LOS ANGELES, June 12 — The PLP high school club here has been very active recently, both before and after May Day. One student declared: “As a high-school senior, I was willing to engage more in my school. When my teacher asked me to be a part of the May Day dinner, I was willing to experience something new. I knew it was about communism but had no idea what that was. Being there helped me to understand that communism means joining people as one and providing equality and fairness among all the people. I developed a new outlook.
“I recently graduated from high school and am about to go to work. My eyes are now open to how we are being controlled and are manipulated. A revolution will help us gain authority and a voice to eliminate this corrupt government.”
Another student said about May Day: “Fresh out of high school, attending events like the May Day dinner and a meeting on sexism helped me find out what’s going on, not just in my community but in the world beyond. The May Day dinner was a preview for the May Day march, including speeches about various political situations. A few of my school mates and I performed a poem, [Good Morning Revolution] by Langston Hughes. The dinner enabled people to come together and prepare for the march as one.”
All this is increasing our potential for youth-based leadership in the region in the coming years. We are also working closely with six high school students, highlighting the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. One has been involved for a while and the others have come around our May Day events.
After May Day, we had two rallies in the downtown garment area revealing the similarities between workers in LA and Bangladesh. We also had a study group about sexism, relating it to the class struggle among garment workers. Afterwards we distributed CHALLENGES to workers at a garment factory.
In the study group, we learned about sexist oppression in other parts of the world as well as what we see in our personal lives — how women workers are paid less then men, and what jobs people think fit a certain gender, affecting how much a worker gets paid.
Sexist ideology says women are inferior to men, leading to intense exploitation of women. In Bangladesh, a garment factory collapse killed more than 1,100 workers, mostly all women. The workers didn’t want to go to work because of cracks in the walls, but the manager warned them if they didn’t show up that day that they wouldn’t get paid. Those who did go to work were among the many who died.
After these months of activities, we now have a solid base for youth leadership and an active campaign around the Bangladesh factory murders that has tied us to garment workers and others throughout the city. We still have a long way to go, but this is a good start. We plan to relate this and other issues next fall to ones on the college campuses where these students will be enrolled, as well as continuing to work with garment workers in the city.
NEW YORK CITY, June 12 — Thousands of angry teachers, transit, fire, sanitation and other workers rallied today demanding new contracts. All city unions have been without new contracts, some for over two years. But instead of staging a city-wide general strike, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the NY Central Labor Council used this as a Democratic Party election rally for the upcoming mayoral election. Some went so far as to say they had come to City Hall to “evict” billionaire Bloomberg, even though he is leaving on his own, term-limited out, after 12 devastating years. The UFT gave out a sea of blue t-shirts that read, “Workers Count and Workers Vote.” That was also one of the main chants from the stage.
At the same time, based on our efforts to bring small blocks of workers and youth from our jobs and schools and the response of workers to CHALLENGE, the rally also showed the potential for building a base for communist revolution.
This demonstration was not the beginning of a real fight to restore needed services in hospitals, schools, and other vital areas. Rather, it was the first of a series of election rallies, winning workers to the idea that if you want a decent contract you better vote for the Democrats. This message was first delivered a few months ago on this very spot when a rally in support of striking school bus drivers and matrons ended after all the Democratic candidates signed a letter urging them to return to work with no contract. Many had no jobs to return to. Sadly, a number of school buses drove past this rally, with no blowing horns and no recognition from the traitors on stage. With hundreds of thousands of workers angry and without a contract, the union bosses were doing their best to keep the workers passive and dependent on this capitalist state. Whoever occupies City Hall, no closed hospitals or schools will be reopened. No racist cutbacks will be restored.
PLP is locked in a fight with the union leaders for the political leadership of workers and youth. When they say “politics is primary,” they mean that you have to vote for Democrats to get a contract with fewer give-backs and concessions. When the PLP says, “politics is primary,” we mean that workers must be armed politically to understand how the racist profit system works, how it is on a collision course for another world war, and how only communist revolution can provide a secure future for the international working class. To defeat the bosses, workers, soldiers and youth need to build a mass PLP.
BROOKLYN, NY, June 16 — “Healthcare Yes! Wall Street No! Racist [governor] Cuomo’s got to go!” This chant, started by members and friends of Progressive Labor Party and taken up eagerly by hundreds of mainly women hospital workers, rang out for the entire march fighting against closing of Downstate Hospital. Many union leaders and politicians looked decidedly uncomfortable. The speeches were more militant in response to the mood of the workers.
Brookdale Hospital workers and Occupy rally to oust the racist administration Mdysis and fight their healthcare cuts in November 2011.
For a year, hospital workers and residents of the neighborhoods served by us have been fighting against the downsizing and/or closings of both Downstate Hospital and Long Island College Hospital (LICH). Downstate, comprising 8,000 workers and nearly 2,000 medical students, is the fourth largest business in Brooklyn.
The hospital and NY State bosses have been waffling on their plans, partly in response to this fightback. In the current economic environment, Governor Cuomo and Sate University chancellors want to cut our wages and benefits; their plan has no good solutions for hospitals that serve a large percentage of Medicaid and uninsured patients. The Public Benefit Corporation experiment proposed in Downstate bosses’ “Sustainability Plan,” will referee the imposition of more and deeper cutbacks.
This is a despicable sexist, racist attack on the working class here. Both politicians and union leaders fear that our struggles will progress into more militant actions than just petitions. Hundreds of CHALLENGEs sold at the hospital were welcomed by workers.
At the frontline of this fight are women workers, most of whom are black and immigrant. Considering the sexist fact women bear most of, if not the sole, responsibility of raising children and taking care of their parents, we are at the forefront of the struggle for healthcare for our families. Those of us who may lose jobs at these hospitals are major, if not primary, wage-earners for our households. In spite of the unpaid labor in the house and the exploited wage labor in the hospitals, women workers are getting involved and taking leadership, often for the first time.
PLP has been deeply involved in organizing these hospital struggles. We were there when Brookdale Hospital workers took on the criminal hospital administration, Medisys. We were part of organizing the first demonstration last June at Downstate with Occupy Wall Street. We have tried to help mobilize the neighborhood Red Hook residents (survivors of Superstorm Sandy) to fight for workers and patients at LICH. Throughout we have warned that this crisis in healthcare is caused by the capitalist need to move resources out of social services into its efforts to maintain control over its world empire.
Workers in all hospitals must stick together and enlist the support of our patients. We cannot rely on voting and politicians. Mass, rank-and-file, militant struggle is our only chance to push back these attacks. Finally we have always said that a system based on profits can never provide decent health care for the working class. That is why we fight to build a mass communist movement in this antisexist struggle.
The company I work for is located in the northern part of the State of Mexico, one of the poorest areas of the state. The company pays $600 MXN a week to women and $650 MXN to men (one U.S. dollar is equivalent to 12.78 Mexican pesos); these are starvation wages, miserable and also humiliating. This company is one of many that exploit workers, taking advantage of conditions in the area, because this is one of the most deprived regions. The majority here doesn’t own the lots where they reside, living precariously in brick and mud houses covered by cardboard or aluminum roofs, and out of necessity are forced to accept dangerous jobs for very low wages. Most never even finished elementary school.
The majority of workers in this company are women and many are under age; there are only three men in the production line. Women do all the heavy work, risking injuries, without safety equipment or social security benefits. Because of the scarcity of jobs, compounded by the low educational level in which this accursed system has kept them, many women have to tolerate abusive bosses who humiliate them, scream obscenities at them and try to destroy their dignity and make them feel like trash.
When I realized a young woman was crying because our boss had insulted her for something insignificant, I loudly challenged the boss, denouncing him in front of our co-workers, telling him he couldn’t talk like that to a person, a woman, and even more so, to a young person; I was so angry that I struck him.
When the contractor learned of this situation, he demanded to know why I had struck the boss, saying that he couldn’t tolerate that type of violence in his company, even though the bosses’ violence is much more serious, because humiliating and degrading words can cause injuries that often never heal.
In the end, I was fired, and the supervisor threatened me with court charges. But what’s good about this situation is that it allowed me to discuss the Party’s politics with some of my co-workers, who are now receiving CHALLENGE. We workers have the possibility of freedom in our hands; we must fight for dignity, eliminating racism, individualism and sexism that destroy us while the capitalists enjoy the wealth that we produce. We must fight for our children to save them from this suffering, for the dignity of our lives, for our freedom, for a communist revolution. Workers of the world unite!
Communist Fighter
Los Angeles, June 7 — When President Obama showed up here today to give a fund-raising speech to the people he really represents — the wealthy of this city and the fat-cat donors of the Democratic Party — he was met by 150-200 protesters, mostly young Latino college students. Many came to the U.S. with parents and relatives in search of a way out of the desperate poverty in Central America and Mexico. A group of us PLP members joined our friends from immigrant rights groups at the rally, to protest an administration that is working 24/7 to detain (jail) and deport an all time high number of immigrants, 1.7 million, in the last four years.
These anti-immigrant policies and actions have prompted anger and demonstrations around the country against the “Deporter-in-Chief” as rally organizers labeled him. But it’s important for workers in these groups, and all workers, to understand that it isn’t just about Obama’s policies or his friends — it’s built into the bosses’ system.
The hangover from the recent capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 has left the U.S. with several million new U.S.-born jobless piled atop the mountain of workers who were already unemployed before the crash. These workers roam the streets and “job fairs” looking for work. By the tens of thousands they enroll in schools hoping to upgrade the sales value of their labor power. Often the only result is debt from student loans.
Yet capitalists, from the biggest corporate manufacturing bosses to the smallest subcontractors, will not and cannot put them to work. The law of maximum profits leads the bosses to look for the lowest costs and wages, and these young workers are unwillingly competing with workers in China, Brazil or Bangladesh for the lowest costs and most dangerous working conditions.
The real purpose for borders is to divide the working class and build racism. All bosses and their capitalist governments are free to export capital the world over wherever and whenever it buys the cheapest labor and resources. They are free to exploit the workers in any area of the world, any time, free to murder innocent people in imperialist wars, free to poison the earth, to lie, spread famine, disease, poverty, push sexism, patriotism, and nationalism.
And that’s why Progressive Labor Party turned out for this protest, because we reject this idea, and believe our young friends can be won, through our communist ideas, to see that capitalism has never, and can never, work for the great majority of us that sell our brains and strength for a wage.
Join us in Progressive Labor Party to put an end to the plague of capitalism. Fight for a communist world without borders.
