Just three years after the selling-off of the first American toll highway, Chicago residents faced the private leasing of their public-parking meters.  Public-parking prices skyrocketed following the $1.2 billion sale along with the elimination of free-parking days and the reduction of free-parking hours.  This very private “arrangement” faced no public scrutiny; Chicagoans barely knew the deal had even taken place until its finalization.  The high-priced transaction was negotiated in just two days, with a number of Alderman hardly even reviewing the components of the contract!

How would Chicago’s officials even know what the citizens of the city wanted or what they believed was in their best interests, if the public itself had little to no involvement or opportunities to voice their own opinions on the matter in question?  Mayor Daley, in fact, is “borrowing” the projected revenue funds from the lease mentioned above to balance the 2010 budget, leaving a meager sum to social programs and other public services demanded by millions.  In less than 2 years, that extra bonus dwindled to almost nothing.  This left Chicagoans asking themselves: “What will our mayor auction off next?  That ominous question received a startling reply: the water and sewage service.

On October 21, 2009, Mayor Daley informed the Chicago Tribune that he was looking into private contracts for Chicago’s water and sewage system.  Daley also mentioned that he had been meeting with various consultants who were interested in realizing his vision.  In past months, the Mayor proved seemingly more interested in bidding off Midway Airport, while the question of leasing the water and sewer system still lingered.

Chicago, however, was not the first city in Illinois to privatize water distribution services.  The residents of Homer Glen – who still drink from the waters of Lake Michigan but have to purchase it from a private company who has ownership of their public-water system – know the detrimental costs of water privatization first hand.  Homer Glen residents are doing whatever it takes to cut their water usage in order to reduce costs.  You name it, and they are doing it: changing faucets, showerheads, toilets, anything and everything that relates to water coming in and out of their homes.

The argument in favor of privatization of public infrastructure is that private firms know how to run a public-sector service more securely and efficiently, even though it, in the end, may actually cost the public more.  Projected financial savings on the part of local and city governments certainly come into play – mostly allowing for the fleecing of the public by private institutions cutting production and other operational “corners” at the expense of the overall quality of product, those employed, and consumers.

A private company’s bottom-line is profit, not the public interest, not the environment, and certainly not their employees.  In contrast, a public-sector service provides a steadier salary, benefits, pensions, and over-time pay more often than its counterparts in the private sector allow for.  Publicly run sectors also hire more ethnic minorities and women, while also providing better pay for all their employees regardless of educational background.

In another example of privatization gone wrong, in 1994, Mayor Woodrow Stanley of Flint, Michigan, looked for ways to shave government spending, particularly in the public sector of garbage collection.  After much research and numerous bidding wars between five private companies, the mayor concluded that, through his scheme, he would end up saving the city a measly $2 million dollars.  The details of the contract read that to actually save the necessary amounts demanded by the administration, the following was necessary: reduce staff by 25%, increase the number of stops by more than a hundred for each crew, and pick up bulk items along with regular garbage, instead of allowing for over-time work – stretching the labor force to the absolute maximum.

The balancing of the budget, therefore, seems to mean the stripping and fleecing of workers and communities at all costs in the interests of profit making.  If management has to prohibit unions, cut jobs, hours, benefits, and pensions, so be it…services must yield a profit for the few before their offering to the many.  Thus is the mantra of the neo-liberal, privatizing elite.

Private companies, in fact, rarely even allow the existence of unions in their places of business in order to maintain strict control over their employees, allowing for potential workplace abuse, abysmally-low wages, safety hazards, etc.  These companies are more than capable of and willing to violate labor rights, environmental regulations, and, not to mention, the safety and health of their employees and consumers…welcome to privatization!

To that effect, we must defend all public-sector services against every privatization scheme with mass, militant action, i.e., demonstrations, occupations, indefinite strikes, and pickets with solidarity action from other public and private-sector unions.  Union leaders representing workers directly involved in the industry must take immediate steps to halt any such plans or any associated potential layoffs, furloughs, wage freezes, and pension cuts to those employed by mobilizing their members in struggle against the bosses and their representatives in government.

We must also fight for the independent organization of the rank and file in their own democratically-elected committees of action with proven class fighters at their head.  Only with such an independent organization, representative of and answerable, to the membership at large, will the rank and file have the opportunity and, above all, the tools necessary, to pursue the struggle to a successful conclusion, routing the capitulationist, bureaucratic leaders as they seek – fearing the militancy of the workers and potential threat it poses to their position as the trusted lackeys of the capitalist class – the most shameful terms of surrender.

Such militancy on the part of workers, undoubtedly, will come under attack from bourgeois society as a whole – especially from its repressive elements: the forces of the State.  The workers must be ready to withstand and repulse such attacks, whether from the capitalist police or elements of the armed forces by forming democratic workers’ self-defense pickets.  These contingents, made up of individuals elected directly by the rank and file can provide the necessary organizational force to prevent the police, strikebreakers, etc, from sabotaging and breaking the collective strength of those directly engaged in battle.

We demand the public-water system and all other public services come under immediate and direct workers’ control, removing all state and federal bureaucrats from any say whatsoever over workplace operations and decisions.  By putting those in charge who know how to run the industry best, the workers, we ensure the continuance – and even the improvement of – quality, safe public drinking water to all.

City and state governments, as in Chicago, experiencing budgetary shortfalls and crises can most certainly make up the costs of public-service operations by taking the ill-gotten wealth out of the pockets of the multi-national corporations, banks, finance houses, and the rich: let them pick up the cost of providing abundant and quality drinking water to the millions of people who need it, not working people already struggling under the capitalist crisis!

Water, as we all know, is a necessity for life and, thus, becomes a human right, not some privilege simply for those who can afford it…if they even can.  Let us make our voices heard by saying it loud and clear to the bosses and their government: We are not for sale, and neither is our water!