‘I like your ideas, how you live and give leadership…’ Jobs Conference Unites Workers, Exposes Capitalist Unemployment

NEW YORK CITY, September 25 — Today  90 workers — black, Latino and white, men and women, immigrants and citizens, young and old, employed and unemployed — came together in a conference to fight for jobs. The room was alive with workers’ solidarity and strength. Our goal is to build a mighty movement, worker by worker and action by action, to confront capitalist unemployment, exploitation, racism and war. “Our movement is based on workers’ power, not the politicians,” one speaker said. “We say, ‘Make the bosses and bankers pay.’”

Workers stood and applauded as a striker from the Central Park Boathouse described how they’d organized their strike and won a victory (see page 3). Conference participants will send a letter of congratulations and solidarity. We also pledged support to the Boathouse workers in their future confrontations with fascist immigration enforcement, job insecurity, layoffs and racist and sexist treatment. Any “victory” for workers can only be temporary until the working class takes state power.

A woman worker from Harlem talked about their fight-back against racist Columbia University, which is building a new satellite campus in West Harlem. After promising jobs to workers in the community, Columbia has hired only two. The conference pledged to turn up the heat on the university by marching in Harlem on October 10.

Then a woman stood and greeted the conference. We soon realized that she was the boss of a group of homecare workers in attendance — whom she owes thousands of dollars in back wages! With one voice, we chanted “Get out!” and “Paque lo que debe!” (pay what you owe). The boss took notice and is now offering part of what she owes. The fight will continue, with the conference pledging support for these workers and a demonstration when they need it. A leader from the Stella D’oro strike last year emphasized the need for workers’ determination and boldness as we fight back.

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March vs. Racist Columbia U. Job Scam

NEW YORK CITY, October 22 — Members of a church in Harlem, community residents and students again marched on the Columbia University’s fake jobs center. For an hour, we kept up militant chants against racist unemployment and Columbia’s collusion with bankers and war-makers. Like other prestigious universities, Columbia supports the research the ruling class relies on to arm its war machine, directs its crisis-ridden banking system and educates young workers in the destructive ideas of capitalism. Columbia’s expansion of its programs has also meant that they have taken over massive portions of the surrounding neighborhoods, leaving many workers without homes or jobs.

Next we marched to the gates of the university, where we held another spirited picket. Our plan was to proceed across the campus to the mansion of President Bollinger. A line of campus security tried to stop us, saying we couldn’t walk with our “dangerous” posters. Several militant marchers refused to give in, and finally they let us in. We loudly chanted our way through. We then heard speeches in front of the obscenely ornate Bollinger residence, pointing out how students and workers are suffering high unemployment and how the university has displaced thousands of local residents in its history and mistreated its employees.

Our movement has become focused on building from the ground up, rather than relying on politicians or media. We have tied our struggle to an analysis of the crisis of capitalism. At least 10 church members who had never been involved in protests before participated in some way. They either leafleted beforehand, demonstrated or cooked for the marchers for our picnic afterwards. However, our numbers are still much too small. Workers need to overcome their cynicism about fighting back. Students need to realize their salvation lies in uniting with workers, on campus and in the community. We will continue to fight and more are sure to join us.

The victory of the Central Park Boathouse strikers and the large anti-Wall Street actions are evidence of growing working-class anger against the system. Our task is to make sure that protestors have a clear understanding that all our problems stem from capitalism and cannot be solved unless we chuck it completely and build a communist world.J

One-day Actions, Reforms Won’t Cut It Teacher Strike Sweeps France

PARIS, September 27 — Today, over 350,000 teachers struck and 165,000 demonstrated across France to fight mass layoffs, overcrowded classes and potential increases in working hours. Today’s actions were notable because public and parochial school teachers were acting together for the first time. Historically, the two groups have been opposed. (Eighty percent of pupils attend public schools and 20% go to private schools, 95% of which are Catholic.)

The force driving this unity, at least temporarily, is the government policy of replacing only one of every two retiring teachers. Education Minister Luc Chatel confirmed a government cut of 14,000 teaching jobs next year, following the 80,000 jobs already axed since 2007.

Over half the 322,000 public primary school teachers and almost half the 394,000 public secondary school teachers struck. The walkout was “strong” in the Catholic schools in western France, the bastion of parochial education. Nearly one-third of the private school teachers struck, entirely closing down some schools, “an unheard-of event.”

Today, 165,000 teachers demonstrated, some 45,000 marching here in the capital. But Guillaume, a high school math teacher, declared, “I don’t have any illusions. This is a big demonstration, and that is good for morale, but the balance of forces isn’t in our favor yet.”

But the major weakness of the teachers’ movement is its aim, to patch up the school system while leaving capitalism untouched, continually building up what the profit system tears down. How much better to build a movement to destroy capitalism and create a system truly serving the working class!

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France: Bosses Flee Hostage Seizure; Workers Reject Layoff Bribe

HAM, FRANCE, September 21 — At 2:00 a.m. on September 17, the four Constellium executives held by angry metalworkers escaped from the plant. The workers are fighting mass layoffs and eventual closing of the facility (see CHALLENGE, 9/5).

 A high-ranking gendarme came to the factory gate and talked to the workers to divert their attention. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the plant, a team of gendarmes cut through the metal fencing and helped the bosses escape by squeezing through the hole in the fence and racing down the railroad tracks in the middle of the night.

The local union leader said the workers are “nauseated by management’s attitude.” He added that “There was no dialogue. We didn’t obtain any concrete improvement.”

On the evening of September 16, a representative of the central government attempted to obtain the liberation of the bosses in exchange for the promise of negotiations, to be held three days later at a hotel 20 miles away. The workers rejected the offer as a stalling maneuver.

“Now we know that we would never have seen them at that…meeting,” the union leader commented. Today, the workers voted against a company offer of a 15,000-euro bonus (US $21,000) for each laid-off worker.

The workers want a commitment to keep the factory open. The plant makes aluminum structures and windows. Constellium plans to lay off 127 of the 207 permanent workers. Forty temporary workers will also lose their jobs. The subcontractors that do work for the Ham plant are expected to lay off 170 of their workers.

The workers’ courageous and militant action to defend their jobs merits praise. But they need to set their sights higher. Instead of accepting the continued rule of their heartless bosses, they should organize for the long-term goal of communist revolution.J

Egypt: Dead-end Reform Goal Doomed Militant Fighters

In actions that inspired the world’s working class, millions of Egyptian workers and students filled the streets of Cairo and other major cities in January demanding the head of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator who ruled Egypt since 1981. Workers’ strikes in key industries, such as oil, textile, transport and on the Suez Canal were crucial in persuading the military to abandon Mubarak, forcing him out.

Sadly, nine months later the workers’ and students’ hopes have been dashed. The absence of communist ideas and leadership and the consequent reliance on the dead-end capitalist notion of reform as the key to ending workers’ oppression doomed the movement from the beginning. Consider:

• One of the most widespread demands was raising the minimum wage, which has remained at $6.30 A MONTH since 1984. In the last ten years, national output (GDP) per person has doubled from $250 a month to $500, but the increased income has all gone to those in the top 10%. The new military government has steadfastly refused to raise the minimum wage. Nor has it raised pensions: in its last year, the Mubarak government raised the minimum pension (what most retirees get) from $9 a month to $24.

• Another key demand was the right to organize independent unions, student groups and political associations. The military government did allow the formation of new political parties if focused only on the upcoming elections. But meanwhile, it has viciously repressed protests. Rather than abolishing the hated military tribunals and the fascist “emergency law” (in place since 1981), the military government has used them more than ever. About 12,000 civilian protestors have been brought before military tribunals, with over 99.9% given long prison sentences — ten times the pace under Mubarak. Workers protesting unsafe working conditions and low wages have been especially singled out for attack.

• The January protests demanded a government more accountable to the people. The great “accomplishment” of that Papyrus Revolution (as it was called) replaced an 82-year-old Air Force general (Mubarak) with a 78-year-old Army general (Mohamed Hussein Tantawi), the head of the new military government!  And these honchos have carefully designed election rules to ensure that the same old elite is re-elected to Parliament. Dissolution of the old ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), mattered little. In the old system the local bosses in each city and town would buy their election, often as “independents” who, after winning, simply rejoined the NDP. The new system will produce the same result; in fact, probably most of the old Parliament members will remain.

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Communist Ideas the Right Rx Hospital Workers Beat Back Racist Attacks

PHILADELPHIA, September 15 — “Racism? You’ll never stop it, never!” declared a retired hospital worker, echoing a pessimism many workers feel. But the promise of communist revolution is that the overthrow of capitalism removes the reasons racism exists. The lower wages paid to black, Latino, and immigrant workers generate billions in extra profits that the bosses can’t do without. Racism also allows the bosses to divide the working class. Communist revolution against the class- and profit-driven system of capitalism is the first step in building the world without racism that most of us want.

At a meeting between the nursing bosses and the nurses, a black nurse with long years of service at a large teaching hospital spoke up against laying off the nursing assistants. Shortly afterwards, she was fired. Hospital workers were shocked and outraged.

The fight against the firing of this veteran black nurse shows how we can’t back down from fighting racism and that the bosses will increasingly use fascist terror. As in other cities, the bosses at this hospital are increasing their attacks on patient care and the hospital workers. On at least one hospital floor, the bosses terminated all the nursing assistants.

PLP members have a long history at this hospital and immediately organized against the firing. We described the firing as racist and an example of fascist terror to scare the workers, especially nurses. We tied this racist firing to the recent police murder of the son of another black co-worker and described both as examples of fascism on and off the job.

Some workers, however, thought we shouldn’t mention that the nurse is black or that the firing is racist. This opinion was expressed by both black and white, mainly nurses. Their main concern was that mentioning that the nurse is black and bringing up racism might alienate the doctors who also wanted to fight the firing. Working-class union members, on the other hand, saw the firing as clearly racist and agreed with our response. And interestingly, the nurses who

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Hart-Rudman 9/11 Plan Fell Short U.S. Rulers Still Need Greater Fascism, More War

Obama’s Ground Zero remembrance left out two names tied intimately to the 9/11 atrocity and its deadlier aftermath: Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. Just two years before the attack on the World Trade Center, the two ex-senators had co-chaired a top-echelon ruling-class panel that envisioned terrorist attacks “galvanizing” the U.S. for imperialist war abroad and fascist measures at home. Launched by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (better known as the Hart-Rudman Commission) studied ways to ensure U.S. global dominance through the following 25 years.

Democrat Hart and Republican Rudman, along with other high-ranking politicians, generals and admirals, proposed a sweeping militarization of government and of society at large. At the time, the rulers’ media kept Hart-Rudman largely under wraps. CHALLENGE, however, repeatedly exposed its deadly schemes well before 9/11. Ten years on, Hart-Rudman’s shortcomings and successes for the bosses are worth assessing. They help us gauge our class enemies’ need and their ability to conduct mass slaughter.

In 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor turned mass U.S. opposition to “foreign wars” into mass support for U.S. entry into World War II. On September 11, 2001, terrorists struck New York and the Pentagon after the FBI and CIA apparently failed to connect the dots from existing intelligence. Ten years later, there is no shortage of theories to challenge the official narrative: Did U.S. rulers deliberately ignore warnings of the 9/11 strikes? Were they actively complicit in planning the attacks? We may never know the true story, but it’s clear that the bosses saw the usefulness of a 9/11-type incident to rally U.S. workers behind a drive for war and fascism:

[T]he United States should assume that it will be a target of terrorist attacks against its homeland....Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers....If the stakes rise in such a fashion, one thing is likely to become vividly clear: The American people will be ready to sacrifice blood and treasure, and come together to do so, if they believe that fundamental interests are imperiled (Hart-Rudman report, 1999).

The hijackers, who cloaked al Qaeda’s oil-profit motive in religion, represented only a few thousand sworn U.S. enemies. They hardly matched the 1941 menace of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, an Axis of millions that waged world war across Europe and Asia. Within the U.S., this global assault spurred huge voluntary enlistments and acceptance of a military draft, resulting in an armed force of 14 million in a U.S. population just one-third of today’s total. By comparison, the flurry of post-9/11 flag-waving accomplished relatively little: the fascist Patriot Act, plus a series of racist attacks against Arab and South Asian immigrants. U.S. rulers continue to rely on an economic draft for their war machine, with unemployment impelling youth to enlist for the lack of jobs.

Recalling the fleeting wave of 9/11 patriotism, the rulers’ New York Times mouthpiece echoed Hart-Rudman in lamenting, “People wanted to be enlarged, to be called on to do more for country and community than ordinary life usually requires....to be absorbed in some greater good....But America has not been enlarged in the years that have passed” (9/10/11). In sum, the attack failed to generate the popular response that Hart-Rudman had anticipated.

Anti-Government Bosses’ Tea Partiers Hinder Obama’s Fascist Effort….

Opposition to new or restored taxes, hardened by the New Depression, has dashed the Hart-Rudman vision of capitalists gladly parting with their “treasure.” This reflects the battle between two factions within the U.S. ruling class: the Rockefeller-led wing that maps long-range strategy to keep U.S. imperialism on top through wars for the oil interests it represents; and its current adversary, domestic capitalists like the Koch brothers, who organized and funded the Tea Party and are driving the Republican Party away from any bipartisan strategy.

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Pickets Expose Racist Columbia University’s Bogus Jobs

NEW YORK CITY, August 23 — Chanting “Jobs center is a phony, all their talk is baloney,” comrades and friends joined once again with community forces to picket Columbia University’s (CU) bogus Employment Information Center.  The struggle against Columbia’s racist takeover of the surrounding Harlem community sharpened both in militancy and political understanding with demands that the University immediately hire 2,000 Harlem residents to replace the jobs destroyed by expansion.

Other demands include not building the planned Level 3 biohazard lab right under 125th St. and maintaining affordable neighborhood housing. PLP’s base has grown enough to start new chants that expand the politics of this struggle: “ExxonMobil, Columbia U, took Iraq and Harlem too,” and “Racist Bollinger you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” (Bollinger is Columbia’s president.)

In conversations and at meetings since May Day, we have been struggling against liberal ideas within the community coalition that has fought CU for years.  After betrayals by the local politicians and the courts, many now see that building a movement from the bottom up is what is needed. Party members are also emphasizing that CU is run by a board composed of 75% ruling-class bankers whose wars for oil and gas are murdering thousands worldwide and lead to the racist cuts and unemployment here that hasten sickness and death for our sisters and brothers in Harlem.

We are planning to step up the attack on CU on September 24 by marching from the Employment Center, through the neighboring housing project, to the campus and to Bollinger’s mansion, which cost $23 million to renovate. We will end with a picnic in Morningside Park to commemorate the victory of students, workers and community residents against Columbia’s plan to build a gym there in 1968.

Making CHALLENGE sales a central part of expanding this struggle will help us win workers and students to the vital strategic goal of communist revolution.

The ‘Mystery’ Contract LA Transit Workers Shout Down Hacks, Reject Sellout

At 11:30 PM on Friday, September 9, I received a call from a fellow transit worker informing me that, after more than two years without a contract, United Transportation Union (UTU) drivers at LA Metro were to vote on a new contract Sunday at 1 P.M. None of the drivers had any idea if it was a “good” or “bad” contract. The UTU leadership told them absolutely nothing except, “Show up Sunday and vote!”

By Sunday morning we’d been able to rally a small crew of friends and comrades to meet at the hotel where the vote was to take place. We brought leaflets (calling for a NO vote on the mystery contract) and the latest copy of CHALLENGE. We met drivers in the multi-level parking lot and by the time they entered the meeting room every driver had a flier, a CHALLENGE, or both.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be turned away when I tried to enter the voting “Ballroom” (I’m not a driver) but my fears were foolish. As soon as I entered, I realized that the union leadership had a lot more to worry about than me. They were faced with nearly a thousand angry, shouting, hooting drivers demanding facts about the new contract, which the drivers all assumed was going to be a sell-out. It went on and on. Security couldn’t do much. Even though the drivers were physically threatened, they refused to sit down, to shut up, or even to vote for the new contract.

At a coffee shop afterward, two bus operators said the union General Committee never got control of their meeting. A few hours after we got home, a driver called to say it was thumbs down on the contract: 365 to 206.

This experience reminded me that it is always a good idea to be ready to act — even on very short notice. The worker who called was glad to see that we had shown up to oppose the contract vote. The connection of the bus drivers’ no vote, the recent Verizon workers’ walkout, and the possible Southern California supermarket strike made it easy to approach drivers, sell CHALLENGE and urge a NO vote on the contract. On a minor note, all of us agreed it was a good way to spend 9/11.

Now comes the hard part — following up on the contacts we collected and working to be a communist presence in the ongoing transit struggle in L.A.

Shut Plants, Block Roads, Battle Cops Protests, Strike Wave Sweep Pakistan, Hit Bosses’ Cuts

Hundreds of thousands of workers in Pakistan have been engaging in mass strikes and protests, taking to the streets, shutting down factories and offices, blocking roads and burning vehicles. Their anger is directed against a government riddled with corruption and against Pakistan’s ruling class, who, like capitalists worldwide, are trying to make the working class pay the price of its economic crisis, slashing wages, laying off workers and attacking living standards. The working class is fighting back, undeterred by the brutal retaliation of the police, arrests and even killing of leaders:

• Earlier this month, over 100,000 textile workers in Faisalabad, Pakistan’s third-largest city, shut down 20,000 power looms and took over the city. Men, women and youths armed with stones fought police equipped with rifles and guns; these workers comprise 38% of the country’s industrial workers and produce half its exports.

• Ten thousand workers at the Karachi Electric Supply Co. occupied its headquarters a few weeks ago, forcing the bosses to reinstate 4,500 fired workers.

• Striking Pakistan International Airlines workers brought air traffic to a standstill, sitting in at airports in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar, disabling ground service vehicles, blocking flights and stopping passengers from checking in. They were protesting layoffs and proposed selloffs of routes to Turkish Airlines.

• Railway workers organized a demonstration in Lahore against the proposed downsizing of 20,000 jobs, defying thugs employed by Pakistan’s governing People’s Party to intimidate them.

• Public sector workers in the Post Office, the Telecommunications Company, the Water and Power Development Authority, steel mills and the Federal Revenue Office are fighting privatization and firings.

• Ship breakers in Baluchistan and young hospital doctors from Baluchistan to Punjab are mobilizing for better pay and conditions.

Following the Lead of 50,000 Militant Textile Workers

These struggles follow the actions of 50,000 textile power loom operators who struck in 2008, shutting down factories for four days. Four leaders were arrested, framed under anti-terrorist laws and jailed. The judiciary, serving the rulers’ dictates, declares workers’ strikes illegal, rejects bail for arrested workers and ignores violations of labor laws, while failing to enforce minimum-wage laws and legal remedies for those losing jobs.

The workers — many who make $61 a month (less than the minimum wage) — have no pension rights, work in inhuman conditions and suffer grinding poverty. Thousands of other workers who marched in solidarity with them were fired on, with nine injured seriously. However, the strength of the protest forced the owners — among the richest people in Pakistan — to agree to the strikers’ demand to be paid previously negotiated wage increases.

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