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.

Capitalism’s worldwide crisis pushes reforms that hurt the working class. Some, like in education, are expanding here in Mexico. The relentless class struggle in the state of Oaxaca, led mainly by the union’s Section 22, is now facing a frontal attack: educational reforms promoted by the capitalists centered around the OCDE, “Mexicans First,” Televisa and TV Azteca.
These bosses’ main objective is to privatize education, to turn it into a profit-making business. U.S. educational reform has become a business reaping profits in the multimillions.
This privatization directly affects teachers’ labor rights, won through decade-long struggles: basic employment, health care, retirement, right to loans and housing and collective bargaining among others. It also affects other sectors of the working class, leading to massive layoffs. The restrictions on teachers’ social security will have an indirect effect on healthcare workers, increasing deficiencies in their social security.
Parents are affected by having to pay for their children’s education, eating into families’ income. The number of families unable to pay for education will grow, increasing the illiteracy of the population. The bosses’ fascist plan has already begun, with their repression directed at the CETEG teachers, to be followed by attacks against those in Chiapas, Oaxaca and other states.
We teachers should respond massively and militantly against these bosses’ reforms. If we unite with parents as well as other sectors, an indefinite strike at work sites combined with mass actions against transnational corporations and government offices could fight these attacks.
We must defeat the hopelessness pushed by the ruling class through its mass media which undermine our struggle and divide our class. We must build class consciousness. If teachers remain mired in trade union struggles, any gains will be limited to petty reforms which the bosses can always reverse when it suits their needs.
Teachers must organize and join a real communist party which unites all sectors of the working class, a party that fights for a communist revolution to take power, ushering in the dawn of a new worker-led society.
To organize against these many attacks by this criminal and decadent capitalist system, join Progressive Labor Party!

PARIS, April 13 — Fifty Peugeot strikers invaded a meeting here of 300 top Socialist Party leaders at their national council, charging the Socialist government with betrayal in not fighting the company’s plan to lay off 8,000 workers in 2014 and close the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant. Over-running the security guards, the angry workers disrupted the meeting, loudly chanting, “No factory closures, outlaw layoffs!” and “We are workers, not vandals, the bosses are vandals!”
The Socialist Prime Minister, who had just finished a speech defending the government’s austerity policies, fled the hall when he saw the workers coming.
The strike began at the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant on January 16, with the workers setting up shop inside and outside the factory. The assembly workshop has been renamed “Strike Square.”
The three-month strike has paralyzed production which used to turn out 500 cars a day. The company has kept the plant open with the hope of producing 250 cars daily with scabs, but “Today, practically no car leaves the factory,” said a 61-yar-old worker, Harfaoul, pointing to the immobile assembly line. The workers have chased after anyone who wants to help the company function, throwing bolts and emptying fire extinguishers against office windows.
The CGT union leadership is misleading the workers in appealing to the austerity-scripted government to set up a mediation process as a solution, saying, “You mustn’t leave us alone against the bosses,” with the threat that betrayed workers will vote for the openly fascist National Front.
This is the result of being trapped in the electoral process, presented with the “choice” of the Socialists, who are following an austerity policy, or the le Pen-led National Front, but with the same result. The latter is talking alliance with the right-wing Sarkozy UMP party — which lost last year’s election to the Socialists — and hoping to develop a populist appeal among workers sold out by the Socialists.
Rank-and-file workers’ direct strike action, as at Peugeot, needs communist leadership with the goal of overthrowing the job-destroying profit system rather than being diverted into depending on still another bosses’ party as the solution to the mass unemployment built into capitalism.