Students & Workers: Organize, Organize, Organize!

This fall has started off with a bang at our Bronx colleges as we started classes facing closed cafeterias on two of our campuses, canceled classes, crumbling infrastructure, broken elevators, and a myriad of other issues.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are involved in many fightbacks on our campuses, including demanding fair wages for adjunct professors, supporting the struggle against the privatization of healthcare for retirees, and building solidarity with migrant workers and our working-class neighbors. We are involved in organizing fightbacks that bring students and faculty, staff together.

An attack on one is an attack on all!
“A victory for anyone of us is a victory for all of us.” An adjunct professor, who teaches at three different campuses, made this comment at a forum we organized last week, sponsored by Rank and File Action (RAFA) and the Bronx City University New York (CUNY) Action Committee. He made a number of points including that the intensification of capitalism was harming the ability of our working-class neighborhoods to secure decent housing, food, and medical care. Three retired municipal workers who have helped to lead the fightback against the privatization of medical care ( see CHALLENGE, 10/20/22) spoke eloquently about how racist Mayor Adams’ proposed change to retiree healthcare would lead to death of older workers. They explained how union leaders colluded with Adams to save the city almost $1 billion on the backs of these workers.

The purpose of the forum was really to educate ourselves about the struggle retirees have been waging, and to send the message that in fact this is the tip of the iceberg. If the city can do this to retired workers, what will stop them from trying to give healthcare on the cheap to those who are currently working?. The forum was attended by students, professors, union members, and the greater school community. The main takeaway was clear—be ready to be in this struggle for the working class for your whole life!

We must be in it to win it!
PLP members are active in our local union chapter as well as with students. We have a literature table where CHALLENGE is distributed and students stop by to talk. Most importantly, we are winning students to get active with us in various campaigns to meet with us, both in mass organizations and PLP study groups. We have seen how students are key to the struggle and that they are the ones who bear the brunt of CUNY’s racist austerity policies. Not surprisingly, they have played a key role in our struggles to get a working cafeteria open, to protest the lack of heat, and to stop early cancellation of classes.

We have also been involved with other union members in “observing”contract negotiation sessions. Along with RAFA members, we have forced union leadership to open the negotiating process to the members. While the point has been made that union members (and students) should be active participants, not observers,involvement in this process has given us the chance to talk with other union members about why, ultimately, nothing short of a strike could win us better working conditions and why capitalism will never provide us with the education our class needs. While “being at the table” with the CUNY administration is infuriating and eye opening, it gives us the chance to engage with others and make the point that the union’s strategy of trying to shame CUNY into offering us a better contract is a dead-end. CUNY’s racist bosses have no shame!  

Build the Progressive Labor Party
We have a lot of work to do as we continue to face the onslaught of racist austerity at CUNY, the lack of equity for part-time educators, and the reality that CUNY bosses plan to  continue to deny proper funding to students, staff, and faculty. As we face the war in the Middle East, we must step up our organizing with teach-ins and actions on the campus. We are already starting to have discussions about how Dominican and Haitian workers have been divided and the parallels to the Middle East situation.

We have a vibrant PLP Study Group, led by college students which meets regularly and analyzes and discusses both the historical foundations of our movement, along with looking at current events. We analyze the struggles we are involved in, look at how we can sharpen our understanding of the world and determine the best way to bring communist ideas into the reform movement. Our group is growing, to involve both college students and graduate students, and our Party’s ideas are so needed in these very dangerous times. We will continue to be in the reform campaigns, but always keep our eye on the ball that although this is the world we inherited, this capitalist nightmare is not the world we want to leave for generations to come!