NEW YORK CITY, June 24 — Today members of UAW Local 2320 the Legal Services Staff Association voted to end their six-week strike and return to work. With the deck stacked against them, and knowing that this offer was “as good as it’s going to get” for now, the 270 lawyers, para-legals and clericals accepted a concession contract and resumed representing their poor, mostly black, Latino and immigrant clients. During the strike, PLP was welcomed on the picket lines and dozens of workers were introduced to CHALLENGE.
The workers waged a militant fight. All strikers participated on local strike committees, and the local established a Hardship Fund to cover strikers’ rent, utility and other bills in an emergency. Women played a leading role in the strike. The International UAW paid the strikers’ health insurance after the millionaire corporate lawyers that run the NYLSC cut them off retroactively and without notice. While this was a great help to those on strike, it also gave the International union tremendous leverage in leading the workers to accept concessions.
The UAW’s strategy was to rely on Democratic Party politicians, especially mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn, to win a contract loaded with concessions, although less than what the union-busting bosses had hoped for. Letters of support came from New York City’s Congressional delegation and a long list of City Council members. But that “support” was used to get workers to pay more for their health care, and anticipated layoffs in the coming year. “Layoff equity protections” with management (there is one manager for every three staff) almost guarantees layoffs, as long as some managers are laid off too.
With all this “political clout,” why wasn’t there a no-layoff guarantee? Why are we contributing 1% of our salary to health care premiums?  Because these are the same politicians that have overseen a drastic reduction in staff and the closure of several neighborhood offices over the past several years. These cutbacks, while costing our members jobs, are mainly aimed at the unemployed and working poor clients we serve. They are racist to the core. They are part of the destruction of the old social contract, the so-called safety net of social benefits such as unemployment insurance, social security, and medicaid. More cuts are on their way to pay for the bosses’ widening imperialists wars.
No strike or contract can stop war and fascism. Only communist revolution can do that.
The contract is retroactive to July 1, 2012, and will expire in July, 2014. More than a few who voted to accept this contract are also talking about walking out again a year from now.  But most important, we need to build a mass PLP among legal service workers and clients.

LOUISVILLE, KY, June 20 — The Progressive Labor Party brought ideas of revolutionary change and communism to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), attended by 3,500 people from across the U.S. The weekend’s highlight was an open Party forum that drew several dozen people who’d received a PL leaflet. Their thoughts on the need for communism and a mass party ranged from hostile to curious and receptive. A few thought that real change could come through the capitalists’ “democratic” process.
There was a lot of discussion about whether violence was necessary, and how the state apparatus maintained power for the ruling class. Eventually, the talk prompted a young worker to express the need for a violent overthrow of the capitalist system. 
We made many contacts through this forum and felt a real expression of interest from many others who were unable to attend.  To build on this success, we are planning another forum at next year’s General Assembly.
One highlight of the Assembly is the Action of Immediate Witness (AIW) process.  This allows attendees to bring a pressing social issue to the body and ask the UUA to organize around it. UU’s from New York spearheaded an AIW condemning the racist harassment of black and Latino youth, in particular the stop-and-frisk policy and racist murders by New York City police. 
The work to enlist support for this proposal and bring it to the floor was a collective effort among Party members, and others who supported the AIW after hearing it introduced. Discussion ensued about growing fascism in the United States as the ruling class builds for war against its imperialist rivals.  We explained how racism hurts all workers, and how we must build a multiracial fight-back against racism.  This kind of give-and-take with people among our friends offered a great opportunity to advance the Party’s ideas.
Over 200 CHALLENGEs were sold outside the convention center.  The issue’s back-page article addressed the UUA’s core principles and explained that they could be achieved only through communist revolution.  The convention delegates’ hopes for a fair and equitable society, one that recognizes the inherent dignity and worth of all people, is simply not possible in a system based on profit instead of people’s needs. The article sparked conversations about the need for a communist society and a Party to lead the working class.
The weekend made it clearer that activity in such organizations is critical to the growth of PLP. The point is not to build the reform movement but to build principled struggle with working-class people who want a better society. When we share our lives with our class brothers and sisters, we can see more clearly that a revolutionary future is possible.

BOSTON, June 12 — President Obama campaigned in Roxbury today for liberal Ed Markey, candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The campaign rally was held in Boston’s main black neighborhood in order to take advantage of Obama’s appeal among black workers. Of the many thousands who lined up to hear Obama speak, more than half were black, Latino and/or immigrant. In a silent vigil, a small group of environmentalists held up signs protesting the Keystone oil pipeline, but it was left to a small but bold group of PL’ ers and friends to directly attack Obama as the manager of racist U.S. capitalism. 
We held a banner and passed out a leaflet that exposed Obama for maintaining racist unemployment and mass incarceration of black workers and youth; increasing the deportation of immigrants; killing and terrorizing civilians with unmanned drones in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan; continuing to kill for oil and bailing out the bankers while working-class families lose their homes.
Although the people who had come to hear him were not a representative cross-section of the population, there were large numbers willing to read our leaflet and consider the merits of our politics. Most of them, however, continued to defend Obama as having well-meaning intentions. Several dozen reacted with hostility, crumpling the leaflet or returning it to us. One woman was personally offended when we called Obama a “tool of the U.S. ruling class,” a puppet rather than a free agent. Her black nationalism and racial pride prevented her from seeing that Obama is no different from any other president, except that he has a slicker cover. An old friend waiting on the line said that when Obama was elected, she was able to feel proud of being an American for the first time in her life. This revealed the ruling class’s real purpose for backing Obama — to win more people (especially black and young people, two of the most potentially revolutionary groups) to actively or passively support U.S. imperialism abroad and vicious anti-working-class attacks at home. The broad acceptance of the fascist lockdown after the Boston Marathon bombing shows that to a large degree the ruling- class’s strategy has been successful. 
What we did today took courage, especially for the two young black women students among us who had voted for Obama. Armed with a class analysis, our multi-racial group was able to penetrate the patriotism and nationalism that fuels the hero worship of a dangerous enemy of the international working class. We introduced many people to the truth about Obama and U.S. capitalism, thereby loosening the grip that the ruling class has over working people. We communists need to seize every opportunity to do this until we can directly challenge the bosses’ rule in a working-class revolution.

NEW YORK CITY, June 28 —  The working class in this city has endured 11 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s racist, anti-student education reform. These policies have accompanied a massive escalation of brutal police tactics against black and Latino youth, anotably stop-and-frisk, and a wholesale assault on the mainly black and Latino unionized city work force. (For the first time in history, every municipal union is without a contract.)
Bloomberg’s Wall Street buddies weathered a brief period of scrutiny at the height of Occupy Wall Street. Since then, they have resumed drawing huge bonuses, free from criticism.  Meanwhile, the mayor brags that his greatest legacy is his denial of years of raises to city workers — and that the main problem with stop-and-frisk is that it fails to harass more black and Latino workers and youth. Racism is getting worse, not only in New York City but nationwide. That is the context of education reform.
The Progressive Labor Party is responding with a two-pronged Summer Project. In New York, we are continuing the struggle for justice for Shantel Davis, the 23-year-old woman who was executed by a cop in Brooklyn last year. In Atlanta, we will take the struggle against racism to the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA).  Like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the NEA leadership refuses to confront the intensifying racism in our schools. To do so would expose the limits of capitalism. Instead, union leaders are tripping over themselves to cooperate in the latest education reform schemes.
AFT President Randi Weingarten issues joint-authored articles with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in American Teacher, the AFT’s own publication. The NEA plans to honor Jerry Brown, the rabidly anti-union governor of California, at their convention.  Our union leaders are too tied to capitalism to imagine, organize, or demand meaningful change.
With the cooperation of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s affiliate of the AFT, Bloomberg has implemented familiar features of the education reform playbook: performance pay for teachers, elimination of tenure, more high-stakes testing.  As tests have been made harder, then easier and now harder again with the Common Core curriculum, college readiness scores remain dismal.  The on-time graduation gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts remained unchanged in 2012, ranging from 20 to 22 percentage points. These numbers have been stuck at these levels for five years.
We Need Communism
Public education, like all institutions under capitalism, is designed for most to fail.  Those who can afford private schooling get small classes, one-to-one tutoring, and excellent facilities. Under such privileged conditions, the bankrupt lessons of individualism, elitism, and patriotism sink in all the more deeply. Meanwhile, public schools provide these high-cost amenities only for the few students being groomed to help the ruling class manage its capitalist system.
The schools we work in have two purposes: to develop workers for the massive low-wage sector of the 21st-century economy, and to produce the foot soldiers for the bosses’ 21st-century wars.
When students fail in the bosses’ schools, they need communist leadership to learn to hold the system accountable. They need to reject the capitalist ideology that those who don’t succeed aren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough.  When teachers face the latest attack upon students in the guise of education reform, we need to redirect the debate toward the racist social conditions that set up most of us to fail.  Through our Summer Project and communist school, PLP will equip a new generation of fighters with the practice and theory that are essential for a communist revolution.