NEW YORK CITY, May 21—Twenty-one thousand AT&T Mobile workers went on a three-day national strike this weekend, as a dress rehearsal for a bigger confrontation. These workers are fighting for survival in a continuing offensive of capitalist profiteering against worker’s conditions of work and living standards. Rivalries between global imperialists are sharpening, and moving toward even greater war. While the telecommunications bosses tighten the screws, the Progressive Labor Party salutes and supports the AT&T workers for saying enough is enough!
Much like Verizon Wireless’s strike last summer this battle is over the outsourcing of call center jobs, the closing of stores, hiring of part-timers instead of full-time workers, and higher co-pays for health insurance. The workers are represented by Communication Workers of America (CWA). The three-day strike is the first for most of these workers and was intended as a shot across the bosses’ bow to move contract negotiations forward.
PLP members in Brooklyn visited a local store and walked and talked with the workers who were predominantly young Black women. Their enthusiasm was high and they warmly greeted us. We intend to go back to the store, develop ties with these workers and help as they prepare for the bigger storms ahead.
U.S. workers, like telecommunications workers at AT&T, are on the front lines of these attacks as the U.S. bosses gear up for war with their imperialist rivals, the bosses of China and Russia. The communist Progressive Labor Party stands side by side with the AT&T workers. The AT&T workers are a key part of a vital organ of capitalism, telecommunications. Examining the role of telecommunications within capitalism, these workers, together with their international sisters and brothers in transit, mining and heavy industries, hold the power to shape a communist world without borders, imperialism, money or profits!
Telecom Workers: Vital Organs of Capitalism
“Telecommunications” refers to the simple sending and receiving of electronic messages. For the working class in the U.S. and many countries, telecommunications—in the form of Internet—capable devices like smartphones and their wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon and other, have entered and now dominate many aspects of life. For many workers growing up today, Internet access and sending text messages can be a taken-for-granted part of every day life.
The global ubiquity of telecommunications is matched only by the depth of its penetration into the labor process. Many lines have blurred and mutually-reinforcing relationships forged between capitalist industries. As of 2013, the London-based Financial Times’ top 500 companies based on profits included seventeen global wireless telephone companies (including AT&T), fifteen fixed-line phone utilities, fifteen multinational mass media companies (like TimeWarner), fifteen software and computer technology companies (including Apple, IBM, and now Google), and eleven healthcare companies who count on massive digital and fiber optic networks for their explosive growth (“FT 500,” 2013).
Not listed as companies, but even more dependent on telecommunications as any company, are the imperialist bosses’ militaries in the U.S., Russia, and China. The U.S. bosses in particular maintain a global array of over 750 military bases, killer drone fleets, aircraft carrier fleets, and nuclear submarines, all dependent on telecommunication.
At the center of this entire industry is the international working class, and telecommunications involves nearly every sector of it. Companies like Apple’s and Google’s brands depend on the advertising industry. Products like phones and computers rely on the extraction of metals and minerals by millions of miners in sub-Saharan Africa, who live in U.S. and Chinese imperialist-backed fascist states. These raw materials are shipped to factory workers in India, China and elsewhere and assembled according to designs made by workers in computer, electrical and mechanical engineering. Warehousing and transport workers ship these products, and millions of storefront and call center workers sell and provide technical support for them.
From that to the workers who build and operate the electrical grids themselves, the power stations, the cables; who manage the invisible electromagnetic waves that devices use; to the thousands of satellites built and launched into orbit around the earth—for capitalism and imperialism, telecommunications have emerged in importance as electricity and water themselves. When workers disrupt even one step in this entire process, we catch a glimpse of the immense power of our class.
AT&T Workers Represent Working-Class Potential
To meet their current demands, the AT&T workers’ strike will take more than contract negotiations to beat back the AT&T bosses. It will take militant rank-and-file workers’ power. Building workers’ power in AT&T must go hand in hand with raising consciousness of their potential power at the center of global capitalism. Capitalism will continue to extract more from workers to bolster profits and prepare for the coming war. All workers face a future of not only more, but also more militant battles against the bosses.
We in PLP fight to unite all workers around the globe to turn this imperialist war against the world’s workers into a class war for communist revolution so that the working class can share among us the wealth we produce and control our destiny. Then, imperialism, racism, and sexism can be destroyed. Then, this modern miracle of telecommunications infrastructure, built by the hands and brains of workers, will no longer be used for profit and war, but for solidarity and communism!