CSU says its ‘AI-powered university’ is good for higher education. But is it?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/csu-ai-university-education-20158671.php
By Martha Lincoln, Martha Kenney
Feb 13, 2025

California State University system plans to integrate …artificial intelligence technology into training, teaching and learning at Cal State East Bay in Hayward and its 22 other campuses.
The California State University system plans to integrate artificial intelligence technology into training, teaching and learning at Cal State East Bay in Hayward and its 22 other campuses.
Brontë Wittpenn/The Chronicle 2024

Last week, the California State University system announced a landmark initiative to make it “the nation’s first and largest AI-powered public university system.”
The undertaking — a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership between the university system, the governor’s office and a roster of influential tech companies, including Alphabet, Nvidia and OpenAI — aims to integrate artificial intelligence technology into training, teaching and learning at all 23 CSU campuses.
Public university students are certainly deserving of innovative opportunities in their education. But as professors in the CSU system — and researchers on a National Scientific Foundation grant that includes funds for the study of AI in society— we have misgivings about this initiative.

The details of the AI university are murky. It is not clear how artificial intelligence will be integrated into classrooms, monitored or evaluated. The mission of CSU’s new AI Workforce Acceleration Board is also thinly described: Though the program aims to create “a pipeline of AI-skilled graduates” and provide internship opportunities to CSU students, no specific metrics or benchmarks are stated. The board is composed solely of officers at technology corporations; it does not, thus far, include roles for students or faculty to provide input.
Another unknown is how much the CSU administration will spend on this program. A recent report suggests that the 18-month contract to provide ChatGPT to faculty, staff and students will cost almost $17 million. Yet the system also faces proposed budget cuts of almost $400 million and has laid off faculty and staff on multiple campuses this year. At this moment of crisis in the CSU system, it is important to ask whether investment in AI is more important than investment in people. It is conceivable that AI will replace faculty and staff — including advisers, tutors and counselors who provide critical services to CSU students.
Even in the absence of these details, it is not clear that generative AI tools will benefit CSU students significantly or help faculty serve them more effectively. The abilities of generative artificial intelligence are routinely overstated — a phenomenon that computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor describe as “AI snake oil.” While generative AI can create what one group of authors has dubbed “reliable sounding language,” it is not capable of independently evaluating the truth or ethical content of a claim.
Beyond being overhyped, artificial intelligence applications can also be prone to errors. AI tools predictably “hallucinate”— generating outputs that are untrue and fabricated and even, in some cases, violent or racist. Further, generative AI is widely associated with dishonesty, cheating and fraud. Its model for text generation, dependent on web scraping, is intrinsically disrespectful of intellectual property rights. OpenAI — one of the companies participating in the CSU partnership — was sued by the New York Times over the unauthorized use of news articles as training data. A new report shows that Meta pirated millions of books to train its large language model Llama. (Meta has claimed this was fair use.)
Generative AI is a particularly poor fit for university settings, where we teach students foundational skills like reading, writing and critical thinking. Outsourcing assignments to generative AI is intellectual dishonesty and robs students of the opportunity to learn these skills themselves. The extensive provision of AI tools will result in asking less of CSU students — de-emphasizing authentic learning and preparing them for less demanding, de-skilled roles in the workforce.

We already know that AI has been used in applications that inflict social harm, especially when adopted without regulation. For example, as ProPublica recently reported, AI is implemented in the health insurance industry — where proprietary algorithms have been used to deny subscribers coverage for life-saving medical procedures. (Notably, this practice was recently banned in California.)
There are also myriad privacy concerns surrounding artificial intelligence, as recent reports on the new Chinese AI product DeepSeek suggest. It is not clear how the data that students generate in CSU’s AI university will be used or how their privacy will be protected.
The introduction of AI in higher education is essentially an unregulated experiment. Why should our students be the guinea pigs?
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
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The CSU administration has claimed that using AI will prepare students to join the AI workforce. This could be a positive outcome for some graduates. Yet university education is not just job training. A university education should provide students with the skills they need to confront a complex and rapidly changing world — one in which, given our murky information ecosystem, the truth can be hard to discern. Artificial intelligence products have already shown their capacity to spread misinformation and disinformation, mislead the public and undermine democratic processes. Recent research suggests that the use of generative AI is associated with weaker critical thinking skills.
We see the AI university undertaking, at least in its present form, as antithetical to CSU’s mission — one pillar of which is “to prepare significant numbers of ​educated, responsible people to contribute to California’s schools, economy, culture, and future.” CSU students need to develop the skills of critical thinking, independent thought and respect for difference. Even amid austerity, this requires a well-funded, well-staffed university that invests in people and capitalizes on its existing strengths. For better or for worse, the work of creating educated, responsible people at CSU cannot be automated.
Martha Lincoln is an associate professor of cultural and medical anthropology at San Francisco State University. Martha Kenney is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University.

CSU says its ‘AI-powered university’ is good for higher education. But is it?

The integration of AI into higher education is essentially an unregulated experiment. Why should our students be the guinea pigs?

www.sfchronicle.com

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/13/denver-trump-ice-lawsuit-schools?fbclid=IwY2xjawIbRDxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHad_XOJxjgVmtyhUHtCAtSnh95zsJkIvlsIpUtxEnmNWGoMjNLYQ4VwP_w_aem_I_aJAhAROCpkGD-gy71Mmg

Denver’s public school system sues Trump administration over Ice access to schools

School district says expanded immigration enforcement diverts resources and causes decreased attendance

www.theguardian.com

UFCLP Open Letter To The World Socialist Web Site
https://ufclp.org/ufclp-open-letter-to-the-world-socialist-web-site-2-12-24/
2/12/24
| Feb 12, 2025
UFCLP Open Letter to the World Socialist Web Site –
A UNITED FRONT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM, NOR …SHOULD IT BE COUNTERPOSED TO ONE, AS THE SEP DOES. AT THE SAME TIME THAT WE FIGHT FOR THE GREATEST POSSIBLE UNITY OF THE WORKING CLASS, WE MUST ALSO DEVELOP OUR OWN REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION AND FIGHT FOR ITS PROGRAM. AT STAKE IS NOT JUST A TACTIC, BUT THE NEED TO FIGHT FOR THE LEADERSHIP OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY BY ENGAGING IN THE STRUGGLES OF THE WHOLE CLASS.
UFCLP Open Letter to the World Socialist Web Site – 2/12/24

In its first weeks in office, the Trump regime has moved rapidly to begin mass deportations, assert the unfettered power of the executive, install loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy, shut down public services, and dismantle labor rights. The working class has already begun to respond, with significant protests in cities across the country. However, the trade unions, under the leadership of the labor bureaucracies, which are tied to the Democratic Party, are doing little to nothing to oppose the grave danger to union members, immigrant and non-immigrant alike. Federal employee unions have attempted to use lawsuits to block the attacks on federal workers led by Elon Musk, but have made no attempt to mobilize their members. Even as Trump works to shut down the NLRB and OSHA and is preparing further attacks on labor rights (Project 2025 calls on Congress to consider whether public sector unions should be outlawed altogether), the union bureaucrats have avoided even beginning a discussion on the clear and present danger to the labor movement, much less taken action.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has sycophantically sought to curry favor with Trump, while social democratic UAW President Shawn Fain, Trump’s erstwhile most vocal opponent in the labor bureaucracy, says he’s “ready to work with Trump” on trade. The labor bureaucracy, as usual, is no opponent of social chauvinism and trade war. For the labor bureaucrats, organizing mass meetings to discuss Project 2025, beginning a campaign of political education, preparing for strike action—in short, the steps needed to begin building a united front against deportations and attacks on labor—is out of the question. Instead, they prefer to keep their heads down, appeal to the Democrats and the courts for support and keep their own memberships on the back burner.

Trump has also shut down the AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center,” which operates in 62 countries with a budget of over $35 million, funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy. Since its formation, the AFL-CIO leadership has collaborated with US imperialist interventions throughout the world in dozens of countries, including Chile, Ukraine, Guatemala, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. It also supports and collaborates with the Zionist trade union Histadrut, which supports the genocide of the Palestinians. This still remains a secret to US workers. The US trade union bureaucracy, after spending decades supporting privatization and helping to prop up company unions around the world, now finds itself the target of a similar attack on public sector workers and unions. The AFL-CIO leadership has so-far remained totally silent about the closure of the Solidarity Center.

As for the various self-described “socialist” groups and sects in the US, most have made little attempt to analyze the class character and historical nature of Trumpism, much less to organize a mass working class opposition. The DSA and PSL have opportunistically embedded themselves into the lower layers of the union bureaucracy; these groups have no interest in forming rank and file organizations in the unions as independent centers of working class power. Tailing the bureaucracy, they refuse to take any steps toward mobilizing union members and building a united front. Moreover, they do not even pretend to provide a Marxist analysis of Trump. They assume that Trump is no more than another right-wing politician and that bourgeois democracy is basically stable. By operating as though nothing has fundamentally changed, they disarm workers in the face of Trump’s drive toward dictatorship.

Among the few groups that has taken the danger seriously—at least in their public statements—is the Socialist Equality Party, which publishes the World Socialist Website (WSWS). They have extensively documented the rise not only of Trumpism but of the far-right globally and have analyzed how it has arisen from the crisis of world capitalism. They repeatedly warned of the danger of a coup attempt months before the January 6 Insurrection, and continue to provide coverage of the ongoing process of constitutional breakdown. However, as we will see, their political methods are completely incapable of confronting the danger.

The WSWS Correctly Warns of the Danger of Dictatorship

The WSWS Editorial Board outlined its view of the world situation in a January 3rd statement, “Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war.” We agree with this statement on a number of points:

The character of the new [US] government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale… Globally, the top 1 percent now possesses more wealth than the bottom 99 percent.
The concentration of wealth and power in a few hands has reached proportions unprecedented since the Gilded Age of the last century. According to the Financial Post, the so-called “Magnificent Seven” tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Nvidia, and Tesla) comprise about one third of the S&P 500 index, and have driven over half of its gains over the last two years, despite falling profit margins. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison, who are at the center of this speculative binge, have openly embraced the far-right and are spearheading the attacks on democratic rights. Amid global economic stagnation and declining profit rates, the capitalists are driven to attack the social gains of the working class, and devour each other. All public services must be dismantled and privatized, trade unions destroyed, and workers’ wages reduced to poverty levels. This is the aim of Musk’s wrecking operation in the federal government.

The hegemonic position of the US in world politics—alongside the world economic order it established after the Second World War—is unraveling. Finance capital, concentrated in the Western countries, and especially the US, depends upon the extraction of surplus value from the working classes of the Third World. The giant transnational corporations, which are concentrated in the US and its allies, use their monopoly position and control of advanced technologies to extract a surplus from wage labor lower on the value chain. Through its control of the imperialist financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, and the US dollar’s status as the international reserve currency, the US is able to finance deficit spending—including massive military expenditures—by shifting debts onto the global economy, while underdeveloped countries in the Third World are crushed under mountains of debt.

Every part of this machinery is falling apart. The Global South is rising up against the transnational corporations and the dollar’s position as world reserve currency is being undermined. At the same time, economic growth in the First World has stagnated, leading to wild financial speculation.

The WSWS rightly notes:

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of speculative financial instruments like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose overall market value now stands at $3.26 trillion. A recent report in the Financial Times revealed that US credit card defaults have surged to their highest levels since 2010. Defaults on leveraged loans have also reached their highest rate in four years, signaling the growth of financial instability. Meanwhile, the national debt of the United States exceeds $36 trillion… Official unemployment rose to 7.1 million in November 2024, with another 4.5 million underemployed and 5.5 million having left the workforce.
A massive financial bubble has formed, including massive speculation in artificial intelligence, which the capitalists look to as a panacea that will help them raise productivity by cutting millions of jobs. But to the degree that the capitalists are successful in automating a significant portion of the economy, the consequence will only be to drive down the rate of profit further. As Norbert Wiener, the “father of cybernetics,” wrote in 1954:

Let us remember that the automatic machine… is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.
AI, far from saving capitalism, can only destabilize it further. The stage has been set for a global financial panic and economic collapse greater than that of 2008, or even 1929, and the collapse of the US dollar as reserve currency.

The US, with its hollowed out industrial base, is unable to compete with China, and this has come to a head in the last decade, as China has moved up the value chain into strategic technologies such as advanced energy, robotics, electric vehicles, AI, etc. The US ruling class has no choice but to respond with trade war and attacks on its own working class as a geopolitical imperative. Imperialism has entered a deep crisis. Under these conditions, sections of the US bourgeoise, including key billionaires at the top of the tech monopolies, have swung behind Trump.

As the WSWS editorial warns:

The incoming administration is planning, from “day one,” to implement a massive assault on democratic rights, focused initially on immigrants and refugees… The targeting of immigrant workers is the spearhead for a broader attack on the democratic and social rights of the entire working class, as the government prepares to enact further tax cuts for the rich and a coordinated assault on every social program won by workers through bitter struggle.
At the same time, the world is confronting an eruption of militarism, first in Ukraine, where the US (assisted by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center) backed a coup in 2014 and provoked a proxy war in order to break up Russia, one of its main geopolitical rivals. The genocide in Gaza, the murderous attacks on Lebanon, the victory of US and Israeli proxies in Syria, the settler pogrom attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, etc. are a prelude to a war against Iran, as the US and Israel attempt to “redraw the map” of the Middle East. Above all, the US is preparing for direct military confrontation with its main rival, China. The US has ringed China with alliances and military bases in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. Its annual military budget has reached around $1 trillion, which includes a massive nuclear modernization program. Trump’s trade war measures and attempts at reindustrialization must be understood as preparation for global war.

Once again, WSWS argues correctly:

This global eruption of militarism is inseparable from the deepening crisis of American capitalism. Trump’s emphasis on “dollar dominance” underscores the extent to which military aggression will be wielded to sustain the global supremacy of US finance capital. Tariffs, trade wars and threats against both rivals and allies—exemplified by Trump’s provocative remarks about annexing Canada as “the 51st state”—reveal the desperation of American imperialism to maintain its hegemony in the face of long-term economic decline.
They go on to quote from Foreign Affairs, which:

…recently described the new era of “total war,” in which “combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.”

That is, all of society is to be subordinated to war.
These conditions are spurring significant resentment among American workers, who have increasingly gone on strike as the only solution to their declining living conditions. This has included workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Boeing, and the Writers’ Guild who, in some cases, have actually won victories of various sizes. Strikes have not been limited to the US, but have taken place across the world, including in Argentina, where workers have organized against the fascistic Milei government:

Across Asia, significant strikes erupted in key industries, including transit workers and Samsung employees in South Korea, and railway workers in Sri Lanka. Strikes by copper miners in Chile and port workers in Brazil highlighted the determination of workers in Latin America to resist the commodification of their labor for global capital. In Mexico, workers in steel and auto fought back against low pay and conditions imposed by transnational corporations.
The world’s working class is no longer quiescent in the face of the attacks by both their capitalists and the demands of the IMF and World Bank. Namibian miners, with the loss of their jobs due to Chinese capitalists, have organized against the attacks, although that struggle has not yet been successful. In the US, the mass deportation efforts and other attacks on immigrants, and the coming attacks on organized labor, public services and education, and Social Security and Medicare, will bring on mass struggles and radicalize masses of people.

The worldwide lurch to the right is due, in part, to the capitalists’ fear of the working class, which will inevitably object to the murderous conditions at home. The capitalist class is preparing preemptively for massive police repression and the suppression of the already-weakened labor movement. Countries around the world, from Sri Lanka, to Argentina, to Britain and Germany are spearheading attacks on people who protest against the genocide in Gaza, and on workers who are fighting against austerity. In the US, the Democrats have laid the basis for far greater repression under Trump, who promises to deport and jail political activists, who he calls “the enemy within” and “communist scum.” Trump and his billionaire backers will also begin to more openly support fascist bands, which will be used to attack unions, immigrants, Black, Brown, LGBTQ, and Muslim workers and drive xenophobia to new levels.

The Trump regime is closely following the Project 2025 plan to consolidate power, including with a flurry of executive orders and an effort to expand the powers of the executive and diminish those of Congress. Trump is installing loyalists throughout the government, including in the military intelligence apparatus, and legal confrontations are being deliberately provoked in order to use the reactionary Supreme Court to expand the power of the presidency further.

The time is rapidly approaching when this systematic effort to undermine the institutions of bourgeois democracy from within will spill over into an open conflict with the existing bourgeois democratic order. Trump’s agenda of social counterrevolution requires nothing less. As soon as he confronts mass opposition, he will seize on the crisis to declare martial law. It also cannot be ruled out that he will not wait for a crisis, but will create one of his own (i.e. a Reichstag Fire incident).

The SEP’s Rejection of United Front Methods

While the SEP argues that, “The only viable response to the crisis confronting mankind is the revolutionary mobilization of the working class,” in reality, they maintain an almost entirely online existence aimed at pulling workers into their own organization. The WSWS is not mobilizing workers in their workplaces, whether union or non-union, and hence is incapable of mounting an effective opposition to the mounting danger. Their idea that authority and credibility in the working class comes from proclamations in their paper rather than actually leading and winning class battles is total idealism.

The fight in the trade unions is key. The union bureaucracies are bound to the Democratic Party and unwilling to take basic steps to mobilize their members, but the pressure from the rank and file for action will mount with the scale of Trump’s attacks. The labor bureaucrats are sellouts, but the unions have real power in every major industry and, if mobilized, could shut the economy down and knock the fascists back on their heels.

Rather than taking on this fight, the SEP continues to denounce the unions as “anti-working class” organizations and counterposes them to its own aspirational “rank-and-file committees,” which it says must be built entirely independently of the unions. They justify this position by arguing that labor unions have degenerated so completely that they serve only to subordinate the working class to the capitalist state. The globalization of capitalist production has undermined the national basis on which the trade unions formerly waged their struggles, and enormously weakened their ability to force concessions from finance capital. The SEP concludes that only new, revolutionary committees (essentially Soviets) can break the working class from the domination of the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy.

But then the question must be asked: how can the masses of unorganized workers and those in the reformist trade unions be brought over to the Soviets? Historically, this has always occurred in stages, through a process of “successive approximations,” as the working class was radicalized by events and learned the need for a revolutionary program. Secondly, how can the working class defend itself now, while the rank and file committees command no influence? Millions of workers are in unions, which are, at present, the only organized defense against the capitalists. In the face of the immense danger posed by the far-right, the SEP advises the workers to throw down the weapon they already have in their hands and go looking for another one.

New democratic class-struggle unions may also become organized alongside the present trade unions if these pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist unions fail to defend their members, but that does not mean we should abandon the struggle in the existing unions, including in the AFL-CIO unions. The greatest upsurge in the history of the labor movement in the United States, that of the CIO, began as a rebellion within the AFL. The Trotskyists in the UAW and the Teamsters in the 1930s and 40s fought the AFL bureaucracy within the existing labor movement, particularly and most successfully in the Teamsters Union, building militant caucuses and locals, and winning leadership of thousands of workers through their determined efforts to win the great union struggles of that period.

We need to organize toward a general strike against Trump’s attacks on democratic rights. General strikes are an historic tool of the working class in defending itself against repression and the crimes of capitalism and imperialism. A mass general strike against the threat of a mass deportation by the Trump regime would be a powerful tool in confronting not just the brutal attacks on immigrants but Trump’s whole fascistic agenda. WSWS does not even mention a general strike in its call to action. It has abandoned this tactic because it has abandoned the fight in the unions. It completely ignores the lessons of the three great strikes of 1934: the Minneapolis general strike led by the Teamsters, the San Francisco general strike, and the Toledo Auto-Lite strike. These successful mass strikes showed that workers can organize and fight back successfully against the bureaucrats and the capitalists. As Art Preis writes, these strikes taught the workers that:

…the struggle of one group of workers is the battle of all workers, in which all labor must cooperate if victory is to be assured.
The WSWS has announced a so-called “International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees” (IWA-RFC), a grand name for a Potemkin alliance. According to the WSWS, “Central to the work of the ICFI and its sections in 2025 is the building of the IWA-RFC as the coordinating nerve center for global opposition to the dictates of the capitalist oligarchy.” And what are the politics of this central nerve center? Has this organization ever held a public meeting, actions, or rally of workers anywhere in the United States since its formation? A nerve center will never grow if it cannot have any organized actions.

Cells of militant rank-and-file workers must be built inside the unions and developed into powerful centers of organizing that can oppose the labor bureaucracies. The SEP refuses to participate in building rank and file cells and caucuses that are not subordinated to itself. They demand that workers accept their program and their political authority, all or nothing, as a prerequisite for participating in their rank-and-file committees. To insist on setting up pure revolutionary committees of this type, sectioned off from the existing mass working class organizations, is to renounce the fight against the trade union bureaucracy.

The WSWS says it defends the legacy of Trotsky, but Trotsky left little doubt what he would have thought of a group like the “IWA-RFC”:

Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small “revolutionary” unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for leadership of the working class. It is necessary to establish this firm rule: self-isolation of the capitulationist variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to a betrayal of the revolution, is incompatible with membership in the Fourth International.
The SEP’s politics are hopelessly contradictory. On the one hand, the SEP labels the unions “anti-working class” organizations and claims that “the trade unions cannot be reformed.” They tell workers to abandon the unions, even calling for workers to vote “no” in unionization campaigns. Yet on the other hand, they utilized a UAW presidential election to spread revolutionary slogans and recruit to their group. They pitched this campaign as an opposition to the bureaucratic apparatus, but if they were consistent, their campaign slogan would have read: “Elect our presidential candidate in order to… dissolve the union!” If the SEP had bothered to build up rank and file cells and caucuses, there could have been a solid basis for their campaign, but instead it was run as a one-off that was not taken seriously by most of the rank and file. Recently, without acknowledging a change in their position, they have subtly shifted their language: “Only to the extent that power is wrested from the hands of the bureaucracy and transferred to workers on the shop floor can the unions be revived as instruments of the class struggle.” So which is it? Can the unions be revived as instruments of class struggle or can’t they?

The SEP also ignores the advice Trotsky gave during the rise of fascism in Germany, where he called for a united front between the social democrats and the communists. He did not instruct the German proletariat to summon Soviets out of mid-air as the solution to the fascist danger, but insisted that communists must fight for the unity of the working class. The SEP rejects united front tactics across the board as an attempt to subordinate the working class to the labor bureaucracy and capitalist parties. But the united front was aimed precisely at tearing the masses of workers in the social democratic parties and reformist trade unions away from these organizations. This is only possible by demonstrating a resolutely revolutionary program in practice. The working class organizations must be mobilized through the pressure of the rank and file. To the extent that the labor bureaucracy refuses to mobilize, or betrays the struggle, the revolutionary forces point to their treachery, and win over the masses of workers step by step.

The united front does not entail subordination to the labor bureaucracy or capitalist parties, or that revolutionaries give up their program or right to criticism. The “Theses On The United Front,” adopted by the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, state this very clearly:

Whilst supporting the slogan of maximum unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist front, communists cannot in any circumstances refrain from putting forward their views, which are the only consistent expression of the interests of the working class as a whole.
A united front can and must bring workers together to fight for specific class demands. Militants in the trade unions need to call for joint meetings of unions and community organizations across the country, and unite working class organizations against attacks on labor and immigrants. This can win a wide audience, especially in the numerous unions that have large immigrant memberships. The idea that one organization, whether it is IWA-RFC or any other exclusive group, can confront this existential crisis for the working class and humanity has nothing to do with the reality of the situation and the tasks ahead. A mass working class united front will show people that we can successfully organize, and will raise the political consciousness of millions of workers.

In 1938, Trotsky called for building a labor party in the US to fight against the politics of both bourgeois parties and so that workers could make a clear statement against the lies of the capitalist politicians. He recognized that the emerging struggles of the CIO would take on an increasingly political form, and that the working class needed a political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. At a conference of ten UAW locals in 1939, Trotskyists in the UAW called for a labor party. While they did not give up their own organization or revolutionary program, they attempted to appeal to the wider membership to build a political party that would speak for the workers.

Now, more than ever, as masses of workers have come to despise the Democratic Party, we have an opportunity to fight for an independent party of the workers. The SEP declares “We are that party!” and imply that a labor party would only bind the workers to the capitalists. In other words, there is no possibility for a struggle in the labor unions or a labor party, because the outcome (reformism) is a foregone conclusion. Compare this to Trotsky’s approach:

…the unification of the unions on a political plan is a progressive step. There is a danger that it will fall into the the hands of our enemies. I therefore propose two measures: 1) That we have only workers and farmers as our representatives; that we do not depend on so-called parliamentary friends; 2) That our representatives follow out our program…

I will not say that the labor party is a revolutionary party, but that we will do everything to make it possible. At every meeting I will say: I am a representative of the SWP. I consider it the only revolutionary party. But I am not a sectarian. You are trying now to create a big workers’ party. I will help you but I propose that you consider a program for this party. I make such and such propositions. I begin with this. Under these conditions it would be a big step forward…
Revolutionaries in the trade unions today should make similar demands: break all ties with the false “friends of the workers” in the Democratic Party; only workers should represent us. Rank and file cells and caucuses should say publicly that the unions should come together into a united coalition, call mass meetings, and organize a common plan of action to defend immigrants and unions. People do not need to agree on an entire program in order to call for the defense of immigrants and confront the all-out assault on workers, which are class issues and the basis of a united front in action. The labor bureaucrats will, of course, continue to stall, avoid calling mass meetings, and rely on the courts and the Democratic Party, but as their members press for more action, they will have no choice but to try to get out in front of the mass movement. If they call protest actions, or agree to enter into a coalition with other unions, we should support these steps, but argue that such a coalition be based on mass meetings open to the membership, not backroom dealing. These developments could be used to fight for a complete break from the Democrats, open meetings, mobilizing the members and creating defense committees, preparing for strike action, and a program of concrete transitional demands.

The SEP cries that any critique of its politics on the basis of the lessons of the historical communist movement is “ripping history out of context.” Thus, to the SEP, the trade unions are outmoded as an arena of the class struggle; the united front is not relevant, because there are no mass social democratic or communist parties; the labor party is an anachronism and all workers must enter the revolutionary party directly; and the mass strike can be discussed later, since what is needed now is recruitment to the SEP. It is one thing to revise our methods and program to suit the changing world situation, but to throw away all the lessons and methods of historical communism is to abandon Marxism.

A united front is not a substitute for a revolutionary program, nor should it be counterposed to one, as the SEP does. At the same time that we fight for the greatest possible unity of the working class, we must also develop our own revolutionary organization and fight for its program. At stake is not just a tactic, but the need to fight for the leadership of the revolutionary party by engaging in the struggles of the whole class.

The working class is woefully unorganized and unprepared for the capitalist-fascist offensive. The present disorganization of the working class does not decrease the relevance of the united front but rather increases it, as a life and death question for the labor movement. Without a mass labor party, large numbers of workers could easily be diverted behind racist and reactionary scapegoating. The treacherous bureaucrats that stand at the head of the trade unions must be swept away and replaced with a revolutionary leadership ready to fight for our class. Great struggles lay ahead, and with them, the chance to rebuild mass working class organizations guided by a revolutionary program and methods that will lead the masses to victory.

United Front Committee for a Labor Party.org

The United Front Committee for a Labor Party (UFCLP) seeks to unite workers, unions and working class organizations in building united fronts against fascism, mass deportations and other class issues. We also support a united front to break the unions from the Democrats and build a mass democratic working class party. We previously challenged David North and the Socialist Equality Party to defend their abstentionist political practice and abandonment of the Transitional Program, and North stated that he was willing to do so. We again invite them to publicly debate this question.

FOR UNITED FRONTS AGAINST DEPORTATIONS & FASCISM, FOR A GENERAL STRIKE AGAINST MARTIAL LAW AND FOR A MASS DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY: WORKERS HAVE THE POWER LETS TAKE IT
UNITED FRONT COMMITTEE FOR A LABOR PARTY – UFCLP.ORG, INFO@UFCLP.ORG

UFCLP Open Letter to the World Socialist Web Site – 2/12/24 | United Front Committee for a Labor Party

UFCLP Open Letter to the World Socialist Web Site – 2/12/24 Posted by MBayram_y2k@Yahoo.com | Feb 12, 2025 | Trade Unions, UFCLP Statements, United…

ufclp.org

Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy
https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-starves-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-elon-musk-doge
RONALD REAGAN IS FLANKED BY NICARAGUAN REBEL LEADERS. FROM LEFT: ARTURO CRUZ, REAGAN, ADOLFO CALERO, AND ALFONSO ROBELO DURING A MEETING IN …WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 3, 1986. (BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES)
DOGE has frozen funds to the organization that was instrumental in helping win the Cold War. ‘It’s been a bloodbath.’
By Eli Lake
02.11.25
It’s hard to keep track of the upheaval in Washington since President Trump’s inauguration, and even harder, amid the media freakout, to distinguish important changes from trivial ones.

But what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.
NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.
“It’s been a bloodbath,” one NED staffer said. “We have not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.”
NED’s dismantling would be far more than a cost-cutting measure. It would symbolize a major change in U.S. foreign policy, undercutting the notion that democratic ideals foster U.S. global strength and influence. Instead, the Trump administration would be signaling that it no longer believes that promoting democracy around the globe is in the national interest.
Created in 1983 with bipartisan support and the backing of President Ronald Reagan, NED was intended to attack the Soviet “empire of evil” at its weakest point: its lack of democratic legitimacy.
It made bespoke grants to activists and labor unions behind the Iron Curtain. “We provided radios and copy machines for Solidarity,” former NED president Carl Gershman told The Free Press, referring to Lech Wałęsa’s independent worker movement in Communist Poland.
After the Cold War, NED expanded its mission beyond the disbanded Soviet bloc, making grants to pro-democracy NGOs in Iran, China, Venezuela, and Cuba—again using a strategy of supporting local citizens opposed to the authoritarian systems that ruled them. NED and its sister organizations, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute—one for each party—enjoyed bipartisan support.
“Thanks to NED grantees, the world learned about the horrible death of Masih Amini at the hands of the brutal Iranian regime,” the endowment’s current president, Damon Wilson, told The Free Press, referring to a young Iranian woman who died in custody after being arrested for failing to wear a head covering.
Other grantees “documented how the Cuban regime has become a kleptocratic mafia state. NED partners exposed the Uyghur genocide as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s network of overseas police stations bringing their tools and techniques of coercion and repression into free societies, including here in the United States,” Wilson said.
The first Trump administration carried on NED’s work. Several key Trump allies were on its board, such as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas sits on the International Republican Institute’s board.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio served on IRI’s board when he was still a senator from Florida. In fact, he was the keynote speaker at its annual dinner last May.
“Nations around the world and peoples need to see that freedom and democracy are not just something to aspire to as an ideal, but as a practical matter, it works and it works better than totalitarianism,” Rubio said in his speech. “It takes longer, it’s harder, it requires you to listen to people you don’t agree with. It requires you to work with people you think are half-crazy. But the alternative is a small group of people who get to decide what happens and we have no voice or role in it.”
Many Republican NED stalwarts—including Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien—have fought behind the scenes to protect NED from the DOGE knife.
But theirs is no longer the consensus view within the GOP coalition. On February 2, Musk posted on X: “NED is a SCAM.” The Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, released a policy paper on February 7 that blamed NED for supposedly helping incite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“A steady stream of NED grants to myriad Ukrainian political entities and movements advanced both the ‘Orange Revolution’ and ‘Maidan Revolution’ that paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war,” the paper said.
For the right to turn against civil society groups that stand up to pro-Moscow authoritarians, formerly a proud conservative cause, is stunning. The implication that NED was a puppet master of the Orange and Maidan revolutions is wrong, and it ignores that Ukrainians were responding to threats to their own elections and sovereignty in both those events.
NED does not direct recipients of its grants to organize demonstrations; it trains citizens in such democratic basics as how to prepare for elections.
“We had nothing to do with organizing those protests,” said Gershman, who led NED at the time of the Ukrainian protests. “We supported groups that wanted freedom and democracy. But we didn’t tell them to do this.”
NED has occasionally strayed from its core mission. Case in point: its 2020 grant to a British NGO, the Global Disinformation Index. Two years later, GDI listed ten conservative-leaning American publications, including Reason, the New York Post, and The American Conservative as vectors of disinformation in the U.S. news media. This was an indirect effort to get advertisers to shun them, a form of censorship and an inappropriate, even dangerous, use of U.S. funds.
Wilson said that, as soon as he learned about GDI’s alleged study of the U.S. news media—which was funded by another private donor—NED “severed the relationship.” Management promptly briefed the NED board and Congress, audited its grant portfolio, and tightened procedures to prevent a recurrence.
Tighter controls and audits of NED, to assure it remains strictly dedicated to supporting democracy activists, would be welcome, Wilson said: “We know there are opportunities to make American support more efficient and focused.”
The chaos DOGE caused by the order at the Treasury Department is no way to accomplish this reasonable goal, which suggests that what DOGE really wants is to end NED, not mend it.
This would be shortsighted, as “We support the foreign aid review,” Daniel Twining, the president of IRI, told The Free Press. “Foreign assistance absolutely should support U.S. national interests,” he added. “What we don’t want is for America’s ground game around the world to be taken off the field for long, because America’s adversaries are not pausing. They will fill any vacuums we leave behind, to the detriment of what makes our country strong, prosperous, and secure.”

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy

DOGE has frozen funds to the organization that was instrumental in helping win the Cold War. ‘It’s been a bloodbath.’

www.thefp.com

Gig work apps unable to track overtime, may break labor laws

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
February 12, 2025 at 16:25 JST

A gig work app (Takaya Katada)
The increasing popularity of gig work apps, which connect companies with workers for short-term jobs, has created concerns about …overwork, inadequate management and labor law violations.

In situations where workers use multiple apps to find jobs, neither the companies nor the app providers may be keeping accurate track of working hours, causing workers to miss out on overtime pay.

Under Japanese labor laws, employers, not app providers, are responsible for ensuring that workers do not exceed legal working hours and are paid overtime when they do.

However, many app providers advertise their ability to manage workers’ hours on behalf of employers.

And while app providers may set rules restricting workers to one job a day through their app, they have no way of knowing if a worker is also using an app from a rival provider.

Tsunagu Group Holdings Inc. provides a wide range of employment consulting services, which, until recently, included a gig work app.

But according to the company, a person used multiple apps to work more than 160 hours a month for the same company, exceeding 40 hours a week.

Under the Labor Standards Law, a company must enter into a labor-management agreement and pay overtime if a worker exceeds eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.

An official with Tsunagu said the app company had no idea how the specific matter was handled because management of working hours is the responsibility of the employer.

Tsunagu discontinued the app service at the end of 2024 because it was felt it had reached its limits in providing accurate information and services.

One company executive said concerns were raised about the risk of violating laws because providing labor management for companies that used the app had become so complicated and difficult.

“Managing working hours in a single app no longer means anything,” the executive said.

While many app providers have set maximum weekly limits for working hours and maximum monthly pay, some workers who depend on gig work to make a living have balked at these restrictions and turned to other apps.

As new app providers enter the market it has become even more difficult to manage working hours accurately.

Masayuki Numata, a labor law professor at Tokyo’s Hosei University, is one expert who believes new laws are needed to manage gig work apps.

“If a worker uses different apps to do jobs at different sections of the same company, it will be difficult for that company to obtain an accurate grasp of that individual’s working hours,” Numata explained.

“Although the company is legally responsible, there is also a need to think about this as an issue concerning app providers,” he said.

He believes there is a need for legal provisions that allow providers to share information about what apps are being used and how many hours individuals are working.

(This article was written by Keiichi Kitagawa and Takehiko Sawaji, a senior staff writer.)

Tesla fined for ‘serious’ safety lapse at Bay Area factory
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/tesla-fined-for-serious-safety-lapse-at-bay-area-20163344.php
By Aidin Vaziri,
Staff Writer
Feb 12, 2025

Tesla vehicles line a parking lot at the company’s Fremont …factory. California regulators fined the company $13,500 for violating heat safety labor laws at its Fremont plant.
Tesla vehicles line a parking lot at the company’s Fremont factory. California regulators fined the company $13,500 for violating heat safety labor laws at its Fremont plant.
Noah Berger/Associated Press

California regulators fined Tesla $13,500 for violating heat safety labor laws at its Fremont plant.
The citation, issued by Cal-OSHA in December, refers to Tesla’s failure to provide adequate rest breaks for workers to cool down. This violation breaches California’s Heat Illness Prevention in Indoor Places of Employment law, which took effect in July 2024.
The regulation requires employers to ensure employees can take preventive cool-down breaks in the shade when necessary to prevent heat-related illnesses.

The law mandates that employees working in high heat must have access to shaded areas and be encouraged to take breaks lasting at least five minutes. If any heat illness symptoms are reported, workers should not return to work until they have recovered.
Tesla’s violation is classified as “serious,” indicating it could have resulted in significant harm, including heat illness or death, had it not been addressed. Cal-OSHA’s inspection report reveals that 50 employees were exposed to heat stress without adequate rest breaks.
Tesla has not commented publicly on the citation.
The violation was especially concerning, as heat illness can rapidly escalate, leading to confusion, loss of consciousness or even death if not promptly addressed, according to Cal-OSHA’s safety guidelines.

Reach Aidin Vaziri: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
Feb 12, 2025

Tesla fined for ‘serious’ safety lapse at Bay Area factory

California regulators fined Tesla $13,500 for failing to provide adequate rest breaks to prevent heat illness at its Fremont plant.

www.sfchronicle.com

A California Battery Plant Burned. Residents Have Gotten Sick, and Anxious.
Heavy metals detected in the soil have also created health implications for Monterey County’s agriculture industry, and the workers who pick the produce.
…https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/california-battery-plant-fire.html?searchResultPosition=3

The Moss Landing Power Plant has stood over the community in Moss Landing, Calif., since 1950.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

By Orlando Mayorquín
Reporting from northern Monterey County, Calif.
Feb. 10, 2025
The vast farmlands just off the coast of California’s Monterey Bay are usually quiet during the winter, when there are no crops to pick.

This winter, a different kind of stillness has taken hold. First, fears of immigration raids paralyzed the immigrant communities that make up the agricultural work force. And now, anxiety has spread over what some in the region believe is a sprawling and silent environmental disaster.

Last month, a battery-storage plant went up in flames and burned for days, prompting the evacuation of more than 1,000 residents and shutting down local schools. The plant, located in Moss Landing, an unincorporated community in Monterey County, is the largest facility in the world that uses lithium-ion batteries to store energy. Residents have reported feeling ill, and many of them worry that the fire polluted the air, soil and water with toxins.

“Now you don’t see anybody walking outside because it’s terrifying, everything that’s going on,” said Esmeralda Ortiz, who had to evacuate from her home in Moss Landing after the plant began burning on Jan. 16.

She noticed an odd metallic odor as she and her two young children fled. She said she later took her children to the doctor after they complained of headaches and sore throats, symptoms she also had. Eventually, her children felt better, but Ms. Ortiz said she worries about the potential long-term health effects and whether the strawberry fields where she and her husband plan to work during the harvest have been contaminated.

No homes were damaged in the fire, which unfolded more than 300 miles north of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in the Los Angeles area. For weeks, residents, officials, researchers and environmental and public-health experts have been trying to understand the scale of damage, but so far there have been few answers. What was unleashed by the plumes of smoke from thousands of burning lithium-ion batteries? And where did it go?

“A lot of people are concerned about the ingestion of heavy metals,” said Brian Roeder, who moved his family into a rental home for the next month after they felt ill at their home in Prunedale, about eight miles southeast of the fire.

“Most people can’t do that,” Mr. Roeder, 62, said of temporarily relocating. “But we have a 7-year-old and we’re like, ‘We got to get him out of here.’”

Brian Roeder at his home in Prunedale, Calif., about eight miles southeast of the Moss Landing battery-storage plant.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
Vistra, the Texas-based energy company that operates the plant, said there were approximately 100,000 lithium ion battery modules inside the storage facility and that most of them had burned. The company said an exact accounting had yet to be done, because crews were still prohibited from entering the facility to do a visual inspection.

Tests conducted by a state agency, the Department of Toxic Substances Control, detected cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese — heavy metals found in lithium ion batteries — at wide-ranging levels in soil sampled at eight sites near the plant and up to roughly five miles away from it. Officials said the data was preliminary and still needed to be thoroughly analyzed. Tests of the local drinking water found the presence of the metals but at safe levels. Air quality monitoring has not detected heavy metal particles or hydrogen fluoride, a gas associated with the batteries, county officials said.

In a separate study, researchers at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve, an estuary next to the battery facility, found that the levels of cobalt, nickel and manganese had significantly increased in topsoil samples in the area compared to levels from studies conducted before the fire.

The results of soil testing by the state agency and the university lab were cited in a lawsuit filed on behalf of four residents by a legal team that includes the environmental activist Erin Brockovich.

The suit alleged that the amount of cobalt, manganese, nickel and copper in the preliminary state data exceeded federal Environmental Protection Agency risk levels for residential soil, including for children. The lawsuit claimed the facility’s fire-suppression system was deficient. It was filed against Vistra as well as other defendants, including the state’s largest utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates another energy storage facility at the Moss Landing plant.

Vistra declined to comment on the lawsuit. The company said in a statement that it was working closely with local officials and community partners. “We have and will continue to do everything we can to do right by our community and are working in concert with federal, state and local agencies to ensure public health and safety,” Vistra’s statement read.

PG&E said it was reviewing the complaint. In a statement, the utility said the fire was not a PG&E incident. “The Moss Landing power plant is located adjacent to — but walled off and separate from — PG&E’s Moss Landing electric substation,” the statement read.
Image

Many residents worry that the fire polluted the air, soil and water.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
Mr. Roeder has helped lead residents in collecting more than 100 of their own soil samples for testing. The preliminary results detected varying concentrations of lithium, cobalt, nickel or manganese as far as 46 miles away.

Haakon Faste, 47, who lives in Ben Lomond, a mountain community roughly 25 miles northwest of the plant, recalled a metallic taste in the air in the days after the fire broke out on Jan. 16. He and his wife experienced a number of symptoms: sore throat, headaches, bloody noses.

“It feels like you’re breathing — I don’t know if it’s like breathing acid or it’s like the air is so incredibly dry that it burns deep down into your lungs, so it hurts to swallow,” Mr. Faste said.
Image

Soil samples from land surrounding the power plant revealed heavy metals found in lithium ion batteries.Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
The couple evacuated and moved to a short-term rental. Trips to urgent care have yielded few answers about what may have sickened them.

People who inhale high concentrations of heavy metals experience profound health effects, said Dr. Justin Colacino, an associate professor of environmental health science at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Throat irritation, lung inflammation and difficulty breathing can occur with heavy-metal inhalation, and manganese can have neurological effects if inhaled at high levels.

“If people in the community are reporting these, that would be consistent with what we know from folks that breathe in metals like this in an occupational setting where the levels tend to be high,” Dr. Colacino said.

Even without a full understanding of the environmental and health effects, the fire has raised questions about the safety of energy storage technology that California is relying on to meet its ambitious timeline for a clean-energy future. The Moss Landing Power Plant has stood tall over the region since 1950, generating gas-powered electricity for the state’s grid. Vistra’s lithium-ion battery facility went online at the site in 2020, in an expansion approved by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Facilities like the one in Moss Landing store excess energy collected during the day and release it as electricity into the grid at night. Presented as a step toward a carbon-free future, the expansion received little attention or resistance from the public or from interest groups, said Glenn Church, a county supervisor who represents northern Monterey County.

“We are right now in a place where government does not have the knowledge to regulate this technology and industry does not have the know-how to control it,” Mr. Church said.

When a lithium-ion battery catches fire, industry best practice is to let it burn. Dousing it with water is ineffective and can cause a chemical reaction.

“I know of no other industry that does that,” Mr. Church said of letting the material burn.

He is pushing to keep the facility off line until there is a full accounting of the cause of the fire and its fallout. In addition, Dawn Addis, the state assembly member who represents the central coast, has introduced a bill to require local input in the permitting process and new regulations for new energy storage facilities. And the utilities commission has proposed the implementation of new safety rules.

More than 1,000 residents had to evacuate when the battery-storage plant went up in flames. Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
The depositing of heavy metals onto soil carries added implications for a region known for growing strawberries and other produce, and for the workers who pick the fruit.

At a forum on immigrant rights hosted by the local school district in nearby Castroville in late January, many hands shot up when the presenter asked how many farmworkers were in the room.

“People are in a such big moment of stress that they say it’s one thing and another,” Maria Tarelo, who works packing berries, said of the fears of federal raids and the battery plant fire.

Ms. Tarelo has advised her fellow workers to take precautions by wearing masks and gloves, as they face the potential of working land that could turn out to be hazardous to their health. For many men and women who labor in the fields, the pressing concern is that contaminated crops could result in less work.

“Then we don’t have anything to pay for food or rent,” Ms. Tarelo said. “Sometimes, no matter the state of the environment, we have to go work.”

A California Battery Plant Burned. Residents Have Gotten Sick, and Anxious.

Heavy metals detected in the soil have also created health implications for Monterey County’s agriculture industry, and the workers who pick the…

www.nytimes.com

UESF Teachers Speak Out At Rally As District Bosses Prepare Layoffs Of Over 500 Teachers and Staff
https://youtu.be/9EavfPrbqng
UESF teachers in San Francisco spoke out about the layoffs and attacks on students, teachers and staff.
This rally took place on February 10, 2025 and the …Board and Superintendent Maria Su announced layoffs of over 500 teachers and staff. The district is also combining classes at schools with a large number of Black and Brown students and is threatening education opportunities the teachers and social workers reported.
Additional Media:
UESF Teachers Speak Out On Genocide, Schools & Capitalism At Rally Against School Closures
https://youtu.be/-p5fBtxefog
SF teachers union rallies against closures despite pause
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/education/teachers-union-steadfast-against-school-closures/article_95d81fa4-9731-11ef-adbe-830f4c4cc704.html
Stop The Closures! SFUSD UESF Teachers Demand More Social Workers & Para-Professionals
https://youtu.be/BiPrtUiBMYQ
UESF Educators & Paras Fed Up! SFUSD Workers Take Strike Vote Over Wages & Short Staffing
https://youtu.be/DxMw_Lu7Dlk
SF teachers vote 97 percent to authorize strike
School staff union has already sought strike; building trades union will seek one, too
https://missionlocal.org/2023/10/teacher-strike-vote-san-francisco-school-district/
Payroll Chaos Kills At SFUSD: UESF SEIU 1021 Workers Fed Up With "Empower" Program That Is A Wreck
https://youtu.be/BrqaxUOR_ro
"Give Us Our Money" SF UESF Sleep-in & Occupation of SFUSD To Get Back Pay For Their Members
https://youtu.be/lkGP6v–84o
No Cuts In the Classes! Trusteeship Threatened As SF UESF Teachers & Students Protest At SFUSD HQ
https://youtu.be/p-zk1okKQXw
San Francisco School Board made harmful budget choices for students
https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/san-francisco-school-board-made-harmful-budget-choices-for-students/?fbclid=IwAR34cgzXCA5G77L_r8BxYd5XqoaM4XMbi9Wank11eZmXWsedH0fs-ypgPQc
‘A cruel austerity agenda is the antithesis of what our students and schools need’
https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/do-not-divest-from-direct-student-services-to-balance-s-f-school-budget/
They Don't Care About Our Safety! UESF Teachers/Students/Staff Protest Lack of Testing & Protection
https://youtu.be/sBSguJmsguI
My Working Conditions Are My Student's Living Conditions" SF UESF Teachers Caravan & Rally Protest
https://youtu.be/t6sgpNGHfpM
Demos, Billionaires & War On Teachers & Public Education From SFUSD To OUSD With Jack Gerson
https://youtu.be/u52tZhMIt7M
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

UESF Teachers Speak Out At Rally & SFUSD Meeting

UESF teachers in San Francisco spoke out about the layoffs and attacks on students, teachers and staff. This rally took place on February 10,…

youtu.be

SFUSD Teachers & Workers Rally Against Layoffs & UESF President Cassondra Curiel Speaks Out
https://youtu.be/AaYxXXgTJIs
Hundreds of UESF teachers, IFPTE 21 members and community supporters rallied on February 10, 2025 at the SFUSD and UESF president Cassondra Curiel spoke to the …crowd. She also talked about the threat of the elimination of Title 1 funds from the US Department of Education which Trump has threatened to shut down and how that would affect SFUSD.
The Board of Education also announced layoffs of more than 500 teachers and staff destroying public education in the City.
Additional Media:
UESF Teachers Speak Out On Genocide, Schools & Capitalism At Rally Against School Closures
https://youtu.be/-p5fBtxefog
SF teachers union rallies against closures despite pause
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/education/teachers-union-steadfast-against-school-closures/article_95d81fa4-9731-11ef-adbe-830f4c4cc704.html
Stop The Closures! SFUSD UESF Teachers Demand More Social Workers & Para-Professionals
https://youtu.be/BiPrtUiBMYQ
UESF Educators & Paras Fed Up! SFUSD Workers Take Strike Vote Over Wages & Short Staffing
https://youtu.be/DxMw_Lu7Dlk
SF teachers vote 97 percent to authorize strike
School staff union has already sought strike; building trades union will seek one, too
https://missionlocal.org/2023/10/teacher-strike-vote-san-francisco-school-district/
Payroll Chaos Kills At SFUSD: UESF SEIU 1021 Workers Fed Up With "Empower" Program That Is A Wreck
https://youtu.be/BrqaxUOR_ro
"Give Us Our Money" SF UESF Sleep-in & Occupation of SFUSD To Get Back Pay For Their Members
https://youtu.be/lkGP6v–84o
No Cuts In the Classes! Trusteeship Threatened As SF UESF Teachers & Students Protest At SFUSD HQ
https://youtu.be/p-zk1okKQXw
San Francisco School Board made harmful budget choices for students
https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/san-francisco-school-board-made-harmful-budget-choices-for-students/?fbclid=IwAR34cgzXCA5G77L_r8BxYd5XqoaM4XMbi9Wank11eZmXWsedH0fs-ypgPQc
‘A cruel austerity agenda is the antithesis of what our students and schools need’
https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/do-not-divest-from-direct-student-services-to-balance-s-f-school-budget/
They Don't Care About Our Safety! UESF Teachers/Students/Staff Protest Lack of Testing & Protection
https://youtu.be/sBSguJmsguI
My Working Conditions Are My Student's Living Conditions" SF UESF Teachers Caravan & Rally Protest
https://youtu.be/t6sgpNGHfpM
Demos, Billionaires & War On Teachers & Public Education From SFUSD To OUSD With Jack Gerson
https://youtu.be/u52tZhMIt7M
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

Labor Media – Labor Media

Federal ICE agents raid immigration lawyer’s office in Providence…

www.labormedia.net

WW 2-13-25 Corruption Of OSHA, Inspector Generals, Whistleblowers & Darrell Whitman
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio/ww-2-13-25-corruption-of-osha-inspector-generals-whistleblowers-darrell-whitman
WorkWeek covers the struggle over whistleblowers at OSHA and other agencies. The …recent airline
accidents, continued derailments and the systemic failure of regulatory agencies to protect workers
and the public is a major question in the function of the government.
WorkWeek interviews Dr. Darrell Whitman who is a lawyer was also an investigator with OSHA’s
whistleblower protection agency. His job was to investigate whether workers had been retaliated
against for making health and safety complaints and should be put back on the job.
In the course of doing his job he discovered that his agency managers and inspector generals
and the Secretary of Labor Tom Perez who became head of the Democratic Party were actually
involved shutting down investigations and preventing OSHA from doing it’s job.
He also talks about the growing danger of airline and railroad accidents and the threats to the
entire population of the destruction of these agencies and their capture by the corporations.
WorkWeek
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio
workweeknow@gmail.com
#laborradionetwork #LaborRadioPod #1u #UnionStrong

WW 2-13-25 Corruption Of OSHA, Inspector Generals, Whistleblowers & Darrell Whitman

WorkWeek covers the struggle over whistleblowers at OSHA and other agencies. The recent airline accidents, continued derailments and the systemic…

soundcloud.com

Book Burning Begins at OSHA – Confined Space

https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/2025/02/11/book-burning-begins-at-osha/

DOGETRUMP
Book Burning Begins at OSHA

ByJordan Barab
FEB 11, 2025
Book Burning
Trump’s purge of documents containing …“offensive” words from government websites is the new book-burning.

But this book burning doesn’t just harm readers; it kills workers.

We know that Trump and his minions feel that any publication referencing DEI is like garlic to vampires. We’ve started to see examples of websites being expunged in a number of agencies, ranging from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to documents referencing sexual violence and AIDS Relief on the CDC website, to information on the US Army’s website concerning the U.S. Army Women’s Museum (hear that Joni Ernst?)

Now the book burners have descended on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. While some of the censorship deals with the mortal (and silly) threat of DEI, many of the bannings are far more serious: they threatens workers’ lives.

An email went to all OSHA employees earlier this month listing the publications to be removed from the OSHA website and directing Regional and Area office staff to remove any physical copies from their warehouses and dispose or recycle them.

With no detailed guidance, OSHA staff — understandably terrified by the mass disciplinary actions and terminations at USAID and other agencies for “insubordination” — seem to be going overboard on Trump’s order“to align agency or department programs, activities, policies, regulations, guidance, employment practices, enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), grants, consent orders, and litigating positions with the policy of equal dignity and respect identified.”

Now the book burners have descended on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. While some of the censorship deals with mortal (and silly) threat of DEI, many of the bannings are far more serious: they threatens workers’ lives.
Any publications with the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “accessibility” and “vulnerable” are coming under potential attack, no matter what context the words are used in. There may be other target words as well. A recent article in Popular Information listed 27 terms from the National Security Agency’s banned words list including not just “transgender,” “diversity” and “inclusion,” but also such leftist, Marxist terms as “pronouns” and “racism.”

This might be a good topic to ask Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez DeRemer at her confirmation hearing tomorrow.

What’s now missing from OSHA’s website?

First, the obvious removals. OSHA had a factsheet on “Restroom Access for Transgender Workers” that is no longer to be found. And in case you were wondering, not being able to use the restroom is a health and safety issue, whether you’re a farmworker, warehouse worker, meat processing worker or a transgender worker.

(Note: Throughout this post I have linked to the original documents from the Internet Archive’s The Wayback Machine, a private service that stores snapshots of thousands of websites, so you can see what’s missing. The links are still on the OSHA website, but if you click on them, you’ll get a “Message #404” Server Error. Some documents have been taken down, and then put back up, so your milage may differ.)

At least two of OSHA’s QuickTakes newsletters have been taken down. Not sure about the reasoning for one of them (maybe Black History Month?), but the other contains the subversive announcement that “The U.S. Department of Labor is committed to improving the well-being of underserved, marginalized and excluded communities and ensuring that all workers’ voices are heard.

And then it gets sillier: there are some OSHA Alliance agreements where groups who have a formal cooperative relationship with OSHA used the word “diversity” in their written agreements.

For example, an Alliance with “Partners for Safe Trenching and Excavation Operations” (the Associated General Contractors, International Union of Operating Engineers, Laborers’ International Union, National Utility Contractors Association and others) was taken down because it commits to “Ensure information developed encourages and reflects the diversity of the workforce and are accessible in multiple languages and formats.”

2017 evaluations of Oregon’s state plan and California’s state plan have also been taken down — probably because of references to “vulnerable” workers.

And then there’s a factsheet on Workplace Mental Health. It contains a sentence reading “People of any age, gender, and background can have thoughts of suicide”

Censorship Kills

But the purge quickly go from silly to deadly — deleting documents that can actually protect workers’ health and save their lives.

For example, “OSHA best practices for protecting EMS responders during treatment and transport of victims of substance releases” has been deleted. This document discusses the measures that EMTs, police, firefighters and other emergency medical responders on the front line of a hazmat response must take to keep from becoming additional victims. Why? Who knows? Maybe because of this sentence: “EMS responders are a diverse group?” Or because it implies that hazardous chemicals are bad for you?

The “Small entity compliance for the respiratory protection standard” which helps small employers figure out OSHA’s respirator standard has also been burned, as have the documents “Assigned protection factors guide for the revised respiratory protection standard” (which helps OSH professionals match the appropriate respirator to the hazard) and “Spirometry testing in occupational health programs: Best Practices for Health Care Professionals, OSHA Publication 3637-03” (which helps clinicians evaluate lung function [spirometry] testing to evaluate lung condition/disease).

Why? Most likely because these documents contain the banned word “gender.” But the word “gender” as used here isn’t used to promote some nefarious LBGTQA+ conspiracy to corrupt impressionable American workers. “Gender,” in these cases, references the physical differences (and increased risk) that exist between men and women and the different facial sizes that need to be considered in fit testing respirators. If respirators don’t fit, they don’t work. Workers get expose, sick and killed.

Workplace violence is one of the leading causes of worker injury in health care institutions, but that didn’t keep OSHA’s new overlords from taking down “Caring for our Caregivers: Workplace Violence: A road map for healthcare facilities.” Possibly because it mentions a Veterans Administration Threat Assessment process that references a study that ” incorporated veteran-specific risk factors, both static (e.g., gender, prior assault status) and dynamic (e.g., recent alcohol abuse, homelessness, and employment status).”

Or maybe because it highlights a hospital where “Managers purposely selected a diversegroup of trainers.” It also discusses sexual assault which is clearly no longer a bad thing in Trump’s Washington.

Don’t Say Ergo

And then there’s a major bias against ergonomics publications that seems to hearken back to Newt Gingrich times. Gingrich, when he came to power in the 1990s, declared OSHA’s ergonomics standard to be the nation’s Public Enemy No. 1. The standard was issued in the waning days of the Clinton administration and then repealed by Republicans at the beginning of the Bush administration.

But many of the ergonomics publications that have been censored were first issued during the George W. Bush administration after Bush and Congress repealed OSHA’s ergonomics standard. Instead of a mandatory standard, then Secretary Chao launched “voluntary initiatives” on ergonomics, including many of the fact sheets and guidance that are now banned. Unfortunately for America’s workers, they also reference the greater risk and prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders related to gender — specifically women.

Workers at risk from crippling back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders will no longer have access to important information in publications such as “Guidelines for retail grocery stores: ergonomics for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders,” “Ergonomics for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders: Guidelines for Shipyards” and “Guidelines for nursing homes: ergonomics for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders.”

All of these documents include this fatal sentence: “In addition, development of MSDs may be related to genetic causes, gender, age, and other factors.” So clearly they had to go.

The nursing home guidance wanders into even more dangerous ground, recommending that “Low profile medication carts with easy open side drawers are recommended to accommodate hand height of shorter nurses.” Yes, nurses come in diverse sizes and heights. Ensuring they can reach their patients’ medications is a classic DEI plot.

“Trump has purged important worker safety and health information and guidance that assists employers, workers, clinicians and safety and health professionals in understanding and identifying and protecting workers from serious hazards and complying with OSHA standards and regulations. The DEI purge makes workplaces unsafe and puts workers in danger.” — Peg Seminario, Former AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director
The Department of Labor Website

I’m not as familiar with everything on the Mother Ship’s webpage (the Department of Labor) or other DOL agencies, but DOL’s Equity Action Plan is obviously gone, as are two other important pages from the main DOL website: Worker.gov and Employer.gov which are both “temporarily unavailable while we perform maintenance.”

Worker.gov contained information for workers about what to do if they feel unsafe at work, if they weren’t paid, treated unfairly, fired or retaliated against. Employer.gov contained information for employers about “Workplace Inclusion” and “Union and Protected Concerted Activity.” Their covers had photos of black, brown and white workers mixing together.

Few of these banned subjects are really about offensive words or gender ideology. But they are all about preventing illness, injuries and deaths by getting vital lifesaving information to workers and health and safety professionals.

As former AFL-CIO director Peg Seminario warns:

The Trump DEI purge is misguided, harmful, wasteful and wrong. It has purged important worker safety and health information and guidance that assists employers, workers, clinicians and safety and health professionals in understanding and identifying and protecting workers from serious hazards and complying with OSHA standards and regulations. The DEI purge makes workplaces unsafe and puts workers in danger.

Some Good News

Before you get too depressed, there is some potential good news:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the nation’s premier health agencies to restore online access to several websites that monitor HIV, health risks for youths and assisted reproductive technologies, which were abruptly taken offline to ensure they complied with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on gender.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates granted a temporary restraining order requested by the nonprofit advocacy group Doctors for America, directing the administration to bring back public information maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration while a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to remove it is pending.

Bates is the same judge that rejected a union request for a Temporary Restraining Order last week to keep Elon out of the Department of Labor.

The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen

“The agencies’ actions create a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, halt or hamper key health research, and deprive physicians of resources that impact clinical practice,” attorneys for the doctors group at the nonprofit Public Citizen said in court papers. They argued that CDC and FDA officials violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that sets out specific steps for federal agencies that are implementing new policies, and the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires officials to “ensure that the public has timely and equitable access to the agency’s public information.”

History Repeatsbook burning

What has been will be again,
What has been done will be done again;
There is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

Thorne Auchter was disturbed. A week after being sworn in as Ronald Reagan’s OSHA head, Auchter, a 35-year old former construction company owner, was looking at the cover of an OSHA publication on Cotton Dust. The cover of the publication displayed a troubling photograph of a cotton dust victim, Louis Harrell, taken by famed labor photography Earl Dotter. Auchter, believing the cover to be inflammatory, ordered the remaining publications destroyed and reissued the document with no photo on the cover.

Ronald Reagan’s presidency began the day before the recently issued Cotton Dust standard was heard at the Supreme Court (and eventually upheld). For the business community, the cotton dust standard was symbolic of all that was wrong with Eula Bingham’s OSHA, and government regulation in general. For cotton mill workers, the cotton dust standard meant and end to suffering. Exposure to cotton dust causes byssinosis, or brown lung disease, a crippling lung condition caused by repeated exposure to cotton dust. Symptoms include chest tightness, coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath.

But according to Auchter, if was better if people could not actually see the actual suffering that afflicted cotton workers.

As Auchter explained

That photo makes a dramatic statement that clearly establishes a biased viewpointin the cotton dust issue. . . . While I certainly understand and sympathize with the victims of cotton dust exposure, I do not believe it’s fair or proper to lend the weight of the government on one side or the other in such a controversial area. [emphasis added.]

Right. Should government be pro-death, or anti-death in the workplace? Hard question for OSHA. Very controversial

Anyway, that wasn’t enough. Eula Bingham, Auchter’s predecessor from the Carter administration, had created the New Directions worker training program (now called the Susan Harwood Worker Training Grant Program). Back then, the program allowed grantees to create films that not only educated workers about health and safety hazards, but recounted the tragic history of workplace safety and health, and advocated for strong protections.

Among the products of the New Directions program were the hard-hitting films The Story of OSHA, Worker to Worker and Can’t Take No More, the latter two narrated by oral historian Studs Terkel. The films included rare archival footage and photos that illustrated the problems behind dramatic tragedies as well as the daily dangers that put workers at risk for long-term health problems. They also connects the workplace health and safety movement with the civil rights and environmental movements.

Auchter ordered New Directions grantees and unions that had borrowed the films from OSHA to return all copies, as well as copies of “controversial” publications. The internet may live forever, but this was 1981, before the internet, so hard copies were all that existed.

Happily for us today, many of the grantees and unions declined Auchter’s kind offer to dispose of the subversive materials, despite his threat to withhold funding from organizations that did not return or destroy the materials.

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