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By Maurice Pinzon
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today that private developers would invest $175 million for a facility to be built at the site of the former Flushing Airport in Queens. According to a statement from the Mayor’s Office, 420 new jobs are expected to be created between five and seven years from now, as a result of this project.

Mayor Bloomberg is taking his role as CEO of New York City very seriously (at a recent event the developer Bruce Ratner called him a good politician and the greatest businessman of the last 50 years) and announcing project after project to stimulate direct and subsidiary job creation. But it is not clear whether they are the types of well paying jobs the city needs to stem the loss of higher paying jobs over the last four years.

Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg’s central role in projects such as the Nets Arena in Brooklyn, the Jets Stadium on the West Side and the quest for the Olympics, indicates how much help the private sector needs from government to create any new jobs.

In an analysis New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. issued late last month, he said, “The City lost 800 private sector jobs, seasonally adjusted, in December, as the City’s unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent.” He added, “Furthermore, these decreases were from a November base that was revised downward by 500 jobs by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

It is ironic that as Mayor Bloomberg touts a city with historically low crime rates, a portion of the middle class may be disappearing, not because it is fleeing crime in the city as it did during the 70’s, but because it may not be able to sustain itself economically in New York City.

Stanley Aronowitz, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, explained why in an extensive interview with New York New Network.

Professor Aronowitz, who is the author of numerous books, including The Jobless Future, said that in his upcoming book he argues that there are three main reasons why people are confused by a recovering economy that creates few jobs ”” jobs that pay little.

Mr. Aronowitz argued: “The whole outsourcing phenomenon distorts the picture of what the relationship is between economic growth and job growth.” Companies may be spending more money on production, but the production is taking place in Mexico, and even Mexico is not competitive when it is compared with the lower wages in China.

The lost jobs, however, are not only in manufacturing, but also in high-end technology. Mr. Aronowitz said, “India and China have software engineers and systems analysts and programmers as competent as anybody we’ve produced in the United States.” Mr. Aronowitz said that people receiving technical training at community colleges and senior colleges alike to become workers in this country’s new economy will have to ask themselves whether choosing a narrow technical education at the expense of a broad, flexible liberal arts education was really a sound social decision.

Mr. Aronowitz said the dot-com bust and the argument of Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, that higher paying analytical work would supposedly take place in the United States, did not happen for very long. “That happened for a flip of the eyelash, but it basically went down the drain in the early part of the turn of the 21st century,” Mr. Aronowitz said.

In addition, retail sector jobs, which pay only minimum wages and provide few benefits, are not growing at a very fast pace, Mr. Aronowitz said

Mayor Bloomberg has insisted at numerous economic development announcements that since manufacturing jobs are no longer available, he is supporting development projects across the city. He said that these positions, which include tourism and jobs of the future, are the types of jobs the mayor said new immigrants will use as their new economic stepping stone. But these jobs are not the jobs the middle class lost in the recent recession.

According to Mr. Aronowitz, the reason why most jobs will neither return nor be created, is that “productivity is really about technological change,” which means that new technologies are cheaper than workers. In addition, employees are working more hours, allowing the company to freeze hiring so that they do not have to pay for new employees’ accompanying benefits.

Economic indicators have charted a dramatic increase in productivity. Mr. Aronowitz said that this is all possible “because technological change is really about destroying jobs.”

Mr. Aronowitz added: “So the jobs that are being created during this last three years of the Bush administration are fundamentally low paid, close to minimum wage jobs ”” in the majority ”” and at the same time, they are much, much fewer than the jobs that were created in the Clinton era.”

Bruce Bernstein, president of the New York Software Industry Association, said that technology created more jobs because “the percentage of overall value added to the world economy represented by software only increases over time because more and more products have technology embedded in them.”

Mr. Bernstein added, “It becomes a competition among regions in and outside the U.S, between China, India and other regions within the U.S. But the overall value added in the world economy increases, hence the jobs.”

How this will play out in the worldwide economy is a complex question of rapid change.

Nevertheless, a report issued by the Fiscal Policy Group early last month supports Mr. Aronowitz’s more specific argument. The report states that “the average wage for the industries losing job share was much greater, $54,537, since three broad industries paying above average wage (Durables, Manufacturing, Information Services and Professional and Business Services) together lost 118,000 jobs from November 2001 to November 2003.”

The report also said the following: “On average, industries gaining jobs in New York State pay $20,500, or 38 percent less [in salary] than the industries losing jobs in the two years since the national recession officially ended.”

A call to New York City’s Economic Development Corporation was not returned before this article was posted.

By Nadia Damouni
What started as a civil court case in Florida almost three years ago between the Coca-Cola Company and several of its Colombian employees ”” who had accused their employer of human rights violations ”” has now spread to New York City, where a local fact-finding delegation recently returned from Colombia, loaded with testimonies of systematic murder, torture, kidnapping and intimidation.

The independent delegation, composed of educational and union representatives, was led by New York City Council member Hiram Monserrate, Co-Chair of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. His team spent 10 days visiting sites around Colombia, where Coca-Cola’s bottling plants and its subsidiaries, Panamco/FEMSA, have been held accountable for using paramilitary forces to suppress union movements.

“It was overwhelming the volumes of tragedy that we heard city after city,” said Dorothee Benz, communications director for the Communications Workers of America during a news conference last Thursday. She gave further examples of the harassment received by family members, describing the kidnapping of children and intimidation of spouses as a means of pressuring employees to withdraw from a trade union organization.

One such union is Sinaltrainal, a workers’ coalition that represents the rights of Colombia’s Coca-Cola employees. Despite Sinaltrainal’s efforts to bring paramilitaries and bottling plant officials to court for their alleged role in the assassination of nine Coca-Cola employees, no charges have yet been made available.

In response to these claims, the delegation stated in its preliminary report that “violence is often committed with complete impunity from the Colombian justice system” and that it is carried out by “right-wing paramilitary forces, also known as death squads.”

According to eyewitness accounts told to the delegation, Coca-Cola worker Isidro Gil was murdered in 1996 within the confines of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The manager of this plant ”” who fled just before the assassination ”” reportedly consorted with the paramilitaries in the region and allegedly threatened to wipe out the union prior to Mr. Gil’s death. Eyewitnesses to this murder fear for their safety in Colombia. Mr. Gil is one of more than 1,500 Colombian trade unionists killed in the past decade according to the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF).

At the news conference, Council member Monserrate suggested that Coca-Cola has never addressed the violence against trade unionists: “With respect to Coca-Cola, not one person has been prosecuted or convicted for any of these murders. Not one person has been prosecuted or convicted for any of the countless kidnappings that have occurred. Not one person has been prosecuted or convicted for any of the beatings that have occurred on-site [at bottling plants] or at people’s homes, which are directly connected to their employment at Coca-Cola.”

Segundo Pantoja, director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, told New York News Network that Coca-Cola’s practices were just “one component of a complex picture” in which multinationals have taken advantage of a politically unstable climate. “Exploitation of labor is nothing new, and Coca-Cola has major plants in Brazil and other South American countries. But what is happening in Colombia has crossed the boundaries of life and death. There is a direct threat of life to maximize profits,” Mr. Pantoja said.

Agreeing with this sentiment, Ray Rogers, director of Corporate Campaign, Inc., and Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, said: “By keeping unions out of bottling plants through an alliance with paramilitaries, profits can be more easily reaped as labor costs remain low. The object is no social movement.” He added that it is difficult for workers in this type of situation to change jobs due to a scarcity in the employment industry, a common factor among developing countries that causes a network of “slave labor.”

With a lack of employee security, Sinaltrainal, in conjunction with the United Steelworkers of America and the ILRF, filed a lawsuit in July 2001 against the Coca-Cola Company and its Colombian subsidiaries under the Alien Claims Tort Act. This act, which allows foreign victims to bring claims to U.S. courts for violations of fundamental human rights clearly defined under international law, was presented to the U.S. District Court in Florida.

However, in March 2003, the case was dismissed on the grounds that it did not have enough “factual or legal basis.” Meanwhile Coca-Cola had already begun proceedings against the plaintiffs in a Colombian court, accusing the workers of slander and defamation and calling for 500 million Colombian pesos in compensation.

During a meeting in July with Coca-Cola representatives, including Rudy Beserra, vice-president of Latin Affairs in Atlanta, Ga., Mr. Monserrate said that it was “unacceptable” for the company to file criminal charges against its former employees, who had suffered harassment “to a point that they had to file a civil suit in the U.S.” Mr. Monserrate addressed the company’s legal counsel in Colombia’s capital, Bogotand was told that the lawsuit was a “consequence” of the employees’ claims against Coca-Cola.

As part of the delegation’s preliminary findings, Mr. Monserrate has asked for Coca-Cola to dismiss immediately all criminal charges against union members and publicly denounce all acts of anti-union violence. Coca-Cola officials in Atlanta sent a statement to New York News Network, indicating that an international law firm had launched an in-depth investigation in 2001 that “produced no evidence supporting the allegations.” They were unable to release related documents still being used in the pending lawsuit against their bottling partners.

In their defense, Coca-Cola said that they “deplore and condemn all acts of violence committed by any paramilitary or guerilla group in Colombia that targets trade union leaders or any other group.” They also argued that through their extensive business relations in the country, local jobs and suppliers have been created, contributing “to the aspirations of Colombia for peace, economic opportunity, and long-term stability.”

Mr. Monserrate and his delegation members, however, were not convinced. The Council member insisted that the public start acting more conscientiously with their purchases. New York holds one of the largest Colombian immigrant communities and is a leading consumer of Coca-Cola and its products.

Mr. Monserrate said: “We talk about Coca-Cola, a logo that signifies American capitalism. It is what America is all about, and I would hate to think that this logo or symbol in foreign countries, as it is today in Colombia, signifies death, violence, kidnapping and the crackdown on workers throughout the world.

“We are all shareholders in Coca-Cola, not only through direct investment but also through consumer dollars. I believe it is our responsibility in the U.S. to ensure American transnational corporations are good citizens and they are abiding by the law not only here but [also] abroad.”