PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 28 — If anyone needs a clearer picture of the murderous attacks by U.S. bosses on workers — and the need for a worker-run communist society — two recent events here highlight them.
This month, school bosses said they’re closing 23 public schools (10 percent of the total) and will fire nearly 4,000 teachers and other workers. This assault on workers and students raises the toll of firings since 2011 to more than one-third of the workforce!
This is disastrous for school workers and their families, causing hunger, homelessness and even death in some cases. It’s racist as well since black students comprise 81% of those affected. However, $400 million of the cuts from the state budget will be used to build a 5,000-inmate prison instead. So the bosses do have a plan for black youth.
There have been frequent protest rallies and marches, and a hunger strike aimed at rolling back the cuts and firings, but the school board and state assembly haven’t budged.
Secondly, to add criminal neglect to their official terrorism, on June 5 city bosses allowed a small downtown building — in the shadows of glittering office towers and hotels — to collapse, killing six workers and shoppers in an adjacent store and injuring 13 others.
A criminal contractor, using untrained and vulnerable workers, was demolishing nearby buildings on the cheap. He had declared bankruptcy only weeks before. After the deadly collapse, a city inspector who had been assigned to oversee the demolition, which he had visited only once, was found dead in his truck, shot in the chest with a suicide note nearby. An “investigation” into his death has been ordered.
The owner of the collapsed building is a small-time criminal who has owned a string of adult businesses here and in New York City. The demolition was to have cost him $10,000 for work that, if done safely, would have cost ten times that. 
A vital support was removed from a 4-story wall, causing it to collapse and crush the store and the people inside. The adjacent store should have been closed for safety reasons, but the city had not issued a closure order. It remained open and filled with shoppers, despite warnings of the obvious danger to the store’s workers and patrons. No sidewalk protection was provided either, exposing passers-by to serious injury or death.
Though the April collapse of a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, claimed far more lives (over 1,100 vs. six here), the causes for the Philadelphia deaths are the same: greed for profits at any cost.
Most of the largest U.S. retailers (target, Wal-Mart, Kmart, JC Penney) refuse to force their Asian producers to adopt labor, building safety and health standards. Bosses’ disregard worldwide for workers’ lives is murderous.
The International Business Times carried an article (6/19) comparing Philadelphia and Bangladesh:   
Both places are scarred by immense poverty, entrenched political corruption…and decaying infrastructure. A...U.S. census..survey...[for]2009-11 revealed that of the ten largest U.S. cities, Philadelphia ranked first in the number of people living in “deep poverty”; more than one-quarter, or 28 percent, of Philadelphia residents are living below the poverty level — up from about 23 percent in 2000...
...People often go hungry, live without running water or electricity — conditions not too dissimilar to those faced by the masses of Bangladeshis...Across the U.S., more than 20 million people live in deep poverty, largely the victims of the collapse of the manufacturing industry and the continuing impact of the financial/mortgage crisis.
Only communist revolution in Philly, the U.S., Bangladesh, and the world will eliminate the bosses and their profit system, the cause of such racist exploitation, hunger, death and hazardous working conditions.