<a href="http://educationinthestreets.blogspot.com">Education In The Streets</a>

Saturday, March 13, 2004

HELLO CLEVELAND!

A state maintenance worker was suspended after he displayed a sign with the word "traitor" on a snowplow while helping provide security for President Bush's motorcade, the Ohio Department of Transportation said.

Michael Gerstenslager was asked to park a snowplow on an entrance ramp to block access to a highway that the president's motorcade used to go from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport into downtown Cleveland on Wednesday.

That the department he works for has suspended him while they contemplate the appropriate forms of discipline is strangely ironic -- it highlights why Bush's anti-union agenda means a denial of a "voice at work" for millions of people in this country (and his combination of neoliberal trade and debt imperialism and neoconservative imperial warfare deny voices to far more of us all over the globe,) and why we need to fight back.

AP: ONE MEXICAN WORKER DYING EVERY DAY

The article is sensationalist and doesn't even begin to think about issues of race - or, for that matter, power on the job, both of which are a central part of the story of why Mexican workers cross the militarized border in search of jobs which peso devaluations, NAFTA inequities, and other engines of transnational (but nevertheless imperial) capital have taken from them, and why they end up in jobs white euroamericans don't have to do anymore (the wages of whiteness and all that shit) and why they wind up paying for the privilege of making possible the vast machinery of a dozen U.S. industries with their lives. Pritchard points to Bush's McBracero proposal as a step in the right direction, but for me the second tier status of immigrant workers is as much at fault as the simple lack of documents, the "illegality" of their presence north of the Rio Bravo, and Bush's proposal cements this inequality rather than combatting it. (this is not a big surprise. Bush, after all, went to Yale, and Yale is all about exploiting casualized and unstable employees).

¶ 8:18 PM

Smash Yale-[ comments.]

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