NASSAU COUNTY, NY, February 20 —

Grievances and labor laws or class struggle? How do we win co-workers who have been temporarily co-opted by the bosses’ games of favoritism, racism and sexism? Can white workers be won to understand that racism hurts them? How is the goal of communist revolution connected to these problems?

These are some of the questions threaded through meetings of hospital workers as we try to organize against the bosses’ attacks.

One meeting several weeks ago began with a hospital worker passing out a recent CHALLENGE article written about the workers’ fights. Then he made sure everyone got the newest paper. From there began a lively debate about how to fight the hospital bosses.

In the weeks before the meeting a flyer mysteriously appeared all over the hospital. It publicized the attacks on workers in various departments. In many cases these attacks were clearly racist, since they appear to be restricted to black workers. Several housekeeping workers were just fired and workers from another department had been written up and suspended. The flyer called on workers to organize to fight back.

After the flyer, the fired workers were reinstated. The workers did involve the union with their terminations, but the assessment at this meeting was that the flyer definitely played a role in the bosses reversing the firings. At the same time the bosses and the union leaders began threatening anyone they suspected was associated with the flyer.

The rehiring of the fired workers and the reaction from the bosses and union leaders fueled a lively debate. Some of the workers wanted to understandably focus on the write-ups and the technicalities of the grievance cases. Other workers connected these attacks to the bigger things going on around us like the capitalist economic crisis, widening wars and deeper fascism.

The workers who had received write-ups do see the disciplines as racist and are dissatisfied with many of the union delegates whom they view as either in the bosses’ pockets or unwilling to fight militantly. From this point the debate began between the ideas of fighting the bosses mainly by union grievances and the bosses’ labor laws versus developing class struggle against the attacks and building to communist revolution. That first meeting ended with the consensus that the workers would work on the grievance cases at the same time we’d work to build a rank-and-file fight.

At another meeting we heard reports that the threats from the bosses and the union leaders continue against the suspected “trouble-makers.” Also, another worker was fired. The debate continued between relying on grievances and labor laws versus class struggle and communist revolution. Another point of discussion this time was the need to win white workers to understand how racism hurts them.

The workers at this meeting made plans to continue the fight against the racist firings and write-ups. Several of them want to join a PLP study-action group. It’s no surprise since many of them are part of CHALLENGE networks