BRONX, NY, September 1 — If you walked into this little restaurant, you wouldn’t notice him sitting there nursing a coffee. And you wouldn’t notice the steady stream of men and women that come in when they can, to either pick up or drop off the latest copies of CHALLENGES. They are former Stella D’Oro workers, who struck the company for 11 months only to lose their jobs when the company was sold and moved.

They are bruised, but not beaten, still fighting back. Now they are fighting the Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International union leaders, who have made it much harder for unemployed members to reach the “Golden 80” and qualify for a full pension.

“Golden 80” refers to a combination of age and years of service. So if you are 60 years old with 20 years of service, you qualify for a full pension. As of July 30, workers like the Stella D’Oro workers, who reach “Golden 80” while unemployed due to plant closings, will take a 40% cut in benefits, including those who only needed a month or two to qualify. If they hit “80” with less than 15 years of service, they will take a 60% cut. This is especially vicious as it targets the oldest workers who are the least likely to work again given the current economic crisis and mass racist unemployment.

One woman said, “I worked 27 years for this company and contributed to my pension. I need three months for Golden 80 and they want to give me 40% less!” The wife of a worker who was one month short of his “Golden 80” reported that this has made him physically ill, unable to sleep and suffering from high blood pressure. Another worker said, “We fought for a year and a half. We stood up for this union and they give away our pension!”

The union claims that the cuts were needed because the pension fund is in danger of going broke. But at the same time they were cutting Stella workers, they were cutting $300 supplemental checks to current Golden 80 retirees. Also, Stella D’Oro had to pay a $12 million penalty to the pension fund in order to withdraw from it. Yet, none of that money is being used to help the victims of the plant closing.

By mid-August the Stella workers were fighting back. They found a lawyer who has taken their case, but they will really need to rekindle the mass actions and militancy of their strike in the fight to protect their pensions. If they win, so will every BCTGM member.

As this fight unfolds, we are trying to organize Stella workers to join a contingent of unemployed workers in the October 2 march on Washington, D.C. (see page 1).  Out of this struggle we will be in a better position to organize the unemployed, fight racist unemployment, and build the revolutionary communist PLP

HARTFORD, CT, August 31 — “All the owners care about is money. They don’t care about the patients and they don’t care about the workers!” So declared a nursing home worker on  strike at the Spectrum-owned Park Place Health Center, one of four Spectrum-owned nursing homes in the state that have been struck for four months.

When Spectrum purchased the home following a fire a few years ago, the workers, members of SEIU District 1199, had a union contract. Spectrum has tried mightily to destroy the contract, and, if possible, to bust the union.

The bosses want to tie wages to Medicaid reimbursement, so if the latter increases, wages will increase a little, but if reimbursement declines, so will wages. Workers won’t be able to count on the wages they’ll receive. Furthermore, the owners’ plan will cut holidays.

“We want a fair contract. If we give back, it will just get worse and worse. This with the economy so bad and everything going up in price,” said one striker. “Some of the work is very hard, lifting patients, moving them from one place to another. If we get hurt, we get put on light duty and our pay is cut $4 to $5 an hour. If someone gets hurt, they won’t tell the boss because their pay will be cut, so people are working hurt, which is not safe for the workers or the patients.”

“To me,” said another striker, “it’s as much about the patients as it is about us. One patient came down to the picket line — what were the scabs doing that he got out? — to get shaved by his regular CNA (certified nursing assistant). She shaved him.” In another incident, a patient came down to the line short of breath. “We called 911 to get help for him while the scabs watched from the building,” said the striker. “We and the patients are like family.”

Scabs are crossing the line. One group comprises those who were working before the strike and did not honor the picket line. “The strike would be over if they had come out,” was one comment.

The others are young people fresh out of school who are told by the bosses that they will have permanent jobs if they cross the line. These people are generally dumped after three months before they qualify for medical insurance. As one woman said, “I feel sorry for these young people who were conned into coming here to work and then kicked out. On the other hand, they crossed our line, and it’s our job and our life, so too bad!”

The strike is the sharpest example of class struggle in Connecticut at the moment, so much so that before the Democratic gubernatorial primary, candidate Dan Malloy walked the picket line to “prove” he’s pro-union. PLP can play a role in this strike in exposing unions’ and politicians’ collaboration with the bosses, and showing workers that only a revolutionary fight can win workers’ power.

The workers, Latino, black and white, women and men, are united and optimistic. “We’re going to win. We’re not going to give up,” vowed one woman. PL’ers have been organizing strike support and introducing communist ideas to the strikers.

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 28 — PLP boldly confronted tens of thousands of lily-white Tea Partiers streaming into a rally led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. We challenged the racists, haranguing them on a loud bullhorn for two hours and individually in their faces as they walked by. Speakers exposed the Tea Party as tools of big business, especially Koch Enterprises, a multi-billion dollar energy company that organized and funds the Tea Party with millions of dollars. (Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” New Yorker, 8/30).

PL’ers called for multi-racial unity to fight against racism and for jobs, affordable housing, and against  the wars for oil. Some speakers called for the unity of all workers to fight for communism, a society run by the working class without profiting from anyone’s work, and condemned the racially-divisive message of the Tea Party.

We distributed over 400 CHALLENGES and 700 leaflets (including 300 the night before at an anti-racist gathering) explaining the fascist nature of the Tea Party. Our numbers grew when other anti-racists looking for a protest showed up. Our friends were furious at Glenn Beck’s attempt at hijacking the symbols of anti-racism by holding his rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

This location is associated with the end of slavery and was the site of Marian Anderson’s famous concert in response to the racist banning of her performance in Constitution Hall in the 1930s. The rally was called on the anniversary of the anti-racist March on Washington in 1963. Beck even got Martin Luther King’s niece (a right-winger who is estranged from her family) to speak favorably at the rally.

The Tea Party crowd was overwhelmingly white, middle class, and older. Most vigorously denied they were racist, while some were openly racist. Most wanted to “take back the country” and “return it to its roots,” a thinly-veiled call to return to segregation and even slavery. Almost all of them viewed undocumented workers as a major cause of the problems in society.

Other Tea Partiers were vague as to what the rally was about. Several said that they had voted for Obama, but were furious that he had sold out to the Wall Street banks during the crisis, and so had switched to the Tea Party. Capitalism in crisis drives people to take sharper positions, either to the left or the right. We have to be there to win increasingly angry workers to revolutionary politics, not fascism! We cannot abandon any workers to the demagoguery of fascism.

We struggled successfully with our coworkers, friends and neighbors and comrades from out of town to join us and not be intimidated by this emerging fascist movement. Our greatest victory was that the workers we brought with us got to see the danger of the beginning of a mass fascist movement up close and personal, which gave a sense of urgency for building PLP and the revolutionary movement.

Greater Dangers

The Tea Party and its allied Freedom Works support policies to enrich big business, especially aggressive southwest capitalists challenging the eastern Wall Street capitalists within the ruling class. The Tea Party and Freedom Works want to privatize social security, eliminate welfare, charge for currently free Internet services, eliminate environmental protections to control global warming, and restrict unionization. The longer-view liberal capitalists generally oppose these policies as unnecessarily disruptive, but they are moving in the same direction.

The Tea Party may have mobilized fascist foot soldiers, but the main danger remains with the liberal bosses currently led by Obama. They are the leaders of imperialist wars, massive cutbacks in services, and ongoing fascist repressive measures that in some ways have exceeded those of the Bush administration (for example creating a list of “terrorist” enemies and giving the green light to assassinate them anywhere in the world, not just on the battlefield).

These forces have mobilized labor unions and the NAACP for a mass march on October 2 to shore up the political power of their faction of the ruling class. We must be there to expose their efforts to mislead angry workers into the bosses’ election charade. What is called for is sharper class struggle in the streets and in the workplaces.

The Tea Party is similar to the movements that grew in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. We have started a fight-back movement, but we have to grow larger quickly to derail the fascist Tea Party through more vigorous struggle, similar to our campaigns against the Klan and Nazis.

With the economy going deeper into recession, more workers are looking for answers, and the Tea Party offers other workers as scapegoats. PLP can show workers that capitalism is the cause and that revolution for communism is the solution. Let’s bring that same message to the bosses’ demonstration on October 2.

NEW YORK CITY — “The racists are freely demonstrating in front of the mosque right now! And we’re the ones fenced in three blocks away by the NYPD,” a PL’er said to 150 demonstrators. They were assembled to counter-protest 500 racists opposed to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” a mosque that an Islamic association is hoping to expand into a community center.

The mosque has made headlines in the bosses’ press worldwide. Liberals like Obama have questioned the “wisdom” of its location two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, and right-wingers have declared it a haven for “terrorism.”

Our PLP club and several friends from Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and West Africa participated in the counter-demonstration and raised our internationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics. We distributed CHALLENGE and encouraged the crowd to picket and confront the racists, in spite of the fears of confrontation by the socialist group that officially organized the event.

One PL’er climbed the ladder to speak, and pointed out that the racist demonstration occurring in front of the mosque is part of a U.S. ruling-class-sponsored intensification of racism against Muslims, particularly Arabs, Persians, and South Asians. Their goal is to build momentum for even larger wars in the Middle East/ South Asia.

The PL’er concluded with the need to confront the racists by marching directly to them to picket, so as not to repeat the mistake of ignoring racism the German working class made during the rise of fascism. A leader in the socialist group warned the crowd not to break away from the steel fences, instead inviting everyone to a meeting the following week to “discuss” the day’s events. In the end about two or three dozen went to the mosque, where we were forced to picket the racists from across the street, because of the heavy NYPD presence.

The U.S. bosses may be divided amongst themselves for the moment, but in the long term they will need Nazi-like soldiers who won’t hesitate to butcher more of our Middle Eastern working-class brothers and sisters for control of oil. Equating Islam with Bin Laden’s terrorism is only a first attempt to build the racism they need to win workers here to become those butchers.

We can count on the bosses not missing an opportunity to try and mobilize workers into the streets around their imperialist agenda. We can’t miss our own opportunities. We must use CHALLENGE to build the mass international working-class movement that will stop these racist bosses in their tracks