Verizon Strikers Fighting for the Whole Working Class

NEWARK, NJ, August 13 — Forty five thousand Verizon “wireline” workers struck their bosses last Sunday.  Like the mass uprising of workers in Wisconsin, the decision by Verizon workers to go on strike is a breath of fresh air in the current climate of joblessness and economic crisis. With 25 million adults looking for full-time work, the decision to strike takes courage! We in the Progressive Labor Party salute this courage.

PLP members here have gone to the strike picket lines all this past week. We have brought fellow workers and students with us. We helped lead militant chants on the line of “Shut it down, shut it tight, the bosses can’t profit when the workers unite”; “The workers united will never be defeated” in English and Spanish, and “Make the bosses take the losses.” Many workers took CHALLENGE and a Party flyer analyzing the big picture. Workers clapped when we came back a second time with others. We had great political conversations with workers, and renewed at least one old friendship (see more next issue).

Along with many other bosses, Verizon chiefs are expanding the limits of recent attacks on the working class. Although Verizon posted $22 billion in profits over the past four years, the bosses are demanding $3,000 per year additional health care contributions per worker, the elimination of pensions for new hires, severe cuts on current pensions, givebacks on sick days, etc. As a further insult, Lowell McAdams, Verizon’s CEO, made $20,650 an hour in total compensation in 2007.

This may be a long strike. Like all U.S. capitalists, Verizon bosses are in a dogfight for the number one position against domestic and “foreign” competition. To maximize their profits, Verizon has been downsizing and firing “wireline” workers, while expanding the lower-paid, non-union wireless division. Because the vast majority of Verizon’s profits come from that division, they have viciously opposed union organizing of those workers. A strike in 2000 challenged these anti-worker policies, but the Communication Workers of America (CWA) leadership caved in on unionization demands. Since then, Verizon has vastly expanded their wireless workforce.

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Obama’s ‘Race to Top’ Puts Workers, Students At Bottom

WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 30 — At a rally and march to the White House today sponsored by Save Our Schools (SOS), some of the 3,000 angry and enthusiastic teachers, parents and education advocates vigorously took up the chant started by a PLP member: “Obama and Duncan, you can’t hide!  We charge you with Education genocide!” Duncan is Obama’s Secy. of Education.

SOS’s reform demands included: 1) Equitable funding of all public schools; 2) An end to high-stakes testing; 3) Local curriculum development; and 4) Teacher/community leadership on policy questions.

Participants were rightfully outraged by ongoing school “deform,” an effort by ruling-class billionaires like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg to replace public schools with charter schools, cut resources for education and maintain the most severe racial segregation since the 1960s. “Deform” would coerce millions of teachers to abandon serious education by threatening bad evaluations and loss of employment unless they “get with the program” and do little more than test preparation, all year, every year.

In just an hour’s time, 50 people took CHALLENGE with serious interest, clearly understanding — after a brief discussion — that it stands for communist politics and the fight against racism.  Some gave contributions.

One of the keynote speakers, Diane Ravitch, who served in the Bush administration — while now opposing No Child Left Behind (which she previously supported) — failed to challenge the central tenet of Obama’s “Race to the Top”: an effort by U.S. imperialism to maintain its lucrative and bloody empire, in part, by out-competing its rivals to train large numbers of top engineers, scientists and mathematicians. This international competition and rivalry is the basic cause of imperialist war and massive human devastation.

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Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Under Capitalism Workers Pay with Their Lives

Despite its recent absence from the news, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan has been moving from bad to worse. After more than two months of befuddling and dodging, the Japanese government finally  admitted the Fukushima plant suffered meltdowns in three of its reactors, releasing more than double its previous estimate of radiation since the March earthquake. (Moreover, government objection to independent testing around the site means these estimates are unconfirmed and probably understate the real amount — (London Telegraph, 6/10).

On June 4, robots entering Reactor 1 reported the highest levels of radiation since the crisis began: 40,000 tons of irradiated water remains in the plant’s lower levels that might or might not be sealed and an unknown amount has leaked into the ocean and surrounding area. (USA Today, 6/4) And questions remain regarding how much radiation has entered the nearby Tokyo water supply. (NY Times, 3/23) Now the Japanese government has admitted that melted fuel might have broken through the containment vessels in Reactors 1-3 which, if true, represents a significant escalation of the disaster. (Bloomberg News, 6/6)

Hundreds of workers in Japan have accepted virtual death sentences by entering the plant to try to contain the meltdown, and 270 retirees and older workers have volunteered to go to Fukushima to help with the containment. One stated, “I will be dead before the cancer gets me.” (Reuters, 6/6) These workers’ sacrifice represents the finest qualities of the working class.

The capitalist class has performed in its usual cowardly way, pushing workers into the plant while hiding safely in Tokyo trying to cover up the scope of the disaster. In a particularly crass move, the Tepco top brass (operators of Fukushima) has to cut workers’ wages 25% to pay for the disaster. (Bloomberg, 4/26) Futhermore, the government refused to expand the evacuation zone “to avoid compensation payments to still more evacuees.” (NYT, 8/9). Under capitalism, workers pay for disasters with both their wages and their lives.

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Competition: Built into Capitalism, Deadly for Workers

Capitalism arose gradually hundreds of years ago, mainly through competition among various trades and businesses. They grew into giants that continue to devour their smaller rivals. As corporations try to beat each other to market to sell their products, some inevitably outdo others, leaving the losers with products they can’t sell. But to maintain profits as much as possible, the smaller rivals cut their costs by laying off workers. Even those able to sell their products continually replace some workers with machinery and then speed up the rest.

Capitalists call this process “productivity” and claim that, despite the inevitable layoffs, it is good for both workers and capitalists. After all, they say, this represents progress.

So the underlying cause of unemployment is instability in profits caused by competition among capitalists, combined with their control over employment. Competition is built into the system. Capitalists cannot do away with it, even if they wanted to.

Competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. We’re taught competition is “natural in human society.” We’re even trained to enjoy competition through such things as sports and contests. We’re taught to focus on winners, rarely being reminded that for every winner there are losers, unless we’re among those losers. This process of competition produces losers, psychologically and often monetarily.

Competition inevitably harms some, and often most, whether participants or fans. It fosters individualistic concentration on one’s own welfare, whether real or imagined, and works to destroy class solidarity. Therefore, competition is not good for workers and certainly isn’t “natural.”

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PLP Anti-Racist Summer Projects Haiti: Picket Lines, Health Clinic, Freedom School

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, July 18 — Health workers, teachers, and students from the U.S. joined with our counterparts in a show of international solidarity in the class struggle. The first week of the Summer Project included organizing a health clinic and a freedom school. By relying on friends and comrades we were able to see 150 patients from two tent camps.

More than one million are forced to live in tents because the January 2010 earthquake either destroyed their homes or made them structurally unsound. The people in camps have been waiting on the government for help while trying to survive in these “temporary” facilities for the last year and a half.

The goals of the health clinic included trying to provide clinical health services and building awareness of public health issues like cholera, asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes. We provided information and had discussions on how many of these diseases are related to social class, and ones’ ability to access clean water, enough food, and medical care. Many complained of gastrointestinal ailments that may have been due to a lack of food; also vaginal infections which may have been attributed to frequent douching, which changes the pH of the vagina.

In the clinic’s waiting area, people said that they were disgusted with the government’s inaction, and the UN troops which occupy Haiti. We were told that the troops spend most of the time on the beaches, and raping women. We used this opportunity to have political discussions on the struggle against our common enemy, the capitalist ruling class.

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Students, Teachers Blast ‘Education Genocide’

CHICAGO, July 18 — “Brizard, you can’t hide, education cuts cause genocide!” rang through the streets of downtown Chicago on July 6. (Brizard is Chicago’s new schools CEO.) Students and teachers marched against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) bosses and the banks that steal millions from the education system.

The march was the closing event of an all-day National Conference to Fight Back for Public Education, organized by various “progressive” caucuses and union leaders.

PLP Exposes Fascist Assault on Public Schools

PL’ers participated on different levels. They advanced the Party’s politics, charging that the assault on public education is part of the bosses’ plan to step up fascist attacks and prepare our class for larger imperialist wars.

Many conference participants called for an “end to corporate greed” and to have the bosses pay “their fair share.” But workers have no “fair share” when it comes to their exploitation by the bosses who grab as much of the value produced by the working class as they can.

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The Bosses’ Profits Have No Ceiling

The recent drama over the federal debt limit, with politicians in gridlock amid scare stories that the U.S. government might default on its bills, marks a significant move toward fascism by an embattled capitalist ruling class.

A default was averted when Democrats and Republicans agreed to at least $2.1 trillion spending cut over the next decade to counter a hike in the debt “ceiling,” the legal cap set by Congress on government borrowing. But the rulers’ internal crisis remains. The debt ceiling battle reveals their two essential needs in the current period:

To wring extreme profits from the working class with cuts in critical social services in a period of perpetual and massive racist unemployment.

To discipline their own ranks to help fund imperialist wars abroad and repair a crumbling infrastructure at home.

These imperatives are the hallmarks of fascism, the phase of capitalism that forces the ruling class to discard its mask of liberal democracy. President Obama recently took the lead on both fronts with his “Grand Bargain.” This ploy for “shared sacrifice” called for a devastating $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, alongside just $1 trillion in tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

The Republicans’ “no-new-taxes” (on the rich) pledge, pushed hardest by the elements coalescing around the Tea Party, gives Obama cover to maintain his liberal credentials even as he ruthlessly targets the most vulnerable workers: the old, the sick, the poor. And as the first black president, he is the bosses’ perfect tool to impose racist cutbacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers, the same people who were hardest hit by the latest economic crisis (see box on page 5).

Capitalists Divided

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PLP Summer Project Backs: Strikers with ‘Mops and Stethoscopes’ Fighting U.S./Haitian Bosses

PORT-AU-PRINCE, July 21 — “Haiti has a hardscrabble beauty,” an art historian said about its eroding slopes, its city streets turned into a huge informal market, its people always on the move in the daily scramble for food. However, Haiti, at the bottom rung of racist capitalism, has the beauty of workers struggling with their backs against the wall.

Workers at the University Hospital (HUEH) led off a strike with a demonstration at the Ministry of Health, for unpaid wages, decent health services for patients and working conditions for workers. Our PLP Summer Project medical clinic team spotted the demonstration and learned more from the local nurses working with us. The strikers are in the Syndicat des Travailleurs de Santé (STS — Health Workers’ Union), an industrial union whose logo combines a stethoscope with a mop.

Today we brought 50 students from our Project’s freedom school, and health workers and translators from our medical clinic to the sweltering STS union hall. We were given some of the few seats, fans were brought up, and they looked at us expectantly.

Charles, the head of their negotiating committee, explained the problems at HUEH, whose administrator lives in Canada and, with his cronies, gets paid in U.S. dollars. They have, in essence, destroyed the hospital.

Since the earthquake, labs, medicines, even food for the patients are missing or are allowed to deteriorate. Workers must find food for the patients themselves. The bosses allow patients to pile in without the means of caring for them. And workers being paid? Maybe.

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Training for Revolution Jewish and Arab Workers, Students Halt Racist Eviction

RAMLA, PALESTINE, July 26 — After more than a month of struggle, the eviction warrant placed at the al-Aju family compound was finally revoked. This victory was met with celebration by family members, neighbors and activists — both Jewish and Arab, workers and students — who supported the struggle. This small victory and others like it are a signal, not that capitalism can serve the needs of workers, but that a united working class has tremendous power and that we are moving toward exerting that power in communist revolution.

This struggle has deep roots in the recent history of Palestine. In the 1948 war, the al-Aju family — originally Arabs from the nearby town of Lydda (Lod) — was deported from their homes by the Israeli military. However, unlike many other Palestinian refugees, the family managed to remain inside the so-called Green Line and has settled on the land of another Arab family that had been driven off its land by Israeli bosses. As its original owners were no longer present, the Israeli state took over the land, and managed it through the national housing company Amidar.

For over sixty years, the al-Aju family lived on the land as tenants, paying rent in full to the landlords, Amidar. The family’s men are municipal maintenance workers, working hard for a low wage; some, especially of the younger generation, couldn’t find a job at all. As apartments are rarely marketed to Arabs in Israel, the entire family had to build their homes on the same plot of land, with over 70 people, including dozens of children, living in that cramped space with minimal infrastructure.

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‘Our Union’s in bed with the Bosses...’ Brookdale Rank-and-File Must Unite and Lead the Struggle

BROOKLYN, N.Y., July 29 — “So what they’re talking about doing here is building a whole working-class movement, beyond our union,” stated one Brookdale worker to another at a home visit by PLP members. Despite torrential rain, we met to discuss the ongoing struggle at Brookdale Hospital, which foreshadows the even bigger racist cuts coming from the Obama-Tea Party circus, such as the $655 billion federal cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Brookdale Hospital and its 3,500 workers, in the majority black and Latino working-class Brownsville neighborhood have been stripped bare by the racist bosses of MediSys. The misleadership of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU  — see previous CHALLENGE, 8/3).

Workers expressed their disappointment that the fight hasn’t escalated further, regardless of the militant sit-downs and picketing. “When we go outside now to march, we tell everybody in our department, ‘hey! You all should take your lunch break and come march with us!’“

After the previous months of struggle and confrontation between the workers and bosses, these workers didn’t hide their frustration with the declining militancy, and exasperation at how the hospital bosses are getting away scot-free. “We were telling the union for months what was going on here.” Another worker declared, “but they kept telling us to wait until the legal people did something.” The 1199 leaders are out for their own interests; it’s time to call upon new leadership, ourselves.

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