Workers, Students Unite in Wage Struggle

HARLEM, April 1 — Twenty-five Columbia University (CU) students, along with some City University students and fighters from the local St. Mary’s church, marched to the McDonald’s on 125th Street and Broadway, and rallied today. Workers there are demanding a wage increase to $15 per hour. By exposing the racist bosses and their drive for profit, there is potential in this struggle to win students and workers to fighting for a communist world.
Worker-Student Solidarity
This action was in alliance with the national campaign by United Students Against Sweat Shops (USAS). Under nationwide pressure, McDonald’s has agreed to a measly $1 above minimum wage hike. This increase doesn’t even apply to 90 percent of its stores, which are franchises. The new CEO of McDonald’s, Stephen Easterbrook, just got a base-pay increase to $1.1 million, while his predecessor Don Thompson will rake in $3 million in cash for “consulting services.” And his predecessor, Jim Skinner, raked in $10.2 million cash upon retiring in 2012. Meanwhile, the average wage slave at a fast-food restaurant makes $18,880 per year.
CHALLENGEs were distributed. Two workers from St. Mary’s spoke about their experiences fighting racist unemployment. Students cheered! A retired teacher recalled the victorious 1968 student-and-worker struggle to prevent CU taking over a park in Harlem.
A larger action, involving students from the whole city, is planned on the CU campus on April 15, beginning with a march from City College at 3 PM.
Unite Under One Banner of Communism
The CU students were from the campus Student Worker Solidarity group, which supports campus workers in their struggles against benefit cuts and other abuses. The students recognize the importance of building student-worker solidarity on campus and in the neighborhood. This is especially important as racist CU is involved in a new massive expansion into Harlem, which has cost housing and jobs in this mainly working-class Black and Latin neighborhood. CU not only made false promises to provide jobs and job training to local residents, but also backed the massive police raids on local housing projects in which 103 young people were arrested in June 2014. Most still remain in jail.
There has been a lot of student organizing at CU recently: calling for divestment from private prison investments and polluting industries; opposing mass incarceration and sexual harassment; and fighting for justice in Palestine, among other issues. The potential for a movement grows if these different groups unite, with workers on and off campus.
All issues need to be viewed as functioning aspects of capitalism that cannot be solved in isolation or within the system. This system needs racism and sexism in order to super-exploit and divide workers. It also needs prisons to intimidate and control those whom the system drives to desperation or rebellion. No amount of reforming and restructuring can eliminate the bosses’ drive for profit, and universities’ drive for indoctrinating students to accept a world with profit.
There is no such thing as a “fair wage.” Capitalism cannot survive without paying the lowest wages that workers will bear to make profits. By definition, a wage is the leftover part of total value returned to workers as income after most of it has been stolen as profit by the bosses. Furthermore, $15-an-hour is certainly not enough to live on! We don’t need bosses to run the system. In fact, the parasitic bosses need workers to survive. Imagine a world where workers make the decisions, without being motivated by wages or profit: communism.
Workers and students must make a life-long commitment to fighting capitalism. They must strive for a communist revolution to have hope of overcoming the injustices they so deeply care about. Marching on May Day on May 2 will help them see that masses share and embrace this egalitarian vision.