LOS ANGELES, CA, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party joined together with workers from a university campus here to rally and march into the office of the assistant vice chancellor. These workers have been fighting for four years in order to be hired by the university itself — not by an outsourcing company that had fired workers on a whim and forced the remaining workers to do twice the work. Recently, the workers won that battle, but the fight continues.
In the last three months about 30 workers, almost a third of the staff, have received “counseling memos.” This is a fancy way of saying they were written up. Many of these write-ups were based on the fact that the supervisors didn’t understand what was necessary in order to get the work done. For example, one worker was written up for being “out of area.” The worker wasn’t working in the building they were supposed to be because the workload they had been given in another building was too much and they could not finish on time. Three workers have been fired recently because of these attacks.
Latina Women Won’t Back Down
The supervisors have also been harassing the workers in other ways, such as giving them their checks late. This is a blatant attempt to intimidate these militant, mainly Latina women workers. The bosses and supervisors are scared of these workers because they have refused to back down.
Today was no exception. The workers chanted and refused to wait as they walked into the building and into the assistant vice chancellor’s office. They presented him with a petition. They demanded that the harassments stop, that workers be rehired, that all “counseling memos” be rescinded, and that the workloads be reduced to a reasonable size for each worker.
The assistant vice chancellor said that he would “look into it.” These workers have heard that before. So they told him they need action within a week or they would continue to fight.
These university bosses and their pet bureaucrats should be scared. These workers have the will to fight and communists are on their side. We must transform this reform fight for reasonable working conditions. A reform maintains the system that keeps the working class fighting the same fights over and over again for the bare minimum. It essentially builds capitalism, and fools workers into thinking that capitalism can be reformed for workers’ interests. We need to put forth revolution. We need a system that works for all workers: communism.