Detroit workers picket ‘State of the City’ speech
By
Cheryl LaBash
Detroit
Published Mar 30, 2005 10:55 AM
On March 22, mayoral
appointees and the selected audience for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s last
“State of the City” address came face to face with the workers who
keep Detroit running, along with welfare-rights organizers and anti-war
activists.
“Public sidewalk!” chanted determined Detroit Water
and Sewerage workers. A New York-style protest pen across Wood ward Avenue sat
unused as police tried and failed to push picketers away from the front of
Orchestra Hall.
Four out of eight City Council members boycotted the
mayor’s speech. They submitted a “People’s Agenda” at a
news conference the following day.
The mayor painted a picture of a
sparkling new city rising from the old Detroit. But in his April 12 budget
address, Kilpatrick will announce the price: a multi-front attack that includes
reorganizing and eliminating city departments, cutting health benefits and
wages, and reducing the official city work force via outside
contractors.
Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees union
presidents in the city of Detroit are calling for a 4 p.m. protest that day at
the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, rejecting the cuts. Union contracts
expire on June 30. That’s just a couple weeks before the July 12 All Star
baseball game in downtown Detroit—which gives the workers an important
bargaining chip in the struggle to stop the cuts.
City workers and
residents face what the administration’s public-relations consultants term
“right-sizing” of city government: a permanent reduction in jobs,
benefits, wages and services. This program is presented as a solution to a $214
million to $300 million budget deficit for the 2005-2006 fiscal year.
In
reality, if successful, this plan would extend the restructuring of private
industry to the still highly unionized public sector. It’s a serious
attack on Detroit’s mostly African American working
class.
Feeding Pentagon, banks
Detroit’s reported $214
million deficit is not really a deficit. It is a shift of funds. Detroit paid
$366 million in interest payments to banks and bondholders in the current fiscal
year.
This shift of public funds to big business has been
ignored—except for an unpublicized resolution by Councilwoman JoAnn Watson
calling for the banks and bondholders to accept the same 10-percent reduction
that’s proposed for city workers.
But at the “State of the
City” demonstration, workers chanted, “Cut the debt, not city
services.”
Detroit’s share of the price tag for the first year
of the Iraq war was $429 million. Planning is under way for a Conference to Stop
Starving the Cities to Feed the Pentagon, to take place in the
fall.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the city tried to stem racist
disinvestment by offering tax abatements to locate industrial facilities in
Detroit, including the General Motors’ Poletown, Chrysler Jefferson East
and Pepsi bottling plants.
This process has been refined and intensified
with enterprise zones, renaissance zones and other creative ways to channel tax
dollars to benefit huge corporations and banks.
GM received a $25 million
grant to rebuild public roads and infrastructure around the Renaissance Center,
now its world headquarters on the Detroit River. With these tax dollars, the
development profits of GM-owned parking lot properties ballooned.
Why not
demand a worker-community audit of the city books on these kinds of schemes
before public services are cut?
The administration claims that
workers’ wages and benefits equal 60 percent of costs “before a
street light bulb is changed.” Health-care and pension funds are
specifically targeted.
Why not start a public campaign for national health
care? Workers, employed and unemployed, unionized and unorganized, could caravan
to Washington, D.C., to demand national health care and expanded Social
Security.
Many Detroiters already suffer without heat, light and water. An
expedited foreclosure program by Wayne County is seizing homes for non-payment
of taxes. The city’s nuisance abatement enforcement will penalize
slumlords, but what about the people who live in those substandard homes? Will
they be guaranteed the right to relocate into affordable housing?
The
People’s Agenda Legislative Response to the mayor’s “State of
the City” demands immediately: implementing a water affordability plan;
setting aside 20 percent of units for low-income housing in the Fox Creek
development; a land bank controlled by Detroit; supporting a proposed ordinance
to prevent foreclosures and an anti-predatory lending ordinance; neighborhood
schools; and a public, free recreation center.
The People’s Agenda
states: “At the federal level, precious resources are being used to fund a
protracted, disastrous and costly war and to provide tax loopholes for the top 1
percent of the wealthy few, instead of funding people’s programs in the
cities where they live. At the state level, it is estimated that closing the tax
loopholes for wealthy businesses would guarantee a state surplus.
“Cuts in revenue sharing and income tax rates have surely hurt
Detroit’s ability to provide for the people.”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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