GARY, IN, September 24— Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) attended a "People's Town Hall on NIPSCO Accountability” meeting this evening, hosted at a working-class church. We were present to blast the racist nature of climate disasters under capitalism and to advance a revolutionary communist alternative that puts the needs of the international working class first.
On August 11, a derecho storm tore through Northwest Indiana with winds approaching 100 miles per hour, ripping apart trees, homes, power lines, and the basic infrastructure that working-class people depend on to survive. At its peak, roughly 375,000 workers lost electricity—about 80 percent of Northwest Indiana residents.
In the majority Black city of Gary, the damage was especially devastating. Tens of thousands were without power. Food spoiled, sewage backed up, grocery stores closed, and families were forced to survive without refrigeration, air conditioning, lights, or reliable communication. Nearly two weeks later, thousands of Gary residents were still waiting for electricity to return. NIPSCO, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, eventually declared restoration essentially complete on August 25, but for many working-class families, the disaster did not end when the lights came back on.
This was not simply a natural disaster. It exposed a social disaster created by capitalism. Extreme weather is becoming more destructive while the infrastructure workers depend on is left to decay. The people who suffer first and longest are those with the fewest resources: Black workers, poor families, renters, elderly people, and workers who cannot simply leave town or work from home. Capitalism privatizes the profits of essential infrastructure while socializing the costs when that infrastructure fails.
Workers already know how to respond to the disasters of capitalism
Workers did not wait for NIPSCO or the politicians to save them. Across Northwest Indiana, people organized food distributions, hot meals, dry-ice giveaways, cleaning supplies, baby supplies and other forms of mutual aid. Churches, neighborhood groups, small businesses, community organizations and individual workers stepped forward. These efforts were essential because people needed help immediately. The mutual aid effort was essential but is not a substitute for working-class power. It is a demonstration of what working people are capable of when we organize around human needs rather than profit, but only class struggle and communism can liberate us.
PLP members and friends have been deeply involved in this response. Decades of political work and relationships in Gary and throughout Northwest Indiana meant that people already knew whom to call. Workers looked to trusted PLP members and friends for leadership because those relationships had been built long before the storm. We distributed dry ice, food, home supplies to over 300 workers.
In the past month since power has been restored, we’ve continued to push to sharpen the working-class fightback, including our participation in tonight’s town hall meeting. Furthermore, we’ve led a protest rally at Gary City Hall, and helped host another community forum as well as various fundraisers in Chicago where we’ve discussed the politics of the crisis with workers in our base. Crucially, we’ve pushed for multiracial unity among those devastated by the derecho and educated NIPSCO utility workers to understand the profit system as the common source of our misery and the need for a mass PLP to defeat it!
NIPSCO: Only driven by profit
For NIPSCO, the storm is an opportunity to launch more attacks on the working class. NIPSCO's 2025 revenues were in the billions, while the average residential customer's bill skyrocketed. The average NIPSCO customer bill rose 16.75 percent in July 2025, or nearly $280 annually, with the bosses saying the rate hike was “necessary for modernization, reliability, and its transition toward renewable generation (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/25).”
The NIPSCO bosses have increased rates for future infrastructure and energy projects that haven’t seen the light of day while also entering into a major agreement to provide electricity for Amazon data centers. These changes have amounted to record profits for NIPSCO, the same company that notoriously locked out over 1000 of its workers earlier this spring in a two-month contract standoff (see CHALLENGE, 6/7). NIPSCO shows its exploitative core in the aftermath of the fascist lockout against its workforce, who were fighting for increased protections around overtime and the use of outside contractors.
When disaster strikes, it is workers who climb the poles, cut the trees, replace the lines, and rebuild the grid. The workers who do this work should have every resource they need to do it safely. They should have enough staffing to prevent exhaustion and injuries. They should not have to fight a corporation for decent overtime provisions. And the company should not be able to respond to a crisis by simply leaning harder on existing workers and contractors. But this is all part of the daily reality of capitalism.
A worker-run utility would operate on different principles. Instead of asking how few workers can keep the system running, we would ask how many workers are necessary to make the system safe and resilient. Instead of cutting vegetation when it becomes an emergency, we would employ crews year-round to maintain every right-of-way. Instead of asking whether an infrastructure project produces enough profit to fill capitalist banks, we would make sure it made people's lives safer. Instead of making workers fight over the scraps, we would put the entire energy system under the dictatorship of the working class.
Communist revolution must be the goal
We must continue to fight in a mass way with working-class leadership so that NIPSCO pays for the damage caused by its failures. We must fight utility shutoffs and unaffordable bills. We should demand that workers have the staffing, wages, safety protections, and hours necessary to maintain the grid. Ultimately, we must fight to overthrow this racist profit system.
Capitalism is already preparing to turn climate disaster into an opportunity for profit. We have to prepare to turn disaster into an opportunity to build working-class power and communist revolution.
