NEW JERSEY, October 21— “Workers created unions to fight, not be in bed with the bosses. You run this union like a country club!” Class struggle has been heating up at Essex County College (ECC) with faculty and members of the Progressive Labor Party indicting their local racist local union misleaders at a local meeting recently against racist cutbacks and layoffs on staff and services amidst the pandemic.
PL’ers and friends have been in the thick of organizing fightback and student and staff unity, and the fight is only just beginning to fight back against these conditions and build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can smash this entire system!
Cutbacks are racist attacks on students
ECC is a community college in Newark with currently around 5,000 working class students, with the majority of the students, faculty and staff Black, Latin, immigrant and women. Every cut and layoff is a racist and sexist attack on this student population, who depend on the staff and services being cut. Meanwhile, while the cuts were being announced, ECC received eight million dollars in federal Covid-19 relief.
Over the summer, ECC students and faculty organized 300 students and workers to sign a petition demanding to know where this money had disappeared to and presented it at an online Board of Trustees meeting. The students were not only prevented from speaking because of a rule requiring all comments be submitted 24 hours in advance, their petition was openly laughed at by several of the Trustees.
Furthermore, and conveniently for the bosses, the person who could best answer the students’ questions—ECC President Andrew Munroe— had just resigned to assume presidency of a college right across the Hudson River: at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College in neighboring New York City.
Sharpening fascism and ‘shared sacrifice’
Fascist attacks on the working class in Newark have been sharpening for decades. ECC’s new president, Augustine Boakye, is connected to both Newark’s local real estate bosses and Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka through organizations like the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.
The GNCVB and Big Fascist-tied investment banks Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and insurance giant Prudential have poured hundreds of millions of dollars to attract property developers and companies like Amazon while driving out working class Black residents (NYT, 11/26/19; PR Newswire, 9/26/19).
ECC’s Board of Trustees is composed of former politicians and lawyers from firms who have helped lead these attacks. ECC’s union chapter looks and acts like a capitalist country club: led by an all-white group of racist men whose chapter chair is paid more than the ECC president. The chapter is part of the National Educators’ Association (NEA), the largest union in the U.S. with over two million members. Along with their counterpart the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union is close allies of the Big Fascist-aligned Democratic Party.
These fascist union misleaders have joined with the ECC Trustees and NJ Governor Murphy in calling for “shared sacrifice” through five per cent pay cuts, which will force faculty deeper into poverty and searching for additional jobs, all of which worsen student learning conditions.
Fightback grows
ECC students, faculty and PLP have waged years-long battles against both the ECC administration and these union misleaders. As a sign of our growing strength, after two years of struggle we scored an important victory in getting a racist, sexist administrator fired. With PLP leadership, faculty continue to expose the ECC union misleaders utter collaboration with the bosses, and more and more faculty who have never been “political” before are stepping up to join us.
During a recent faculty town hall following the Trustees meeting, PL’ers and friends received support for calls to unify with workers in other departments under attack, including a mail clerk who was recently laid off. This semester we are also organizing with our students who reported to faculty that ECC Enrollment Services has been utterly unresponsive to them due to the cuts. We are currently planning campus demonstrations with them, and using CHALLENGE to connect these struggles with the racist attacks on workers in Newark, and that it’s these same bosses driving our entire class to more fascism and imperialist wars.
Liberalism, identity politics main danger
Both ECC and Newark are led by Black misleaders—Ras Baraka, a liberal Democrat, was the target of PLP demonstration this summer. Workers are told to trust that these bosses somehow “identify” with Black workers’ struggles because of their race and/or gender—yet they are forcing the most brutal cuts! Communist leadership of worker fight-back is more necessary than ever in the face of liberal fascist and gutter fascist attacks on us. As more workers see through their lies—the bosses won’t stand a chance!