Letters of February 8

Israel: I Won’t Let Mall Bosses Get Away with Wage Slavery
I am a contract worker in Israel who earns minimum wage of 24.88 shekels (6.48 US$) an hour, which is less than 1,300 US$ a month. This is not enough even for basic living expenses like rent and food despite hard work as a housekeeper at a shopping mall. The mall bosses prefer to hire manpower contractors, who receive a large sum per work-hour and pocket most of it, paying only a starvation wage to the workers.
For each dollar I earn, the contractor pockets another dollar, earned by my work, without him doing anything at all. In our mall, this is how they employ the housekeeping and security workers. The contractor gets rich at our expense, and the mall bosses gets “flexible employment”—that is, workers they can fire at a moment’s notice.
The contractor also skims our pay, sometimes refusing to pay us for our lunch breaks or for overtime.
I am a member of the Coalition for Direct Employment, a group of workers fighting back against contractors and their clients (such as the mall bosses). As part of my coalition activity, I underwent a leadership training program. Part of the program involved learning how to organize actual struggle.
Through the coalition, I organized a contract workers’ block at the Tel-Aviv Mayday march last year. This year, we are taking on the mall bosses. I prepared a video showing how contract work is exploitative and even economically expensive for the boss (a price the bosses are willing to pay for “flexible employment”). We sent it with a letter to the mall chain’s management with a letter demanding a transition to direct employment with rights and job security.
As expected, the bosses ignored our letter and video. We are now moving to the second stage—organizing picketing and leafleting at the malls to tell the public they are shopping at a place employing contract-slaves. The bosses will not get away with their blatant exploitation of housekeeping and security workers.
Winning this struggle will allow us, the contract workers, to breathe more easily and earn a living wage. However, even with direct employment, we will still remain wage slaves. Wage labor, in its most basic essence, means being exploited economically and being robbed of our basic human dignity. To change that, we will need to do far more than our current struggle—we will have to fight further towards revolution.

Fightback on Campus: March, Sit-In
On my usually conservative college campus in California, people had a rally of several hundreds on Inauguration day to protest the racist, sexist, nationalist Donald Trump. I was energized to see this multiracial crowd and some speeches that talked about class and profits as the source for our problems.
Other speeches were limited by divisive identity politics that urged white people to look inside themselves and reject “white supremacy.” The problem is not white people but our racist system that turns workers against each other. In fact, white workers were not the only ones to vote for Trump. More Latin workers voted for Trump than for Romney, the presidential candidate four years ago. Three times more Muslim workers voted for Trump than for Romney, too. Nobody is immune from racism. The real problem is not the working class but the capitalist system that feeds us racism instead of food when workers go hungry.
As we marched, people chanted fairly liberal chants like, “No justice, no peace!” and “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” When there was a break in the chants, I started chanting, “Racism means we got to fight back!” The crowd picked it up enthusiastically and soon, many people were chanting these chants louder than the liberal chants. I started sharing the bullhorn with one of the march leaders to lead more chants. It was so energizing and I was able to meet some cool people this way.
After the march, a multiracial group of students invited me to have a sit-in in front of the Wells Fargo Bank on campus. They are calling for my school to divest from Wells Fargo because it supports private prisons and the Dakota Access Pipeline. During the sit in, many students talked about capitalism as the source of our problems. We successfully challenged administration (one of whom had the nerve to tell us, “I’m a fighter from the 60s! I know how it is!” right after telling us that protesting is not the way to get what we want). We are excited to plan more direct actions, and I am excited to build better relationships with these students and fight back with them.

PL Studygroup Generates Debate, Fightback
As members of our PLP club participate in a mass organization, one of the many things we do is persistently build our PLP study group. Following is a report of the study group we had after the election of Donald Trump.
We have been having study groups for the past ten years throughout the time of our work in the mass organization, with lots of ups and downs and ongoing debate within the club. Twenty-three workers attended our last study group, most of whom were friends. The response was a bit greater than usual because our base wanted to discuss Trump, the Party’s analysis and fight back. We covered a range of topics: fear, imperialism and the inevitability of war, the power of the working class, religion, fascism and capitalism versus communism.
We spoke about Fidel Castro’s death, the history of Cuba and while acknowledging the advances in healthcare and education, we emphasized that the Party and the working class need to learn from the errors of the old movement. We must destroy the profit and wage system, money and the difference of so-called “value” of different kinds of work.
One comrade said we jumped around too much while others said it was good because everyone participated. In the club meeting that followed, we debated how and if to work with religious people, whether we are being “opportunist” or in fact are putting forward the Party’s ideas and confronting anti-communism.
A couple of new people at the study group said they’re in PLP, so our club will welcome them and begin the process of consolidating them to the Party.
At our next study group, we will talk about the history of building the international PLP in a couple of areas in Latin America.

Women’s March: Our Challenge Selling Experience
Two of us distributed Challenge at the Women’s March on NYC. We were short of papers from the current issue. I brought along 50 English and 10 Spanish from the current issue and 30 from the previous. We discussed the front-page headline “President Trump Will Carry On Obama’s Racist Legacy”  before we started distributing. I said the headline correctly described Obama’s racist policies. My friend did not disagree, but thought that people might misread the headline. I talked about Obama’s racist policies, including deportations and the targets of imperialist war. She said she would distribute the older issue.
We both got a good response from the marchers. But a few people did not take the current issue because of the headline. I decided to open up two other papers, one to the second page which said, “It’s not just Trump, it’s Capitalism” and another to the page that had an article about the women’s march, while still holding up the front page headline. By this time, my friend was also distributing the current issue.
As people walked by, I said in a loud voice that the Obama administration had dropped over 26,000 bombs last year alone, and had deported 2.4 million immigrants between 2009 and 2014. Not one person disagreed or said anything negative during the half hour or so that I kept it up. Quite a few enthusiastically agreed. My friend got into good conversations with several people. We also encountered a woman who told us her father used to work on CHALLENGE 30 years ago, and another friendly former comrade with a sign attacking racism and sexism.
Going into the sale, I thought anticipated a lukewarm response because of the headline. But I decided before the distribution that I had to be aggressive and creative in order to combat my doubts. In retrospect, however, I think we should have asked for donations from the marchers. I think we would have collected a good amount of money.
In conclusion, comrades and friends, be bold when we sell the paper, give the working class and others a chance to hear us out, and ask people for money for our common cause. We have a world to win!