On February 1, 3,800 oil refinery workers launched a health and safety strike against the deadly combination of outsourcing, short staffing, and forced overtime. The strikers are members of the United Steel Workers Union (USW), which represents 30,000 oil industry workers, at 63 refineries, oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities. They produce 65 percent of U.S. oil.
The walkouts took place at nine strategic refineries in Texas, Kentucky, Washington, and California that produce 1.82 million barrels of fuel a day. The rest of the workers are working on 24-hour contract extensions that could end at any time, and which could shut down the rest of the organized sites. This would be the first industry-wide strike since 1980, when all the workers walked out together, and stayed out for three months.
The union called the strike after rejecting proposals from Royal Dutch Shell, the lead negotiator for the industry. The other companies involved in the strike are Tesoro Corporation, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Petroleum, and LyondellBasell Industries. The U.S. oil industry made almost $90 billion in profit in 2014.
Big Oil is notorious for spills and explosions that threaten oil workers, the surrounding community and the environment. An explosion at a BP refinery outside Houston in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured nearly 200. Regulators found BP responsible for willfully violating safety protocols, and enacted millions in fines. Four years later, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found 700 more violations, and enacted $87 million in fines for not correcting the violations that caused the explosion.
Another safety issue is that maintenance work, originally done by union members, is now being contracted out. Full-time union workers get health and safety training from both the company and the union. Lower-paid, contract workers do not.
And when workers either leave or retire, they are not replaced, forcing others to pick up the slack with overtime. “If they staffed this refinery, it would create 150-200 full-time jobs in our community,” said one striker.
So far, the strike has not seriously affected production as managers are operating the facilities. Letting anyone cross a strike picket line is a sure loss. The best way to guarantee that the sites are closed is for the workers and their supporters to occupy them. This would up the ante and expose the media, cops, courts and politicians as hired hands of the oil industry.
It could rally the support of workers and youth as we recently saw around the issue of racist police terror. It could begin to lead thousands of workers and youth off the treadmill of legal reform and onto the road to communist revolution. We aren’t holding our breath for the USW leadership to choose that path.

EAST AFRICA — Due to capitalism, the majority of students here regularly miss lunch or dinner, receive poor quality of food and healthcare, substandard accommodations, and limited access to electricity and water. Likewise, the capitalist curriculum fails the new generations’ aspirations and potential. This is naked capitalism. However, from April through October 2014, students at a Teachers’ College have been fighting back against racist theft and utter disregard of students. We have also been fighting back against the sexist denial of education to girls in a rural town.
In June, 2014, these student-teachers left for their three-week practicum without the daily allowance that pays for accommodations and meals that is their due. The 876 student-teachers managed to survive for 21 days, living in hardship, especially during the evening hours after they returned from school. When they returned to the Teachers’ College, the cruel principal told them to prepare for the college closure without giving them their allowances retroactively or providing any explanation for the administration’s theft. This kind of criminality by the bosses in schools, colleges, and universities has been a common and legal practice.
Student Strike
A PLP contingent acted as a catalyst for action, first by sharing their views with fellow students, and student governments. These meetings resulted in a united strike where students rallied with posters that read, “We want our Money”  and “Shukana: A Figurehead” (attacking the specific role of certain administrators). They also staged a hunger strike. They not only won their demand but they spread the struggle to other colleges that also have a history of criminal administrators. Students refused to accept these racist attacks on education, where the bosses expect to get away with theft from Black students.
As students were preparing to go back to school after holiday, they were met with another attack. In the final days before college opened on July 11, a minister announced an increase of college fees of 400,000 shillings ($218) — a 200 percent increase! (The average family of seven lives on $1 per day.) This is like giving a two-year-old baby a 20-kilogram bag of maize to carry. This is an impossible task, as majority of the students come from the working class. It is true that education is supposed to benefit workers’ lives and the whole community. Under capitalism, schools are a way for the bosses to make profit off workers, and teach pro-capitalist ideas to those students who can afford school. Students responded by demanding a meeting with the administration, and they conducted strikes on several campuses. The administration ended up accepting student demands to remove the increase in fees!
Next, on October 14, the students discovered that the Secretary, Vice President, and Dean of Students had stolen and spent the $670,000 Condolence Fund that is created from a 500-shilling-per-month donation from each student. The purpose of the fund is to help students who need to go home during the semester for funerals or other family crises. The theft was discovered when three students requested support to attend funerals of their relatives. The administration has no shame! Students demanded that the money be returned. This led to a serious fight between the students against the government and the college administration.
The PLP comrades from the Teacher’s College will continue to build unity between workers and students among colleges here and worldwide to fight against capitalism’s criminal education system. In the coming months, we need to find ways to deepen the political consciousness of the masses of students, so we can sustain and intensify the struggle.
The capitalist government oppresses the working class daily by taxing its people heavily while refusing to provide the services promised. Now the living conditions for the workers are as bad as they were during colonialism. We call for unity of every tribe, sex, age group, schooled and unschooled, rural and urban workers alike to bring down the bosses and pave the way for working-class rule. Our voice is the voice of the exploited and oppressed class of the world that will one day destroy capitalism. Our organizing today is digging graves for the bosses’ burial tomorrow.

ORGANIZE AGAINST SEXISM

PLP members in a rural secondary school here in East Africa are struggling with parents against the practice of taking their girls out of school to marry them off for the bride price, which is paid to the bride’s parents by the groom’s family. This major problem has its roots in poverty, sexism, and class society. Many of the young girls who are supposed to be in school are forced by their parents to stop studying and get married. In 2013, this contributed to 40 percent of the students here leaving school because of their parents’ decision.  These traditional values keep the working class thwarted by illiteracy.  
PLP teachers and friends organized meetings with parents about the importance of education for girls. With a bride price, the girls were a commodity to be bought and sold. Under capitalism, everyone’s value is turned into commodity. We must fight capitalism because it is the source of all exploitation in the society. Although some parents are still reluctant, most of the parents and the masses in the district became aware of how education is crucial. After five months, the number of students dropping out of school in this district was reduced.
Child brides are an outcome of a system based on capital. When workers’ livelihood is based on money, families are forced to sell their daughters, as property, as an income to allow the family to live another day. The working class needs more than a world that values girls and boys as equal. We need to abolish the source of inequality: the wage system. In that sense, the emancipation of women is intrinsically tied to the emancipation of the working class.
When these girls are sent to school instead of sold as domestic slaves, what is the purpose of their education? With communist teachers, students can also receive a political education. They can begin to understand why they are poor when they live in a country rich in resources, and why there are poor and rich countries in the world. These girls can grow to become fierce women fighters against capitalism. Teachers, students, and parents can work towards a vision of a communist society where human life is priceless, where women and men are equal.

Workers are fighting determined battles against the bosses in India, a country with almost one-fourth of the world’s population, more than the Western Hemisphere plus Europe combined. PLP is growing roots and winning workers to our international party, and for communist revolution.
Workers and Students Fight Sexism and Battle Bosses
Worldwide attention focused on the systematic sexist violence against women when a medical student, Jyoti Singh, was raped and murdered on a New Delhi bus in 2012. Thousands of demonstrating workers then broadened the grassroots struggle against sexism throughout India, especially in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Recently, tens of thousands of students in Kolkata marched in protest against the corrupt cover-up of a sexual harassment incident, and dozens were arrested in clashes with the police. The main university was disrupted for weeks, with many functions completely shut down.
In the same city, workers producing jute, a rope-like substance made from plants, have fought back particularly hard. The hard labor to make jute might earn from $1.60 to $6.50 per day. This is nothing compared to the amount the bosses make off of this product, and many workers have had their hours cut. In one factory, workers physically attacked a plant manager who cut the workers’ hours and, in the attack, the manager was killed. In a separate attack, workers damaged a plant manager’s home while the manager escaped. These attacks are not isolated examples of workers’ fightback, as thousands of auto, transportation and agricultural workers have staged militant strikes in the north and south of the country.
India has a rich history of class struggle and revolutionary movements, which have been betrayed again and again by political parties claiming to be “communist” while joining with the bosses in helping to exploit the working class. Many working-class people became disillusioned with these parties, especially the mainstream “Communist” Party of India, and simply did not vote, which resulted in the electoral victory of the right-wing capitalist parties over the usual liberal capitalist parties. The bosses’ current right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has a mass base in the viciously racist and sexist Hindu nationalist movement, the Hindutva, which has many similarities to Hitler’s Nazi Party.
In 2002, Modi was Chief Minister in the state of Gujarat, India’s industrial and commercial heart, Hindutva mobs rioted and murdered over 1,000 Muslims following years of anti-Muslim, nationalist propaganda. During the killings, Modi had requested the police and security forces not to intervene. While Modi is now Prime Minister and openly dedicated to helping giant corporations and banks accumulate more and more wealth, those workers won to Hindutva ideology are being used the same way that Hitler used middle-income types rocked by economic crisis to turn against their working-class brothers and sisters.
Separate Struggles With the Same Goal
The stakes are high in India. The increase in working class fightback in India is extremely positive, and workers around the world can learn from their example and their heroism. But unless workers in India are won to a revolutionary communist party with an international outlook of organizing billions to lead a revolution and destroy capitalism, workers will continue to be divided and suffer grinding poverty and vicious racist and sexist attacks. All these struggles show the courage and determination of many working-class people. But all of these movements also reveal the weaknesses that will destroy these movements as fascist repression intensifies.
All of the struggles are divided with no revolutionary communist party to tie them together and build the type of mass movement that workers need. The women’s movement in Delhi was an important part of the recent struggles against sexism, but is a single-issue movement. Killing an individual boss here and there will not systemically change the lives of jute workers of Kolkata — they need a revolutionary party to destroy the bosses’ entire system of capitalism. That means building unity with the women’s and student movements, which number in the tens of thousands in the same city. It means unity with fellow striking auto workers and agricultural farmers. In the countryside, the government is using the military to push the indigenous Adivasi people off their land to make room for big corporations who want to steal it, and the military has been especially brutal.
The capitalists in India are not fools — they know to maintain their power, regionally and nationally, they need to pit one group against the other. The capitalists have also found ways to effectively use the centuries-old caste system of ranking people by birth — technically banned — even as they pretend to oppose it. These types of racism severely super-exploit and oppress targeted groups like the Adivasi, the Muslims and lower-caste workers. But they also split up and distract the whole working class from a unified fight against our common oppression. This keeps the whole working class down. PLP has always made the struggle against all forms of racism the front edge of our struggle to build a communist movement.
Workers Need a Revolutionary Party to Go All the Way
The masses of workers fighting back have been breaking away from the fake “communists” and other capitalist parties with their false promises about reforming capitalism. Capitalism is the reason for these nightmares in the first place — centuries of imperialism and vicious racism gave way to national independence and instead of British capitalists, workers are oppressed by Indian capitalists.  
PLP’s strategy of building an international party has had greater appeal to many workers and students as nationalist movements have become the new oppressors. In the past, the communist movement tried to compromise with nationalism. It believed that nationalism was a necessary aspect of the struggle against imperialism. History has proven what PLP pointed out almost fifty years ago — that nationalism leads potentially communist movements right back to capitalism. In India, and throughout South and Central Asia, PLP is systematically expanding its influence among industrial workers, students, and grassroots organizations, fighting for workers to understand that the working class in the whole region has the same destiny as their sisters and brothers all over the world, and need one party to destroy imperialism at its core: capitalism.                                                                   

NEW YORK CITY, February 5 – “Millionaire Wall Street lawyers on MFY’s [Mobilization for Youth] board…believe that only wealthy people deserve highly trained, experienced legal professionals and attorneys. We reject that vision. We are fighting for our clients!” That was the message from one paralegal as more than 200 workers and professionals braved frigid temperatures to picket MFY Legal Services. The 56 striking attorneys, paralegals, and secretaries from this office are represented by the Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA)/UAW Local 2320.
Funding for legal services for the poor, which includes housing and family court, bankruptcy, benefits for the elderly and many other issues, has been cut steadily since the 1990s. Federal support has decreased over 60 percent  since the 1980s. Most contact with clients is now by phone as demand for assistance has surged while resources have declined.
MFY is attacking the pay and benefits of the workers, but the cuts are really aimed at the poor and low-wage mostly Black, Latin and immigrant clients we serve. MFY’s staff and caseload have more than doubled in recent years, but its administrative support staff, all Black and brown women, has only grown from three to four people. They are demanding family leave, reduced workloads and pay-equity for the lowest-paid workers. They are also fighting to keep experienced staff while recruiting new Black, Latin and immigrant staff that more reflects those we serve.
Ultimately, we have to replace the racist profit system with communist revolution. Workers won’t need legal help to survive. There would no such thing as a poor worker. A good life for all workers will be the goal of society. From fighting for our clients to affirmative action in hiring to pay-equity for the lowest paid workers, this is a strike against racism with the potential to be a school for communism.