Dear Editor:
Since Con Edison as of 2 a.m. Sunday, July 1, 2012 locked out 8,500 ConEd power workers jeopardizing the health and safety of the City of New York and Westchester during this heat wave, in accordance with the fascist corporate state policy “to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions” (“Occupy Wall Street Declaration,” New Politics, XIII (4),Winter 2012, p. 9), I propose the measure of “extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State” (The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Marx and Engels) be implemented by the United States Congress with respect to Con Edison and all power companies.
Con Edison is bargaining in bad faith with the intent to phase out defined pensions and adversely impact wages and healthcare so, to avert a legal strike, Con Edison authorized a lockout by notifying unionized workers not to report to work.
Amendment V of the Constitution of the United States of America permits the confiscation of private property for “public use” with just compensation (i.e., nationalization). Despite high electric rates for residential and commercial consumers, brownouts and blackouts every year during heat waves in New York City, this relative monopoly survives since they have “donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them” (“Occupy Wall Street Declaration,” New Politics, ibid.9).
This is in perfect synchrony with Mayor “Bloomberg’s aversion to democratic planning and oversight” (“Planning the Neoliberal City,” Dan Steinberg, New Politics, ibid. p. 145), and the concomitant political neutralization of the counter-hegemonic force of American trade unionism.
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