NEW YORK CITY, February 9 — Today, despite freezing temperatures and snow, at least 75 Columbia University (CU) students rallied in defense of underpaid Faculty House workers. They were joined by about 25 workers, members of other unions and seven members of St. Mary’s Church in Harlem. It was a loud and militant procession, a unity which has not been seen in decades.
The Student-Worker Solidarity (SWS) group was formed last fall, composed largely of freshmen, many of whom had had ties with Occupy Wall St. Their first action supported Barnard’s (CU women’s school) clerical workers who were threatening to strike over pay and benefit cuts. Students leafleted several alumni events and demonstrated on campus, becoming an important factor enabling Barnard workers to win.
For the last two months, they’ve been supporting the Columbia workers at Faculty House, who haven’t had a raise in three contracts. The workers are also laid off in summer and other breaks during which they receive $65/wk. CU adds a 22 percent gratuity to every diner’s bill but gives the workers not one penny of it. Now CU wants to cut their health benefits and offer nothing in return. The wages are so low that many work 60-80 hours a week to meet expenses.
Students attempting to attend negotiations have been thrown out, but have demonstrated outside. They’re petitioning, approaching faculty, organizing teach-ins and leafleting. Every week their meetings grow.
Columbia is an elite ruling-class institution, run by a Board made up almost entirely of bankers and aims to train the next generation of rulers. The student body is predominantly white and well-to-do, and divorced from the neighboring poor and largely black working-class Harlem community. In the ’60s, amid the tumultuous student movement sparked by opposition to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, thousands of CU students demonstrated and occupied buildings to protest the campus of an exclusive CU gym in Harlem. They won.
Now, however, Columbia is taking over 17 acres of Harlem, causing the loss of low-income housing, small neighborhood businesses and jobs. Although there has been a community opposition movement for years, only a small number of students have been involved. Last year about 15 did participate in a 5-day occupation of 125th Street in Harlem, but nearly all of them have graduated.
This new vigorous student group is on the right track, building fight-back, united with campus workers. For the last few meetings, community residents from St. Mary’s Church have also joined them, an important step forward. This may enable an expansion and continuation of the fight to force Columbia to hire more local residents.
CU promised 7,000 new community jobs as part of its expansion agreement, but so far has hired no one. Columbia’s racism is apparent in the way they treat their largely black, Latino and immigrant workers and their Harlem neighbors.
Students are horrified by the unfairness and inequality they see at a university that pretends to be a bastion of progressive values. But, in fact, Columbia espouses capitalist values. It pretends that equality and fairness are possible under capitalism. This system depends on competition for the highest profits and on racism to divide and weaken workers.
As U.S. rulers compete with their imperialist rivals for the world’s resources, capitalism cannot maintain a pretty mask. Thus, students must recognize that they, too, are future workers and that unity with lower-paid workers is imperative to building a movement strong enough to overthrow capitalism, creating a whole new society, a communist society, based on equality and distribution of goods and services according to need.

SAN FRANCISCO, February 6 — Four hundred students, teachers, school workers and community members streamed into today’s meeting at San Francisco City College (CCSF) to protest the cuts and reorganization plans ordered by the State government-imposed Special Trustee. She already forced an additional 8.8 percent teacher wage-cut after teachers unfortunately agreed to a 2.5 percent wage-cut last year. This trustee also ordered the layoffs of 49 classified workers, 25 part-time instructors and 18 part-time counselors.
CCSF serves 85,000 mainly working-class, Latino, Asian, black, and immigrant students. The government accreditation commission (ACCJC) is threatening to close our college in the future, which has scared some into accepting cutbacks. The commission claims to be “independent” and composed of educators and others representing the “public interest.” In reality, it is part of what communists call “the state apparatus.” The “public interest” is actually the needs of the capitalist ruling class to stifle, stratify, and divide the working class. At the same time, the education “state apparatus” promotes a mass blame-the-victim mentality, as more younger people can’t find a stable job (See “Why It is Hard to make it in America,” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2012).
PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE as friends and people entered the room. We fight against the destruction of public education while at the same time present a communist alternative of what education should be:  an apparatus to develop everyone to their fullest potential to participate in, and have the power to make real decisions, in a society based on the concept, “from each according to commitment and ability to each according to need.” The mass movement here is moving beyond just voting for change.
According to ACCJC: What are CCSF’s Crimes?
Is it education? Is it related to funding? No, not according to ACCJC. The “crime” seems to be too much money spent directly on students and educational workers, including benefits and pay for part-time instructors. Instead, the Special Trustee will put the money in the reserve fund and in retiree benefits: areas from which capitalist “investors” can make money. We must fight against the following attacks, which are racist and anti-working class in nature.
The “crime” seems to be:

• Not enough “professional” administrators who side with the cutbacks.
• Too much democracy: Department Chair people are elected by their peers and have an important role in managing the School.
• Too many campuses around the City, which give easier access to SF’s population.
• Too many free classes where many people learn English and prepare for Citizenship tests.

Whose interest do the ACCJC and the Special Trustees Serve?
These changes are part of the campaign of the Lumina Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which represent the needs of billionaires (like Bill Gates and the Koch brothers), to privatize education. The Gates Foundation and Lumina gave $3 million to oversee our college. Big capitalists and corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash with no profitable place to invest it. Now, they have discovered the $650-billion education industry. Corporations need to control the ideological content of education to create a submissive workforce. They invest in and promote:

• Loan indebtedness for college-age students (banks and even the federal Department of Education make profits);
• Charter schools (some for profit, others to destroy existing public schools); “private” tutoring for younger students (for profit);
• Testing at all levels (a for-profit $1.3 billion industry)
• Privatized colleges and online classes.

Communism Serves the Working Class
Under capitalism, all education — public, private, for-profit, or otherwise — serves the needs of the ruling class. The communist world PLP is fighting for means that all education is free. In fact, there would be no money, no wages or production for profit. Education would be everywhere and international: schools, work sites, neighborhood collectives, and childcare centers. Those who do “the work” would do the planning and implementation because communism eliminates divisions between “mental and “manual” labor.
The purpose of education would be to empower the working class worldwide, to encourage and develop collectivity and cooperation, to show how we depend upon each other and that all value comes from the labor of workers. International working-class unity would smash the national borders. Education would not only be free, but it would be in the interest of the working class. In order for that to materialize, we must destroy these Boards of Trustees in our colleges and this capitalist state.

WASHINGTON, DC, February 5 — Today transit workers in Local 689, Amalgamated Transit Union, took a big step against the racist Metro system by opposing the bosses’ rule against hiring former prisoners. Thousands of workers are returning to the District of Columbia from incarceration every year, desperately needing jobs. Metro, like other bosses in the city, are blocking them. “I paid my debt to society,” one worker declared, “and now I need to work. I don’t want to be going back to prison anytime soon.” But background checks and former criminal convictions are keeping them jobless.
Recently, the city council refused the demands of masses of workers to pass a bill making it easier for such returnees to apply for and obtain employment. Initially the politicians acted like they were supporting them in their quest for jobs, but when the DC Chamber of Commerce launched a lobbying campaign against the bill, the councilors quickly remembered who they worked for and vetoed the bill.
The denial of job opportunities to these former prisoners is blatant racism. First, the bosses’ cops stop and frisk young black and Latino workers and send them to prison on weak and/or manufactured evidence. (See first item in Red Eye, page 7.) Then the bosses deny them jobs when they return. This creates a low-wage workforce, easily exploited by the bosses. A good exposé of this modern slavery is Michelle Alexander’s recent book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
For three decades, the Metro transit system here hired workers who reported their former jail time on their applications. Last year the Metro Board changed its policy and the traitorous transit union leadership fell into line, supporting the new policy of background checks to weed out applicants with records. Metro has even begun background checks on existing employees, firing them if an offense is found.
But this week workers at the union meeting overturned the union mis-leadership’s slavish support of Metro policy. Workers understood this policy is racist and were angry that their family members and friends were no longer eligible to work at the best-paying blue-collar job in the District. Many long-time workers told of encounters with racist police in an area where racial profiling was so prevalent that Amnesty International exposed it in their report entitled, “Driving While Black.”
This show of class solidarity against a racist system energized workers at Metro. It could lead to further pressure on transit bosses and the city to “Ban the Box” (on the job application where incarcerations have to be declared) and hire returnees so they can live independently and rebuild their lives.
Now is the time for the PLP club at Metro and the thousands of rank-and-file workers to fight the bosses’ onsalught of racism towards their workers and the community in general. For example, Metro has raised fares and cut bus service in predominantly African American areas, including Southeast DC/Anacostia.
By distributing CHALLENGES at this week’s union meeting, the Party was able to link the struggle here with that of New York City’s striking school bus workers. Solidarity with other transit workers and these returnees (who are brother and sister workers as well) must move front and center as the bosses’ crisis spurs increasing racist attacks on the working class.

BRONX, NY, February 2 — Three hundred people gathered outside the house of Ramarley Graham, the 18-year-old black youth who was murdered by the NYPD when they broke into his house one year ago.  The cops had no warrant and Ramarley had no gun.
Various politicians including city comptroller John Liu who is running for mayor spoke at the memorial rally.  They all tried to steer the masses into believing that electing better politicians and legislating more laws was the answer to the harassment that black and Latino youth face on a daily basis. 
However, as we left the house and marched towards the police precinct chants such as, “We don’t need those police, those racist police” rang out.   It is not just a few bad apples but the entire system that has to go. CHALLENGEs were sold and a PL flyer was distributed which explained that the role of the police is to protect the capitalist class’s profits stolen from the poverty and racist unemployment of black and Latino youth.  Justice for Ramarley Graham and all of the other victims of capitalism will only be achieved when we join together and revolt against capitalism and establish communism.
Because PLP has been active in building and sustaining the Ramarley’s Call movement during the last year, a comrade was invited to speak at the last stage of the day’s memorial inside the local church. He related the struggles of workers around the world against unemployment and war and explained how PL believes that capitalism was built on racism and used racism to maintain itself by dividing the working class.  He recounted how striking school bus workers had eagerly received leaflets about the  Ramarley Graham struggle  and understood that Bloomberg and the police were the common enemy. 
The Ramarley’s Call movement has made important steps in uniting several families who lost love ones due to police brutality.  PL members must step up their efforts to convince  these militant anti-racists to ally with communists, not politicians and capitalists. Together, we can challenge the entire system to build a better world devoid of racism and oppression.