foxconn Workers in China Say ‘Meaningless’ Life Sparks Suicides,” 6/2/10.

2 Gizmodo, “Undercover Report from Foxconn’s Hell Factory,” 5/19/10.

3 Business Week.

4 Open Letter from Chinese Sociologists, “Address to the Problems of New Generations of Chinese Migrant Workers, End to Foxconn Tragedy Now,” http://sacom.hk/archives/644 , dated 5/18/10, retrieved 8/1/10.

5 Christian Parenti, The Nation, “Chinese Struggle Over Resources Under a Quasi-Maoist Capitalism,” 5/18/08.

6 Open Letter from Chinese Sociologists.

7 China Daily, “China’s Suicide Rate Among World’s Highest,” 9/11/07.

8 The Telegraph, “Wave of Suicide Sweeps China’s Graduate Class,” 7/25/09.

9 CHALLENGE, “Unemployment: Capitalism’s Killing Fields,” 3/17/10; NYT, “US Study Links Rise in Jobless to Deaths, Murders and Suicides,” 10/31/76.

10 Bloomberg, “Murder, Suicide Rates Climb When Jobs Vanish and Economy Slows,” 7/7/09.

11 AOL News, “Amid Lack of Jobs, Suicide Hot Line Calls Surge,” 7/6/10.

12 Mother Jones, “Depression, Abuse, Suicide: Fishermen’s Wives Face Post-Spill Trauma,” 6/25/10; Washington Post, “Apparent Suicide by Fishing Boat Captain Underlines Oil Spill’s Emotional Toll,” 6/24/10.

13 CNN, “Desperate Japanese Head to ‘Suicide Forest,’” 3/20/09.

14 WHO, “Suicide Rates per 100,000 by Country, Year, and Sex,” 2009. Sri Lanka would be 4th highest but was omitted because the most recent numbers were almost 20 years old (1991).

15 The Lancet, Suicide Rates in Russia on the Increase,” 7/19/03.

16 Ria Novosti, “Alcohol Abuse Kills 500,000 Russians Annually,” 6/16/09.

17 The Guardian, “No Country for Old Men,” 2/11/08; Pravda, “Russian Men Become Extinct,” 11/3/05.

18 The Guardian, “Foxconn Offers Pay Rises and Suicide Nets as Fears Grow Over Wave of Deaths,” 5/28/10.

  19 Sydney Morning Herald, “I Promise Not to Kill Myself: Apple Factory Workers ‘Asked to Sign Pledge,’” 5/26/10.

  20 ABC News, “Worker Death Tally Rises at Foxconn China,” 7/21/10.

  21 Business Week.

SOUTHERN ISRAEL, JULY 27 — Some 1,500 heavily-armed Israeli cops, backed by choppers and bulldozers, demolished the “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in southern Israel (the Bedouin Arabs are former nomads who have established their villages in the desert), leaving 40 impoverished working-class families stranded in the desert without a roof over their heads. The villagers’ olive orchards, chicken coops and sheep pens, used to supplement their meager incomes, were also destroyed.

Even before its demolition, Al-Araqib’s residents — like the residents of numerous other “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin villages in the Negev — were denied even the most basic infrastructure and services. They lived without modern sewage facilities, with no local medical care or schooling, and had to use expensive on-site generators and plastic tanks to provide their electricity and water. The Israeli government conquered the Negev in 1948 and made it a part of Israel, claiming that the Bedouin — who have lived there for centuries — established the village “illegally” on land now belonging to the state. At the same time the Israeli government easily grants land, infrastructure and services to small Jewish settlements in the area and even to single-family “individual settlement farms” owned by rich ranchers (generally ex-Israel Defense Force ranking officers). Recently, one of these racist ranchers shot and killed a Bedouin; needless to say , he was found not guilty by the bosses’ Zionist court, thus giving the green light for others to follow suit.

Demolition U.S.-Financed

The aim of this racist demolition was to pave the way for a planned ruling-class gated settlement, Hiran, A Religious–Jews Only enclave. It is financed by U.S. billionaires, including Ron Lauder, in conjunction with the racist JNF (the Zionist Jewish National Fund, which controls all the land grabbed in the 1948 and 1967 wars). In other words, the Israeli Zionist police force erased an entire village off the land as a service to real-estate tycoons .

The destruction of Al-Araqib is not an isolated incident. It is another step in the Israeli ruling class’ ongoing attack on workers’ housing in the service of real-estate capital, both local and foreign. This is a racist and colonialist policy — ethnic cleansing to serve the rich. The racist, ultra-nationalist Israeli regime also wants to guarantee a Jewish national supremacy in every part of the country.

Recently, thousands of Palestinian workers living in the ancient city of Jaffa (part of Tel Aviv today), and super-exploited Jewish workers in the Kfar Shalem neighborhood (established on the ruins of a Palestinian village demolished in 1948) in south Tel Aviv are threatened with eviction to make way for massive real-estate development projects in the areas. The Miami-based real-estate tycoon, Irving Moscowitz, is using the Israeli state-machine to evict many Palestinian families from the villages of Sheik Jarah and Ras al-Amud in order to clear the land for real-estate development.

The fascist Israeli state, as well as its racist ideology of Zionism, serve only the capitalists, is more than willing to act with extreme brutality and cruelty against workers when it is deemed necessary by the tycoons’ interests. This government uses racism as a tool to divide the workers and turn them one against the other, all while blatantly ignoring the most basic needs of entire populations of workers.

The interest of the Israeli and Palestinian workers is, therefore, to unite and smash this fascist state-machine and place the working class in power. Only workers’ communist rule would be able to provide for the needs of each and every worker in this part of the world, be that housing, education, healthcare or adequate infrastructure. Only the seizure of power by the working class will do away with all tycoons and their rotten system that breeds racism, poverty and war.

UPDATE - AUGUST 10, 2010 - Al-Araqib was demolished again by the fascist Israeli police force, for the third time in two weeks. Several Jewish and Arab activists who tried to resist the destruction were arrested. But the workers and peasants of Al-Araqib have not given up, and will continue fighting against the racist government and its capitalist masters.