Letters: Transit, Sanitation Strike, and mroe

Making inroads towards communism with transit co-worker
I've had discussions in recent months with my Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) train operator classmates about the bosses' racist attacks against us on the job. For some time, I was not confident my efforts were bearing fruit. My colleagues oftentimes laughed me off as just some crazy anarchist guy rambling. It felt like a hopeless endeavor. Though I still kept trying.
But recently, a classmate texted me that he was seriously interested in becoming a union representative because, “[L]ike you said, stand up for the little guy,” referencing a conversation we'd had around late January.
During the aforementioned talk, I spoke with him about how the MTA blames its workers for fare hikes during contract negotiations, and how the racist media parrots the same lies. He was amazed to discover this information.
He asked me a question later that same day: “Would you rather be the corporation going up against the little guy? Or the little guy going up against the corporation?”
“I'd rather be in a collection of little guys (and gals) teaming up against that corporation and this system,” I responded.
Though we as communists know that bosses have today's unions under their boots and use them as campaign vehicles for their stooge politicians, this worker's shift shows his rising class-consciousness.
He sees how capitalism is devastating workers at the MTA, with over 120 of us dead from Covid-19, within a two-month time span, because Transit bosses didn't give a damn about safeguarding us from the virus.
He wants to bring change, but just needs nudging in a more communist direction. Before this discussion, he may not have seen much reason for us to organize. We plan on going to union meetings when they reopen again, and I'm looking into books about the TWU Local 100's communist roots for us to read together.
I'll continue talking with him whenever I can.
Eventually, I want to give him CHALLENGE as well. But for now, baby steps. I'm taking this as a lesson well learned. NEVER give up on workers, and never assume they'll never be able to get it.
You just might be surprised.
*****
CHALLENGE is essential news
Around the world, workers are finding creative ways to continue to fight back amid the Covid-19 Pandemic. Progressive Labor Party knows that an important way of fighting for the working class is spreading communist ideas with CHALLENGE newspaper. In order to do this many have been encouraging people to check out www.plp.org or sending their contacts the newspaper in the mail.
Another approach used recently in NYC, the center of the pandemic, was to build a portable CHALLENGE stand and place it near a line of folks getting food as well as a protest against racist ICE incarceration. It was then possible to offer it to people “hands-free“ and many eagerly took the paper as they passed. Let’s keep creating new ways to resist and spread our important message.
*****
Sanitation workers on strike
I have been working in New Orleans testing folks for HIV and Covid-19 in a Federally Qualified Health Center. We serve workers like the sanitation workers who have been collecting trash without safety equipment. These front-line workers are subcontracted by People Ready and paid $10.25 an hour with no benefits or health insurance. They work long hard hours starting at 4 AM sometimes until 6 PM. As summer heats up in New Orleans their job gets even harder. Between the heat, the increase in people doing yard work—disposing of tree branches and such in the trash—there is even more to do. They are not provided with masks or gloves and work closely with others. On May 5 some “hoppers” (those who jump on and off the truck collecting trash) went on strike with these demands:

• PPE for all workers each day starting NOW
• Fix broken trucks that leak toxic hydraulic fluid on workers every day
• Provide hourly pay of $15/hour
• Provide weekly hazard pay of $150/week

The first day on strike a boss told them they were fired and some returned to work the next day. A week later they received a letter saying they weren’t fired, and they are hoping that will motivate others to join them. The company (Metro Services Group) has started bringing in prisoners on work release to scab during the strike.  Those on work release were threatened with being sent back to jail if they did not comply.  These workers are paid about half of what the sanitation workers were making – definitely forced slave labor. As of May 21, the bosses were still not meeting with them. The workers are trying to form a union—the City Waste Union— and have gained support, including solidarity with striking baristas and a large rally at City Hall on May 18.
The worker’s signs say I AM A MAN, a reprise of the slogan of the famous Memphis sanitation workers strike that brought Martin Luther King Jr to the city where he was assassinated.  I have been talking with the strikers and put support signs in my apartment windows in the gentrifying area of Bywater, New Orleans.
I will be bringing revolutionary ideas and CHALLENGE to the picket line. This fightback has inspired other workers to donate nearly $60,000 to support the strikers through a Go Fund Me page: https://tinyurl.com/y7duxffg. Workers of the world unite!
*****
Communism: news bosses too scared to print
The New York Times, mouthpiece of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, proclaims itself as reporters of “All the news that’s fit to print.” But that “All” doesn’t seem to include the truth about communists.
The editorial in its April 29 issue is headlined, “Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s.” What “way”? In alluding to current strikes by Amazon workers and others protesting the rulers’ ignoring the unsafe effects of the coronavirus, it recalls “The consequential strike wave of 1934…a year of unrest in workplaces across the country,” when workers could “look to President Franklin Roosevelt as an ally.”
It fails to mention that this “unrest” was a product of massive sit-down strikes led by communists in the auto plants and among basic industries like electrical and steel. Six of the seven members of the strike committee that organized the 1936-37 44-day Flint sit-down strike that smashed the open shop and established the auto union at General Motors were communists.
That strike sparked scores of others across the country, battling the National Guard and U.S. Army troops. It was part of a red-led movement that championed the eight-hour day. Communists organized 800,000 workers into the National Unemployment Councils which forced Roosevelt to quell the workers’ protests and establish the Unemployment Insurance and Social Security systems and the 40-hour work-week.  Somehow the Times’ editorial writer didn’t feel that this news about these communist-led movements in the 1930s was “fit to print.”
Just below that editorial was an op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman in which he labeled the coronavirus a “war,” asserting that “wars are fought and won by humans.” So who were the humans that won the Second World War? That happened, says Friedman, because “We” — meaning the U.S. — “could out-mobilize the Nazis and Japanese to win World War II.” (!)
Somehow he “forgot” that the working-class in the communist-led Soviet Union was squaring off against 80 percent of Hitler’s armies on the 2,000-mile-long Eastern Front, from the Arctic to the Crimea, smashing them at Stalingrad, which was universally viewed as the turning point of WWII. It was their heroism that greatly reduced the number of Nazi divisions that the U.S. and Britain had to face in the West, enabling them to open up the Second Front in France in 1944. This, after the Soviets had fought alone for three years.
Perhaps Friedman never read what the U.S. General Douglas MacArthur told the Associated Press on February 23, 1942: “The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army.” Their heroic “resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back into its own land” is “the greatest military achievement of all time.”
Now THAT is “news that’s fit to print.”