City Manager Jerry Miller showed up with one of his flunkies today at a meeting of library employees in Long Beach and told a sob story about how bad the city finances are and told workers that they must not be selfish and listen to their union but must agree to sharp reductions in health insurance and other benefits because "we are all in this together." (He makes a huge salary.) The two suits blasted the Machinists Union, which represents library employees for not giving back a 3 percent payraise that the City agreed to in a contract. Not surprisingly, no representative of the union was there to offer a different view; the Library Director has refused to ever allow anyone from the union to attend one of these mandatory meetings. His assistant, a smiling and attractive yuppie female, assured everyone that all this was fair because she goes to some kind of "neighborhood meetings" where "the citizens" all demand that City employees pay more for their own health insurance! Yeah, right. These two birds allowed the lowly employees to send up index cards with questions -when they got to mine, which asked if contracting work out to employers who pay less than living wages to their workers didn't make the City a partner in the exploitation of these workers and how much the city had paid last year in police misconduct lawsuits, they decided that they were out of time and had to leave without answering it. Then they fled. Two things these clowns are afraid of are pointed questions and militant, united union members. We have to make sure that their fears are realized.

Nice to see someone like you is sticking up for the rights of your fellow workers and sticking it in the face of the boss man! At least not everyone takes this shit lying down.

No war but the class war, as they say. It's time for workers to turn the tides on these swine. I'm sure Long Beachers could use a little more such moxie.

One reason Long Beach is facing financial disaster (aside from such reasons as the national recession, the California budget debacle and Bush's transfer more wealth from the needy to the greedy policies) is that is has long relied on a regressive utility tax to finance its services. This was to avoid taxing the people who actually count in the eyes of the city government - wealthy individuals, Boeing, the oil companies that pump endless amounts of oil out of the ground beneath the city and offshore, and the international shipping companies that make the Port of Long Beach one of the busiest in the world. Last year voters understandably voted down the reactionary tax in a local referendum, and now the City Council and the City Manager want to avoid taxing their corporate backers and their affluent buddies down at the country club by riding out the financial crisis at the expense of the city's already low-paid workforce.

is a living wage ordinance. That would be a very, very tough campaign to organize, but it would be well worth the effort. Among other things, it could evolve into a genuinely multi-racial, multi-ethnic struggle against the corporations and the upper classes, since sweat shop wages make conditions worse for all workers and exert a downward pull on all workers' pay. A victory would not only make life more livable for many super-exploited wages but would build class consciousness in southern California in a dramatic way.