Fairfax County, Virginia, February 26 - Today striking Fairfax County transit workers from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU Local 689) rallied to demand a better contract from Transdev, a predatory private contractor. Transdev wins transportation contracts from Washington, D.C. area county governments by low-ball bidding at the expense of its workers. But Fairfax Connector workers, mostly Black and immigrant, have solidly shut down Transdev (647 out of 650 workers have hit the bricks). They have been without a contract since November, and are fed up with Transdev’s slow-walking of negotiations and their pitiful contributions to their 401(k) retirement fund. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, including members from Local 689, provided regional solidarity at the rally while sharing revolutionary communist analysis of the need to overthrow capitalism. The bosses have tried to weaken the workers by splitting up the regional workforce into smaller companies, but workers are fighting more intensely than ever. 

Transit workers rail against bosses’ attacks
Recent transit strikes in Loudoun County, at Metro Access, and DC Circulator, coupled with threats of strikes at Driving Alexandria Safely Home (DASH) transit in Alexandria, VA have put the bosses on notice that ATU Local 689 workers will not back down. They are fighting for parity with the wages and benefits of the 9,000 workers for the much larger Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). And now, with the expiration of the contract with WMATA set for June 30, the bosses better beware! 

WMATA faces a $750 million operating deficit and is poised to take this out of the hides of its workers by attacking pensions, health care, other benefits, and wages while also reducing transit service to the rest of the working class. Workers are becoming strike-ready across the region. Workers are testifying at WMATA budget hearings opposing the bosses’ plans and demanding that the big developers and sports arenas who benefit from the mass transit system should pay for it, not workers.

We cannot be fooled by liberal Democratic Party politicians this time around. They promise their support to union leaders and then sell us out. We must rely on ourselves and other workers to fight back and at the same time build revolutionary leadership in our union and around the world to topple this exploitative capitalist system.

Brooklyn, NY, February 12 —Brooklyn workers are facing a new racist attack. The State of New York, along with hospital administration, has unveiled a plan to close Downstate Medical Center (DMC). Ten years ago, they had a similar plan. Downstate workers, patients, and the community mounted a fight that helped save it. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in and led parts of that struggle. In the end, Downstate stayed open. But around the same time, two other Brooklyn hospitals that DMC took over, Victory Memorial and (despite prolonged workers’ fightback), Long Island College Hospital, were closed. During the pandemic, Downstate was designated a COVID hospital. Workers fought tirelessly to care for the sick. Some workers died.

Closing Downstate, which is in the center of Brooklyn, is racist. Life expectancy is years lower in Black and Latin neighborhoods in eastern and central Brooklyn. Part of the reason for that is that these neighborhoods have fewer providers, fewer staffed hospital beds, fewer practitioners who accept Medicaid, and lower hospital quality. Since the pandemic, life expectancy has decreased significantly and disparities have widened. Since then, in a plan similar to the one being proposed for Downstate, Kingsbrook, another central/east Brooklyn hospital, has been closed. 

One key measure of racism in healthcare is maternal/infant mortality. Maternal mortality of Black workers is three times that of white workers. Black workers experience infant mortality rates more than double that of white workers. These disparities have worsened since COVID. It is estimated that 84 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable with proper pre- and perinatal care. There are only two regional perinatal care centers in Brooklyn whose labor and delivery beds average 93 percent full.  One of them is Downstate, Manhattan has more than double the staffed labor and delivery beds as Brooklyn. 

So here we are ten years later fighting again for Downstate to survive. The ruling imperialists, in mortal competition with the Chinese bosses and others,  need to save money on healthcare and other human services to funnel into their various wars for world domination. As long as they run things, we will never have decent equitable health care. We will always be fighting for scraps.

So, if we can’t win, why should we fight back? For one thing, sometimes we can force them to back down temporarily. Our fight 10 years ago saved thousands of lives during the Covid pandemic, not to mention thousands of jobs.
More importantly, our class can learn in the battle to see through the tricks used to divide us: racism, sexism, and nationalism. Our class can emerge stronger, especially if some join PLP and dedicate themselves to getting rid of the rule of the few over the many once and for all and help build an egalitarian communist society, where healthcare would be allocated as needed, not for profit and large segregated areas would disappear as we moved to make all workplaces and neighborhoods free of racist and sexist super-exploitation.

BROOKLYN, NY, February 26 — “The hardest part of this is the indifference from the College. They said nothing. I’ve served my food here for years…some of the regulars who work for the college don’t even make eye contact and avoid me.” These are some of the words from a worker and friend of Kingsborough Community College’s antiracist club, Common Ground, whose halal food cart at KCC’s front gate was recently defaced by racists. 

Amidst ongoing genocide in Gaza, and hours before the U.S. imperialists expanded bombings simultaneously in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, racists spray-painted “Kill Palestinians” and crossed out the word “halal” on the front of the cart. As soon as the worker discovered his cart was defaced, he called the campus Public Safety. When Public Safety told the worker that the cart was technically outside their jurisdiction, and the NYPD didn’t have any units to assign yet, the worker contacted a member of Common Ground. 

Students and faculty in Common Ground, and members of the international communist revolutionary Progressive Labor Party, spread the word immediately. Within an hour of the call, we were at the campus gates inspecting the halal cart. Even though our campus is still on winter break, part of building a campus student-faculty-worker alliance includes conditioning ourselves and our base to respond rapidly to racist and sexist attacks and demonstrate multiracial working-class unity.

N-Y-P-D, KKK, C-U-N-Y all the same
Upon arrival, we asked a KCC Public Safety sergeant at the front gate if it was possible any of the surveillance cameras pointing outward captured the attack. The sergeant said it was possible, but the request must come from the NYPD, who had already been called. We waited with our friend for six hours outside in the cold, and eventually, he revealed that this hadn’t been the first attack; they suddenly began after October 7. In one attack, his entire generator was stolen. With KCC on a dead-end street with little traffic, there is no question these sudden racist attacks aren’t a coincidence!

The NYPD did not respond that day, but instead called the worker and instructed him to file a report at the precinct the next day.

The next day at the precinct, the police told the worker filing a report was impossible, and that he should have called 911 and waited by the cart. Several hours later, upon arrival at the cart, the police stated they couldn’t read the writing at all. When the worker asked whom then the written word “kill” may refer to, they told him “Don’t worry about it” and assured him it wasn’t “necessarily a hate crime.” When the worker asked why “halal” was painted over and no other words, they shrugged and said it would be downgraded as vandalism with no surveillance requested and left.

After multiple people called and reported to the precinct, the NYPD finally sent a detective who concluded it was a hate crime. After launching a joint investigation with the New York State police and stating they obtained surveillance video from multiple cameras, two weeks later, they have no new updates. Our demands are for a timely and thorough investigation, for KCC’s administration to publicly acknowledge the racist attack just outside campus the same way they typically report crimes near campus, and raise money to repair the cart.

Building PLP for antiracism and revolution 
Under capitalism, workers don’t have state power and we’re forced to use -with struggle- the bosses’ institutions for things we sometimes need, like police reports. PLP members in Common Ground are sharpening this contradiction by struggling to make working-class student leadership primary over-relying on the police and growing our CHALLENGE network. 
We are also welcoming another new member joining PLP this past week; this is how we build the antiracist movement that will lead us to ultimate victory: a workers’ dictatorship, where there would be no police or bosses, and the armed working class would immediately investigate anti-worker attacks!

Gearing up for fightback and May Day!
These latest racist attacks are the ongoing consequence of the CUNY administration’s racism against students and adjunct faculty, and U.S. imperialism. But as racism is essential to the functioning of capitalism, antiracism is the key to destroying it. 

Common Ground is recruiting multiracial and strong women leaders who are providing leadership for this semester.  While genocide, imperialist war, and racist attacks surround us, fighting to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system with communism is the order of the day. JOIN US!

KCC has a decades-long history of vicious anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism. Through the 1970s, Zionist fascist and genocidal terrorist Meir Kahane gave multiple public speeches here with his fascist “Jewish Defense League”, protected by both the NYPD and FBI (KCC Scepter, 3/18/75). 

Since 2018, CHALLENGE covered the years-long struggle exposing a racist Zionist administrator in charge of KCC’s social media who was caught publicly posting racist anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Black messages.
Last year, Public Safety tackled, detained, and arrested a Latin student attempting to de-escalate a situation where a white student was yelling the n-word. The mostly Black and liberal administration spread misinformation about the facts of the case, then pursued disciplinary action against the Black student who was called the n-word! We defeated this through student-faculty fightback.