Detroit

Detroit city union leaders said Tuesday that they had reached concession agreements in 25 of the 48 bargaining units for city employees, including huge cuts in the health benefits for thousands of workers.

According to a report Wednesday in the Detroit Free Press, the deals include a $20 million cut in prescription drug benefits and what the newspaper called “substantial” reductions in pension benefits.

The newspaper said that under the tentative agreements, workers would lose their defined-benefit pension plan and be relegated to a defined-contribution plan like a 401(k), which workers, not the city, would be responsible for paying into.

The unions are negotiating with the administration of Mayor Dave Bing over measures to close a budget deficit of an estimated $105 million. The Bing administration claims the city could run out of money as early as April, and set a January 31 deadline for the unions agreeing to its demands, which include a pay cut of ten percent, the second such across-the-board pay cut in three years.

One in four children in Michigan lives in a family with an income below the official US poverty threshold, according to the annual Kids Count In Michigan Data Book 2011, released last week by the Michigan League for Human Services (MILHS).

The non-profit child advocacy group reported that the percentage of children in poverty in Michigan more than doubled, rising 64 percent from the beginning of the last decade through 2009. Children living in families with incomes below the poverty level rose from 14 to 23 percent.

During the same period, the percentage of children in families in extreme poverty surged. One in 10 children in Michigan lived in extreme poverty at the end of the last decade, with the percentage more than doubling, from 5 to 11 percent, since 2000.

These families have incomes less than one half the poverty level. Extreme poverty is really destitution, denoting income under $8,000 a year for a family of three. The agency’s report cites one example of the consequence of extreme poverty: a family in such dire straits cannot afford the average cost of shelter in most Michigan counties.

Local Democrats and pro-Democratic Party organizations staged a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, January 16, to oppose the Emergency Manager (EM) law passed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

The demonstration at Snyder’s home was a continuation of efforts to divert popular opposition to the attack on the working class behind political forces that are no less committed to this attack than Snyder himself.

Snyder has threatened to name an EM to run Detroit, as has been done in four other Michigan municipalities. The EM would be given essentially dictatorial powers to abrogate contracts, enforce pay cuts, sell off city assets and take other measures to resolve the city’s budget deficit on the backs of those least able to afford it. A final decision will come after the recommendation of a financial review team due at the end of February.

Last week’s demonstration was staged by a coalition comprised of a section of the affluent Democratic Party elite, the trade union bureaucracy and middle class pseudo-left organizations. The protest had the support of the self-proclaimed civil rights leaders and millionaires, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. The media, amplifying the event’s size and significance, sent three news helicopters and half a dozen trucks to broadcast via local radio, TV and print.

On Saturday evening an elderly brother and sister tragically died in a house fire on Detroit’s west side, only blocks away from a fire station “browned out” as a result of city budget cuts.

The fire broke out around 9 p.m. on Burlingame St., one block from 12th Street, now called Rosa Parks Boulevard, in a two-family flat. Killed in the fire were Doyle Whatley, 77, and his sister Cecelia Vance, 69. Two other members of the family escaped the fire unharmed—their 84-year-old sister and a four-year-old child.

Neighbors in the closely-knit community joined the elderly sister in desperate attempts to fight the fire with a garden hose as they awaited the fire department. When the small hose turned out to be frozen, anger and frustration rose among the bystanders in the face of the massive blaze. When firefighters arrived, the two victims had already succumbed. A crowd gathered as the firefighters brought out the bodies with several family members attempting to go into the home to find out what happened.