Pakistan May Day Women and Farm Workers Unite vs. Bosses

SINDH, PAKISTAN, May 1 — More than 1,000 workers marched here today, demanding an end to the anti-labor contract system, to recognize home-based women workers as workers under labor laws, and to implement the labor laws and safeguards for agricultural workers. No law can protect workers from capitalist exploitation. PLP asserted that we need to build a communist movement to defeat imperialism and overthrow capitalism with workers’ power.

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Unite Against Racist Murders

Brooklyn, May 21—Today marked the 22nd monthly anniversary of Kyam Livingston’s death while held in a Brooklyn holding cell and denied medical attention. Led by her mother, neighbors, friends and PL’ers, demonstrations against the racist murder of Kyam at the hands of her NYPD jailers have been held every month since.
In this struggle, as well as in the campaigns for justice for Shantel Davis, Kiki Gray and too many more, our message has been consistent. We have called for working-class unity — for men and women, Black, Latin and white — to join this fight against racist police terror. We have brought this message into unions, churches, schools and other organizations, securing support for the struggle and bringing out members of those organizations to participate in the demonstrations and other activities. Our message that we all have a stake and obligation to fight back has been well received.

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Today’s Modest Gains Will Lead to Revolution

Indiana — A group of students got together and organized an anti-police terror rally on campus. The rally was organized by three student organizations, Students for Social Change, Black Student Union, and the Latin Cultural Club, where PL has a solid base.
The aim of the rally was to show solidarity with Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, Justus Howell in Zion, Illinois, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. PL’ers and friends gave speeches detailing the injustices of capitalism and how it needs racism and police terror to sustain itself. Connections with the struggle in Ayotzinapa and Palestine were made as well.

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Politicians Can’t Fix Racist Gentrification

NEW YORK CITY — A group of PL’ers recently went with a coalition of community groups to call on New York State legislators to save a “rent stabilization” law at risk of being gutted by the local bosses in favor of “mixed”-income neighborhoods. The current law limits rent increases for workers on short-term leases (one and two years) to those determined by a Rent Stabilization Board, with a cap on how much landlords may increase rent.
Landlords and others who support throwing poorer workers out to attract wealthier tenants insist that “mixed”-income neighborhoods are necessary to bring in services. These filth use racist code words, like making Black and Latin-majority neighborhoods “cleaner,” or “safer,” or “reducing crime.” They support changing the laws to better suit their profit agenda. Liberal rulers would like to put power into the hands of the Warren Buffets who can “take care of poor people” while pretending that the reality of this racist capitalist dictatorship over the working class doesn’t exist.

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Students, Profs Fight Back Against Racist College Cuts

BOSTON — Chants rang out across the Roxbury Community College (RCC) campus “Hands off RCC, this is our community,” and “No more top down management, no more lies, we want a college where students thrive.”
It was the day after faculty and staff voted “no confidence” in the new administration, and 25 faculty, staff, and students rallied in front of the administration building.
The strong statement was the latest step in the battle by students and teachers to keep alive an idea that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the struggle to win higher education for Black students who had been excluded by inferior schools and poverty. Now the rulers’ agenda for community colleges is to “vocationalize” them to serve area businesses’ need for workers. Just like K–12 education reform, this bosses’ reform is a response to an intensifying capitalist crisis.

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Workers’ Lives Matter

Indiana — Progressive Labor Party’s political work here has become immersed in the Black Lives Matter Movement. We have begun to merge our campus and community bases in Indiana to focus collectively on organizing in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) struggle. The political line in the BLM movement is very nationalist at times and reformist in nature, but it is filled with many workers who want to fight against injustice. Moreover, it is our job to win these workers. If Black workers are a key revolutionary force, then the Party must organize in these struggles and provide revolutionary leadership to them.

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Hospital Workers Need Unity with Patients

BROOKLYN — Medical care for working people, and the jobs of the workers who provide it are under attack in Brooklyn, as elsewhere. The good news is that workers are fighting back against layoffs, cutbacks and hospital closings.
At Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, workers are now suffering layoffs in every department, even as the state spends tens of millions on an outside consultant, PITT Management, hired to orchestrate the layoffs. Despite the construction of two big new buildings, the administration claims there’s no money!

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Women Workers Strike at Detention Center

DILLEY, TEXAS, May 21 — On May 8, a federal judge in Texas refused to protect hunger-striking immigrant mothers from retaliation by jail guards at Karnes County Residential Center. Strike leaders had been placed in isolation, fired from jail jobs and accused of insurrection.
The 78 women on hunger strike are leading the fight for freedom by thousands of immigrant women and children who have crossed into the U.S. since last summer. Obama’s sexist and racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers claim that the women pose a significant “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all were held initially without bail.

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Borders Kill

What an image of the misery of the world’s working class under the rule of imperialism: the unseaworthy boat abandoned or sinking, with thousands of migrating workers left to starve or drown, and hundreds of thousands lined up to follow them.
The boat pictured above was in the Mediterranean Sea, where African and Middle Eastern workers seek in Europe work and refuge from war and famine.  It could also be in the Andaman Sea, where workers flee Myanmar and Bangladesh for work in Malaysia or Indonesia. And earlier, it could have been in the Caribbean Sea, where starving workers sailed in rickety boats from Haiti to find work in Florida.

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PL History: Mack Ave. Plant Takeover

This article continues our account of PLP’s 50-year history. The Party’s concentration among industrial workers, a basic principle in building a communist movement, has helped PLP grow to our current presence in 27 countries on five continents.
In 1970, more than 400,000 workers struck General Motors (then the biggest employer in the U.S.) for 67 days to win a big raise and the 30-and-out retirement pension plan.
Three years later, with watershed contract negotiations looming between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler), thousands of young, conscious, militant Black workers were an emerging force. The auto bosses had hired about 10,000 Black workers as a direct result of the 1967 Black-led rebellions in Detroit and Newark against racist police brutality and for jobs. Many were Vietnam veterans who had rebelled in 1967 and again in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the PLP-led Workers Action Movement (WAM) were gaining strength and credibility by challenging the racism of the UAW leadership and the auto bosses.

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