MONTCOAL, WV, April 58 — When 40 workers died last month in a flooded Chinese coal mine, U.S. media strongly suggested the racist idea that human life is cheap to Asians. They followed a familiar script, trying to demonize an economic rival and potential military enemy.  “China’s coal mining industry is the world’s deadliest, with thousands of miners perishing every year in the pursuit of fuel for the country’s rapidly expanding economy.” (Wall Street Journal, 4/7)

But when an explosion killed 29 West Virginia coal miners a week later, U.S. rulers’ mainstream mouthpieces, like the NY Times, did something startling. They hammered at the profit motive behind the atrocity, editorializing (4/6): “[A]nger is building against the mine’s owner, the Massey Energy Company, which has long been accused by its critics of putting profits before the welfare of its workers.”

But the Times is hardly calling for the abolition of capitalism. It has never had a shred of sympathy for our class. To the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists that the Times speaks for, Massey’s crime lies not in killing miners but in trading with the enemy, China, seeking short-term profits while ignoring the ruling class’s long-term strategic needs.

“Massey Energy Co. is preparing its first metallurgical coal shipment to China as part of its efforts to capitalize on growing demand from Asian steelmakers.” (Associated Press, 3/10) Metallurgical (coking) coal (“dirty” coal) and iron ore make steel. Boosting China-bound coal-for-steel production at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine increased methane gas levels there, leading to the deadly blast. (Washington Post, 4/11)

It was Massey’s China trade, not workers’ deaths, which prompted arch-imperialist West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV to call the firm a “rogue” and a “repeat offender” on safety. (CBS 4/9) Rockefeller worries that Massey coal, in addition to bolstering China’s economic growth, might help it build its expanding military.

Massey Mine Was Serving China, Against Main U.S. Rulers’
War Agenda

The rulers’ harsh response to Massey’s disaster starkly contrasts with their kid-glove handling of the 2006 Sago mine blast that killed 12. Then Rockefeller and fellow senator Barack Obama utterly absolved, and even praised, Sago’s owner, writing, “We know that miners, retirees, and their families throughout the country are well aware of the risks inherent in working in even the safest mines.”

Sago belongs to the International Coal Group, an outfit run by imperialist New York-based investor Wilbur Ross. In the last decade or so, Ross has bought up and consolidated firms in sectors that are now struggling but will be indispensible to U.S. rulers during a global war. Along with coal, Ross has created conglomerates in textiles and steel.

Ross buys up bankrupt companies, tears up labor contracts and re-opens non-union hellholes just as unsafe as Massey’s. The crucial difference between the two camps lies in strategic focus. In contrast to Massey’s China deals, International Coal boasts on its website of serving dominant U.S. capitalists: “We market our coal to a diverse customer base of largely investment grade electric utilities, as well as domestic [our emphasis, Ed.] industrial and steel customers.”

Ross & Co. are bent on ensuring the survival of essential future war producers on U.S. soil. On the other hand, Massey’s biggest shareholder, BlackRock Capital, is in turn controlled by Bank of America, which also seeks immediate short-term profits and does not share the main rulers’ war agenda.

Miners’ History Of Armed Struggle Points The Way To Revolution

The rulers’ absolute need to control coal supplies drives them to exploit miners ruthlessly. Mass killings like Upper Big Branch and Sago follow brutal anti-union campaigns. Tighter mine regulations, as Sen. Rockefeller and the Times propose, won’t change this deadly pattern (see page 1) but only strengthen the bigger, imperialist bosses’ grip on the industry.

Miners, however, have a history of militant fight-back that has often risen to the level of armed conflict — at times which has involved our Party (see box above). Someday such militancy, spread throughout the working class by PLP, will organize a communist revolution that destroys capitalism and its profit-driven disasters. 

PLP has long been active supporting and participating in miners’ struggles, both in the U.S. and abroad.

‘Communism Comes To The
Mountains!’

One of our first actions — six months after having launched the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — was to support a 1963 strike of 500 wildcatting rank-and-file miners in Hazard, Kentucky. The armed miners went from mine to mine, routing scabs and dynamiting scab mines. PLM members organized a Trade Union Solidarity Committee and shipped truck- and trailer-loads of food and clothing to the militant miners while collecting money from workers outside factory gates in NYC, Buffalo and San Francisco. Our effort transformed the strike into a national issue.

We brought the miners’ leader, Berman Gibson, to NYC to address 800 workers and students at the Community Church in zero degree weather. When we shipped hundreds of PL Magazines to the miners, the local Hazard rag ran an 8-column headline across its front page charging, “Communism Comes to the Mountains!” The miners scoffed at their attempted red-baiting and warmly received us as brother and sister workers.

Support West Virginia Strikers

In 1987, PLP was very active in the Pittston coal strike when several thousand miners struck against the coal bosses’ attempt to force major concessions. The coal bosses were killing miners the “slow” way, ignoring safety rules and falsifying air samples. Hundreds of miners died lingering deaths from black lung disease, denied benefits because the air in the mines was supposedly “clean.” CHALLENGE was distributed to many miners as well as a newsletter sent to hundreds of strikers, pointing out the need to destroy capitalism and build communism.

A group of PL’ers came from Detroit to the Logan, West Virginia union hall with a trunk full of food purchased with money collected from auto and hospital workers and in front of supermarkets. An angry flood of miners were streaming into the hall, having just walked out on their union leaders who were trying to sell them out — including UMW President Richard Trumka (now AFL-CIO President). One miner told us, “You go back to Detroit and tell everyone that Richard Trumka is trying to destroy this union!” We couldn’t have asked for a warmer welcome.

PLP organized strike support in many cities and sent groups of workers and youth to deliver food and spend time with the strikers, some living with the miners and participating in strike activity while distributing CHALLENGE and discussing world politics. Ties were built with some amazing people that lasted well after the strike ended.

One day a very militant, angry group of strikers’ wives had had their anti-communism stirred up. One was ready to defend the PLP when another said, “You’re a communist and you didn’t tell us! We can’t have communists down here.”

One PL’er replied that our “communism is a world without bosses, money or profits, where workers get what they need just because they need it, not because they can afford it.”

One woman declared, ”Hell! I’d be a lot better off than I am now,” and we all laughed. “And all of you that feed the strikers, you’re the most communist group down here! You collect and prepare the food collectively, and then you join the picket lines and feed the strikers. You don’t ask them who they voted for in the last election or how much money they have. You feed them because we’re in a war and they need to be fed.!”

Now the women were much friendlier except the one right-winger who originally got them stirred up. She said, “Maybe so. But I STILL ain’t no damn communist!” Everybody roared with laughter.

Back Striking British Miners

In 1984-85, when British coal miners struck for 15 months to save their jobs, PLP actively collected money, Christmas gifts for the miners’ children and letters of support from our own unions. Miners and their spouses came to the U.S. and marched with us on May Day, helped organize California farmworkers and spoke to large and small groups in the U.S. about their struggle against capital.

The strike, over the closing of the coal mines destroying 40,000 jobs, almost toppled the Thatcher government. There were pitched battles between the miners and the police. Mining communities throughout Britain pooled their food and opened communal kitchens for miners and their families.

In the late 1980s, when many U.S. coal mines were being closed or turned into open-pit strip mines (requiring less labor and destroying the land), PLP won British miners to send letters of support to striking U.S. miners in Southern West Virginia. 

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 1 — A bloc of Metro transit workers challenged the Metro board during public hearings tonight as the bosses continued to give workers and riders the choice between losing an arm and losing a leg, i.e., either support cuts in service and layoffs or an increase in fares.

The Metro workers joined dozens of riders in condemning the public hearings as a charade to pretend that the politicians, bureaucrats, and managers who run Metro care about riders and workers. On the contrary, they turn a blind eye to the on-the-job deaths of workers from unsafe conditions and somberly intone that some sacrifices (by workers!) will be needed. Their strategy (supporting the big capitalists) demonstrates that to create a safe workplace and decent standard of living, our class must smash their state and create a communist, worker-run society that serves only working class needs and dismantles all forms of capitalism.

Sharpening Fascism — The Shape
Of Things To Come

Jackie Jeter, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 showed up at these hearings but remained mute, consistent with her refusal to seriously take on the biggest issue facing Metro workers in generations — the fascist gang-up by the courts, politicians, and Metro management on the new contract. If the attack is unanswered it will hasten the end of Metro as a flagship job for U.S. transit workers.

An arbitration panel set the terms of the final contract after negotiations deadlocked — strikes are illegal. In the past, arbitration decisions ended Metro labor disputes. Workers have never liked arbitration since it is biased in favor of the bosses, but given the historic non-struggle character of our union’s leadership, we have usually had to accept it. And this arbitration award was a net loss for us — a tiny pay increase offset entirely by substantial give-backs in healthcare and retiree benefits.

But this time, the Metro bosses took the unusual action of challenging the arbitration panel in court to demand even further concessions from the workers! They kicked us while we were down, and they won! (See box for the details of how the capitalist “legal” system made this happen.)

This attack is a part of a national trend of bosses attacking the working class without regard to past precedents and agreements. Capitalism is in crisis. The ruling class needs money for endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to bail out the banks and other financial institutions and to invest in its businesses. Given these bosses’ priorities, there is no money available to maintain the living wages and benefits of working people. And so the bosses take off the gloves of past concessions to workers’ struggle and use whatever weapons they can find to drive down our wages, be it the courts, legislation, racism or terror. In this case, the attack on the mainly black workforce of Metro shows the racist nature of capitalism — the most super-exploited workers are the first to suffer in a capitalist crisis.

Union Leadership — Vacillating,
Fearful, And Complicit!

Jeter previously had told workers to simply “hold fast,” and at a special meeting of Metro workers at the union hall she continued to put forward a “wait-and-see” attitude.  When challenged by several angry workers, she tried to intimidate them by saying how dangerous it would be to have a strike, how they wouldn’t get paid and might lose their homes.

One worker declared that many Metro workers had already lost their homes, and if we did not fight back, many more would! She then backtracked, claiming that she would support a strike if the International did. But she knew full well that the International would never support a strike at Metro because it would be illegal and the International would be found in contempt of court and fined.

In short, Jeter is maintaining her reliance on the very courts and politicians that are screwing us, and refusing to mobilize the only force that can have any effect at all, mobilized anti-racist militant workers’ power!

Build PLP Leadership At Metro To
Hasten Revolution!

The bottom line of recent developments at Metro is that the bosses have upped the ante in their racist treatment and attacks on Metro’s predominantly black workforce. They believe the growing racial divisions in our society can be used to their advantage. To resist this attack we must overcome the divisions between riders and Metro workers, between us and other unions, and the divisions between documented and undocumented workers.

As we unify our class to resist the latest attacks, we can build stronger class struggle against the bosses and lay the foundation for revolutionary struggle against the entire system of capitalism. To do this, militant workers must create a new communist leadership at Metro to guide the process of building revolutionary struggle against capitalism and all of its racist, imperialist, and sexist attacks on the world’s workers, including those of us at Metro itself.

This is a fight of our class against theirs. We are the ones who must defend ourselves and fight collectively for our class interests. As we do this, we will be able to build the PLP to make communist revolution and abolish the capitalist system that enslaves us. J

Bosses Manipulate Own Rules to Screw Workers

On March 15, 2010, the Federal District court in Maryland ordered that parts of an arbitration award that settled a contract dispute between the union and management be sent back to the Arbitration Panel to bring it in compliance with the National Capital Arbitration Standards Act (NCASA).

The judge ruled that those parts of the original arbitration award that favored Metro management would be immediately implemented. So much for the neutrality of the courts! These included higher health insurance costs, the elimination of retiree health insurance for anyone who is hired after January 1, 2010, a one year wage freeze at the start of the contract and a 2% bonus instead of a wage increase the first year.

Those parts of the award (the 3% increases in the last three years of the contract and the preservation of the current pension system), which were minor concessions to the workers, were sent back for review and will most likely be negated. Not even crumbs for workers!

The judge gave very specific instructions to the arbitrators. He said it was illegal to base a wage increase on the other major transit properties in the United States, even though this had been the practice for at least the last 60 years. He ruled that the arbitrators had to use the provisions of the NCASA, which requires that the panel consider the ability of the local jurisdictions to pay the increases and the pay scales of similar jobs in the region only.

He also instructed the panel to examine the pension proposals Metro had made on cutting the high-four-final earnings formula, reducing the post-retirement escalator clause for pensions, and requiring employee contributions to the plan in light of the NCASA. Again, more significant losses for the workers!

The NCASA was passed in 1995 by Congress and signed by President Clinton explicitly for the purpose of cutting labor costs at Metro. Although the law has been on the books for 15 years, Metro has not forced a contract to arbitration because they feared the workers might rebel if they tried to change an arbitration award. Apparently they no longer have that fear. The times are changing, fascism is growing, and so it’s clearly time for us to restore and increase their fear through sharper struggle and go on to smash their system!



PHILADELPHIA, April 5 — One of the cherished notions that the bosses push in defense of their capitalist system is that workers have the right to freedom of speech. Nurses and allied professionals at Temple Hospital are learning that this “right” can disappear quickly when it interferes with the bosses’ profit-making.

During contract negotiations Temple bosses insisted on a “gag clause” that would allow them to fire nurses for speaking out publicly against poor quality care. One nurse was told by a boss, “if you want your constitutional rights you will have to go somewhere else.”

This gag clause is one of the main issues that led the nurses to strike on March 31. Others are demands for safe staffing levels, keeping tuition reimbursement for the children of employees, and no increase in co-pays for health insurance.

The bosses have hired 850 scab nurses to replace the over 1,000 nurses on strike. They are paying these scabs as much as $10,000 per week. According to union calculations the cost of hiring scabs for two weeks would be enough to settle the contract negotiations. Union estimates are that Temple has spent $5 million over and above regular costs for the first week of the strike and will spend $4.5 million per week for the remainder of the strike. The profit of the agency providing the scab nurses, HealthSource Global Staffing, is estimated at $1.1 million per week. The cost of the tuition benefit that Temple is trying to take away is $1.1 million per year!

PLP is taking the first steps in supporting the Temple strike. We are attending support demonstrations and talking to Temple workers. In our collective discussions of the strike we are identifying the strengths and weaknesses of this particular struggle and the general struggle over health care in the failing capitalist economy. It is obvious that politics is primary over economics in this strike. Why would the bosses be willing to spend so much money on scabs if this were not true?

The most positive aspect of the strike is the strikers fighting for the right to defend patient safety more than for their own economic interests. Temple’s insistence on the gag clause was the real trigger for the strike. Some of the right-wing union leadership’s statements suggest that this clause was put forth by management as a demand that would be impossible for the nurses to accept, in order to force a strike. PLP’ers think that the matter goes deeper than this.

The capitalist class has a long-range plan for developing fascist healthcare. In order to achieve their goals they must break the traditional idea that the nurses’ primary obligation is to advocate for the best interests of their patients. It is significant that the bosses are challenging this long-standing tradition in a hospital whose patients are primarily black and Latino workers. We must increase the understanding of this racist gag clause as a step on the road to fascism.

Stop All Scabs!

The nurses are using the media to build community support. Temple students are circulating a petition supporting the strikers and denouncing the “ridiculous” management demands. While these efforts are important they are no substitute for a commitment to winning the strike by stopping scab nurses from crossing the picket lines. Other nursing strikes have been lost because scabs were allowed to work until the bosses were able to hire permanent replacements for the strikers.

Another weakness of the strike is the lack of support from 1199C Hospital Workers Union. Tensions between the union leaders over raiding have led to this situation, the product of a long history of divisive leadership by the bureaucrats in both organizations. 1199’ers should form rank-and-file committees to support the striking nurses and techs in whatever way they can. For example, 1199’ers could join the strikers’ picket lines at breaks and before and after work. In the past, when other unions struck at other Philadelphia hospitals and the 1199 leadership refused to formally support the strike, 1199’ers organized to do everything from picketing to fundraising to support leaflets to secret sabotage to planning sick-outs. All this was done without the union leadership, but, most importantly, with the involvement of PLP communists.

The most significant weakness of the strike is the lack of communist ideas and leadership. The local PLP collective does not have a strong base at Temple but we can begin to have an influence by talking with the few workers we know at Temple and the stronger base we have at other hospitals in the city. We must win them to see that no matter what the outcome of this strike might be, we can only defeat the increasing attacks on healthcare by building the Progressive Labor Party and fighting for communist revolution.