DHAKA, BANGLADESH, November 26 — Ten thousand garment workers barricaded roads, shut 50 factories and hurled stones at cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas as workers protested the November 24 fire that killed 124 workers at Tazreen Fashions here. Hundreds of workers were trapped inside, symptomatic of Bangladeshi garment factories that have become infamous for their lack of fire exits and stairwells. Over 100,000 outraged workers attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers whose bodies could not be identified” (New York Times, 12/7).

It’s common practice for the garment bosses to chain doors shut to prevent workers from taking breaks. Combined with poor maintenance practices and flammable materials and chemicals, these factories become firetraps. “More than 600 garment workers have died in such fires since 2005.” (NYT, 12/7)

Tazreen bosses told workers the fire alarm was a false one, to keep them working. Then they fled, but by the time workers realized what was occurring, the fire had snaked to the upper floors, blocking any exit routes. Some tried to escape by jumping out of windows.

Tazreen manufactures clothing for Walmart, Sears and the Gap, among other U.S. companies, all of whom make enormous profits from the poverty wages and hazards in these death traps. They are all aware of these conditions, making them complicit in the murders of these workers.

This latest factory fire is the worst in Bangladeshi history. As the families and friends of the trapped workers crowded around the inferno to offer whatever assistance they could, they knew who was to blame. Sabine Yasmine, one victim’s mother and a factory worker herself, moaned, “Where’s my soul? Where’s my son? I want the factory owner to be hanged! For him, many have died, many have gone.” (Associated Press, 11/25)

Yet factory owners are rarely punished for the deadly conditions they enforce in their workplaces. The garment industry is a massively profitable one in Bangladesh, exporting $20 billion annually, mainly to the U.S. and Europe. The Tazreen Fashions factory alone makes $37 million annually.

These massive profits flow from sweatshop conditions inside the 4,500 factories. Safety is ignored as workers are locked inside, working 60-hour weeks for around $37 a month. Workers opposing this murderous system are marked for death. Earlier this year a union organizer was found tortured and murdered outside the city. (AP, 11/25; New York Times, 11/25)

Such mass murder is common under capitalism, particularly in developing industrial economies. Just two months ago factory fires at a garment shop in Karachi and a shoe factory in Lahore, Pakistan killed a combined 314 people. Workers were trapped in the factories with no emergency exits and all doors locked to hold the workers imprisoned inside. Again, these sweatshops netted profits primarily for U.S. and European bosses. (CNN, 9/16; BBC, 9/11)

In 1993, a fire in the Kader Toy Factory in Thailand killed 188 workers and injured more than 500. It was the worst industrial disaster ever until the Karachi fire in 2012. The Kader factory, which made toys for Disney and Mattel, paid their workers slave wages and locked them into the building during the work-day. When the fire started, managers fled the scene, leaving the largely female workforce trapped inside to burn. (International Labor Organization, Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety)

Capitalists care only for profits. The fiery death of hundreds of workers is only part of the super-exploitation of the working class. Only a communist revolution to smash the capitalist class can end this mass murder of workers. Until that day it’s just a matter of time until the next big fire.

ALGIERS, December 5 — Workers and students are blocking buildings and striking for better conditions on the job and at the university against the socialist fig-leaf being used to hide a capitalist economy and the wealth of the bosses. Although a national liberation struggle gained independence from France in 1962, capitalism has remained in the name of socialism.

Large sectors of the economy were nationalized. Today, 90% of the banks are public, the hydrocarbon company is state-owned, and government spending represents two-thirds of non-hydrocarbon Gross Domestic Product. Yet almost one-fourth of the population lives in poverty. Twenty percent of the youth 15-24 are jobless. So the workers and students are fighting back.

Today, municipal workers in Zeribet El Oued struck, blockading the municipal popular assembly building demanding back pay, having gone unpaid for two to six months. The strike united temporary and permanent workers. “Whole families have been paralyzed by accounting and administrative malfunctions, which deprive us of our monthly income for months at a time,” said a public records worker.

Also today, forestry workers in Tlemcen walked out, demanding permanent hiring of temporary workers — in particular safety and security personnel — as well as for promotions that have been delayed, in particular for older workers.

There have been repeated student strikes in Boumerdè condemning the university bureaucracy, which has disorganized teaching and the functioning of different university departments. As of today, the commercial and economic sciences department and the school of hydrocarbons — Algeria is rich in oil and gas — have been blocked for over a week by strikers protesting disciplinary sanctions taken against 15 student strikers.

What is needed is a communist ideology to link all these struggles and to understand the need to fight for communism, not socialism’s state capitalism.

FLORANGE, FRANCE, December 6 — Five thousand steelworkers here are fighting the closure of the ArcelorMittal steel plant, but at every turn they run up against the law of capitalism which seeks maximum profits over the workers’ dead bodies.

Workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Fos-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean blocked deliveries today in solidarity with steelworkers here. Some shifts struck and prevented rolls of steel from leaving the plant. Steelworkers at the company’s Basse-Indre plant on the west coast are set to strike on December 10 against plans to transfer sixty jobs to the Florange packaging plant.

Meanwhile, the union has been putting up its usual militant front while appealing to the government to force the company to keep the plant open, demanding it renegotiate its deal with ArcelorMittal. The local union leader, Edouard Martin, and a dozen union officials briefly occupied the plant, threatening to stage a sit-down inside. They then left when the bosses promised not to turn off the gas valves which keep the blast furnaces on standby.

While Martin condemned the French government’s “betrayal” of the workers, adding that “those who were supposed to help us are killing us.” Who’s kidding whom? It is these union misleaders who are betraying the workers. They repeatedly steer the workers into depending on a supposedly neutral government to protect them against the capitalist class. But the capitalist government was never supposed to help the workers in the first place.

Martin said, “We’re solemnly calling on you, President François Hollande, to take the matter in hand.” But in reality Hollande’s Socialist government serves the capitalist class. Workers can only depend on their own unity and organization in their fight against the bosses.

Last year ArcelorMittal idled both blast furnaces here because of over-capacity. The anarchy of capitalism leads the bosses to expand production wildly in boom periods and then shut plants in the bust that inevitably follows. Meanwhile, the packaging plant, which makes cans for the food industry, continues to operate because it is profitable.

During the recent French presidential election campaign, Socialist Hollande promised the thousands of steelworkers that if he was elected, he would pass a law forcing “a big company [which] no longer wants a production unit…to sell it” so that the plant will not be “dismantled.” Then, after Hollande was elected in May, a series of promises and “militant” statements by Socialist leaders were ignored by the company (which employs 260,000 workers worldwide), claiming the plant was no longer profitable. On October 1, ArcelorMittal put the Florange blast furnaces on permanent standby, leaving the Hollande government 60 days to find a buyer for the site.

Meanwhile, on November 6, the Socialist government announced a “competitiveness pact,” a “massive and unprecedented” 20-billion-euro gift ($26 billion) to the capitalists aimed at lowering the cost of labor and increasing the competitiveness of French companies against their imperialist rivals.

The measure exonerates the bosses from paying 20 billion euros in social security contributions on their lowest-paid workers. It will be financed by slashing 10 billion euros ($13 billion) from the government budget in 2014 and 2015 — including many social welfare programs — and by a 10-billion-euro increase (another $13 billion) in the value-added tax. That will mainly be paid by the working class.

Pretending to get tough with ArcelorMittal, on November 22 the government minister for industrial renewal announced possible temporary nationalization of the site, to give more time to find a buyer. But this was never more than a hollow threat, given that Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault admitted that nationalizing Florange would have cost the French government over a billion euros.

His “compromise” deal says, (1) there is no “white knight” buyer; (2) the blast furnaces will be moth-balled; (3) the 629 blast furnace workers will be offered early retirement or jobs at other sites; and (4) the workers at the packaging plant must submit to more exploitation to increase its competitiveness.

The union misleaders had little choice but to condemn such a deal that falls so far short of worker expectations. But the government said there would be no renegotiating the rescue plan.

Capitalism is truly the source of these machinations which dump these steelworkers on the garbage heap. Based on the planlessness of the system, the bosses overproduce at this plant the amount of steel they can sell at a profit. To maintain their overall profit in their fierce competition with rival steel bosses, they are driven to get rid of this particular plant and its workers who they have exploited for decades. Then the union misleaders and their Socialist government play with workers’ lives with phony militancy combined with defending the profit system. Their stance absolutely precludes the real solution: communist revolution to eliminate the bosses and their oppressive, exploitative system.

Workers must be won to understand that capitalism can’t be reformed, as the above class struggle reveals. It is driven by the pursuit of maximum profits, in direct contradiction to the well-being of the working class. Only the workers themselves, led by the communist Progressive Labor Party, can make a revolution that will put the steel mills and all of society in the hands of our class, which produces everything of value.

[Late bulletin: On December 7, ArcelorMittal agreed to mothball the two blast furnaces for six years.

Recently at work we learned that one of our maintenance workers was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His doctor gave him only six months to live. Those closest to him began to take up a collection to send him on one last trip to fulfill a dream of his, watching a NASCAR race in Daytona, FL. Our machine shop pays the lowest wages in the area, with most workers making between $10 and $15 per hour in one of the most expensive areas in the country to live. But the workers in the shop stepped up, donating what they could. They raised the needed funds in less than two weeks.

Even though this was a modest dream and this maintenance worker had given more than five years of his life to this company the bosses could not find it in themselves to donate a single penny for this man’s last vacation. After initially claiming that they would allow workers to donate through paycheck deductions (something that would help people who live paycheck to paycheck) the company went back on that, claiming that it simply wouldn’t be possible.

Meanwhile you can buy merchandise from the company store and hockey tickets via paycheck deductions, but the cost of having the payroll department process these donations would just be too taxing for the bosses. The most they could find themselves moved to give was to simply allow the collection to be taken up during all shifts.  

This is, of course, nothing new. When the current depression hit in 2008, food banks emptied and charitable organizations that aid the poor and homeless were hit hard as donations declined. The decline revealed a startling truth, that despite overly publicized charitable donations from the capitalist class, it is in fact the working class who make the overwhelming amount of donations to organizations that aid the poor.

A recent study in August by the Chronicle of Philanthropy confirmed that the vast majority of aid to the poor is collected from working-class neighborhoods. The capitalist media tries to portray the wealthy as our benevolent caretakers, but as recent events at my shop have demonstrated, the capitalists are only interested in bleeding the working class dry.

As a final indignity for this maintenance worker he gets to spend his final months not with his friends and family, but at work. Without going to work he loses the meager health care that our job offers, something that would surely bankrupt his family as they tried to pay for his care. Besides, the company would not want to set any bad precedents by keeping him on payroll while he stayed home. This is not a world fit for the working class to live in.

Red Beard