SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 — As CHALLENGE reported in March, MUNI (SF mass transit) drivers rejected a “concession package” recommended by their TWU Local 250a Union leadership. This put a wrench in corporate SF’s plan to solve the transit deficit by cutting labor costs. Recently, Mayor Newsom said: “It’s critical that TWU step up and join every other labor union…by ratifying the $14 million in labor concessions their leadership agreed to…. These…would immediately reverse nearly three-quarters of the $28.8 million in service cuts.” (SF Chronicle, 5\21)

In addition, SF Supervisors are trying to mobilize voters against the drivers with two Charter amendments which attack their wage and benefit package.  The SF Chronicle editorialized (5/19): “…drivers haven’t had to lift a finger when it comes to easing MUNI’s  financial burdens…With its pay rates locked into the city charter, the union can continue to thumb its nose at city officials and riders.”

The Joint City Workers’ Committee of the SF Labor Council has followed the Mayor’s lead. They delivered concessions from all City workers but police, fire and nurses. The chairperson declared that his “primary work for the next few months will be to get MUNI operators to make concessions to the City.” This leadership puts some workers in a mental jail.  For example, an operator said, “Everyone is suffering so we have to give something up. If we just give a little, they’ll leave us alone.”

It’s the drivers’ strategic position and ability to bring the City to a halt that drives the corporate media and politicians in this well-planned media frenzy.

Ideas Are Changing

Drivers are furious. One said, “My dad would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what’s happening!” Another said, “Many of us were the pride of our communities, now we’re the bad guys.” Old expectations are dying. Others express a new urgency and some fear: “Before, I just came to work and went home to my family without thinking about the job. I left all that to the union; I can’t do that anymore.”

Appearance Is Not Always Reality

Since 1967, the City Charter seemed to protect the drivers. Wages and benefits are “equal to the average of the top two” transit districts in the U.S.  It lulled both the union leaders and many members into thinking,  “We automatically get raises, we don’t have to strike and we’ll sue.”  This so-called “guarantee” is what the City politicians want to remove to “fix MUNI.”  

As PLP members point out, no law, no City Charter can protect us from ever-increasing demands from the capitalist class.  They are squeezing more out of workers in this country to pay for wars for oil and competition with other capitalists worldwide. Productivity has doubled. This City Charter did not protect families from growing debt, foreclosures, shrinking purchasing power, deteriorating schools, or expensive health coverage. Because of  racism, this hit the predominantly black and Latino workforce and ridership particularly hard.

The Charter may appear to give us a break from fighting back, but the City powers will break it, find a “legal loophole” or change it when their economic necessity (profits) demands it. This is capitalism’s reality for the working class.

In the face of changing lives and these vicious attacks, drivers organized job actions which the union leadership sabotaged.  PLP members are in the class struggle while engaged in debates as drivers sort all this out. They are asking questions like:

Why do the union leaders interfere when we try to fight back?

Can the Charter or the government help us?

Who are our friends? Can workers organize solidarity?

Vote for concessions or VOTE NO and prepare to fight?

Can we strike? Will we win or lose?

Can we really destroy capitalism and is communism a viable alternative? J

(For further debate, see next issue) 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 19 — At a three-day teachers’ union forum here about the government and imperialist donors’ reconstruction plans for Haiti, teachers and students blasted the plans to “reconstruct” neocolonial capitalism in Haiti. The forum was organized by UNNOH, the National Union of Teachers’ College Graduates of Haiti, along with CTSP (Confederation of Workers in the Public & Private Sectors).

The participants denounced the military occupation by UN troops in MINUSTAH (United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti) and by 1,000 U.S. troops, remaining from a much larger force.

About 130 teachers from K-12 schools and colleges attended, along with students and trade unionists from CTSP. In panels, workshops and passionate debates, we discussed what kind of country/state should be rebuilt; the role of education; the role of women; the role of the university; military occupation; a critical analysis of the Haitian government’s Plan of Action; alternative politics in Latin America and the Caribbean; and plans to mobilize citizens for genuine reconstruction.

A U.S. professor described the model of reconstruction in New Orleans, which serves as a parallel to the situation here: racist policies turning natural disaster into unimaginable catastrophe followed by even more racist reconstruction plans.

This was an impressive and moving event — a great outpouring of Haitian teachers’ grief, anger, and political thinking, a moment of solidarity and resolve. Several expressed parts of a communist analysis and a communist spirit of revolt. Capitalism and imperialism were roundly condemned by almost every speaker. But most ideas for action are still confined within prevailing liberal, nationalist and reformist norms. Organized communism has faded from the Haitian scene, but there is some openness to considering views such as those of PLP which propose to rebuild an international revolutionary communist movement and party, taking account of the errors of previous revolutions.

Racist Attacks on Haitian
Workers and Students

Five days after the Forum, MINUSTAH troops entered the campus of the Faculty of Ethnology to harass activist students, confiscating computers and arresting one student. Two students had delivered militant speeches at the forum against the military occupation and phony reconstruction. The troops arrived with photos of students taken at the forum, apparently the motive for their crude attempt at intimidation. The imperialists are very afraid of working-class anger in a country born from slave rebellions. After students quickly organized a protest and sought support, including from PLP, their arrested comrade was released late the same day.

Passing the rotting, stinking camps like the one in the Champ de Mars, the main square of Port-au-Prince, you could certainly understand why revolution was in the air for some. How can we let our class brothers and sisters rot in these fascist camps under the shadow of UN and U.S. troops, there to enforce the 18-month Emergency Law just passed to allow the president to rule by decree? And the reconstruction plans envision Haiti only as a low-wage platform of production for export (e.g., textiles under the no-tariff HOPE laws passed by the U.S. Congress, or mangos and avocados for the U.S. market).  Impoverished Haitian workers can now be used as a reserve army of labor to help hold down wages in the whole region, including the U.S. and Canada. With the threat of  moving jobs to Haiti, the U.S. bosses can use racism to build discord among workers and prevent them from banding together in international unity.

Caught between the present of the camps and a future of industrial and agricultural sweatshops or migration into the anti-immigrant U.S., Haitian workers and students are beginning to think hard about their situation, imagining how to put our class to work producing the food and other necessities of life for workers and farmers right here. PLP in Haiti is suggesting to our friends that workers need state power to do that, and to win state power we need a communist party and a red army. Those ideas once flourished in Haiti, and will again!

Can the Unions Serve the Workers?

A central question in Haiti is unionism. There is “dual unionism” here: on one side are the “yellow” unions like CNEH, the National Confederation of Haitian Teachers, in favor with the government, affiliated with the big international union federations like Education International (EI), doing nothing for their inactive members. They are “unions in a briefcase” as workers here say, with nothing on the ground. CNEH soaked up all the money teachers around the world contributed to EI, thinking they were giving to fellow teachers after the catastrophe.

On the other side are the seemingly more honest unionists who joined electrical, transport, telephone, teachers, nurses and other workers together in the CTSP federation. Many of the leaders and delegates of these unions are unemployed, fired from good jobs for organizing. They have led very militant reform struggles. The bus drivers in the SESP union, for example, were ALL fired and replaced by scabs when they successfully organized the SESP.

One discussion started at the forum on the limits of unions in anti-capitalist struggle. Can there be red unions, or red-led unions, under capitalism? The Haitian state has “good” labor laws on the books, for example, but breaks them all the time, as when they fired all the bus drivers. They enable the private employers, notably in the textile and other assembly industries for export, to do the same thing. Organizing in textiles is a clandestine operation.

PLP is presenting the idea that a revolutionary party is a necessity within unions and also to link the few unionized workers with the vast masses of the unemployed (70%). We speak of unions as possibly “schools of revolution,” in Lenin’s phrase, but only if there are communists working in them. We know that without communists working within them, unions are often turned into tools of the ruling class rather than the honest advocates for workers they may start as.

The Real Solution for Haiti:
Communist Revolution

It will take a prolonged ideological struggle to bring the ideas of communism back to Haiti. PLP is in that struggle with our friends among unionized workers and students, inspired by their indomitable spirit. “There is no more social sap in Haiti,” a student said, his image deriving from the deforested and eroded countryside. And yet his speech was undefeated, full of juice, full of radical thought and deeply felt. When he and his comrades deepen their already existing alliance with organized workers and go to the unorganized masses, the sap will rise and the trees will return to the hills where the slave revolt was born.

The crowning insult in the bosses’ reconstruction plan is to promote a tourist industry (like the resort at Labadie where the Clintons, who “love” Haiti as vultures love their prey, spent their honeymoon). A tourist park in the mountains where the first revolution to destroy slavery was born, where Charlemagne Péralte’s guerrillas fought off the U.S. marines in the 1920s? What a future!

The bosses have the government, MINUSTAH, the pirate crew of “donors” who formed the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, with Bill Clinton and prime minister Bellerive as co-chairs and the World Bank as a dominant force. But Haitian workers and students have the courage, intelligence and the history of our whole class. And soon — together we are working for it and will bring it into being — they will have and will build to new heights an international revolutionary party, the PLP. J

NEW YORK CITY, May 24 — Transit workers, students and other riders are under attack from MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) bosses:

• They’re cutting train and bus service;

• They laid off 250 station agents in early May despite a court injunction to delay layoffs until the MTA holds public hearings;

• They’ve announced over 3,000 more transit worker layoffs; and 600 non-union administrative employees have already received buyout offers;

• They’re threatening to eliminate student Metro Cards (free fare cards)

• They’re threatening to eliminate workers’ raises;

• Their CEO Jay Walder and the bosses’ media have labeled transit workers’ hard-won benefits of overtime pay and sick days as “abuse.”

Blatant Racism

These layoffs, service cuts and smears are particularly racist because they’re concentrated on city transit workers, riders and students who are overwhelmingly black, Latino and immigrant. And they’re added to racist unemployment, officially already 19% among the city’s black men, nearly twice the “official” overall city 9.8% unemployment rate. In contrast, Mayor Bloomberg guaranteed no layoffs this fiscal year for cops, mainly white, who defend the capitalist rulers’ laws and exploitation.

Fighting Back

Angry workers want more action than the TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100’s court suit that delayed some layoffs. Besides daily afternoon protests in front of MTA boss Walder’s residence at 105 Duane Street in Manhattan, more than 1,000 militant transit workers broke out of police pens at a May 4 union rally to march and demonstrate at MTA headquarters 15 blocks away. Workers ready to break rules and unite with working-class students and riders are on the right track. But more militancy alone isn’t enough.

At the root of the problem is the capitalist system that drives bosses to kill and exploit workers for profits. Rivalry between imperialists in the world’s most powerful capitalist nations is forcing bosses globally to exploit “their” own workers more viciously than their competitors. In NYC this competition drives banks and politicians to squeeze nearly one-fourth of the MTA’s budget for profits through “debt service” paid to wealthy bondholders, amounting to $2 billion interest per year.

The MTA’s new Chief Financial Officer is none other than the ex-Bear Stearns banker, Robert Foran. He helped create the MTA’s current budget “gap” when he engineered a deal to more than double the MTA’s debt in 2000 (“Private Promoter for Transit Debt,” NY Times, 5/1/2000).

Ultimate Solution: Revolution

The bosses will run the show until the working class buries their racist profit system with communist revolution. The Progressive Labor Party aims to up the ante in the class struggle, forging unity among workers, students and soldiers to eventually overthrow the capitalists and build a communist society free of racist class exploitation.

One obstacle to this goal is the conditioning of many workers by politicians, union honchos and bosses to accept these “leaders” as the “lesser evil.” That is, the layoffs, service cuts or fare hikes always turn out to be less than the bosses first announce, giving the politicians and union hacks the opening to say they “fought as hard as we could” and claim “victory” for holding off the worst cuts.

We’re encouraged to deal individually with whatever crap rolls downhill. But it’s all a scam designed to keep us from taking mass collective actions like picketing, slowdowns, physical confrontations and strikes to shut the city down. None of these actions guarantee workers will win their reform demands. But, along with a communist outlook, they can help create the mass fighting communist movement here and worldwide needed to win workers’ power. Then workers won’t have to ask bosses for a damn thing because we’ll be running the show 

British Petroleum’s (BP) bosses murdered 11 workers and caused untold ecological damage when a BP oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico last month. As usual in industrial disasters, profit-driven cost-cutting proved the immediate cause. Texas A&M drilling expert Gene Beck “said BP’s encasement design called for only partial coverage of casings deep in the well. Cement did not reach the bottom of the next-largest casing in high-pressure areas, a decision Beck called ‘shocking.’” (Los Angeles Times, 5/23)

But the blowout highlights only one of the dangers to our class from the oil barons’ reckless pursuit of maximum profits. The very existence of BP’s Gulf rig stems from U.S. imperialism’s need to control world energy supplies by force in the face of increasing competition. Millions of working-class Iraqis and Afghans have already been killed in the capitalists’ struggle over oil and gas. Expanding offshore drilling, however, signals U.S. rulers’ plans for far deadlier conflicts.

Offshore Drilling Helps Pentagon’s Anti-Iran War Plans

Just three weeks before the BP blast, Obama had announced “the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration....in the mid- and south-Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.” Obama pointedly chose a military installation, Andrews Air Force Base, for his speech, declaring, “We are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security....so that we are no longer tethered to the whims of what happens somewhere in the Middle East.”

Obama meant preparing for nuclear-arming Iran’s countering a U.S./Israeli attack by closing off the Straits of Hormuz, the planet’s most important oil chokepoint. Teheran could shut off shipments of millions of barrels of oil should there be a U.S. or Israeli strike at its nuclear program. U.S. bosses must also prepare for the longer-range possibility of Iran’s ally China — its number one oil customer — sending its growing blue-water navy to the Straits to protect its supplies.

Obama’s offshore initiative meshes with arch-imperialist John Kerry’s and Joe Lieberman’s U.S. Senate bill to boost offshore oil, domestic coal and nuclear energy as potential wartime alternatives to Mid-East oil and to build up the U.S. strategic oil reserve. Evidently, war-bent U.S. rulers see 11 oil workers’ deaths in the Gulf; the recent deaths of 29 miners in West Virginia and two more in Kentucky; and a potential replay of the Pennsylvania 3-Mile Island nuclear meltdown — inherent catastrophes under capitalism — all as “acceptable” casualties.

Liberals Rehabilitate Warmaker Halliburton

Obama may indeed make occasional renegade BP (see box) “pay” for the Gulf spill, as he’s promised, by compelling it to follow U.S. imperialism’s war agenda more closely. But BP subcontractor Halliburton, just as guilty of homicide for its flawed cement work, seems to be getting off scot-free on a “just-following-orders” defense. “Halliburton...worked according to BP’s design.” (LA Times article) Besides its oil business, Halliburton builds and services U.S. military bases worldwide. Liberals once loved to attack ex-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney. Bush’s VP, but with liberal Obama in the White House, criticism of the firm has died down.

The bosses care nothing for workers’ lives or the environment. Exxon Mobil, the top corporate beneficiary of U.S.-led genocide in Iraq, recently had the courts cut 90% of its “punitive damages” for its 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe, from $5 billion down to $500 million. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller-controlled company netted the highest profits in capitalism’s history.

As with the Exxon Valdez, there is sure to be a broad and sincere outcry against those responsible for the Gulf spill. But don’t count on Obama to force them to make amends. Only the working class can sufficiently punish the war-making, earth-ravaging billionaires for their crimes. Only   communist revolution would make workers’ safety and environment primary in the production for workers’ needs.

Building a mass PLP internationally among especially industrial workers, soldiers and youth in the shops, unions, barracks, schools, churches and the communities, is the only sure road to that future, the ultimate goal of our Party. 

BP UNRELIABLE U.S. ALLY

We should expect Obama & Co. to aim both empty rhetorical tirades and real sanctions against BP. The London-based firm has proved an on-again-off-again ally of the U.S. Establishment. Last Fall, in return for staunch U.K. military support, Iraq’s U.S.-controlled puppet government awarded BP rights to the vast Rumalia oil field. But BP, seeking cheap labor, brought in China’s national oil company as a junior partner.

BP is principal operator of the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Bill Clinton’s pet project, that ships Caspian crude to Europe and the U.S. free of Russian influence. But BP manages Kremlin-controlled oil and gas schemes in Siberia. It also runs Alaska’s oil pipeline, but the Feds shut it down occasionally for “environmental violations,” as in 2006 to punish BP for ceding control of its Russian operations to the Putin regime.

BP’s checkered history and relationship with the U.S. makes it a geopolitical wildcard for Washington. In Iran in 1953, BP’s predecessor, Anglo-Iranian Oil, lost big-time when the CIA installed the pro-Exxon Shah on the throne. It took another big hit in 1956, when Egypt nationalized and closed the Suez Canal, reacting to western interests ending the funding to its Aswan Dam project. This shut BP’s main export route, inducing a British-French-Israeli invasion, but President Eisenhower refused to send U.S. troops to support the invasion or help British and French oil barons.

In turn, BP later concluded relatively friendly mergers with the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of Ohio and of Indiana. Over the past three decades effective ownership of the firm has passed from private British investors, to the British government, to Kuwait’s emirs, to Goldman Sachs and back to private European-U.S.-U.K. investors.