Yesterday was election day at Deere and NO was the big winner.
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Tuesday was election day in many parts of the country.
I’m not happy about the results in Virginia which elected a Trumper governor.
I was not surprised given who the Democrats chose to run.
I couldn’t be happier that Philadelphia re-elected Larry Krasner as their District Attorney by a whopping two to one majority of the vote.
Krasner explained his win.
"It's a movement that has been led by Black and Brown and broke people, and progressives."
Will the national Democrats ever get that truth?
In the negotiations now going on, congressional Democrats are restoring huge tax credits to the very rich that even Trump took away.
That’s not a win for Black, Brown, broke people and progressives.
If the Democrats hope to win next year they need more Larry Krasners and fewer Terry McAuliffes.
The Power of No.
To me, the big winner yesterday was the no vote on the tentative contract by UAW workers on strike at John Deere.
I’ve been a part of the bargaining teams that negotiated many of our own local union teacher contracts.
When we bargained we represented 450 union members.
The John Deere contract covered 10,000 union members.
That is a big difference.
Either way, NO is the magic word.
Our bargaining team would attend union bargaining training that was built around the theme: “Getting to yes.”
The training was led by union bureaucrats and hacks that had never actually worked under a teacher union contract. Some never even actually sat at a bargaining table.
They didn’t understand the principle that we had learned in the heat of battle.
“Yes” means bargaining is done and what we have is what we have.
“No” means you come back the next day to bargain some more.
At some point we will get an agreement. We always did.
Yesterday, for the second time, 10,000 John Deere workers said no and rejected a UAW bargained tentative agreement.
Striking UAW members in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas voted against the proposal, 55%-45%.
They have been on strike since October 14.
Union and company officials did not say when they expect to return to the bargaining table.
Deere Chief Administrative Officer Marc Howze said in a statement that the company "will execute the next phase of our Customer Service Continuation Plan" to keep its factories running.
That means they will continue to use administrators and scabs to produce product.
Deere earned a record profit in the fiscal year that ended Monday. The company projected in August that Deere would earn $5.7-$5.9 billion — at least 62% more than in 2013, its previous record year.
The media seemed incredulous that striking Deere workers would turn down a 10% raise.
But Deere has been running a two-tier salary schedule since 1997, with workers hired after that earning half of what workers at the company had been paid for doing the exact same job.
Striking UAW workers at the Seeding plant in Moline, Illinois. Photo: Fred Klonsky
Douglas Woolam, a 23-year employee at John Deere Seeding Group in Moline, was among those who voted against the contract Tuesday.
Woolam said his family has worked at Deere for 75 years, beginning with his grandfather. Woolam's aunt and father later worked there, and Woolam joined in 1998.
He said his father retired earning a higher wage than Woolam does now. Though his father had cancer when he left the company, Woolam said Deere's lump-sum retirement benefits were enough to cover the cost of a new roof, siding and windows for his parents' home, saving his mother from expensive repairs. At the time, the company also covered health insurance for retired employees and their spouses.
The new contract would have paid union employees between $22.13 an hour and $33.05 an hour, depending on their position. But Woolam said the majority of employees are on the lower end of that pay scale, earning no more than $23.70 an hour — about $50,000 a year before overtime.
"I'm not thinking about me," Woolam said. "I'm thinking about people behind me. My dad thought about people behind him. My aunt thought about people behind her. And my grandfather thought about people behind him."
Labor analysts keep writing about how the pandemic has given workers like those at John Deere leverage.
And that may be partly true.
But I say that even more it is the willingness to say no.
Imagine the Angels of Bread
By Martin Espada
This is the year that squatters evict landlords, gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges, who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers, stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine, the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth, teeth like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread.