At a state convention of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), a postal worker approached National President, Cliff Guffey to challenge the recent sellout contractors. He recalled how this “leader” had signed a five-year agreement giving up the eight-hour day for thousands of workers and cutting wages of new hires in half. They would have no chance of ever reaching the higher rate of veteran workers. They contract also freezes wages for two years, in line with Obama’s wage freeze for other federal workers. Guffey who was obviously taken aback when the rank-and-filer demanded, “how could you sign a contract allowing management to bring in new workers for half of what we make?”  

“Well, at least we kept those jobs in our bargaining unit” he replied. 

“Right, and now management is trying to fire all of us to bring in low-paid workers,” the worker shot back. 

“Well, these things usually work themselves out,” said Guffey. “You have to file grievances.” 

“It sure is working itself out”, the worker retorted. “They are making clerks become letter carriers, while they hire new clerks at $14/hour.”

Guffey advocated to concentrate on electing more Democrats in November. 

“You mean more of the politicians that have been screwing us in Congress so far?” the worker responded. Obama voted for reducing the 6 day delivery system down to 5.  “They haven’t exactly done what we wanted them to do, have they? They’re all no good!”

Attacks against postal workers have caused a lot of confusion and anger, fueled by racism. The Post Office has been one of the primary avenues for black workers to break out of poverty and make a more decent, steady living. While racist unemployment continues to rise the bosses, with Obama’s full support, are trying to slash another 200,000 jobs.  Postal unemployment already declined by several hundred thousand clerks. A two-tier wage system means they will never hire clerks at anything much beyond the minimum wage. 

The union has gone along with these attacks “to save ‘our’ postal service.” Management bought off the union by allowing the new low-wage employees to join the APWU and buy into its insurance plan, but no other. As workers we know that our power comes from multi-racial class unity, not from turning our backs on each other. 

These attacks aren’t unique to the postal service. The “lesser-of-two -vils” Obama has been attacking auto, steel and health care workers, among others — forcing them to accept layoffs, wage cuts, speedups and cuts in pensions and health insurance. 

The U.S. bosses are in a fight to the death with their imperialist rivals in China, Europe and Russia. To pay for this, they’re forcing workers to pay for their wars. This is the “shared sacrifice” Obama was winning our class to in 2008.

But workers are beginning to fight back more. Caterpillar workers are striking in Joliet, IL (see CHALLENGE 6/6/12). The Occupy movement has inspired millions of workers to consider the reasons why the1% control all the wealth while the 99% do all the work. 

All workers have an enormous responsibility. Building a movement for communist revolution is the only way to end this profit system, which is the cause of the layoffs, excessing, and pay and benefit cuts. By uniting black, Latino, Asian and white, we can organize workers to understand the need to smash these bosses and build a communist society.

CHICAGO, May 23 — Strike was on the minds of some 6,000 teachers and paraprofessionals, joined by nearly 2,000 supporters, who took over several downtown streets here to demand that city students get better schools and to oppose the rulers’ all-out assault on students and teachers. The march followed simultaneous indoor and outdoor rallies, where, in a show of unity and solidarity, virtually every Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) member wore red CTU shirts.

The CTU contract expires June 30 and the Board of Education wants to increase class size, outsource art and music positions, increase work hours 20 percent for 2 percent more pay, introduce “merit pay,” decrease job security, and close more schools.

During the rally, members spontaneously shouted “Strike” and carried signs reading “YES,” foreshadowing a June 6 strike authorization vote (unannounced at the time of the rally). 

The ruling class here has been viciously attacking students and education workers for years. Recently, in Chicago and throughout the U.S., the attacks have ramped up as rulers, faced with trillions in war costs, feel the economic squeeze on their profits. Internationally, public education has been under attack for even longer.

Fighting A Racist School System

The ruling class wants to turn teaching into a revolving-door, lower-paid job. In line with their need to maintain racism that produces super-profits, they don’t want to spend money on educating poor, working-class black and Latino students. Defense of their empire is a more important priority. They’ve closed over 100 schools here, replacing them with charter schools. In what is still the country’s most segregated city, predominantly black schools suffer disproportionately from closures. 

Whether through charters or regular public schools, the ruling class wants to more finely craft the schools attended by working-class students so they better serve the rulers’ interests. Penny Pritzer, billionaire owner of Hyatt Hotels and others sit on Chicago’s Board of Education.

Education for Profits 

As one rally speaker revealed, Pritzer told an interviewer: “Students are entitled to get the skills in reading, math and science so that they can be productive members of today’s workforce.” She was talking about working-class students, not those in schools attended by her children or other children of the wealthy. “Skills to become productive workers,” she means teaching students the skills and ideology they need to become workers who make lots of profits for the corporations or become soldiers who fight to protect those profits.

Chicago education workers may challenge ruling-class plans by striking next fall. The politicians who serve the rulers thought they were preventing this by passing a law in 2011 requiring a 75 percent vote of the entire membership (not of just those voting) to authorize a strike. Now it seems highly likely that threshold will be met.

A strike opens up the potential for teachers’ union members to feel their power, to build multi-racial unity against the capitalists who control Chicago’s Board of Education. It can be a great opportunity for a militant, united, anti-racist fight against the children’s exploiters who run the school system. Anything less, in fact, will only embolden these fascists and encourage them to quicken the pace of their attacks on students and education workers.

However, a strike is not enough to stop these profit-driven attacks. Only communist revolution accomplish that and allow students to flourish in schools designed in their interests, not the bosses’.

New System, Not New Mayor

The CTU is still hampered by its reformist outlook. At the rally and march, for example, sellouts Jesse Jackson (Operation Push) and Randi Weingarten (American Federation of Teachers president) had front-row seats.

Marchers chanted, “The workers, united, will never be defeated” but also “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel has to go.”  Replacing the Mayor, electing the school board, or doing anything else short of overturning capitalism only ties workers more to this murderous system. Communist revolution really is the only solution.

PLP’s role in this fight is iadvancing, but still needs improvement. A serious group of teachers who meet regularly with the Party; a PLP flyer and CHALLENGES were distributed at the march; the level of discussion and struggle inside CTU and the numbers reading CHALLENGE have increased, creating the potential for more PLP supporters and members.

If a strike occurs, it will provide an even greater opportunity for PLP to become more deeply involved in this class struggle. We must be in it to win workers to realizing they can and must take power and run society.

The Obama administration’s authorization of drone attacks — initiated by his Bush predecessor — has carried past U.S. murders of innocent workers to a new high. Based on a New York Times analysis (5/29), the Nation of Change (NOC) website reports that the Obama killers “are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17.”

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, suing the CIA on behalf of drone victims, cites “a program that has existed for eight years, picks its targets in secret, faces zero accountability and has killed almost 3,000 people in Pakistan alone whose identities are not known to their killers,” including “women and children in Waziristan…killed with Hellfire missiles.”

In trying to justify these executions as “limiting civilian death tolls to a minimum,” the Times reported that the CIA simply counts all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants.” Their rationale is that “people in areas of known ‘terrorist activity’…are probably up to no good.” (Shades of racist George Zimmerman’s “self-defense” claim in murdering Trayvon Martin.)

Obama Gives CIA Greater Kill Potential

In addition to hit lists, “Obama has granted the CIA authority to kill with even greater ease using ‘signature strikes’ — strikes based solely on suspicious behavior.” The Times noted the U.S. State Department’s description of the CIA’s criteria: “The joke was that when the CIA sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bomb makers — but might also be farmers.”

Under such a rationale the NOC website said, “China might declare an ethnic Uighur activist living in New York City as an ‘enemy combatant’ and send a missile into Manhattan; Russia could assert that it was legal to launch a drone attack against someone living in London whom they claim is linked to Chechen militants. Or consider the case of Luis Posada Carrilles, a Cuban-American living in Miami who is a known terrorist convicted of masterminding a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people….The Cuban government could claim that it has the right to send a drone into downtown Miami to kill an admitted terrorist and sworn enemy.”

The NOC website says, “The kind of ‘intelligence’ used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of ‘intelligence’ that put people in Guantanamo….Hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the U.S. military by bounty hunters.”

Obama’s Killer List may very well be part of his presidential campaign to portray his “tough leadership,” not being a shrinking violet when it comes to killing. Of course, this drone campaign is only a part of capitalism’s death and destruction through imperialist wars, mass racist unemployment, poverty, periodic Great Recessions, racist cops and other horrors. All the more reason to destroy it with communist revolution that puts the bosses six feet under and the working class in control of our future.

NEW YORK CITY, June 1 — John Laje, a very rich businessman and owner of a dozen car washes in New York City, has never wanted to meet with his workers who have asked him on various occasions for a better contract including a paid vacation, paid sick days, salary raises for a year and protection against unfair layoffs.

The car wash workers face extreme exploitation that is typical of capitalism. They work 72 hours per week making $5.25 to $5.50 per hour. The workers have to put up with extreme temperatures and using dangerous chemical products without proper equipment or protection.

Management has stolen their tips and sent them home without pay when it rains. Exploiter Laje has doled out a measly 25 cents-an-hour raise to pacify workers. 

Laje’s move backfired; the workers went into the streets to protest in front of “LMC CARWASH AND LUBE,” one of his car washes in Harlem. They were joined by workers from community organizations and unions.

This protest was led by members of a fighting organization in Brooklyn supporting the car wash workers in Manhattan. The purpose of policies and union leaders is to demand that the laws and “rights” of workers are respected. It is very emotional seeing that group yelling militant PLP chants such as: “This fist is seen, power to the workers”.

In a meeting a few days before the protest, the group of workers who led this protest proposed celebrating a new conference in which the main theme would be racism, a social construct that directly affects our comrade workers. With the introduction of the Secure Communities Law throughout the U.S. — a racist anti-immigrant law that targets and deports thousands workers through mass arrests), we’re going to see more attacks on and terrorization of immigrants. More than 50 of the present members approved of this protest and we are now organizing this conference for the month of September.

This entire struggle shows us the importance of uniting and creating class consciousness. Capitalism is the root of all evil and it must be destroyed with a revolution. By broadening our base and building the Progressive Labor Party, we can build a new society where power is in the hands of the workers: a communist society.