By Les Leopold / Substack
Dear Brother Fain,
It’s time for a new organization to protect working people from the plague of mass layoffs. Let’s call it, for now, Workers United Against Mass Layoffs.
Given the United Autoworkers’ growing prestige, this seems like the ideal moment for the union to lead the fight against needless mass layoffs everywhere and for everyone.
The United Autoworkers know all about mass layoffs. Currently, GM is laying off 1,314 workers across two plants in Michigan, and another 322 UAW members are losing their jobs at Missouri Central School Bus.
They are not alone. More than 30 million working people have suffered through mass layoffs since 1996. In January of this year, 82,307 workers lost their jobs. Even those working in the booming high-tech sector are also going through a tsunami of mass layoffs. Last year more than 262,000 workers in high tech firms lost their jobs, with another 57,000 shoved out the door so far this year.
Tragically, most of these layoffs are entirely unnecessary, having nothing to do with market forces, or efficiency. Rather many are the result of corporate stock buybacks and/or private equity/hedge fund activity — financial tactics that enrich executives and stockholders. As wealth is transferred to the few, the many lose their jobs to cover the costs.
Layoffs are among the most traumatic events that a worker can suffer. Health studies confirm that losing your job severely undermines health and well-being.
Fortunately, for the laid off UAW members, they have the UAW to fight for them. But who is going to bat for the tens of thousands of non-union workers? With only 6 percent of the private sector in labor unions, the other 94 percent of workers are out in the cold, growing increasingly bitter about the failure of the economy to provide stable employment.
Remember this: Donald Trump’s intervention to stop the Carrier Air Conditioning company from moving to Mexico was widely popular across the political spectrum. All the more reason for the UAW to empower unorganized layoff victims to fight back against Wall Street’s willful destruction of their jobs.
What if the UAW used its well-honed technical and political skills to create a new organization that intervened in these layoffs?
Imagine a small but nimble organization that:
1. Investigates the origins of the layoffs and exposes the role that stock buybacks and private equity/hedge fund machinations play.
2. Determines whether companies are receiving public funds, either through state/federal subsidies or contracts. Taxpayers should not be funding mass layoffs of other tax payers.
3. Organizes pickets and publicizes how a mass layoff is likely to cause great harm to workers, their families, and their communities.
4. Forms a legal team to file headline-grabbing motions and enjoin companies from conducting mass layoffs.
5. Creates a set of demands based on the idea of “no compulsory layoffs,” and brings into the battle local and national political leaders, as well as local labor leaders, to support those demands.
6. Collects the names of every worker at a facility who might lose their job. Win or lose, these workers will remember what the UAW tried to do. These workers might be a key to future organizing campaigns and other political activities.
7. Uses the publicity from these interventions to get a plank in the Democratic Party platform calling for the end to stock buybacks.
Workers United Against Mass Layoffs could start relatively small by focusing on a few critical states, like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The WARN notices (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) in the those four states show the official layoff tally at 8,700 workers so far this year, and growing. These threatened workers would surely welcome intervention on their behalf by the UAW.
And doing nothing may pave the way for authoritarianism.
Mass layoffs may be tarnishing the entire idea of democracy is tarnished. What good is democracy if workers can’t find stable employment to support themselves and their families? Why should I vote at all, workers might say, if no one in government ever intervenes to prevent the destruction of my job?
Working people are hungry for a union like the UAW to help them fight for a better life and to stop needless mass layoffs.
In solidarity,
Les Leopold, Executive Director of the Labor Institute and author of Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed are Destroying the Working Class and What to do about it (2024)
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Les Leopold
After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, Les Leopold co-founded the Labor Institute in 1976, a nonprofit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics for unions, worker centers, and community organizations. He continues to serve as executive director of the Labor Institute and is currently working to build a national economic educational train-the-trainer program with unions and community groups.