WASHINGTON, DC, April 13 — Today 30 workers from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 gathered at the union hall for a meeting called by the local leadership to organize a campaign against privatization of parts of the city’s transit system. For two decades, several lines in surrounding counties have been separated by local jurisdictions from the unified rail and bus system. This has shrunk workers’ wage and benefit packages in these separate and privatized sectors as well as cut into the ATU membership, weakening the union.
The DC government — run by liberal Democrats, most of whom have been endorsed by the local unions — has decided to investigate the cost savings from further privatization, this time for lines inside Washington, DC itself. This would cost another 175 union jobs and workers hired for those lines would end up worse off. This is just another bosses’ tactic to roll back workers’ standard of living to boost their own profitability.
Two approaches on the issue quickly developed. The union leadership and the organizer from Jobs with Justice advocated educating the membership about the danger of privatization and the possibility of layoffs if this occurred. They advocated that ATU workers and their allies circulate a petition to the Mayor demanding privatization be stopped.
 In contrast, PLP’ers and other militant workers advocated a strategy based on political analysis showing how the bosses’ privatization tactic is part of a general racist attack on unions the bosses are using to solve their current economic problems. (A huge majority of the transit workers are black and Latino.) These workers felt that we needed to urgently educate workers about how this privatization attack and many more similar assaults on workers’ well-being will continue as long as capitalism continues because of its need to maximize profits. Winning workers to see the need to eliminate capitalism has to be part of any strategy to fight privatization.
On a tactical level, both approaches are similar. Both want to have meetings and rallies against privatization, build a worker-rider alliance and eventually carry out work actions to drive the point home. The difference is in the message. Only revolution can win the fight against privatization. Any other “victory” will be short-lived, or the gains we make will be taken from some other workers. Moreover, if workers understand that this attack is just one arrow in the quiver of the capitalists, with more attacks to come, they will become more active and aggressive now in the current fight.
Our approach requires us to fight as hard as we can to preserve jobs, but also to organize for May Day around the goal of destroying capitalism, with its racist practices, and fighting for communism.
At the meeting several workers were skeptical about their co-workers joining in the fight, whether simply for the fight against privatization or the broader fight against capitalism. But blaming the workers won’t get us very far. An organizer must figure out why our brothers and sisters are not fighting back vigorously and convince them to change. This often requires patience and perseverance, including clear education about the urgency of the need to resist the capitalists’ systematic attack on our well-being. We are not going to win every battle, but by fighting together we can build a stronger movement against capitalism, and this will create the basis for our eventual victory.
At the end of the meeting several workers took May Day leaflets and posters, a step in the right direction.


BROOKLYN, NY April 20 — “SAVE LICH, NO MORE CONDOS FOR THE RICH!” That was the chant on April 7, as more than 200 Long Island College Hospital (LICH) workers and residents of the Red Hook housing project, marched together from the project to the hospital. They were demanding the hospital remain open, despite the fact that the SUNY Board of Directors voted to close it on June 18. (LICH was recently taken over by SUNY Downstate Medical Center.) The march united hospital workers and those we serve. The chants were loud and militant as workers and residents made a powerful statement, marching together through housing project many LICH workers had never been to before, even though many LICH patients live there. Every worker who attended talked about it for days.
The racist police presence was heavy. In contrast, the same 76th Precinct assigned just two unarmed Auxiliary officers to a march of 75 mostly white residents two weeks earlier, through the wealthy Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Uncertainty reigns on all sides as to whether or not the hospital will actually close. But the past month has seen promising activity fighting the closure and building the PLP.
One of the biggest victories has been winning workers and youth from Red Hook and LICH to see this struggle as a fight against racism. On March 13, a community group called the Red Hook Initiative (RHI) hosted a meeting of 35 mostly black and Latino women residents, along with LICH nurses, doctors and paramedics. Militant young volunteers distributed hundreds of flyers for the meeting across the sprawling housing development, the largest project in Brooklyn. We discussed how there are an average 60,000 ER visits a year and over 100,000 patients receive specialized care at LICH annually. The proposed closing will mean certain death for Red Hook residents, making the hospital closing a vicious racist attack. The response was overwhelming, but we did not have a clear plan of action that everyone could begin organizing for.
After this meeting, the unions representing LICH workers, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and 1199SEIU, held a joint union/physician coalition “leadership” meeting. The union leaders follow the bosses’ playbook that relies on paying for publicity in the bosses’ media and closed-door meetings of hand-picked “leaders.” But a paramedic brought two militant Red Hook youth to speak about the hospital closing as a racist attack. In the end, NYSNA, 1199SEIU and the LICH physicians group scheduled the April 7 march.
The struggle to bring some of these fighters to May Day is afoot, although complicated because CHALLENGE readers are busy working second (even third) jobs as they brace for losing their primary income. More work lies ahead in building PLP in Red Hook, and every experience selling CHALLENGE has been positive. We know that bigger racist attacks are on the horizon as the U.S. gears up for growing imperialist wars. The children of Red Hook and LICH workers will soon be called on to kill and be killed while our families face poverty, overcrowded hospitals, schools and prisons. The struggles that we have participated in over years here have planted the seeds. This struggle will nourish them. We will greet this May Day a little stronger than last year, and with some momentum.

Brooklyn, NY April 17 —   One of the drivers who had been a rank and file leader during the school bus strike called excitedly to say that a NY Post column had exposed the lies that NYC’s Mayor Blumberg and his schools commissioner had told when they claimed that the “EPP” job security clause in ATU 1181’s contract was illegal. The bigger question is why didn’t the union leaders of 1181, the Transit Workers International Union and New York City’s Central Labor Council do anything to expose these lies and stop these attacks? We think it is because the labor movement functions as the junior partner of the bosses and their system.
 As Challenge has reported, ending EPP was a major part of the bosses’ plan to cut the wages of school bus workers. Workers are both furious at and resigned to the 15% cut in wages, loss of paid time off during winter and spring break vacations and the increase in their share of the costs of health insurance premiums. Most of all they see the possibility of mass firings of senior higher paid workers when the new school year begins in the fall. What would have happened if the leadership of 1181 had called on its members to stop scab buses? What if the international union had supported the strike with cash for strike benefits that would have offset the lost wages workers missed for a month? What if the central labor council had called for all its member locals to join mass picketing of bus barns?
Then a real fight would have been made over the bosses’ plans. This kind of fight will never happen if we look to the enemies in our midst (the union flunkies) for leadership. That’s why we need to build a workers movement around the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party.
We urge our brothers and sisters who led the strike earlier this year to join us in the streets on Saturday April 27. This is the day the working class reviews its forces and celebrates its accomplishments. Your leadership provided a great inspiration to workers and students all around the world. You will feel the excitement as we march in the streets of Flatbush with workers and students from around the world.
We learned from you how international our struggle is as we met and talked with your members from Haiti, Eastern Europe, Dominican Republic, Italy, Puerto Rico and all over the world and how you united to combat the bosses attacks. We were impressed by the commitment and perseverance that we saw in this battle. But this is a lifelong battle and that is what Mayday represents-the necessity of workers to fight back and make revolution.
This struggle is international as workers all over the world face the same attacks. This is a day to make our voices heard and our presence felt. Let’s take the lessons we learned from the strike and go forward –we will win when hundreds, thousands and finally millions of workers embrace these ideas.

(The following is an excerpt from an article by investigative reporter Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch):
The bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or… here {in the U.S.], not on corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies….
We had two acts of terrorism in the U.S. this week. The first…at the end of the…Boston Marathon…. [and] the second…in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues….
The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be…easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.
West Fertilizer was built…in the middle of.…West, TX. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate…is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer…which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.
Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential…area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too….
Back in 2006…the company had assured the EPA…that there was “no risk” of an explosion at the plant! An AP article reports that the company…claimed…[it] “was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers, water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms in place at the plant.”
….Aside from the ridiculousness of West Fertilizer management’s reported assertion that the plant wasn’t handling flammable materials (a claim that the current deadly catastrophe has demonstrably proved was false), consider the incredible response of the EPA to this incredible assertion: The agency, emasculated by the Bush administration, and still a joke under the Obama administration, levied a pathetically small fine, but did nothing to shut the operation down until it put in place critical safety measures.
The other agency that could have acted, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is even more of a paper tiger than the EPA….In six years, it [West Texas Fertilizer] has not been visited by OSHA inspectors!
….The entire health and safety regulatory apparatus of the U.S., from the federal level to the states and right down to local government, has been effectively neutered by corporate interests, who have used everything from threats of relocating to campaign contributions and outright bribes of officials and elected representatives to buy or win the right to basically operate as unsafely as they like….As a result, regulation of dangerous plants and factories in the U.S. these days is essentially nonexistent.
That…is a kind of terrorism,…far more dangerous to the health and safety of the American people than any foreign or domestic terrorist or terrorist organization….
The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not…terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage….
Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often “just” putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety of workers and people who live nearby….The difference is that we won’t see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just hide behind the immunity of their company’s corporate “personhood,” collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before — usually in the same location.
Under capitalism the bosses hold state power and follow the “golden rule”: those who have the gold make the rules.