France: Workers Fight GM Attacks

STRASBOURG, FRANCE, July 7 — Exploiting the give-backs agreed to by the unions last year has spurred GM to further attack the workers at its plant here. This has sparked fierce resistance by the workers. The company claims union secretary and shop steward Roland Robert’s deafness makes him unable to perform work and wants to transfer him to a job over 800 yards away from the factory. But the independent occupational physician assigned to the plant says many jobs exist inside the plant which he could hold down.

In less than two days, 503 fellow workers signed a petition protesting GM’s attack. Yesterday evening, over 100 union reps attended a support meeting. The four trade unions at the plant jointly condemned “management’s maneuvers to isolate…Roland Robert from the shops.”

The Strasbourg GM workers are asking workers everywhere to send support messages to: CGT General Motors, 81 rue de la Rochelle, 67100 Strasbourg France.

GM’s aim is clear: to isolate a union leader, silence worker grievances and weaken the unions at a time when the company continues to envisage closing the plant. More broadly, GM is attacking union rights won through generations of struggle, but that’s the way capitalism works — the bosses, through their control of production and the state, eventually wipe out reforms won by workers’ past battles.

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Church Meet Backs Strikers, Hits Anti-Muslim Racism, Afghan War

CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 26 — Among the 4,000 people attending a nationwide Unitarian Universalist convention here, there was sharp debate over issues that directly affect the working class: support for an upcoming supermarket strike, scapegoating of Muslims and withdrawal from Afghanistan.

One resolution called for support for 62,000 Southern California supermarket workers, who will probably go on strike. This would be the biggest labor action in the U.S. since the last Southern California supermarket strike, in 2003 — the biggest fight-back against the notion of “shared sacrifice.” A few objections arose: that boycotts might hurt unionized workers not on strike or that not shopping in certain areas would be impossible. These arguments were countered by one speaker, saying that this detracted from viewing the action as class struggle. The vast majority of delegates voted to support the strike in a variety of ways.

One issue that caused debate was whether representative Peter King’s hearings attacking the Muslim community were related to pressure for continued war in the Middle East. Most attendees agreed racist, hate-inspired King’s assault must be stopped. However, many weren’t prepared to support the idea that the “war on terror” is in reality one of control over resources. With that clause removed, the resolution passed. But all delegates present had been exposed to contradictions in Obama’s promises for withdrawal. The issue of CHALLENGE with an editorial on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline as well as an article about demonstrating at King’s office was sold to 99 delegates.

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NYS Unions Suck Up to Governor; Workers’ Power Can Sweep Them Out

NEW YORK — The lesson of Wisconsin state workers was that instead of accepting whatever the state government gives us, we should organize mass struggle. For that, they received overwhelming workers’ support.  Here, it’s a different story.

The CSEA (Civil Service Employees Association) union sold out NY government workers in a projected agreement with the state that attacks the living standards of 66,000 workers in the operational services unit. The Governor of NY, Andrew Cuomo, congratulated the union leadership, in a communication sent in June that reads: “The union has worked very hard to get an agreement that benefits its membership in these difficult times.”

“This is sheer hypocrisy,” was the comment from one NYS worker, who asked, “how does this benefit the workers if we are not getting a raise for two years? How is this beneficial when we’d only get a 2% raise in 2015 and 2016? They don’t see the impact of the high cost of living, the increases in rents, transportation, and gas? To make matters worse they are taking more out of our pay for health insurance — giving our money to the “poor” corporations that are already sucking our blood; how is that?”

Who Benefits From Workers’ Sacrifice?

During the third week of June several state workers were fired. One of them had a salary of $32,000 a year, but in a few days another person making twice as much, $65,000 a year, replaced him, to do exactly the same job. That’s only one example of the way state bureaucracy works.

The majority of the jobs lost, though, were in the lower-wage levels, and have not been replaced, making twice as much work for those still holding a job.  The job and wage cuts are both racist and sexist, as the workers affected are black, Latino and women.

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‘Don’t Buy Scab Food!’ California PL Mobilizes to Back Store Workers

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, July 27 — In preparation for a probable strike of the 62,000 Southern California grocery workers, approximately 300 mostly black, Latino and women grocery workers and supporters, rallied and marched this week. The two paths open to workers were on display: On the one hand, the NAACP and the workers’ union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) push strategies of compromise and concession, proven to lead to wage-cuts and attacks on pensions. PLP, on the other hand, was there with the message that this and other strikes are training grounds, where workers learn that united, we can smash capitalism and its racist exploitation.

Due to capitalist competition, Ralph’s, Albertson’s, Von’s and other chains must continually strive to maximize their profits. The result is a race to the bottom for workers as their wages and benefits are attacked. Now, after suffering through UCFW-approved wage and pension give-backs, the workers are being asked to pick up an additional $7,000 a year in health care costs! For many of these workers this cut would be a third of their annual income. Meanwhile these three stores raked in $5 billion in profits last year!

In this period of economic crisis, expanding imperialist wars and racist unemployment a potential strike of over 60,000 workers is an opportunity for our Party to join the class-struggle, mobilize our friends on the job, campus and in our mass organizations to expose the inherent exploitation of capitalism and the bankrupt tactics of the sellout unions and build the revolutionary communist PLP.

Leading up to the march, about 30 members of a local church gathered at a nearby store where they demonstrated and then marched inside, handing out letters of support to the workers. This was after Party members pushed for a resolution  at a national convention of the Universalist Church (see page 5) to support the strike nationally, pledging to hold demonstrations and walk the picket lines. A contingent of PLP members and friends from the church joined the rally and march wearing stickers “Don’t Buy Scab Food,” which was a hit for many workers.

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Workers, Students Unite vs. U. of Maryland’s Racist, Sexist Abuse

COLLEGE PARK, MD July 15 — University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) workers and students are fighting serious abuses against campus workers in facilities, grounds and housekeeping services. Workers describe working there as being on a plantation.

Managers harass and demean workers, using racist and ethnic slurs against black, white and Latino workers. They sexually harass and assault many of the Latina housekeepers. The managers treat workers unequally, increase their workloads, pass them over for promotions, deny them professional development opportunities and write them up when they are sick. When workers file complaints, they get extra work or are moved to a different zone.

The Black Faculty and Student Association (BFSA) along with AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) 1072 compiled workers’  experiences into a 56-page report and met with the university president in May.  More than that, BFSA organized workers, students, alumni and community residents to rally. After two months, the president’s office only responded: “Thank you for your concern.  We are looking into it.” But the workers refused to give up.

On July 15th workers, students, and community residents attended the 4th forum to testify, offer support and organize. The power and energy were clear. Latino, black and white workers all spoke in solidarity with one another:

“You — my black, white and Latino brothers and sisters — are my family. The administration makes you invisible, but you keep this place running.

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Women Hospital Workers Lead Fight vs. Boss-Union Hack Gang-up

BROOKLYN, NY July 18 — “Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!” That’s how a rally of two hundred Brookdale Hospital workers ended after a night of picketing, marching and chanting in front of their hospital. Almost every worker carried a copy of CHALLENGE with the story of their struggle on the front page. Militant workers from Downstate, Methodist, Woodhull, Long Island College and other hospitals and unions came out in solidarity, greeting their Brookdale sisters and brothers with warm hugs, handshakes, and plenty of conversation.

One worker said, “The entire hospital would walk out and strike if the union said so, but they keep telling us to wait…” These racist cutbacks are taking place in every city, designed to make workers and patients pay for the trillion-dollar imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, and for the bailouts of the bosses and bankers.

Just before the rally, a vice-president from Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) played emcee to a collection of city and state politicians in a town hall meeting. Their aim was to numb the workers into staging a silent “candlelight vigil,” unsurprising, considering that SEIU’s idea of “struggle” is a bus trip to beg Governor Cuomo and other politicians at the state capitol.

These politicians are part of the same city and state government that orchestrated the closures of eight city hospitals in the past five years. They said the same “fighting” words before shutting down St. Vincent’s and North General hospitals. Parts of Brookdale, a 3,500-worker hospital, have already shut down, robbing the mostly black, Latino, Caribbean and women workers and patients of their jobs and health care.

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Comrade Milt Rosen, 1926-2011 Founding Chairperson of PLP, Great 20th Century Revolutionary

In the fall of 1961, Milt Rosen convened a small collective that would soon leave the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) to form the Progressive Labor Movement. Four years later, Comrade Milt became the founding chair of the Progressive Labor Party. He served our organization and the working class in that capacity until 1995.

On July 13, Milt died of Parkinson’s Disease at the age of 85. He is survived by family, friends, and thousands of comrades — and by a revolutionary communist party deeply rooted in the international working class.

Since PL’s birth half a century ago, many left organizations have withered and died. Others have decayed into the living death of electoral politics or a fake Marxism which allies with “progressive” sections of the ruling class. PL is the exception because it never stopped evolving. Milt grasped the essence of dialectical materialism, the philosophy of communism: that the objective world is ever-changing, and that the Party must continue to learn from its own experience and those of the courageous but flawed workers’ movements that preceded it. He was staunchly principled, but never rigid.

Sparked by Milt early on, PL exposed both counter-revolutionary revisionism and “revolutionary” nationalism as death traps of worker-boss unity. It indicted the state capitalists of the Soviet Union as far back as 1966, and then broke with the ones ruling the People’s Republic of China. Those failed revolutions led PL to advance beyond Marx’s two-stage theory that socialism was a first step toward communism; history had shown that socialism inevitably led back to the exploitation of capitalism. And unlike any other group on the landscape, the Party emphasized the importance of the fight against racism as a basic communist principle, not a mere tactic. It understood that all struggles are essentially anti-racist struggles. Most important, it saw that capitalism cannot survive without racism dividing groups of workers, and that racism injures and exploits the entire working class. 

PL stayed vital and relevant because Milt and other comrades refused to shrink from struggle or to compromise our communist politics to make expedient alliances. The Party stood apart from others parading as “left” groups; Milt called that separation “glorious.” He knew that our unity, first and last, must be with the working class.

Over decades of action and analysis, the Party was built by Milt and by people he directly influenced and developed. They steered PL to its early growth amid the opportunities of mass movements and the threats of government attacks. Then they kept us on course through the “dark night” of rising fascism. As Milt noted in “Jailbreak,” his down-to-earth booklet on dialectics, “We must be able to combine urgency with patience.”

The Progressive Labor Party is now growing on five continents. It continues to sharpen its practice and its political line to overthrow capitalism and build a communist future. That struggle endures today. It is PL’s living history, and Milt’s legacy to all of us.

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Draft on the Way: Obama’s War Budget Makes Workers Pay

The U.S. ruling class’s “debate” over raising the debt limit above $14 trillion and cutting the budget is all a cover to hide the goal of forcing the working class to foot the bill for U.S. imperialism’s global wars that are slaughtering workers internationally.

Wars for control of Mid-East oil and gas and for strategic footholds against China and Russia cost U.S. imperialists a fortune — $3.7 trillion so far in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, as battlefields widen to Libya, Yemen, Somalia and beyond, the current depression leaves U.S. rulers with inadequate ready cash. So Obama and the major capitalists he serves are pushing a budget plan that shoves even more war burden onto the backs of workers.

Obama’s proposal for 2012-2020 slashes $655 billion from the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits workers have earned. (White House Budget, published in 2010) This includes lowering Social Security benefits and gradually raising full retirement benefits from age 65 to past 66 and eventually to age 69. Consequently, millions more workers will die on the job before they can retire.

Meanwhile, the needs of struggling U.S. imperialism belie his promise to curb the military budget by 7%. In fact, the imperialists themselves demand a whopping 67% boost. (See CFR’s Sebastian Mallaby quote below.) The only significant “cost-cutting” move likely at the Pentagon, one now pushed by the highest brass, is restoring the draft. Most draftees, unlike career enlistees, get rock-bottom pay and no pension.

Lying Obama Promises Tea Partiers Pentagon Cuts; Bigger Bosses say ‘Forget about ‘em’

Obama’s phony Pentagon pruning aims solely at appeasing obstructionist, anti-tax Tea Party elements in Congress. The latter front for smaller domestically-minded U.S. capitalists who don’t directly benefit from the bigger bosses’ expensive and expanding war agenda. But the main U.S. imperialists, whose profits depend on war, and who bankrolled Obama into office and fill his cabinet, reveal the intentional hollowness of his rhetoric.

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NYC Summer Project Youth Learn, Spread and Are Inspired by Communist Ideas

NEW YORK CITY, July 16 — “Fight Back!” could be heard ringing through the streets as Progressive Labor Party marched in Harlem to arouse the working class. We had a flyer that denounced Obama as a racist puppet of the U.S. ruling class. Our militancy, multiracial unity, and revolutionary politics won many workers to pump their fists, clap their hands, and chant along with us. This final march of the Summer Project illustrated our success and power to win workers to PL’s communist ideas.

The NYC Project began with an orientation that included over 50 young people —  teachers, workers, soldiers, students, parents; women and men; black, Latino, Asian, and white — the backbone of our Party and its friends. We discussed why PLP was having the Project.

A group of largely undocumented workers spoke in Spanish about unemployment; a PL soldier outlined the role of imperialism. Racist health care was analyzed as well as PLP’s organizing among transit and hospital workers (see CHALLENGE 7/20). PL brought young people together from all over the U.S. — Chicago, LA, Baltimore, and beyond — to both recognize that we’re fighting the same enemy and that the working class is facing similar conditions everywhere.

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Racism In S.F. Transit, Driven By Capitalism; Muni Workers Fight Back

SAN FRANCISCO, July 16 — Once again, the San Francisco mass transit (Muni) drivers are leading Bay area workers in class war.  For a second time they rejected a give-back contract with a resounding two-to-one vote, 994 to 488.  These NO votes show the potential for Muni drivers to stick together and act in their class interest, a terrifying possibility for corporate San Francisco.

Drivers’ vote defied the combined forces of the city’s labor leaders, the Democratic political elite, and San Francisco’s downtown big business interests. Labor leaders publicly denounced the drivers. Meanwhile, local billionaires campaigned against city worker pensions (Fortune Magazine, 6/13).

Corporate money passed a City Charter amendment, Proposition G, which specifically attacked the drivers’ salary formula as the way to “fix Muni.” Muni management boasted that it would save $41 million from union concessions.  Corporate-controlled media promoted vicious, anti-working-class lies, many of them coded against black and immigrant drivers. All of these forces joined the standard fascist chorus: “We need shared sacrifice.”

Pushing the fraudulent ideology of all-class unity, the leadership of Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 250A had recommended the contract package as a “win-win.” Here is what the workers are slated to “win”: a pay freeze, big cuts in full-time jobs and transit service, reintroduction of part-time work, and the weakening of worker rights to allow speedy firing.

On June 13, an “independent” arbitrator used Proposition G to shove the rejected contract down the drivers’ throats. The arbitrator had the full backing from the union leadership, which worked to sabotage any real strike preparations.

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