BROOKLYN, NY, February 14 — This is a racist attack on the residents of Red Hook. The State of New York is coming for our patients’ lives. The power to stop this comes from us when we are united…Writing letters will not do it!
That’s what a Long Island College Hospital (LICH) paramedic said to hundreds of co-workers and community residents at a rally to stop the proposed hospital closing. And it brought the crowd to their feet!
Hundreds of hospital workers are struggling to stop the closing of Downstate Central and LICH. These hospitals serve primarily black, working-class neighborhoods. LICH serves Red Hook, an area devastated by superstorm Sandy and the massive public housing projects there.
These closure threats follow the attack on Brookdale Hospital and the closing of Peninsula Hospital in Far Rockaway a year ago. The largest of all the hospital unions, Local 1199/SEIU, with over 200,000 members in NY, has kept the workers at each of these sites isolated from each other. Rather than mobilize the workers to shut the City down and up the ante against the racist profit system, they handle each case individually, citing mismanagement and corruption as the root of the problem.
When Brookdale was threatened with closing almost two years ago, LICH 1199 leaders argued that Brookdale should close because it would mean more job security at LICH! Then last summer, this same crew called the cops on a retired 1199 member who attended a meeting about the LICH closing and argued for a strike. Not only did they have him removed, these rats had him arrested and falsely accused him of making terrorist threats. Now the chickens have come home to roost!
No doubt, there is a cesspool of corruption as the politicians throw millions of dollars at private consultants, subcontractors and the corrupt hospital management firm, Continuum. These thieves make obscene salaries while hospitals are short on toilet paper and the most basic supplies. But more to the point, Democratic Governor Cuomo and the Feds are cutting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals by 50 percent. These cuts are racist to the core, aimed at the unemployed, children and the elderly. As the black woman doctor who heads the neo-natal unit said at the rally, “We’re fighting for our babies.”
Cuomo says they “are running out of money for these hospitals,” yet the rulers have deep pockets for their continued carnage in Afghanistan and Pakistan and potential imperialist attacks on Iran and N. Korea. Ultimately, these spreading wars are potentially headed to another world war between the U.S. and China.
The good news is that healthcare workers and patients are in a fighting mood. PLP has a base at both hospitals, including hundreds of CHALLENGE readers who have led mass actions. Together we can try to lead workers past the obstacles the unions, courts and politicians place before us. Maybe we can stop the closings and maybe not. But by fighting back we can build the revolutionary communist movement which is the only way we will ever have free health care for all. Having a healthcare workers contingent at this year’s May Day March is our next big test.
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Worker-Student Unity Battles Columbia U.’s Billionaire Board
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- 14 March 2013 253 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 8 — Today several hundred chanting students joined workers in another militant solidarity march on Columbia University’s (CU) campus. The 35 Faculty Club workers are fighting for a decent wage, for pay during school breaks and against all their tips being stolen. Many students and workers, a faculty member and community supporters spoke about the millions of dollars CU spends to pay and renovate the home of President Bollinger and to take over West Harlem while refusing to pay a living wage to workers.
Many speakers mentioned the humanistic, liberal pretenses of CU. If you scratch a liberal, you find a capitalist. Liberals are capitalists who try to put a nice veneer on their hunger for profit. CU has an endowment of billions and large real estate holdings. Seventy-five percent of CU’s Board members are bankers. Their role is to train new capitalist leaders and money managers while simultaneously teaching students to set themselves apart from workers.
The growing Student Worker Solidarity (SWS) group sees clearly how oppressed these workers are and how their working conditions contradict the university’s avowed goals. The chants reflect the power of, and need for, worker-student unity. More and more students are joining the struggle.
Marchers took over 70 CHALLENGES and May Day flyers. PL’ers can win these militant students and workers to see themselves as lifelong fighters for a society based on equality and production for need — a communist society.
Rely on Rank-and-File Workers,Not Union Mis-leaders
We need mass support from workers in other unions on campus. As reflected in labor struggles worldwide, union leaders neither seek support from other unions nor offer it when other unions are striking. Although most campus workers seem supportive, the union leaders refuse to organize it. This mirrors the recent school bus workers’ strike, which had widespread support, but whose leaders stopped it dead to please local politicians. Pro-capitalist union misleaders today are invested in winning favor with politicians and favors for themselves. It will take mass action from all rank-and-file campus workers to fight this and future struggles. We cannot rely on any bosses but only on the power of the working class.
AUSTIN, TEXAS, February 23 — Over 2,000 angry parents, teachers, students and community members rallied today, demanding an end to STAAR (the state’s latest standardized testing scheme) and to fight the $5.4 billion cuts in education.
The crowd this year was angrier and more militant than in the past. The rage could be felt as the multiracial mass led by two all-black marching bands strode up the main downtown avenue toward the capitol. Liberal misleaders of the march led chants of “Si se puede” (“yes, we can”) and “Save our schools.” PL’ers, joining in with rank-and-file students and teachers, led militant slogans: “The banks got bailed out, schools got sold out!” and “Up, up with education, down, down with deportations.”
At the rally speaker after speaker condemned STAAR. Signs in the crowd called on parents to openly defy the exam by opting their children out of taking it. Thousands read a student leaflet exposing the billions paid to the testing company Pearson to create and administer the new state exam. With these developments there is a potential to win thousands of students, parents and teachers to PLP’s communist ideas.
Out of School into Prison or the Army
While the STAAR exam threatens all Texas students, the impact it is having and will continue to have on working-class mainly black and Latino students is devastating. The latest STAAR results have shown that the lowest scores occur in the poorest schools. The reality is that thousands of these black and Latino students will be pushed out of school and into the prisons or the army, serving as cannon fodder for the next imperialist war. This fact reveals the truly racist nature of the standardized testing movement.
Two black students spoke about a struggle in their mainly black high school to stop a charter school takeover. One of the youth described how he regularly attends school board meetings where he attacks the board for their compliance with the charter school. Thousands cheered this sophomore’s actions, which were a sharp contrast to the empty platitudes of the school bosses who were invited to speak.
Several superintendents and board presidents spoke out in opposition to the cuts and the testing-mania. But there is true hypocrisy when the very people who implement the cuts on a local level claim to be leading the fight against them. These school bosses are as much to blame for the cuts as the politicians they condemn. Pearson bosses and the servants of capitalism in the government rely on the compliance of these school boards and superintendents to maintain their capitalist system.
The overarching theme of the rally was to blame “greedy” and “incompetent” Republicans and companies like Pearson for the problems in education. The cuts are actually caused by a capitalist system in crisis, one both Democrats and Republicans are attempting to “cure” off the backs of working-class youth. In reality, the liberal rulers pose a higher threat to the working class, as they are better able to pacify and trick workers. The rally called for everyone to vote for “pro-education” Democrats.
PL’ers called to “vote with your feet” toward revolution. Hundreds of leaflets and CHALLENGEs were distributed, calling for communist revolution as the only solution to the problems of education. People were very receptive to PLP’s ideas and we plan to intensify our CHALLENGE sales at future events.
Tie Budget Cuts, Tests to Capitalism’s Racism
There is much potential for the Party’s ideas to grow in the fight against budget cuts and standardized testing. The line of the liberal misleadership to vote for change has a strong appeal in a period where many see no alternatives to capitalism. We must be vigilant in connecting the budget cuts in education and the standardized testing movement to the racism inherent under capitalism. And we must continue to put forward a sharp line of class-conscious anti-racism and
anti-sexism in these movements. It is around these ideas that we will win thousands to PLP and expand the fight for equal education to a fight for communism!
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Rage Against Collocation, School Shutdowns Students Set Up to Fail
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- 14 March 2013 237 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 13 — Students and teachers took to the streets last Thursday once again to protest the Department of Education’s (DOE) proposal to collocate a charter elementary school into the Tilden campus building. It already houses three high schools. This time the struggle was taken to the steps of Tweed, the DOE’s headquarters in Manhattan. Students from Brownsville Academy, who recently won their collocation, fight joined dozens of students and staff from the Tilden campus. Despite the cold and rain, spirits were high as students picketed and chanted. Many received CHALLENGE.
Collocations and school closings are the order of the day for thousands of predominantly black, Latino and immigrant schools citywide. Under capitalism these attacks will continue because the bosses cannot afford, and has no interest, to educate all children. Capitalism needs millions of working-class youth to settle for being the next foot soldier, prisoner, low-paid worker or part of the unemployed.
If students blame themselves for failing the tests required to graduate, the bosses don’t have to worry about them questioning this racist system. Budget cuts, large class sizes, and the instability caused by these collocations and school closings are just some of the racist attacks students face every day they make focusing in the classroom, and passing standardized exams more difficult.
After some chanting, students gave passionate speeches about the need to fight the collocation. The Tilden students gave a perseverance award to the Brownsville Academy students for their successful struggle against a DOE proposal to collocate their school and for their solidarity with the struggle at the Tilden campus. Students marched into Tweed to deliver a “math award” to the DOE’s office of space planning for figuring out how to fit over 300 students and staff into 12 classrooms! The cheering crowd then marched to City Hall to deliver a “disrespect award” to Mayor Bloomberg. More chants and fists in the air ended the day’s rally.
The fight against this collocation will continue. Angry workers, parents, and students organized against the proposal to shut down 22 schools. The Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), Bloomberg’s cronies, voted to pass it. In fact the PEP has always voted in favor of the DOE’s proposals. It is clear that workers do not live under a democracy, but rather a ruling-class dictatorship. The capitalists and their government appointees will continue to attack us until we realize that the international working class has the power to shut their system down!
ALGIERS, March 4 – Wildcatting dairy workers have taken on four enemies in one fell swoop: union misleaders, company bosses, the courts and the government.
Workers at the largest dairy supplying the capital are continuing their February 28 wildcat against the official trade union and its corrupt general secretary, Khelifi Ali. The strike has shut the public-sector Colaital dairy company in Birkhadem, six miles south of here.
The workers have defied a court ruling the wildcat as illegal. The general director of the government’s National Milk Office (ONIL), Fethi Messar, is ordering in police as strike-breakers. The ONIL is also increasing production at 11 other dairies in order to help break the strike. Meanwhile, Messar said he’s willing to “mediate” the conflict.
The strikers are demanding a wage hike and the resignation of Khelifi Ali and his cronies. A minority of the dairy workers are striking, but they’ve blocked the strategic pre-pack unit, closing operations. Public-sector dairy managers and the union misleadership made joint threats to try to prevent the strike.
The struggle began on February 7 when the dairy workers first struck against the company union and for higher wages, permanent jobs for the temporary workers and reinstatement of unjustly-fired workers. The three-day walkout ended with the workers winning a 40 percent pay hike and the permanent hiring of 100 temporary workers, while obtaining the “freezing” of company-union activities, Khelifi Ali’s removal and a general assembly to elect a new union leadership.
Oust Union Traitors,Strike to Enforce It
When the authorities failed to call an assembly, on February 21 the workers held one on their own and voted out the corrupt leaders. But the company union has refused to recognize the vote, leading to the present strike. The courts ruled the strike “illegal” since the bosses’ law does not permit a strike to change the union leadership.
The action hits a key sector here where per capita milk consumption is 137 liters/year (U.S. consumption is 72 liters/year). The strike has already caused a shortage of pasteurized powdered milk in the shops.
Class relations are clear in Algeria. In their struggle, the Birkhadem dairy workers are fighting four enemies: the misleader of the only government-recognized union, Khelifi Ali; the courts; the general director of the public-sector company, Derouiche Mohamed Abdelhamid; and the government’s general director of the ONIL, Fethi Messar. Sellout union, judge, company and government — all in one bag!
It’s clear that real victory cannot come from chopping off only one of the monster’s heads, Khelifi Ali. Workers will also need to defeat company management and the government. Ultimately, only communist revolution can beat that gang-up.
