NEW YORK CITY, June 5 — The Municipal Labor Committee, a coalition of city-worker unions totaling 300,000 members — teachers, transit workers, workers in the mayoral agencies as well as fire and sanitation departments — will be rallying June 12 at City Hall park. Will this demonstration lead to a real fight to restore levels of city services needed in hospitals, schools and other vital areas?
Will it lead to a real fight for contracts that expired two and three years ago?
Will it end the racist police terror of “stop and frisk” and police murders?
Will it lead to a general strike that brings the banker-, real estate- and Wall Street-backed politicians to their knees?
We don’t think so!
Its main purpose is to win city workers, their families and friends to blindly follow and trust the preferred Democratic mayoral candidates of the various unions. The union leaders all support the capitalist system and its political process. They want us to buy into a rigged system that has always served the interests of the ruling class.
Progressive Labor Party members are participating in this demonstration to unite with our brothers and sisters who desperately want to fight back. We’ve helped lead struggles on our jobs and in our communities.
As we fight back, we will share our understanding that U.S. capitalism, fighting to keep its position as the top imperialist warmongerer worldwide, intends to cut our living standards, including wages, pensions, health care and governmental services, cuts that are all part and parcel of capitalism. We therefore build a movement that fights for the unconditional benefit of the working class and for the destruction of the profit system. We fight for communist revolution, to build a society free of all forms of exploitation, racism, sexism and boss-inspired war.

New York CITY, June 1 — “When you reach a certain point, you can’t continue taking your kids to the doctor, or you can’t afford to go to the doctor. You can’t raise your kids here in New York, so you have to find other work…The cuts are so drastic that they will undermine our ability to serve our clients.”
That’s how one striker explained why 270 lawyers, paralegals, process servers, and other staff are in Week 3 of their strike against Legal Services NYC (LSNYC), after working without a contract for over a year. The strikers are members of the Legal Services Staff Association/UAW Local 2320 (LSSA), a nation-wide UAW local with branches across the country.
The millionaire cooperate lawyers who run the LSNYC board want workers to take a pay cut equivalent to two years of seniority, pay thousands of dollars a year in health care contributions while providing greatly reduced coverage, cut employer contributions to the retirement fund by nearly one-third, and end cost-of-living pay increases.
Even more than union-busting, the proposed cuts are a racist attack on the poorest, mostly black, Latino and immigrant workers whose only access to legal assistance is through LSSA. It represents workers facing evictions and foreclosure, those denied disability benefits or unemployment compensation, victims of domestic violence, guides newly arrived immigrants through the racist immigration system and more.
The Legal Services Corporation was created by Congress in 1974 after the anti-racist rebellions of the 1960s, to ensure the grievances of poor and working people were moved into the judicial system. Forty years later, U.S. rulers can no longer afford a safety net they created when they were mostly unchallenged by rival capitalists.
The attack on Legal Services is a part of the shredding of the old social contract and very much a part of the development of fascism as the U.S. lurches to ever widening wars. And no strike, no matter how militant, can change that course. While we need to fight tooth and nail to defend our livelihoods and our clients, at the same time we must build a revolutionary movement that can smash war and fascism with communist revolution. We invite every striker to join and build a mass Progressive Labor Party.
The bosses have dug in, hiring the notoriously anti-union law firm Seyfarth Shaw. One striker noted,
“Milbank Tweed [building], where the chair of the board works, is downtown at Chase Manhattan Plaza. Michael Young, the vice chair, works in the New York Times building in Midtown Manhattan…Their clients are large banks. Our clients are the poorest of the poor, often being sued by those banks.”
The strike has the support from workers around the city. Workers from other unions have joined the picket lines and offered cold drinks to the picketers. Like the recent struggle to keep Long Island College Hospital open, workers uniting with those they serve can be a winning, anti-racist formula. It also has the “support” of the NY Central Labor Council, which helped to pull the rug out from under striking school bus drivers just a few months ago.
This past week, UAW Region 9A, which includes LSSA/UAW2320, rounded up about 50 strikers and union staffers to endorse Christine Quinn for mayor on the steps of City Hall. Quinn, as speaker of the City Council, has been billionaire Bloomberg’s closest ally as he has refused to settle even one contract with a city workers’ union. She refused to allow a vote on paid sick days for three years and is the strongest defender of racist NYPD commissioner Ray Kelley. She and four other Democratic candidates for mayor signed a letter urging the school bus drivers to end their strike, even though many no longer had jobs to go back to.
Strikers don’t need to be standing behind Quinn or any of her rivals. They are doing the right thing, relying on each other (every striker is on a strike committee) and the clients they serve. And they need to be wary of the Central Labor Council and UAW leadership. As the fight unfolds, we’re fighting to hold on to what we can, and limit our losses. That’s the period we’re in. In order to get the fruits of all we produce, we will have to take power from the bosses with communist revolution. That day may not be around the corner, but the opportunity to build that movement lies within this strike.

Economic crises are deadly for workers. But for capitalists, crises are opportunities to attack the working class. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon declared at the onset of the Great Depression, “During depressions, assets return to their rightful owners.” By “rightful owners,” he meant the capitalist ruling class. (Mellon himself was a financier who amassed a personal fortune of more than $300 million.) The system’s internal contradictions create periodic busts that weed out weaker capitalists and enable the surviving bosses to increase their profits by rolling back workers’ gains.
The current Great Recession is no exception. The capitalist class has used it to wage a relentless class war, complete with massive unemployment and givebacks from workers still hanging on to their jobs. This brutal cycle can be ended only when workers fight back — not just against pay cuts, but to destroy capitalism itself.
A Worker Faces the Crisis
In 2008, when Michael was laid off from his construction job, he was just one of millions of workers who found themselves jobless due to the latest capitalist crisis. What he didn’t know was how deeply this crisis would cut. In his home Washington State, there were now 350,000 workers collecting monthly unemployment checks. In Seattle, where Michael worked, there were three unemployed workers for every job opening.    
After spending nearly two years on unemployment, applying for hundreds of jobs, Michael finally found work in a factory. Though the job was similar to his old one, he was forced to take a 30 percent cut in pay; his wages fell from $16.75 to $12 an hour. He was not alone. The average worker coming off unemployment during this crisis took a 17.5% pay cut, with the deepest cuts concentrated among the lowest-paid workers.
Where did all these lost wages go? They were pocketed by the capitalists. In 2010, 93 percent of all income gains in the economy went to the top 1 percent of the population — what economist Joseph Stiglitz called “the largest redistribution of wealth in such a short period of time in history.” In fact, this class thievery merely accelerated a trend of the last four decades. In 2000, U.S. workers received 64 percent of national income; by 2012, their share dropped to 58 percent. In short, the capitalist class has grown even wealthier at the expense of the working class.
Class War by Design
The civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the ‘60s and early ‘70s fought militantly to empower the working class. Rejecting the ballot box, workers, students, and soldiers took to the streets to demand justice. Mass urban rebellions helped to crush the capitalists’ ability to wage genocide in Vietnam. As a result, wages and benefits between 1966 and 1972 rose at a record 6.8 percent per year. In 1966, official unemployment hit an all-time low of 3.8 percent. In 1969, the average duration of unemployment fell to a record low of 7-8 weeks.
This period was a nightmare for the capitalist class, squeezed between rising inter-imperialist rivalries abroad and revitalized working-class movements at home. In 1971, in a secret memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell warned that the Left was “waging ideological warfare against the free enterprise system” and that “almost half of college students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries.” He stated that capitalists needed to stop their policy of “appeasement” of the working class: “The time has come — indeed, it is long overdue — for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.”
In a 1976 report by the Rockefeller-organized Trilateral Commission, ruling-class stooge Samuel Huntington echoed Powell’s concerns. He stated that the U.S. suffered from an “excess of democracy” and that “people no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.” Two years later, another Trilateral Commission member, William Simon, warned that the U.S. is “careening with frightening speed toward collectivism.”
The rulers’ solution was to launch a massive attack on workers. In the early 1980s, as head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker jacked up the prime interest rate to induce a recession. This caused unemployment to skyrocket amid a relentless attack on labor unions, spearheaded by Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981. In 1982, at the height of the Volcker recession, 60 percent of unions agreed to pay freezes or cuts.
Hand in hand with their economic attack, the capitalists launched a political assault on workers. They packed their think tanks and universities with intellectuals dedicated to neo-liberalism, a reactionary ideology that stressed total reliance on the market and the elimination of social programs run by the government. Think tanks and foundations, Simon stated, must “serve explicitly as intellectual refuges for the non-egalitarian scholars and writers” — those who would exalt the deeds of capitalists while relentlessly attacking workers.
Soon enough, the dramatic reversal of U.S. class struggle was apparent. In 1993, the Wall Street Journal reported that industry had “excelled in holding down the cost of labor. Hourly pay in the U.S. was lower than in most other [industrial nations],” to the point where “gaps have narrowed” between the U.S. and “emerging nations” like Mexico and Taiwan. The Journal lauded this trend as “a welcome development of transcendent importance.”
In Congressional testimony in 1997, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan explained that resurgent capitalist profits were the result of “atypical restraint on compensation increases” and “mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.” In 1991, as he pointed out, 25 percent of workers feared being laid off. By 1996, that number rose to 46 percent. In explaining how Ford “tamed the monster,” namely the United Auto Workers, the Wall Street Journal gleefully reported how “massive layoffs” and “outsourcing” had forced “increased cooperation” among workers now willing to work harder for less.
Worker Misery is No Accident
Michael is part of a growing trend. Between 1972 and 2011, as worker productivity increased by 80 percent, wages have gone up only 4 percent. More recently, workers have actually lost ground to the price inflation on necessities. Since 2000, food prices have risen 25.2 percent, health insurance premiums 131 percent, and the price of gas 286 percent. With public transit allowed to deteriorate under neo-liberalism, Michael and millions of others spend an increasing proportion of their paychecks on gas as “extreme commuters,” traveling 40 miles or more to their jobs.
Yet Michael is not the hardest hit in this economic crisis. The bosses have used racism in their effort to make even more profit and also to divide the working class. They’ve created categories of super-exploited workers. As racist anti-immigrant hysteria is stoked by the media and politicians, the bosses have taken greater liberties in exploiting Latino workers through overwork and stolen wages. Black workers are still “last hired, first fired.” A recent study found that a black male with a college degree had as great a chance of being called back for an interview as a white male with a felony conviction.
The Only Solution is Revolution
More than anything, what Michael and other workers across the world need is class consciousness. The capitalist class is organized in its attack on the working class; workers must be organized in their counterattack. They must organize under the only political banner that has consistently fought for the rights and dignity of the working class: communism. There is a reason why the capitalists’ lackeys label those who opposed slavery, racist segregation, apartheid, sexism, child labor, and imperialist war as communists. It is because communists fight for workers. Communism is the political movement of the working class.

El Salvador — PL’ers met to discuss May Day activities. We discussed the planning and outcome of each activity:
First, one comrade went to Honduras to coordinate the event there and arrange the distribution of 2,000 flyers at the May Day march by six CHALLENGE readers.
Following that, in the capital city of El Salvador, San Salvador, 15 comrades, members and friends of PLP, distributed 5,000 flyers. These comrades come from various nearby communities.
In total, 45 people distributed flyers at the May Day event in San Salvador. We’d also like to highlight the number of flyers that were sent to a university in Guatemala, through the efforts of a PLP sympathizer. Further, we printed one thousand more flyers than the number planned at a pre-May Day meeting.
In summary, we’re certain this event was a success and a step forward for PLP, and therefore for the working class, and the peasants from the villages, who were pleased. All the PLP members in San Salvador are very proud and we’re ready to continue the struggle organizing workers, women, peasants, teachers, soldiers, and students.
Youth who participated were able to realize that the only way to change the capitalist system is organizing to build our base and contribute to consolidating and strengthening communism internationally to destroy the forces of imperialism.
Long Live May Day! Long Live the Workers of the World! Long Live PLP!