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Solidarity, Not Charity: Profs, Students Back Haiti’s Workers
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- 03 March 2010 97 hits
NEW YORK CITY, February 19 — More than 180 CUNY professors, staff members and students packed the union hall tonight for an “Evening of Solidarity with the People of Haiti.” The event kicked off with a delicious dinner of Haitian food, and continued with traditional Haitian folk music performed by a classical guitarist. Members of the union’s International Committee distributed a sheet of brief commentaries on Haiti from radical historians and novelists like Jacques Stephen Alexis.
The evening had two goals: to raise thousands of dollars for relief work in Haiti (which it did) and to provide a critical explanation of why the January 12th earthquake resulted in so many deaths, injuries and homelessness. Two CUNY professors, both from Haiti, explained how the earthquake was not a natural but rather a social disaster, or as one speaker termed it, a “poverty disaster.” It was largely the poor who perished when their poorly- constructed homes, schools and workplaces collapsed. The small but wealthy Haitian elite, residing in their mansions on the hills above Port-au-Prince, went relatively unscathed.
One of the professors noted how the U.S. media has emphasized Haitian poverty but neglected to mention the country’s inequality — how 5% of the population controls 46% of the wealth. The media also neglect to mention how the backbreaking labor of Haitian slaves once enriched French plantation owners and bankers, and how in recent years U.S. companies like Sears, G.E. and Wal-Mart profited handsomely from Haitian sweatshop labor. The speaker explained how U.S. trade policy had impoverished Haitian farmers, who then swelled the shantytowns of Port-au-Prince, which were devastated by the earthquake.
The second speaker, a long-time Haitian activist, was in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He met a friend whose mother died in the quake, but his friend put off mourning until he finished organizing shelter and food for the survivors. It is this spirit of collectivity and courage on the part of ordinary Haitians that draws this professor back to the island.
Both professors warned that the U.S. and capitalist institutions like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank will use the disaster to restructure the Haitian economy to benefit U.S. corporations. The 20,000 heavily-armed U.S. troops in Haiti are there to mainly ensure that Haiti remains a neo-colony of the U.S., a haven for U.S. sweatshops, and will allow the U.S. to build military bases in this strategically-located Caribbean nation.
A union leader quoted William Blake’s line that “Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody poor” to emphasize how important it is for people to understand the social causes of disasters like Katrina in New Orleans and now Haiti. She emphasized that our goal is not charity but solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Haiti. Later, another professor made clear that it was racist capitalism, not the earthquake, that had caused the deaths of 250,000 Haitians and left a million homeless. He argued that true solidarity would be to build an international movement aimed at overthrowing the monstrous system that has impoverished most Haitians and billions of other workers around the world. He cited the union’s past support for striking teachers in Mexico and Colombia as positive examples of international labor solidarity and urged the union to demand “U.S. Marines Out of Haiti!” today.
This evening of solidarity ended with people suggesting having forums on many campuses, so that thousands of students and faculty can learn the truth about Haiti.
ANKARA, TURKEY, February 26 -— The strike of TEKEL tobacco workers is now more than 10 weeks old. The strike erupted after the government decided to close all the company warehouses, eliminating 12,000 jobs, as part of privatizing the government-run tobacco company. The strikers and their families descended on the capital and set up a tent-city to protest the job cuts.
Acording to Turkish labor law, workers who are laid off due to privatization are supposed to be placed in jobs elsewhere, with full benefits. But the only “job” the TEKEL workers have found is actually fighting for one.
The strikers and their supporters have clashed with the police, the bosses’ hired thugs. On December 16, the cops attacked a rally in front of the headquarters of the ruling AKP party. The following day in a nearby park, police erected barricades and attacked protesters with water hoses, tear gas and clubs. After that the workers moved their encampment to the headquarters of Türk-Is, the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, who have failed to answer the bosses’
attacks with militant strikes or demonstrations.
Capitalist labor laws aren’t worth the paper they are written on, especially in the face of a worldwide financial crisis that is spreading poverty and war to everything it touches. The more workers fight back against these attacks, we create a better atmosphere to learn that a system that can’t provide jobs should be smashed. Poverty, war and racist terror are all the bosses have to offer. The only way to stop them is by building a mass international PLP and fighting for communism. That is the most important victory that we can win in the class struggle.
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Greece: Angry Workers, Youth Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis Cuts
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- 03 March 2010 101 hits
ATHENS, GREECE, February 26 — More than 20,000 workers marched to this city’s center as part of the second 24-hour general strike in two weeks, closing airports, public transportation and schools. Cops fired tear gas at youth throwing stones and paint near the Parliament buildings. Workers carried banners declaring, “Tax the Rich” and “Hands off our pension funds.”
Workers are protesting the rulers’ austerity program demanded by the World Bank which will force the working class to pay the price for the crisis capitalism has created. European Union bosses are pushing the program to deal with a potential default of a national debt of $400 billion. The situation is similar to that which caused the U.S. banking crisis, and involves some of the very same U.S. banks
The bosses’ government has imposed a wage freeze and bonus cuts, and is expected to raise the value-added-tax by two percentage points, raise fuel prices and abolish a month’s additional pay received by public- and private-sector workers.
“What else are they gong to cut,” said Kiki Oikonomou, employed at a state school for disabled children, “the air we breathe? This is like a jail sentence.” (NY Times, 2/25)
“If people see the minority living a good life and their wages plummeting, they’re going to take to the streets,” predicted Haralambos Dramantis, employed by the state power board. “We haven’t seen the big uprising yet but it will come.”
These 24-hour strikes reflect the anger and militancy of the working class, but they can only produce a real “big uprising” — revolution — if workers trace the cause of the bosses’ crisis to capitalism itself. And that can only happen if communists are present and lead the working class in that direction. Unfortunately, that kind of leadership is lacking currently in Greece.
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France: Immigrants’ Strike Mirrors Need to ‘Smash All Borders’
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- 03 March 2010 97 hits
PARIS, February 24 — “Everyone here is a worker who has no rights,” declared Mahamadou Doucansy, among the undocumented immigrant workers who have been striking to win “legal” status. “They have been working in France for years, paying into social security, paying taxes and not one has documents,” continued Doucansy, who has been working here in construction since October, 2001, for the minimum wage. He is one of 250 strikers occupying the premises of the Job Training Insurance Fund since February 2. They are preparing for a police attack to evict them.
All told the cops have violently removed sit-downers from 50 occupied sites during the four-month strike, but the thousands of immigrant workers are holding fast. The solidarity from other workers and students here and from abroad has helped sustain them. (See letter to CHALLENGE, 3/3.)
This strike defies the bosses’ policy of super-exploiting such workers, holding them hostage to poverty wages under threat of deportation but without whose work whole industries could not function. It brings to the fore the bosses’ anti-working class and racist attacks based on borders established by national ruling classes.
Citizen-worker support for these immigrant strikers has international political significance since it helps to raise sharply the need of workers worldwide to smash the bosses’ borders. This kind of unity is essential to prepare workers to take the only road that can free our class from capitalism exploitation, the road to communist revolution.
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Link French Colonialism to Attack on Immigrants’ Rights
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- 03 March 2010 93 hits
PARIS, February 27 — A demonstration of 7,000 people demanded the abolition of the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity and the “legalization” of all undocumented workers. They linked France’s treatment of undocumented workers to its history as an imperialist colonial power. They chanted “Besson, Sarkozy, it’s over, the time of colonies.” Besson is the minister of immigration and “national identity”; Sarkozy is the president of France. Eighty-five organizations supported the march to the Immigration Ministry building.
The demonstration was part of the “anti-colonial week,” February 19 to 28. Patrick Farbiaz, one of the organizers, declared, “We would like to show that there is a link between the colonialism of yesterday and that of today in the way that the descendants of immigrants and undocumented immigrants are treated.”
