DETROIT, September 28 — “This is bullshit! It will take me another eight years to reach top pay!” That’s what one worker at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant said of the tentative sellout agreement between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US (FCA) and 40,000 workers in the United Auto Workers (UAW). If what he says is true, top pay will be $25 an hour, a 15 percent cut from the current rate. The UAW leadership’s nationalist “Buy American” dogma and their strategy of partnering with the capitalist auto bosses has been a racist disaster for the mainly Black workers of Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago and other cities. Thousands of Black families in Detroit are facing another wave of water shutoffs and foreclosures.
The local bosses’ plans to build new sports arenas for their own profit and entertainment wouldn’t be possible without the total collaboration of the UAW misleadership. Once upon a time, the UAW was a militant union organized by communists during the class wars of the 1930s. The great Flint sit-down strike of 1936-7 inspired workers throughout the world. Coinciding with the successes of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, Flint gave bosses worldwide good reason to tremble at the prospect of revolution. But over the decades, the old movement’s strategy of allying with lesser-evil bosses has turned unions like the UAW into powerful enemies of the working class.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is picking up the red flag where the heroic workers of Detroit once raised it. We are fighting for what bosses fear most: communist revolution.
With “Friends” Like These…
Having given away the store, UAW President Dennis Williams was promising hourly pay raises for longtime workers who haven’t seen one in a decade. He also said the union would “bridge the gap” for second-tier workers hired after 2007, who now start at about half the pay of first-tier workers. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne had another idea for how to end the two-tier system: by lowering wages for top-tier workers!
Today, 45 percent of FCA-UAW members make entry-level wages of about $17 per hour. Over the last two labor contracts negotiated by the UAW, FCA workers have seen their wages drop as much as $30 per hour. These givebacks by workers’ false friends in the UAW and the Democratic Party have lowered their pay to the level of non-union workers at Toyota and Honda in the U.S. South. Now, in the name of moving production back to the U.S. from Mexico, these class traitors are pushing more wage-cutting contracts.
After decades of being battered by its international competition, culminating in the 2007 bankruptcies of GM and what was then Chrysler, the U.S. auto industry has undergone drastic changes. So has the UAW, which has chosen to ally with U.S. auto bosses instead of the international working class.
Counting the foreign-owned “transplants” and the massive parts supplier industry (which used to be mostly in-house at the Big Three auto makers), there could be more than 700,000 auto workers in the U.S. But the vast majority of the industry, including temporary and part-time workers, is non-union, and wages outside the core assembly plants have collapsed. The parts supplier industry has workers making as little as $9 per hour, even as they toil for luxury auto makers from Cadillac to Mercedes.
Thousands of workers may be voting this contract down. Workers have rejected it at Jefferson North, Sterling Stamping, Trenton Engine, Kokomo Casting, and Toledo Machining. No matter what the final count, this antiracist rebellion by the rank-and-file against the UAW leadership is a welcome development.
Same Enemy, Same Fight!
The attack on autoworkers is worldwide. On September 10, 4,300 Ford workers in Sao Bernardo de Campo, the industrial region around Sao Paulo, Brazil, went on strike against mass layoffs and pay cuts. The strike concluded with a deal to cut workers’ hours by 20 percent! Workers in Brazil at Fiat, Volvo, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen and truck manufacturer Iveco have faced thousands of layoffs and forced time off without pay.  
The ruling Workers’ Party, Brazil’s version of the U.S. Democratic Party, has been busy slashing workers’ wages and pay in response to what they call the “economic crisis.” Meanwhile, these bosses are rolling out a red carpet of tax breaks and blank checks to builders of giant stadiums and luxury hotels for the 2016 Olympic Games. The workers of Brazil gave $15 billion to the capitalists to pay for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, sponsored by Ford and Fiat—a disaster for the working class. Now the workers in Detroit, like their sisters and brothers in Brazil, are shouldering the costs of new professional sports stadiums there.
Unlike the UAW or Brazil’s anti-Workers’ Party leaders, the Progressive Labor Party isn’t trying to bail out the bosses; we’re fighting to destroy them with communist revolution. We’re not pushing two-tier wage contracts; we’re fighting to abolish wage slavery.
PLP salutes the militancy of industrial workers fighting back in São Paulo and Detroit! Over the past three years, tens of thousands of autoworkers in Brazil, Mexico, China, South Africa, and Turkey have staged bitter strikes. Their unions cut deals to keep the assembly lines churning out profits for the capitalists. As the 1937 Flint strike showed, industrial workers are at the center of capitalism’s profit engine. They will play a key role in communist revolution. United with the international revolutionary communist PLP, we can build a world run by the working class. PL’ers and friends should call on their local unions to organize actions of solidarity with auto workers from Detroit to Brazil. Our aim is to build an international PLP that can smash this racist, imperialist system once and for all.

Like racism, poverty, and mass unemployment, homelessness is an integral element of capitalism.  By driving rents ever higher, capitalists increase their profits and then blame the homeless victims.  Many workers who can’t afford their rent or to save toward a place of their own end up joining the bosses’ military—sent off to kill other workers turned into homeless refugees by capitalist inequality and imperialist war.  
Communism would focus solely on meeting the needs of the working class throughout the world.  Providing shelter for all workers would be primary. With all wages, currency, and profit abolished, the labor and resources now used to construct rent-generating office buildings would be diverted to build safe and sanitary living quarters for the working class.  
Homelessness is sexist and racist.  It is sexist because it imprisons millions of women in unsafe conditions and abusive relationships because they can’t afford to move out and find a home for themselves and their children.  Among U.S. adults in homeless shelters in one recent study, 78 percent were women (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, July 2011).
Homelessness is racist because Black, Latin, and immigrant workers are super-exploited or subject to racist unemployment, to the point where millions cannot afford rent, let alone buying a home. In 2010, according to a report by The Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness, Black family members in the U.S. were seven times as likely to have stayed in a homeless shelter as white family members (huffingtonpost.com, 3/14/12).
In India, where 96 percent of a vast housing shortage affects low-income workers, you can find “miles and miles of built homes with nobody living in them” in suburbs of Delhi, the capital (BBC.com, 5/21/15). According to the property consulting firm CRBE South Asia, there are 12 million vacant homes across urban India—many built to shelter investments by wealthy individuals seeking to dodge taxes.
In New York City, one can walk by countless new luxury condos that the working class cannot possibly afford.  Outside, on the sidewalks of the capital of world capital, homeless people are forced to ask for money to eat.  
Banks Win, Workers Lose
A vast amount of homelessness in the U.S. was created by the crisis of overproduction of homes that began in 2007—what the bosses call “the subprime mortgage crisis.” From the beginning of capitalism, the system has created periodic crises when more of a product is produced than can be sold. When the working class became unable to keep up payments on homes where the real estate value had plummeted, millions lost everything. Under Barack Obama as the banks got bailed out, the working class got sold out.
Imperialism is the stage of capitalism where capital must go beyond national borders to achieve a maximum return on investment. As China has turned to market capitalism, newly minted billionaires—running scared from the Chinese bosses’ cynical “anti-corruption” campaign—are investing in real estate in places like New York and Los Angeles.
As a result, housing prices have been driven even higher; in both of these cities, homeless is again on the rise. And how did these rich Chinese get their money in the first place – by brutally exploiting their own workers!  This illustrates the maxim: What affects workers anywhere affects our class everywhere.
Homelessness will end with the destruction of the profit system. With the leadership of Progressive
Labor Party, we will organize society to provide for the working class.  We will build a society based on communist economics: “From each according to commitment, to each according to need.” Instead of having countless miles of empty homes while
workers are desperate and homeless, we will build the housing that the working class needs and deserves.

In 2014, a wave of enthusiasm swept the medical field as new medicines to cure hepatitis C became available. Older treatments had limited success in eradicating the virus, and side effects stopped many from completing treatment. The new medications can eliminate the virus in 80 to 95 per cent of cases, are in easy-to-take pill form and have few, if any, side effects over the 8 to 24 weeks of treatment.
The wave crashed, however, on the cost of the medications: a thousand dollars per pill. Profits to Gilead Sciences, the first to get a new drug approved, are projected in the billions. In yet another chapter of the racist U.S. bosses’ history of medical apartheid, the high cost of these medications hits Black workers hardest, along with millions of workers around the world suffering from this virus.
Hep C and Racism
Hepatitis C affects from 135 to 160 million people worldwide, including an estimated three million in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Black workers comprise 22 per cent of all hepatitis C patients, despite being only thirteen percent of the U.S. population.  The mortality rate for middle-aged Black workers with hep C (8 percent) is twice that of comparable white workers; native Americans and Alaskan natives with hep C have an even higher mortality rate. In the U.S., more people die from hepatitis C complications than from HIV-related illnesses! Hepatitis C causes death from liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in 5 to 10 per cent of sufferers, and is the leading cause of liver transplants in the U.S.
Hepatitis C is usually a chronic disease. Life-threatening complications take 10 to 30 years to develop. HIV and alcoholism increase the rate and speed of complications. While physicians agree that almost all of those infected should be treated, the insurance companies have decided that only those with the worst disease should get medication. The process to get approved for treatment under Medicaid frustrates both doctors and patients. Many give up, and the cost is prohibitive for the uninsured and undocumented. If you live in states like Louisiana, which opted out of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, you’re similarly out of luck.  
 Pharmaceutical price-gouging has been in the news of late—particularly the company that raised the price of Daraprim, which treats an HIV-related illness, from $13 to $750 per pill. But Daraprim is only the best-known example. Current costs for the new hepatitis C treatments—Harvoni, Solvadi, and Veikira Pak—would bankrupt public health programs like Medicaid.  Medicare faces huge costs as well, since federal rules bar Medicare from negotiating lower prices. Legislative efforts to change this policy have failed, because politicians are bought and paid for by the drug companies.
Bosses Profit, Workers Die
Pharmaceutical companies like Gilead claim that prices are driven by research costs. In fact, research on the hepatitis C virus was funded publicly, through taxes paid by the working class to fund institutions like the National Institutes of Health. Scientists and investors developed this public research, claimed the patent rights for the first drug, Solvadi, and formed a company, Pharmasett, that invested less than $500 million in research and development to produce the medication. Gilead then bought the drug for $11 billion and promptly began selling it. Production costs per patient are about $100, but the price of treatment is approximately $100,000—a markup of one thousand to one. In the first year alone, Gilead billed Medicare and Medicaid $6 billion. This naked capitalist struggle for profits leaves workers without lifesaving treatments.
International treatment of hepatitis C is likewise controlled by the drug companies. Trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement are designed to protect companies’ patents.  Egypt, with the highest rate of hep C in the world, was offered a discount but only for “a sliver of people abroad who are lucky recipients of some specialized access program…access is fatally compromised and the human right to health is fundamentally violated” ((Jeffrey Sachs, consultant to World Health Organization).
Smash Global Medical Apartheid!
A communist society would prioritize research, development and mass production of every life-saving treatment.  Communist worker-scientists would no longer be driven by profit;  medical breakthroughs would be the property of all. The communist Progressive Labor Party is fighting for that world. In Washington, DC, where the prevalence of hep C runs from 9 to 12 percent in Black working-class clinics and hospitals, PL’ers have been calling for screening and treatment. We are preparing to move to the next level with a campaign at the American Public Health Association (APHA), protests at lobbying giant PhRMA headquarters, and continued patient advocacy.
Capitalist restrictions on biological breakthroughs extend beyond hepatitis C medications. New medicines for HIV, cancer and heart disease are often price-gouged, even though government scientists did the research. We are organizing and fighting back while also showing that attempts at reforming drug pricing will never be enough. Reforms will always exclude the hundreds of millions of our working-class sisters and brothers around the world who won’t ever be able to gain access to these medicines under capitalism. Only a communist revolution will enable the working class to manage its own health care, research and pharmaceutical distribution. Only a communist world can eradicate the virus of capitalism.

Mary “The Jewel” Harris, who died on September 4, was known by everybody in Progressive Labor Party’s Philadelphia hospital work. She was a wonderful friend, a force of nature, the salt of the earth—and a terror if you got on her bad side. Mary was also a pillar of PLP. When she worked in housekeeping, she routinely distributed up to 60 CHALLENGEs. After each issue, she would pass over a bag heavy with coins and bills.
Mary steered many CHALLENGE readers toward the Party and was invaluable in recruiting new members. Whenever we organized union and PLP events, her participation helped guarantee success.
Mary took to heart the egalitarian promise of communism and participated in her club’s political discussions with an unpretentious sincerity. She viewed May Day as the day for “our family,” meaning the working class. Mary also embraced her hospital comrades, Black and white, as family, something she didn’t take lightly.
In a fight, she was someone you wanted on your side. When actions were needed on the job, some might be scared, but Mary was always up to the task. Short in stature, she had a booming voice that never needed amplification, and a fierceness that intimidated larger adversaries. Respect for Mary and her loyal friends and co-workers helped to restrain attacks on PL members by the union and hospital bosses.
Two years ago, Mary accompanied us when 50 hospital union retirees marched into the hospital administration offices to protest benefit cutbacks. When an executive vice president emerged with menacing security men to “reason” with us, Mary stood directly in front of him. At full volume, she yelled, “I need my medicine! I need my medicine!” The executive was about six-foot-three and Mary only came up to his belly button, but she unnerved him. Afterward, she observed with her sly grin that the administrator “looked like he was ‘bout to cry.”
One PL comrade remembers transporting Mary and a carload of her friends to a union meeting. The women workers talked about how they protected themselves in some dangerous Philly neighborhoods. The comrade was impressed by the women’s matter-of-fact courage, especially when each of them pulled knives or clubs from their purses; one even produced an enormous revolver. For these women, the need for violence was not some abstract philosophical question. Armed with PLP’s ideas they will be a formidable revolutionary force.
Mary kept up her political activism and personal relationships to the day of her death. She was so sick when she came to the emergency room that she couldn’t remember the phone numbers of the two comrades who were her emergency contacts. For six days, Mary’s friends and family didn’t know she was in the hospital. Then a hospital social worker who knew Mary from her activism found a comrade’s contact number.
Workers from many departments visited Mary in the hospital. Retirees came from their homes. Many younger workers described how she had been a mother figure to them. Worker after worker told stories like, “When my husband died, Mary gave me a bag with $1,000 she had collected.”
As her cancer rapidly progressed, Mary was soon told she needed to go into hospice. She had no local relatives. But for two of her friends and comrades, Mary was family, and on her 75th birthday they brought her home with them. Mary died three days later.
When the working class seizes power for communism, Mary’s voice will be part of that thunder.