Detroit workers picket ‘State of the City’ speech

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.

March 22 protest.

“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.”