‘Market Reality’ Fascism Hits Axle Strikers Jobs, Wages Cut in Half

DETROIT, June 1 — The recent sellout contract signed between American Axle and the UAW is a perfect example of how capitalism works and where its priorities lie: destroying the lives of thousands of workers and turning U.S. industry into a low-wage haven. The immigration raids spreading throughout the Midwest and Southwest are no accident. They’re aimed at terrorizing ALL industrial workers, immigrants, undocumented or citizens, into accepting even lower wages. A worker who falls for any kind of racism is betraying his/her own class interests.

Axle workers are the latest victims of this fascist attack. The Axle bosses say the new contract “addresses market reality.” (NY Times, 5/29/08, and all following quotes) After their 87-day strike, this is how that “reality” hits the workers:

• Within a year, 2,000 of 3,650 union jobs will be eliminated.
• “Wages and benefits would be cut at least in half.”
• “Most new work will be going outside the United States.”
And this is how “reality” meets the company’s bottom line:
• “It expected to save about $300 million a year under its new contract.”
• “American Axle…lined up $1.4 billion in new…business for the next five years and…85 percent of it would be sourced abroad.” (“Operations in Mexico and overseas helped the company earn $37 million in 2007.”)
• Wages in Axle’s new plant in Guanajato, Mexico will be barely $1.50 AN HOUR.

What about the union? The bosses say the UAW “jointly addressed” this market reality “in this new set of agreements.” Yes, it “addressed” more than half the workers onto the street and cut the wages and benefits of the remainder more than half. To say the company has the union leadership in its hip pocket is putting it mildly.

This swindle follows the pattern set by the Big Three automakers and the union. GM just announced that one-fourth of its workers, 19,000 (adding to the 34,410 who left in 2006), are taking the company-offered buyout. Of these 19,000, JPMorgan auto analyst Himanushu Patel “predicted GM won’t replace 15,000…and will hire 4,000 [at half the pay] for total annual savings of $2.1 billion.” (Associated Press, 5/31)
Forty years ago, UAW President Walter Reuther was acclaimed for signing a contract with a “guaranteed annual wage.” Hundreds of thousands of laid-off U.S. autoworkers can now testify that the only “guarantee” under capitalism is job- and wage-cuts for workers and maximum profits for the bosses. And the racism of the bosses and UAW hacks has hit black autoworkers even harder, devastating cities like Detroit and Flint.

Since 1999, Michigan has lost 143,000 auto jobs — 45 percent of the total lost nationwide.

No matter what gains  workers make through bitter struggle, when capitalism’s market asserts itself — through global competition, the drive for maximum profits, economic crisis and the needs of imperialist wars — the workers wind up at the bottom of the heap. After all, the bosses control the government and this state power is used to enforce the laws of the capitalist market. That’s why PLP says this system can’t be reformed. “Market reality” won’t permit it.

The only lasting victory that can be won from the Axle workers’ three-month battle is for the workers who bought and read CHALLENGE and came to PLP’s May Day events to join the Party in building a movement that aims to eliminate this system and its profit-driven markets so workers can hold state power and use it on behalf of the working class. Our goal is to establish a communist society in which workers come first and there is no “second” — profits, bosses and their labor lieutenants will be buried six feet under.

Axle Strikers Battle 50% Pay-Cut, Slash GM Production

DETROIT, MI March 11 – The strike by 3,600 UAW workers at five American Axle Manufacturing (AAM) plants is into its third week. This is the latest aftershock in the restructuring of the U.S. auto industry, which has seen starting wages cut in half at GM, Ford and Chrysler at the same time that they have eliminated over 80,000 jobs. This is the result of the sharpening competition between the world’s auto billionaires for markets, resources and cheap labor. The U.S. market is under siege by Asian and European auto bosses. U.S. bosses, with the UAW in their pocket, are slashing wages and benefits which took workers 70 years to win.

Actually, it’s more like two strikes. The workers are striking against the bosses’ demands to cut wages in half, cut health care, and end pensions. The UAW leadership is striking over how much it will cost AAM in buyouts, “buy-downs” (lump-sum payments in return for permanent pay cuts) and other schemes, to get what they want.

“How are we supposed to live like this? Is gas going to be cut in half, or groceries, or our house and car notes? And the company’s making profits. They are attacking us to ‘stay competitive.’” That’s how two black strikers with 15 years at AAM saw it.

The mostly black workforce at the Detroit plant is already struggling to survive in a city ravaged by racism. With soaring unemployment and the highest foreclosure rate in the country, more mouths than ever depend on each and every paycheck. Cutting them in half is devastating.

Meanwhile at Solidarity House, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said, “Our members cannot be expected to make the extreme sacrifices American Axle is asking for with nothing in return.”

AAM wants to cut wages in half, increase co-pays for prescription drugs, eliminate vision coverage and freeze pension benefits, replacing them with a 401(k) plan. This would lower overall compensation from $65 an hour to $27, costing AAM workers $200 million a year. It would cut wages to $11.50-$14.50 an hour, matching what the UAW negotiated at Delphi, GM, Ford and Chrysler.

AAM also wants to close some union factories and move the work to non-union plants in the U.S. paying $10.00/hour, and a plant in Mexico paying 70 cents/hour.

As of today, the strike has forced GM to shut or cut production at 29 plants, involving over 37,000 workers. This has had a ripple effect closing many supplier plants. Unfortunately, the effects of this have been blunted because GM has a 90-day backlog of unsold cars and sales are even slower at this time of year.

Nevertheless, this shows the potential power we have in our hands. A small number of determined workers can shut down a significant part of the industry with ripple effects that go far beyond. If these workers were led by a revolutionary vision of class war, with their eyes on the prize of abolishing wage slavery with communist revolution, this could be the “spark that starts a prairie fire,” and the stakes could quickly rise.

But without that revolutionary vision, this strike will be just one more speed bump on the road to fascism, racist terror, poverty and war. PLP is introducing and re-introducing CHALLENGE to some new and old friends on the picket line. We will try to win them to march with us on May Day. This strike is not going to have a happy ending. The good guys are not going to win. The deck is stacked. But by building a base for PLP, we will have a chance to turn a bad thing into its opposite.

Boxxxx

Capitalism’s Twin Crises Flatten Wages, Jobs

The net U.S. job loss for February was 63,000, the largest falloff since the last recession. (NY Times, 3/7/08) Fifty-two thousand manufacturing jobs and 39,000 construction jobs were wiped out, offsetting small gains in other sectors.
Bush and many bourgeois economists still maintain “there’s no recession.” Workers know better — polls show more than half say the recession has already begun.
According to Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, the labor market has been “clearly infected by the contagion” from capitalism’s twin mortgage and financial crises. Worker

Racist Super-Exploitation Behind Air Force War Tanker Deal

Recently the Pentagon gave the $40 billion Air Force tanker contract to the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS)/Northrop Grumman partnership over American rival Boeing. EADS the parent company of Airbus will provide sections of their A330 aircraft to be assembled in a new plant to be built in Mobile, Al. This award gives the consortium an inside track on follow-up contracts worth over $100 billion. This surprise decision is intended to slash aerospace workers’ salaries; thereby cutting the costs of a vast array of new weapons the Pentagon needs to confront emerging imperialist competitors.

The new Northrop Grumman factory in Mobile will be the first non-union, low-wage major aerospace assembly plant in the U.S. It will employ upwards of 2,000 workers with a network of U.S. suppliers to reach 20,000. Eventually, it will assemble commercial A330 airplanes, which will drive down the wages and cut jobs of French and British Airbus workers. Wages in Alabama are about half those in Boeing’s Washington State plants where the 767 is assembled (see plp.org for chart). Meanwhile, “Northrop will subcontract tanker work to 40 Los Angeles plants representing 7,500 workers” (LA Times, 3/8), at the lowest salaries yet–$8-$10/hour. This sets the stage for a two-tier contract at Boeing this summer. Such is the bitter fruit of the long history of racism. (see below)

This Mobile plant advances a long-held Pentagon goal. The generals have blamed high aerospace wages for the huge costs of new weapons systems for some time. Eight years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board proposed that “competitive outsourcing could be the answer” to the bosses’ military funding problems (Aerospace Daily, 2/3/2000). With the costs of two wars and emerging imperialists banging at the door, the Pentagon had to up the ante. This contract goes beyond “competitive outsourcing” (re: low-wage, non-union labor) of parts production to low-wage assembly plants.

In this regard, Pentagon officials are in alliance with foreign policy experts from the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). They admit “if the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the U.S., China will have the advantage. Their answer is “a revived Western system.” (Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2008) They couldn’t be too happy Airbus set up a Chinese A330 assembly line. They want to more closely tie Europe’s economy to the U.S. Where countries in Europe will finally line up as the imperialist contradictions sharpen is anybody’s guess.

Class War Answer to Bosses’ Flag-waving

From the new assembly plant in Mobile, to the hundreds of thousands of mostly Latin workers slaving away in Southern Californian aerospace subcontractors, the Pentagon and aerospace bosses are using racist super-exploitation to rebuild U.S. imperialism’s industrial might. As in auto, it will be used to drive down wages and benefits in the traditional union plants. The Boeing union’s happy talk about how we can get a “good contract” without striking in September flies in the face of this reality.

Major sections of the 767-based Boeing tanker are also made overseas. The fuselage comes from Japan, the tail from Italy and other pieces from Britain. This hasn’t stopped the union from mounting a nationalist campaign. IAM International president Buffenbarger appeared on racist Lou Dobbs –– followed closely by IAM-endorsed Washington Senator Murray –– to wave the flag. Clinton and Obama soon joined the jingoistic frenzy.

So the choice becomes clear. Wave the flag and ally with the same Pentagon and aerospace bosses that are slashing our wages and benefits or build an anti-racist alliance with super-exploited subcontractor workers –– and now assembly workers. As one Boeing Machinist said discussing the above points, “If they want a war, we’ll give them a class war!”

Pro-War AFL-CIA Steel Hacks Serve Racist Bosses

CHICAGO, IL, March 5 — Recently the United Steelworkers union (USWA) sponsored a “free dinner” at the Museum of Science and Industry here. Their flyer pushed “fair trade” for U.S. companies; obviously the union “leaders” had more on tap than chicken wings and potato salad.

USWA President Leo Gerard and some of the biggest steelmakers have formed the “Alliance for American Manufacturing” (AAM), supposedly to “keep American jobs in America.” But the event was an all-out China-bashing affair. Amid questionable statistics, were reactionary comments such as, “When [U.S. companies] go under, you’re not going to see the name of the Chinese factory on your kids’ Little League uniform.”

Even more menacing was, “These technologies support our military, particularly our soldiers fighting overseas…We simply cannot risk being held hostage to the interests of other countries, especially when they may run counter to our own.” Current and former steelworkers were bused in to hear this pro-war, anti-China propaganda. Many such events were held nation-wide.

The AAM website (AmericanManufacturing.org) sounds like a CIA-front — full of anti-China rhetoric with a few words thrown in about health care and pensions to keep it “union.” The Executive Director is Scott Paul, a former AFL-CIO lobbyist who degrees in Foreign Service, International Politics and Security Studies from Penn State and Georgetown. Deputy Director Horace Cooper is a former Deputy Director of the CIA-run “Voice of America.” Several top leaders sit on Congress’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which reports annually on the “national security implications of…trade…between the U.S. and China.”

Afterwards, a steelworker commented, “Why do these guys think anyone would stop doing business with China, when they have the cheapest labor and prices? That’s what the bosses are always looking for.” He’s right. Capitalists are forever seeking maximum profits. But globally there’s a fierce rivalry among imperialists fighting each other for profits. Chinese capitalists are growing stronger while U.S. capitalists are starting to lose their grip. Ultimately, imperialism leads to war.

As humble servants for the racist bosses, Gerard and the rest of the union hacks are trying to win workers to see China as “the enemy,” much as they did with Japan in the ’70s and ’80s. Bringing in busloads of workers to hear tales about U.S. imperialism’s “good old days,” and contrasting that with stories about the “evil Chinese” and their unsafe pet food and toys, only serves to build a racist base for war against China. As the U.S. economy weakens and factories close, the drums are beating louder, especially from the major industrial unions in auto, steel and aerospace which handle war production.
We must counter these pro-war AFL-CIA hacks by building a mass base for PLP and communist revolution. This means winning more CHALLENGE readers and sellers among industrial workers, confronting the pro-war union leaders and building for May Day. This will help bring these workers into the Party.

Industrial Workers Find Their Party: PLP

“When I was a child growing up in Mexico a question occurred to me: Why do some people have more than they need while others have nothing. I always felt this was very unjust; and since my parents had no answer I spent most of my youth with this question in my mind. So when I first read CHALLENGE and met the Party I understood that I was not the only crazy person that wondered about these things.” This is how an industrial worker described his first impression of CHALLENGE at a recent dinner for industrial workers. He was then asked if he considered himself a member of the Progressive Labor Party and immediately replied “Yes, yes!”

In all, two industrial workers joined the Party at the dinner, showing us, as one comrade put it, that workers know that the racism, imperialist war and capitalism are hell for us, but what is missing is the solution: communist ideas and our Party.

Communist ideas were front and center: a comrade opened the dinner with a talk about the importance of CHALLENGE in building for revolution and in the need to have confidence in workers’ openness to communism. He called on everyone to renew their commitment to getting CHALLENGE to as many workers as possible through our networks of family, friends, and co-workers. These networks will form the basis for battles in the streets, factories, barracks, and eventually the taking of state power by the working class.

After dinner a comrade suggested we play a game called three questions. Each person answered three questions and then chose the next person to answer, and so on until everyone had a turn. The questions were: how were they introduced to the Party/Challenge, what their first impressions were, and how their impressions have changed. Workers gave suggestions on how to improve CHALLENGE, how we might utilize and distribute the paper under fascist conditions, and asked for advice on how to distribute it to more workers. We struggled with each other to commit to translating and writing more. Through this discussion, which ran late into the night, we all got to know each other a little better and realized what another comrade summed up at the end: “it seems we all came to be here tonight through our friendships with other workers. That is how the Party has grown and will continue to grow. Our task then is to build more friendships and turn all our friendships and relationships into vehicles for building our CHALLENGE networks and the Party.”

It was a great evening overall. We consolidated our growing industrial base, raised close to $200, and sold all our tickets for the upcoming May Day Dinner. Best of all the Progressive Labor Party now has two more industrial workers fighting for communism.

FORD STRIKE IN RUSSIA ENDS

The three-week strike at the Ford factory in Vsevolozhsk, located right outside St. Petersburg, ended on Dec. 14. Ford workers are among the lowest-paid factory workers in Europe, making between 16,000 and 25,000 rubles ($600-1,000) a month. This is comparable to auto factory wages paid in Latin America.

Ford used office workers to maintain one production shift, and toward the end of the strike managed to start a second. Nevertheless, the strike crippled production and exhausted the union’s strike fund. The police harassed the picketers and strike leaders were threatened with arrest.

Ford workers voted to go back to work after the bosses agreed to a wage increase. The union and the company agreed to settle all unresolved issues by Feb. 1. This was the longest strike in the post-Soviet era, the first under the new Labor Code and the first where strikers won a general amnesty against reprisals.

The workers failed to win their demands of a 30 percent wage increase, higher pensions and reducing the work day. But a strike leader, reflecting the fighting mood of the workers said, “I think [Ford] should agree to concessions. They would hardly want to see a new strike in the spring.”

Lesson of Mack Ave. Wildcat: Scratch A Liberal, Find A Fascist

In December, Justin Ravitz died. He was the judge in 1974 who tried to jail the Chrysler workers who led the Mack Avenue Sit-Down strike. In August 1973, 350 workers seized the plant after a comrade was fired for his role in an anti-racist health and safety struggle, and reported to work the next day, refusing to leave.

Chrysler security was driven out of the plant, and the next day, the workers faced off against the Detroit police chanting, “FIGHT BACK! – FIGHT BACK!” It finally took 1,000 thugs organized by the UAW, just about everyone on the payroll and many KKK members, to violently retake the plant for the bosses. A white comrade and a black worker who gave crucial leadership to the action were arrested and each charged with two counts of felonious assault.

Ravitz had a reputation as an anti-racist lawyer and criminal court judge. He was involved in the legal dismantling of STRESS, a police undercover unit that murdered 20 people, 17 of them black, and fought to have more black people on juries. He called himself the only Marxist judge in the U.S., banned the American flag from his courtroom in protest of the Vietnam War, and refused to stand for the pledge when he was sworn in. But when it came to prosecuting PLP and communist-led workers, Ravitz was on the side of Chrysler, the UAW leadership and the Detroit police.

At the time, the bosses were still trying to retake control of the major cities, after the armed rebellions of the late 1960’s. Henry Ford and the New Detroit alliance of bosses, bankers and politicians were calling the shots in Detroit, pulling the strings of Coleman Young, a former Communist Party auto organizer and Detroit’s first black mayor, and a City Council of preachers and fake radicals.
PLP relied on auto workers and youth to wage a political defense around the city, exposing Ravitz and the bosses he served. Every notice posted inside the plant soliciting prosecution witnesses was torn down in minutes. Literature saturated numerous plants, Wayne State University, and unemployment and welfare offices, calling on workers and students to defend PLP, the Mack Sit-Down and exposing Ravitz, the UAW leaders, and the rest. Many supporters attended the trial, and many more gave money. The black worker who was arrested, a Vietnam vet, joined the Party on the very day he was called to testify.
Ultimately, the case was tossed out. There was a provision in the law at the time that the prosecution had to produce witnesses from a cross section of the population that witnessed the alleged crime. The Chrysler bosses, UAW and the Detroit police could not produce one Chrysler production worker to testify against the defendants. Not one. Case dismissed. Ravitz was beside himself, and scolded the cops and Chrysler bosses for failing to make their case.

A lot has happened since then, and today Detroit is a shell of what it was. Every anti-racist “reform” has given way to more and deeper racist oppression, from mass unemployment and poverty to crumbling schools and over-crowded jails. The infant mortality rate here is comparable to that of the poor countries in the Caribbean. This is the legacy of the reformers like Ravitz, who above all else were loyal to the profit system until the end. And we are better off for having fought them.

Mack Ave. Defender

Transportation Workers Can Be Key Force for Revolution

For several weeks last fall, French transit workers engaged in a series of strikes to defend their pensions and jobs. Other workers and students also struck. Meanwhile, the cops murdered two youths, sparking an anti-racist rebellion of African and Arab youth. It is inter-imperialist rivalry that is spawning increased racist attacks on our living standards worldwide, attacks which impel these strikes and rebellions.

French bosses are using president Sarkozy to attack industrial workers and youth, shredding the old social contract. The pro-capitalist union leaders refuse to counter these attacks. The bosses have their strategy for the future; what is ours?

The major imperialist powers are freely investing capital globally. New transportation and communications systems are creating rapid, mass migration of workers. The industrial working class is expanding, especially in India and China, where migration is mainly internal, from rural areas to the cities. In Europe and the U.S., migration is primarily from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In Latin America, workers migrate from poorer countries to those somewhat less poor — from Haiti to Dominican Republic, from Nicaragua and Honduras to El Salvador, from neighboring countries to Brazil and Argentina. The bosses use this mobility to force large pools of unemployed workers to compete for jobs. We can use this greater connection to build an international movement against capitalism.

Transportation systems that move people and commodities are becoming increasingly critical to capitalist profit. The transportation industries can be the Achilles heel of capitalism if we can organize breakthroughs here. This adds importance to the recent transport strikes in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, and the struggle in mass transit worldwide.

Our strategy is to unite the unemployed, immigrant and industrial workers in a movement for communist revolution, bringing workers to power and crushing the racist bosses. With communist leadership, transportation workers can take the lead.

French transit workers were able to draw students and other workers into the struggle, but lacked the leadership to unite with the unemployed and immigrant youth. Communist leadership is necessary to develop the anti-racist class consciousness required to advance at this time.

Among transit workers in NYC, Washington D.C., Chicago and the West Coast, we’re fighting racist attacks and cutbacks that target a mostly black work-force that serves an even larger black, Latino and immigrant population. We struggle to keep the fight against racism in the forefront of contract fights and union elections. We organized support for those left to die in New Orleans during Katrina, and more recently for the Jena 6. We have tried to pass union resolutions and collected money from co-workers.

Mainly, we’re fighting to spread CHALLENGE and PLP literature in our garages, bus barns and workplaces. We’re trying to develop personal and group discussions among co-workers, inviting them to study-action groups and PLP club meetings. Self-critically, we can do much better on this. The better we do, the better we can do. We must fight against getting buried in the daily demands of “union work.”

The transportation unions are shadows of their former selves. Strikes, like the 2005 NYC transit walkout, are seldom used and often broken. This year the rulers will spend over a billion of our dollars in a sucker’s bet on the 2008 presidential elections. Clinton, Obama and Edwards are the bosses’ shell game. Whoever we choose, we lose! No matter who’s elected president, more and deadlier imperialist wars will still rage, racist terror will be used to attack and divide us, and transportation workers will face more cutbacks and attacks. These are the laws of capitalism.

Transit workers, airline workers, railroad workers and truck drivers are the lifeline of modern industrial society. We can be a key force for communist revolution. The current inter-imperialist rivalry is leading to wars that will make Iraq look like a tea party. Slowly but surely, a new generation of black, Latino and women transportation workers will be building a mass international PLP to end the profit system once and for all.

2007: Rival Imperiaists Challenged U.S. –Workers Fought Back Worldwide

World domination by U.S. rulers is being challenged by the bosses of Russia, Iran and China. This sharpening rivalry is displayed in many ways. Pick up a mainstream U.S. newspaper any time and the message you most likely receive is that China is evil. News sources reported all year about the dangerous or poisonous products of China: from pet chow to toothpaste, from toys to sea food. The mouthpieces of the ruling class were determined to paint China as the devil, even though U.S.-owned companies produced the goods in question.

A communist analysis tells us that the bosses’ reason for this is not concern for our safety. They fear China’s growing ability to compete with the U.S. as an imperialist power, and they need to build up anti-China sentiment in workers in anticipation of future armed conflict.

The U.S. rivalry with China and other growing powers drove many of the events of the year, either directly or indirectly. The Save Darfur movement is being built among students and workers in order to oppose China’s interests in Africa. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is able to call George Bush names without much fear, partly because of his ties to imperialists in China, Russia and elsewhere. Over a million people have been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan waged by U.S. bosses to prevent rivals from gaining access to Mid-East oil.

The year 2007 saw the outbreak of rebellions by Arab and Muslim youth in France and mass strikes in France, South Africa, Peru, Italy and the Dominican Republic and a general strike in Greece. Workers in the United States have fought back with strikes in war plants at Northrop-Grumman in Pascagoula, Mississippi and at Navistar. Although those workers struck for economic reasons, striking war plants shows that they did not fall for the boss’s patriotism. PLP supported these strikers and helped expose the pro-boss union hacks still holding back our class. PLP’ers have also been organizing in the military and in subcontracting plants serving the war industry.

The lead-up to the next presidential election was big news as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton jockeyed for the Democratic Party nomination, each hoping to convince workers of their anti-war stance while assuring Big Oil that they would do a better job than Bush at securing control of the Middle East. Both Obama and Clinton have openly supported pre-emptive strikes against al Qaeda in Pakistan and the Iranian rulers respectively.

In mass events, PLP’ers — through chants, speeches and sales of CHALLENGE — have consistently exposed the liberal politicians as more dangerous as they try to win worker support with their lies while deepening the wars their “conservative” counterparts started.

Meanwhile, the current government used the “war on terror” to excuse increasingly fascist tactics in oppressing the workers. We saw a rise in the use of video cameras everywhere, from schools to buses. Police murdered black and Latin young people in every major city like Kiel Coppin in NYC, Francisco Mondragon in LA and Aaron Harrison in Chicago. Brutal crackdowns on immigrants, like the raid at a plant in New Bedford, Mass., separated families through deportation at the same time that immigration “reforms” like the DREAM Act promise citizenship to those who would join the military to fight in the Middle East. The bosses have worked hard this year to build fear and passivity in the workers, but they face a major contradiction: they are attacking the same people they need to be patriotic and fight their imperialist wars.

PL was there to lead militant, multi-racial protests against gutter racists like the Minutemen. We stood up against racist right-wingers like David Horowitz with his Islamo-Fascism week and against military and CIA recruiters on our campuses.

The local courts in Jena, LA, viciously punished young black students who fought back against racists who hung nooses at their school. Since then the media has reported that racist attacks are on the rise. As the NY Times reported (11/25), “…this country has seen a rash of as many as 50 to 60 noose incidents. The level of hate crimes in the U.S. is astoundingly high — more than 190,000 incidents per year.” Masses of black workers and students converged on Jena, LA, to protest the racist events there. PL members brought communist politics to these anti-racist events.

The rulers left workers to suffer in many ways while they struggled to keep control over their imperialist interests. The sub-prime mortgage crisis meant many workers, disproportionately black and Latino ones, lost homes and financial security. Bridges collapsed, miners died in cave-ins, homes and lives were lost to fires and floods, earthquakes from San Diego to Tabasco, Mexico, to Peru, the Caribbean and Bangladesh. The wreckage left in the wake of hurricane Katrina is in even worse shape after two years of the bosses’ “recovery effort.” The bosses have decided to demolish the public housing which were totally livable.

No matter how much the bosses abandon all responsibility for our safety, workers take care of each other. Students, teachers and workers are still traveling to the New Orleans area to lend support to their class brothers and sisters there. PLP contingents made the trip several times during the year, organizing our friends to help in schools, churches, community groups and workplaces.

High school students spoke to the Delegate Assembly of the New York teachers’ union for the first time, demanding that their voices be heard against imperialist war. On the West Coast, high school and college students spent their summer building unity with industrial workers.

Even as the bosses try to beat us down and win us to their nationalist ideas, the workers’ anger is still there. It’s the job of communists to give this anger at the system a revolutionary direction. We don’t want to rebel fruitlessly, but to build a movement that will be able to challenge and destroy capitalism. Then workers will be able to run the world according to our class interests. PLP is leading the way towards that communist future.

Red Transit Workers Mean‘Doomsday’ For the Bosses

CHICAGO, IL, December 27 –– For the third time in five months, transit workers and riders are facing a “Doomsday”(see CHALLENGE, 11/14/07) deadline. The bosses are threatening to slash thousands of jobs, dozens of bus routes and other service cutbacks if a new 5-year concession contract and state funding are not in place by January 20. These are especially racist cutbacks as they target a mostly black work force that serves an even larger black and Latin population.

Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) boss Huberman admits that mass transit creates $2 billion in value added wealth to the local economy by bringing millions of riders to work, shopping and events. But that $2 billion goes into the vaults of the biggest bosses and bankers. We create the wealth and they keep it. That is the secret to capitalism. The attacks on transit workers, the riding public and para-transit users are taking place as the economy slides into a recession and federal funding is cut to pay for the $12 billion-a-month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

City and state politicians are fighting over how to fund mass transit. Mayor Daley, the CTA and the ATU locals want the matter settled with a 5-year concession contract that creates a permanent two-tier system, a fare hike to $3.00 and service cuts. The CTA and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) sent the contract to arbitration to keep it from being voted on by transit workers. The contract will go into effect as soon as the state politicians vote on funding, but they are fighting to tie funding to casino gambling. As with the Cook County health care cuts a year ago that closed half of the public health clinics, closed wards and slashed hundreds of jobs, the city and state politicians are Democrats, black and white, elected with union money.

Daley and the CTA had the union leaders (ATU locals 308 – rail, and 241 – bus), call for a one-day “job action” on December 17. They wanted us to demand funding that would saddle us with the 5-year concession contract, force new hires to work 15 years longer before they can retire, and use our “raises” to fund the shaky pension plan.

Most transit workers smelled a rat and wanted no part of it. Others were frustrated and wanted to take some action, like the three-day strike of 500 para-transit drivers in November and the one-day strike of PACE drivers in early December.

Had this been the start of a real strike to stop fare hikes and service cuts, and win a decent contract, the media and the bosses would have threatened us with jail and fines. But we didn’t hear a thing from them because they were behind it. Some workers notified the ATU International leadership and they threatened to put the ATU locals into trusteeship. The action was called off.

During this period, a group of transit workers took matters into their own hands, distributing a flier in several garages exposing the Daley-CTA-ATU charade. They called on workers to unite with riders to fight racist cutbacks. They got a very good response. As this struggle unfolds we have an opportunity to introduce more workers and transit activists to CHALLENGE newspaper and PLP. Communist revolution will be “doomsday” for the racist rulers, as we build a society that serves the needs of the international working class, not the bankers and casino operators.