LOS ANGELES, June 12 — The PLP high school club here has been very active recently, both before and after May Day. One student declared: “As a high-school senior, I was willing to engage more in my school. When my teacher asked me to be a part of the May Day dinner, I was willing to experience something new. I knew it was about communism but had no idea what that was. Being there helped me to understand that communism means joining people as one and providing equality and fairness among all the people. I developed a new outlook.
“I recently graduated from high school and am about to go to work. My eyes are now open to how we are being controlled and are manipulated. A revolution will help us gain authority and a voice to eliminate this corrupt government.”
Another student said about May Day: “Fresh out of high school, attending events like the May Day dinner and a meeting on sexism helped me find out what’s going on, not just in my community but in the world beyond. The May Day dinner was a preview for the May Day march, including speeches about various political situations. A few of my school mates and I performed a poem, [Good Morning Revolution] by Langston Hughes. The dinner enabled people to come together and prepare for the march as one.”
All this is increasing our potential for youth-based leadership in the region in the coming years. We are also working closely with six high school students, highlighting the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. One has been involved for a while and the others have come around our May Day events.
After May Day, we had two rallies in the downtown garment area revealing the similarities between workers in LA and Bangladesh. We also had a study group about sexism, relating it to the class struggle among garment workers. Afterwards we distributed CHALLENGES to workers at a garment factory.
In the study group, we learned about sexist oppression in other parts of the world as well as what we see in our personal lives — how women workers are paid less then men, and what jobs people think fit a certain gender, affecting how much a worker gets paid.
Sexist ideology says women are inferior to men, leading to intense exploitation of women. In Bangladesh, a garment factory collapse killed more than 1,100 workers, mostly all women. The workers didn’t want to go to work because of cracks in the walls, but the manager warned them if they didn’t show up that day that they wouldn’t get paid. Those who did go to work were among the many who died.
After these months of activities, we now have a solid base for youth leadership and an active campaign around the Bangladesh factory murders that has tied us to garment workers and others throughout the city. We still have a long way to go, but this is a good start. We plan to relate this and other issues next fall to ones on the college campuses where these students will be enrolled, as well as continuing to work with garment workers in the city.