SUPPORT BOEING STRIKERS!

Over 27,000 Boeing workers are on strike against one of the biggest and most profitable war contractors in the world. Boeing is flush with cash, having made more that $13 billion in profit in recent years. At the same time, union wages dropped an average of $6/hour between 2006 and 2008, thanks to a two-tier wage system agreed to in prior contracts. Union wages will continue to slide as nearly 50% of the highest paid workers become eligible to retire during the life of our next contract.

Boeing wants aerospace workers to suffer the same fate as our brothers and sisters in auto, steel and other industries. They want to cut wages, health care and pensions, and a free hand to send more work to low-wage non-union shops. The bosses, with the help of the auto and steel union leaders, were able to get away with these brutal attacks because they were losing money and markets. But Boeing is one fat cat, with billions in profits, backlogged orders and a steady stream of new Pentagon contracts.

Global capitalist competition (imperialism) is causing the attacks on industrial workers, particularly younger, newer black, Latin and immigrant workers. The rise of Russia and China as industrial and military powers gives new urgency for U.S. bosses to retool and cut costs. The racist super-exploitation of millions of non-union sub-contract workers in low-wage sweatshops from Alabama to southern California is changing the face of the aerospace industry.

As negotiations dragged on this past month, “Rolling Thunder” shook the plants, as workers banged their tools making a deafening sound, every hour on the hour. Boeing workers forced the IAM union leaders to call this strike. Now we must lead it as well.

The battle for the hearts and minds of Boeing workers is as sharp as the sound of Rolling Thunder. The pro-capitalist union leaders have nothing to offer but loyalty to a system bent on war, racism and terror, no matter who lives in the White House.

On the other hand, PLP has helped lead mass rebellions in Boeing plants, organizing mass marches and protest rallies as part of class struggle against the bosses and their imperialist plans for the aerospace industry. We have no illusions that militant activity alone can reverse the sharpening attacks on our class. Only communist revolution will do that. We built this factory with our labor, and the working class should control it!

The road to revolution can be paved in this strike. For this to happen, more Boeing workers, on strike in Seattle or in LA sweatshops, must be guided by revolutionary communist class-consciousness and a mass international PLP. The main measure of victory will be how well we do in moving in that direction.

WORKERS VOTE TO STRIKE FIGHT:

WARMAKER BOEING’S ATTACK ON ALL WORKERS

Puget Sound, WA,  August 30 —“Strike, Strike” reverberated down the Auburn plant aisles. Thousands or Boeing Workers marched outside negotiations near the airport chanting, “Out the Gate, in ’08.” Seven thousand emptied the Everett complex for three days running taunting the company to  “Paint the Lines,” a reference to the green lines security traditionally paints around the factories to mark where picketers shouldn’t cross. These marches followed a month of Rolling Thunder: workers banging their tools making a deafening sound like thunder rolling through the plants, every hour on the hour. Boeing workers have taken matters into their own hands, forcing the union mis-leadership to recommend a strike Sept. 4.

This militancy did not arise spontaneously. For years, PLP helped lead mass rebellions in Boeing plants building Rolling Thunder, organizing mass marches and protest rallies as part of class struggle against the bosses and their imperialist plans for the aerospace industry. The union misleaders have tried to appropriate the tactics, but it got away from them. As IAM District President Tom Wroblewski lamented,  “Once you get these guys up the mountain, it hard to get them back down again.”

Workers should harbor no illusions that this militant activity alone can reverse the sharpening attacks on our class. Millions must be guided by communist, class-conscious ideas, organized by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in order to truly change society.

Global capitalist competition causes the general trend to attack industrial workers, particularly younger, newer workers. The rising industrial and military prowess of Russia and China, the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist competitors, gives new urgency to the U.S. bosses’ need to retool and cut costs. In addition, the racist super-exploitation of subcontract workers, those working in a rapidly growing number of non-union, low-wage sweatshops, is changing the face of the aerospace industry.

Reject the “Kick Your Kids to the Kurb (KKK)” Contract! Strike!

Boeing is flush with cash at the moment, having made more that $13 billion in profit in recent years. The bosses, however, feel pressed to hold every penny as they look to the sharpening fight against their imperialist rivals. The union misleaders, meanwhile, are bickering over how much of this cash they can get to bribe older union workers to sell out the next generation.

Between 2006 and 2008, average Boeing wages have dropped $6/hour because of lower rates for new hires agreed to in prior contracts. This contract will lock in the trend of increasing exploitation, as nearly 50% of the Boeing workforce, those currently earning the highest wages, will retire in the next few years.

The tactics may differ, but in the end, aerospace workers will suffer the same fate as their class brothers and sisters in auto and other industries. More work will be subcontracted to the non-union shops; union workers will face lay-offs or lower pay in the current plants. We must not accept this contract. Workers must strike!

Workers Debate Dismal Future Under Capitalism

Progressive Labor Party called for a “United Aerospace Strike” in our well-received flyer at the airport demonstration. We included solidarity statements from Mississippi shipyard workers, Long Beach Boeing workers and L.A. subcontractor workers. Every statement warned of “losing higher-paid jobs to lower paid, non-union employees at an alarming rate.”

The battle for the hearts and minds of the Boeing workers is as sharp as the sound of Rolling Thunder. The pro-capitalist union leaders offer ideas that will not challenge the bosses’ system. They blame the bad contract offer and the loss of union jobs on “this blatant example of corporate greed.” That’s why they tried, and failed, to start the chant “Boeing’s offer is unfair, all we want is our fair share.”

Workers debated the unions’ ideas for hours on the shop floor, with many rejecting the misleaders’ analysis. We built this factory with our labor, and our class, the working class, should control it!

As the bosses fled Rolling Thunder, we organized meetings of CHALLENGE readers in the plants. Riffing on the debates initiated during the Party’s July Summer Project, we discussed how bad ideas undermined the Chinese Revolution. We learned how Chinese revisionists –– misleaders who revised revolutionary ideas to take power back from the working class –– defeated the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, and consolidated capitalism’s hold on China. They busted up the communal farms, sending the equivalent of the U.S. population into the new Chinese factories at dirt-cheap wages. The imperialist rivalry has never been the same.

Kick Capitalism To The Curb

We also discussed how capitalism reinforces racism, sexism and imperialism. We discussed how the dog-eat-dog capitalist economic base makes it impossible to mitigate, let alone eliminate, these divisions in the working class. “How can communism succeed when we are so divided against each other?” asked our friend.

We examined the different economic base in a communist system, based on the collective strength of the international working class and the slogan “from each according to their commitment, to each according to their need.”  We debated whether a movement guided by communist politics that smashed the ruling class and revolutionized the economic base could indeed change how workers interact with each other. The road to workers’ power is built on  fighting these evils of capitalism right now in this contract battle. But many agreed that the final defeat of racism, sexism and imperialism requires a communist revolution.

Everybody agreed this was a long, hard fight, made doubly difficult by the defeat of the old communist movement. One friend said, “A light bulb turned on” when PLP members explained how concessions to the wage system made by the old movement doomed it from the start.

In the end, the choice was made clear: we could kick our kids to the curb or kick capitalism to the curb. We left these discussions resolving to sell more CHALLENGES, distribute PLP basic documents Road to Revolution III and IV, organize two PLP study groups and build our revolutionary forces. As we go to print it looks like we’ll strike on Sept. 4. Either way, the future is ours if we build these revolutionary communist forces in our industry and throughout the working class.

Veteran PL Farmworker’s Inspiring Stories of Battles in the Fields

LOS ANGELES, CA, August 9 –– After another day of CHALLENGE sales, house visits, and study groups, L.A. Summer Project volunteers took a trip through history when one of the main PL organizers of the migrant worker struggles, Epifanio Camacho, hosted a “carne asada” (BBQ). With the smell of collectively-prepared barbeque in the background and under a large shade tree, PLP volunteers squeezed into Camacho’s yard, many unsure of what to expect.

Camacho began speaking of the political work in Delano of organizing workers, comparing it to birds spreading seeds. In Delano, often workers from Mexico would learn communist politics and then return home where the lessons and politics they learned could one day bear fruit. This is one way that communism spreads around the world. Camacho fielded questions from PL youth and former Delano Project participants alike, opening up discussions that are still echoing through the Summer Project

Camacho spoke about his experiences working with Cesar Chavez, the misleader of the United Farm Workers Union. When asked if he thought Chavez, who would regularly turn workers over to immigration officers and make deals with bosses behind the workers backs, should be given a holiday, he instantly said, “Hell no!” He told stories of how Chavez went on a hunger strike to stop violence against scabs (the bosses canonized him in the media).  Later Camacho told how he and the workers of his town organized a demonstration against the fascist police who were terrorizing and killing workers. The militant demonstration was held in the police station were the workers threatened to burn the station down if they did not stop the fascist attacks. This action chased out the cops –– almost 20 years ago –– and they never came back. His stories were inspirational to everyone.

Just like the work in Delano sent seeds of communist thought through Mexico, so will the L.A. and Seattle Summer Project participants spread the lessons we’re learning and the excitement we’re building through CHALLENGE sales, study groups, and collective living across the country when we return to our home cities.J
(Camacho’s memoirs are on PLP.org)

Aerospace Workers Need United Strike vs. Warmakers

WICHITA, KANSAS, Aug. 4 — Over 100 striking Machinists closed down the Hawker-Beechcraft plant here today with mass pickets. Earlier, 4,700 workers in IAM (International Association of Machinists) Local Lodge 733 (Wichita) and 500 in IAM Local Lodge 2328 (Salina, Ks.) voted 90% to reject the new contract and 89% to strike the same day — the first strike since 1984.

Everyone’s wondering how this relates to a possible strike early next month at Boeing because the issues are so similar. Even IAM International President Buffenbarger had to acknowledge the obvious: “It looks like workers are not going to take it anymore,” he admitted. The “rolling thunder” — the militant deafening banging every hour, on the hour — that has already started in the Boeing plants indicates he may have got it right.

Like Boeing, Hawker wants to separate new hires from veterans with cuts in earned time off, cuts in two job codes that will affect new hires and hidden costs in medical benefits for new hires. A veteran machinist Terri Holloway said: “If we don’t fight for the new people, they’re going to get the old people next.”

None of this should come as a surprise as Hawker was recently taken over — with the union’s blessing — by Onyx (in partnership with Wall Street Investment bankers Goldman Sacks). Onyx is the same outfit that grabbed Boeing’s Wichita plant and immediately cut wages.

To add insult to injury, Hawker leaked a secret plan to develop a final assembly plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. The threat (and fact) of moving more work to low-wage areas in the U.S. and Mexico has changed the face of aerospace. Narrow trade unionism has become a sick joke.

Aerospace is crucial to the bosses’ imperialist ambitions. As challenges to U.S. rulers’ dominance mount daily (witness Russia’s incursion into Georgia and China’s emergence during the Olympics), the bosses are determined to reindustrialize on our backs. War becomes the more likely option and we’re going to fund that war machine with our lives and livelihoods. In 2001, the Pentagon called for “competitive outsourcing” (Aerospace Daily, 2/3/2001). Now they want to build a “southern aerospace corridor” — taking advantage of low wages in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama caused by years of racist super-exploitation.

As expected the bosses’ servants in the union mis-leadership wave the American flag. We, on the other hand, wave the red flag of communist class-consciousness. Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite!

Angry Homecare Workers Must Sack Union Hacks, Bosses’ Politicians

NEW YORK, NY, Aug. 7th –– Eleven thousand members of Local 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Workers East attended a rally at Madison Square Garden to support 30,000 homecare worker members in their struggle for upgrading pay and against the growing threat to their medical benefits. Their contract expires December 31. As PL’ers distributed all the CHALLENGES newspapers we had to eager and angry workers, it was clear that the workers were ready to fight.

The reasons for their anger were clear. Many of the agencies that employ them are run for profit. They typically skim off half of their state- and city-funded budgets for “administrative expenses.” The average homecare worker, almost exclusively minority and immigrant women, gets about $8/hour while providing lifesaving services. (As CHALLENGE has pointed out before, these workers receive no extra pay for overtime hours and less than their hourly pay when they stay overnight.)

The system under which tens of thousands of the elderly and infirm are cared for in this city makes it clear why we must smash capitalism. The bosses’ system places little value on the lives of those who no longer produce profits for them and therefore spends as little as possible on their care.

Homecare workers have suffered racist exploitation from their bosses and less than full support from the SEIU 1199 leadership. The union leaders refuse to unify them and prepare for a massive strike. On the contrary, this rally was dominated by speech after speech from politicians like Governor Patterson who is planning a $1 billion cut in the state budget. Also featured were Senator Schumer and Congressman Weiner who are busy urging war on Iran. Each of these politicians promote cutting workers’ living standards to pay for U.S. imperialism’s economic and war needs. SEIU leaders are lulling healthcare workers into believing we have no power other than in our union’s political endorsements. In the face of capitalism’s growing economic crisis and war in the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian regions, this is deadly poison for the working class.

Progressive Labor Party and its paper, CHALLENGE, must organize the working class to make a communist revolution. How do we get there? By stepping up the struggle with bosses every day, not allying with them, by getting involved in the daily problems faced by our friends and co-workers, by reading and circulating CHALLENGE participating in discussion groups, and joining the PLP to make egalitarian communism the main issue of the day!

From California to Seattle: Volunteers Help Connect Boeing Workers

LOS ANGELES — “I have the paper,” said a Boeing worker as he drove from the parking lot, “but I just wanted to stop and thank you for being here.”

During shift change at this plant that builds military planes, students and teachers from the PLP Summer Project here distributed 120 copies of CHALLENGE and 500 leaflets, a reprint of the CHALLENGE article, “Bosses’ Imperialist Dogfight Sets Stage for Boeing Contract Fight.”

Men and women, younger and older, black, Latin, Asian and white workers took the literature. They were especially interested in the article since it was written by Boeing workers in Seattle.

Another worker exited his car to tell us that the bosses in his section had called a meeting earlier today “to get out misinformation about the contract fight.”  He thought they were trying to use SoCal Boeing workers as pawns to pressure Boeing workers “up north” to settle on the bosses’ terms.

One guy took a bunch of leaflets to distribute in the plant — “I’m on the inside!” he said.  Later he came out to say, “I’ve hooked you up!”

A Summer Project volunteer introduced CHALLENGE to another worker as “a communist paper” and he took it eagerly. This led to a long conversation about racism, exploitation and fighting back.  The volunteer then asked, “Do you have a friend who thinks like you do, who might also like a paper?” When the worker said he had, the volunteer asked, “How many friends like that do you have?”  The worker took five papers and gave her contact information to stay in touch with the Party.

Conversations were difficult because many workers were in cars and also because — as one volunteer noted — “these people looked more tired than anyone I’ve ever seen come out of work.” Almost nobody was hostile or even unfriendly. A student leafleting for the first time at such a plant, felt it was “good practice” but also said a discussion of the leaflet before-hand would have better prepared us for conversations.

This was a modest, very inspiring example of how PLP can unite workers around our newspaper and our Party.  Through the leaflet and the work of the Summer Project, SoCal Boeing workers now have a connection to Boeing workers in Seattle.

We’ll try to strengthen this connection by continuing to come to Boeing, following up our contacts, making more contacts and building ties with the anti-capitalist workers who are reading our literature.  We’ll try to win some to join PLP and build it “on the inside.”

Bosses’ Imperialist Dogfight Sets Stage for Boeing Contract Fight

The July 16 strike sanction vote means the Boeing contract battle is in full swing. For nearly a year, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) leadership has been pushing the slogan, “It’s Our Time, This Time.” They say that if workers in union plants stick together, they can negotiate a contract to increase our wages, benefits and job security. Workers on the shop floor are not so sure. As one machinist puts it: “What part of capitalism don’t they understand?!”

In this struggle, illusions won’t serve us. Currently, Chinese, Russian and European capitalists are economically challenging the U.S. bosses, undermining U.S. rulers’ political clout. War to maintain the empire is pushed to the forefront, with both presidential candidates offering plans for a “better” war. In this climate, the U.S. bosses are rebuilding their industrial military base on the backs of the working class, particularly those of us in basic industry. Racism and sexism lead the attack. Black and Latin workers — women and men — in the subcontractor plants were the first and most brutally attacked. (The subcontractors are non-union, low-wage plants to which outfits like Boeing farm out work formerly produced by higher-wage union plants — domestic outsourcing.)

The bosses use racist super-exploitation as a wedge to attack all industrial workers: 140,000 unionized senior autoworkers will be replaced by 77,000 new workers at half the wage. The UAW carefully isolated American Axle strikers for 83 days this spring, and then railroaded a contract through that cut 2,000 jobs and wages by a third to a half. The Nucor company is building the first integrated steel plant in the U.S. in four decades right outside Katrina-ravaged New Orleans to take advantage of some of the country’s lowest, non-union labor. No matter what eventually happens with the tanker contract, the bosses, with the Pentagon’s blessing, are determined to erect a “southern aerospace corridor” in non-union, low-wage Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. The system depends on this kind of racist exploitation to build profits.

The Boeing bosses have no illusions about the times — or their ruling-class needs. In late June, they eliminated defined pensions (ones with guaranteed specific benefits) for all non-union new hires, demanding the same of union workers when the old contract expires on September 3. They’re pushing healthcare cuts disguised as a “wellness-based healthcare system.” They’ve said our wages are “above the market rate” after they slashed the “market rate” through racist outsourcing — which they’re accelerating. In order to afford to attack the world’s workers, the bosses must attack us here at home — and Boeing bosses are doing their (very profitable) part!

Fight The Bosses’ Ideas  Within Our Ranks

Relying on deals with the company bosses — never wise — and believing their lie that “what’s good for the company is good for the workers” is increasingly delusional in these times. The bosses’ imperialist plans call for more war, nationalism, racism, sexism and attacks on our standard of living. The only viable answer is to smash the capitalist system with communist revolution — no easy, short-term task. We’ll never succeed without waging a long-term fight against the bosses’ ideas.

When union members struggled for our locals to participate in the immigrant rights May Day marches to fight anti-immigrant racism, they were building the class-consciousness we’ll need this fall. When workers raised money for the Jena 6 on the shop floor and fought the union misleadership to protest this racist outrage, we were laying the anti-racist groundwork for the class struggle ahead. When we exposed the Pentagon’s role in promoting aerospace wage-cuts, we took aim at the dead-end flag-waving of the union sellouts.

In this vein, PLP is sponsoring Summer Projects in the Seattle area and among L.A. aerospace subcontractors. Building anti-racist, international solidarity between union workers and non-union super-exploited subcontractor workers takes aim at the bosses’ divide-and-conquer strategy.

We face a tough battle, and may not win this round, but we can build our offense with strike preparations. We can struggle for the kind of class-consciousness and solidarity that teach us about workers’ power. We can build forces among those already in basic industry and young revolutionary workers just entering the factories in order to eventually destroy this bosses’ nightmare.

Support the Seattle and Los Angeles Summer Projects

The Progressive Labor Party is organizing Summer Projects in Seattle and Los Angeles to both learn from workers’ experiences and bring revolutionary ideas to workers, soldiers and students.  We urge you to join us in going to factories, military bases, visiting with workers, and studying the science of revolution — Dialectical Materialism — as well as hearing from the experience of revolutionary workers themselves.  Volunteers will learn first-hand from their class sisters and brothers and share experiences, which can lead to a lifetime of serving their class and fighting for a communist revolution. Please join us for a great revolutionary time! Make a donation and support a Summer Project volunteer.

Red Leadership Could Turn Lights Out on Con Ed’s Scabs

NEW YORK CITY, July 2 — Over 9,000 workers were set to strike the billion-dollar Con Ed electric company at midnight last night when a “tentative” agreement was reached in the early hours of this morning. Few details were released. The rank and file will be voting on it over the next month.

Con Ed was preparing a massive scab operation, ready to work non-union managers 24 hours a day on two 12-hour shifts, in automated control rooms, dispatch centers and on service trucks, but without routine maintenance.

The bosses had “offered” what amounted to a wage-cut: a one-half of 1% annual wage “increase” in a four-year contract, healthcare cuts, a switch to 401(k)-style pensions for new hires (which first reports said was scrapped) and a clause to make workers pay back workmen’s compensation benefits from their pensions. With inflation mounting at 4.2% a year (excluding food and gas costs!), a less-than-one-percent wage “increase” is a gigantic slash in real wages.

Meanwhile, the “neutral” government has taken the company’s side, with the State Public Service Commission saying, “Con Edison has a plan….We are confident…they are doing everything they should be doing” (NY Daily News, 7/1).

Yes, a “plan” all right — a massive strike-breaking scab operation to protect their tens of millions in profits reaped off the backs of the 9,000 workers and from charging exorbitant rates to millions of customers.

How to beat such a plan, in a company thriving on automation? If the union was worth anything it could have been doing the following:
• Calling on workers throughout the city’s labor movement to come out in support of Con Ed’s workers, and together with them surrounding the company’s buildings and barring anyone from entering or leaving;
• Better yet, preparing in advance to have thousands of Con Ed workers remain in the buildings in a mass sit-down strike to prevent any scab supervisors from performing union jobs;
• Mobilize New York’s working class to the strikers’ side, calling attention to Con Ed’s constant rate hikes that impoverish electricity consumers, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods where non-payment of exorbitant bills lead to service cut-offs.

Such a plan would inspire the entire working class with a militant, no-holds-barred strike that could deal with the company’s scab-operated automated equipment. No matter how automated, workers are still needed to operate it.

A sit-down strike could hold Con Ed’s billion-dollar automated plants hostage, just as the communist-led autoworkers did in their 1936 seizure of GM’s key plants to win their demands on threat of immobilizing the company’s machinery. In fact, the utility workers industrial union itself grew out of the militant CIO in the 1930s, largely led by communists, and is responsible for the wage and benefit levels these workers have today.

No doubt Con Ed would cry that the workers “don’t care about the public.” But it is the bosses who don’t care, raking in millions in profits while offering what amounts to a huge wage-cut to workers who are suffering skyrocketing costs in food and gasoline and being forced to pay for the bosses’ trillion-dollar oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While Irish and Italian workers have long-dominated the workforce, lately half the workers hired are black and Latino, with one in five women. The company would like to use this situation to drive a wedge between the older and newer workers. The fact that for decades the older workers had not fought to integrate the workforce could be coming home to roost now, giving Con Ed the racist tool with which to divide the workers, and feel it can get away with offering such a lousy contract.

The kind of action needed to carry out the above plan won’t happen with the current crop of union leaders whose main aim is to elect “pro-labor” politicians and who always side with the bosses. Workers need a long-range plan to build communist leadership. Organizing solidarity and unity in this current battle could help prepare the workers for the kind of action that, with red leadership, would result in a revolution that would shut off Con Ed and their partners’ in the bosses’ state.

Coal Barons, Gov’t Guilty of Murdering Miners

When six miners died in the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah last August 6, it was no “accident” — it was deliberate murder for profit. Ten days later three more workers died from a tunnel collapse while trying to rescue those six. All nine deaths were completely avoidable.

The mine owner, Robert Murray, claimed it was due to an “earthquake.” This lie was exposed in a recent Congressional report, but don’t hold your breath expecting anything will be done by the bosses’ politicians to prevent future murders.

Murray’s operation practices “retreat mining.” This method involves removing the massive coal pillars that support the mine’s roof. As miners move backwards towards the entrance, this allows sections of the mine to collapse, “the technique of doubling back to carve final profits from the coal pillars that brace the mine.” (NY Times, 5/9) With coal prices soaring, the mine owners find it extremely profitable to extract every last bit of coal, over the dead bodies of the miners who dig out the coal.

In March 2007, a similar collapse occurred in the same mine, but the pillars and mine roof didn’t fall on any miners. However, the Crandall bosses played down that incident, which should have led to the banning of retreat mining.

In fact, before the August disaster, miners — including one of the six who died — reported that sections of the mine floor had been buckling up from the intense pressure placed upon it. They said the mine bosses knew about the problem but continued operations anyway.

Then, on August 6, a series of pillars burst apart, causing a mine cave-in so powerful it registered 3.9 on the Richter scale. It killed the six miners, entombing them in the mine. Their bodies were never recovered. Three were immigrants from Mexico, forced by the bosses’ racism to work on the more dangerous, unsafe jobs, a condition which then spreads to all workers. Ten days later, three more miners, working to reach the six who were trapped, were killed as well when a 1,500-foot section of the tunnel collapsed on them.

If the company had stopped this “retreat mining” after the March 2007 collapse, all these miners would be alive today. But the owners concealed the extent of that incident, leading to the August murders.

Now a big hue and cry is rising, from the Congressional report to NY Times’ editorials, calling for a “criminal inquiry” and new safety laws. But the report itself upholds the legitimacy of “retreat mining.” And the Mine Safety and Health Administration is notorious for being run by pro-industry appointees, who have done next to nothing about enforcing current laws. The “worst” that happens is a slap on the wrist for mine owners’ violations.

Some coal bosses say domestic coal could become an “alternative” fuel to the U.S. rulers’ dependence on imported oil from war-torn regions and anti-U.S. governments. Daydreaming! Modern industry and armies can’t run without oil. Besides, the biggest U.S. bosses, like Exxon-Mobil, make multi-billion-dollar profits from oil; the Pentagon itself is geared to preventing U.S. imperialist rivals from grabbing control of the flow of oil. But — oil or coal — capitalist industries’ main goal is reaping maximum profits. Killing workers, including ignoring their safety, is part of that process. Only a communist society, where workers’ lives are the first priority and the fruit of their labors will be shared by the whole working class, not a few profiteers, will end this carnage.

Anti-War Solidarity Actions Sweep CUNY Campuses

NEW YORK CITY, May 19 — On May Day, PLP members participated in events upholding workers’ solidarity at multiple CUNY campuses. One of the campus unions, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), held rallies to celebrate the West Coast longshoreman’s (ILWU) plan to organize an eight-hour work stoppage against the war. We were excited by this opportunity to show how class-conscious industrial workers can fight for more political demands (for a critical analysis of the ILWU May Day work-stoppage see report on the May Day activities in the Bay Area, CHALLENGE, May 21, 2008).

At the events, we participated in various anti-war activities — bullhorn rallies, teach-ins, film showings and literature tables — and distributed CHALLENGE, which linked the war with the CUNY budget cuts. On one campus a dozen union members unfurled a 15-foot-long banner, “US Out of Iraq…No Attack on Iran!” in front of the cafeteria. As speakers explained the real reasons for the war on Iraq along with conditions here at home, a student called out, “What about the war in Palestine?” We invited him to join our discussion.
During another rally, a letter received early that May Day morning from the General Union of Port Workers of Iraq was read aloud (see box). Inspired by ILWU’s actions in the U.S., the Iraqi unionists were planning to stop work in Umm Qasr and Al Zubair.

On a third campus, the administration refused to grant a sound permit. When speakers began to use a handheld bullhorn, campus security backed up by city cops swarmed in, threatening to arrest the chapter chair and the speaker. So much for free speech on campus.

After these city-wide campus events, many students and union members went together to the Immigrants’ Rights Rally in Union Square.

From these successful May Day actions the potential exists for building a strong worker-student alliance and to recruit new members to PLP. We will continue to be involved in struggles on our campuses to make this happen.

(Excerpts from the May Day message from the Port Workers in Iraq to West Coast U.S. dock workers.)

In solidarity with the ILWU, the General Union of Port Workers in Iraq will stop work for one hour on May Day in the ports of Umm Qasr and Khor Al Zubair.
Dear Brothers and Sisters of ILWU in California:
The courageous decision you made to carry out a strike on May Day to protest against the war and occupation of Iraq advances our struggle against occupation to bring a better future for us and the rest of the world as well….[which] will only be created by the workers…. We in Iraq are looking up to, and support you until the victory over the U.S. administration’s barbarism is achieved.
Over the past five years the sectarian gangs who are the product of the occupation have been trying to transfer their conflicts into our ranks.  Targeting workers, including their residential and shopping areas, indiscriminately using all sorts of explosive devices, mortar shells, and random shooting, were part of a bigger scheme that was aiming to tear up the society…. We are struggling to defeat BOTH the occupation and the sectarian militias’ agenda….
Long live the port workers in California! Long live May Day! Long live International solidarity!”