BROOKLYN, April 18—Rank-and-file hospital workers are demanding their department boss stop the harassment and intimidation immediately! They’ve circulated a petition inside the hospital, demanding fired workers be reinstated. Although many signed, so far the hospital bosses have refused to act.
Dreadful Working Conditions
The bosses are pushing workers to the limit, firing and writing up workers in the transport department for “not working hard enough.” They want workers to over-compensate for shortages in staff and an increasing workload.
Workers at another Brooklyn hospital have been laid off and people leaving are not replaced. We finish work every day exhausted. Many have gotten sick, but when we use our sick time, bosses call us lazy. We have the same salary for double the work — one person doing the work of two or three. At the drop of a hat, the bosses send us to labor relations, where they fabricate lies, bullying some into resigning. When it comes to us workers, the bosses “have no money,” but meanwhile they’re remodeling, throwing out relatively new furniture, computers and carpeting.
The transport workers move patients throughout the hospital while on their feet their entire day, except for their lunch break. They cover a lot of distance before their shift ends. “While transporting patients we’re constantly being paged to go to other floors in the hospital,” reported one worker. In the last six months, three workers from this department were fired because they transported the wrong patients to different areas within the hospital. One had been on the job for 30 years!
Black, Latin and women workers face the brunt of these sexist, racist working conditions and attacks. They then go home and do a second shift to maintain their households.
Workers Fight Back, Union Stands Still
The transport workers’ reformist union, 1199/SEIU, has been passive in this fight for workers’ demands against the capitalist bosses. Like all unions, they’ve been relying on the bosses’ system of filing grievances and arbitrations to solve workers’ problems, both of which take a very long time. Most of the outcomes favor the bosses.
Like all unions, 1199/SEIU has also been trying to channel workers into the election game. It promotes the reformist idea that the class struggle is over and involvement in election campaigns is the only solution for healthcare workers. How many times can we hear the Demopublicans’ promises before we realize that voting is a dead-end? The politicos, from Governor Cuomo to Mayor de Blasio, from presidential candidates Trump to Clinton to Sanders, are dedicated to preserving the profit system.
PLP members are working with the healthcare workers in both hospitals to keep fighting. Armed with communist ideas, workers have waged and won many militant battles in the past, including informational picketing that saw workers pouring out from every department and confronting the hospital CEO directly in his office. Through these struggles we learn to see through the bosses’ tricks, how to unite and wield our power.
Keep Fighting, March on May Day!
Sometimes, it seems we fight the same battles over and over. As soon as we win something, the bosses start trying to take it back. Nevertheless, we have to challenge the ways they use and abuse us. On April 30, PLP will march through Brooklyn to celebrate May Day, the international working class holiday. We invite all Downstate workers to bring their struggle to May Day and commit to continuing the fight.
PLP fights for communist revolution as the only real solution for the working class. Workers will build a communist world where all workers give their talents and efforts to building a society without racism, sexism, imperialist war and bosses’ profits. Read CHALLENGE regularly and join us on May Day.
NEW YORK CITY, April 17—Twice in the last three days, Progressive Labor Party has rallied under the banner “elections can’t fix capitalism, fight for communism,” once in Manhattan where the Republican candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were speaking (see page 3) and again in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park opposing Bernie Sanders.
Today, a small but integrated group of female and male PL’ers followed up a May Day planning meeting by heading out to the Sanders rally and test our Party’s line that liberal bosses are the main danger to the working class. We demonstrated around our banner on the entry route into the staging area for Sanders’s speech. Many lingered around us and took CHALLENGE, the newspaper of communist revolution.
Our statements that the Democratic Party is the party of drones, deportations and a jobless recovery earned many nods of agreement. No matter how sweet sounding, Bernie Sanders is an imperialist candidate. If elected, he will be the commander in chief of the most vicious imperialist machine in history. He is still a capitalist candidate through and through. He is a path of reform and pacification through the ballot box.
Those who support Sanders do so because they want changes for the working class. But, only a communist revolution can answer that call. People were open to the idea that Sanders is a misleader. Absent of communist politics, the masses will gravitate towards the “lesser evil.” But when communists are rooted in the masses, the working class will be armed with class-consciousness and an organization that can turn our aspirations for a better world into reality.
The best part of the day was running into a few co-workers and friends. They stoped to say hello and see us standing strong for communist revolution in the face of a festival of liberalism.
NEW YORK CITY, April 20—Dozens of former students, parents, colleagues and friends have been filling the hearing office every day at the “trial” of a New York City educator under attack on false charges, ones of which he’s already acquitted in criminal court! Despite that, the city bosses are trying to take away his licenses and keep him from ever serving our kids again. Even parents from the school he was removed from almost two years ago have come to support him and report back to others.
The whole building has been buzzing about the support, and we’ve been keeping the chairs filled as a team of Department of Education lawyers tries to suppress evidence, exclude spectators and lie their way to victory. But they’re having a hard time of it because they’ve used only the same discredited witnesses from the court trial.
The ruling class’s attack on the working class, and especially Black and Latin children, takes many forms, including poverty, poor housing, poor healthcare and the capitalist education system. That includes crowded classrooms, pathetic reforms, attacks on teachers, and the just plain lies and ruling-class ideas our kids are taught.
This case involves an elementary school principal, with a long distinguished record as an early-childhood teacher and teacher coach He found that he’d became principal of a so-called “failing” school in a building that also housed a charter school which wanted the space. The pushing of charter schools into already existing schools’ spaces is a divisive ruling-class tactic. Appealing to parents’ desires to provide the best for their children, they pit parent against parent and teacher against teacher to convince us to blame each other for the failings of the bosses’ schools. The charter school movement also pacifies parents who might be won to fight for better schools by pulling them away and convincing them there’s a better alternative. But there is no such thing as a good school for the working class under capitalism!
This makes it especially important to organize within the schools to fight the attacks by the Dept. of Education (DOE). When parents, teachers and students unite, the nature of the system is laid bare. This unity scares the bosses. When the principal began to rally the school staff and parents to rebuild the school and fight for the resources his students need, he was arrested on fake charges of physically attacking a student.
Even though he was acquitted of the charges in court, colleagues and friends now face a new fight against the DOE, which is still trying to take away his license and his ability to fight for our children.
When our friend became principal, the school was down to under 100 students, student results were poor and staff and parents were demoralized. The charter school, which belongs to the high-profile “Success Academy” profit-making chain, wanted it to fail and leave so they could take over the space. Although the school had a lot of technology, the DOE had left it drastically short of support services for students, a third of whom needed special services.
Within his first weeks as principal, things began to turn around. He helped teachers begin to work together more, worked with staff to recruit more students (increasing by 25 percent) and started to develop new ties with parents. These moves were important, because getting everyone together is necessary to fight for what our children need, against the system’s racism and neglect of working-class kids. He also fought to keep the charter schools from taking away two classrooms needed for special education students.
So it was no surprise that when the principal took action to protect a disturbed third-grader, and—according to Department rules—prevent him from rushing out of the building and into the streets, the charter school bosses twisted it into being the principal’s attack on the student and pushed to have him arrested on false charges. In court, the principal proved that the charges, the testimony and the whole case were a fraud. The judge acquitted him the minute the trial ended.
His acquittal was positive. But what’s even better is that it led to more fightback, with support from dozens of parents, colleagues, former students he taught years ago and more. He has reached out to people throughout the area, and spoken at many churches, community groups and other gatherings, receiving strong response. Many people said they couldn’t believe this kind of attack against a committed pro-student educator. Many have contributed to legal costs and said they will come to support him at his hearing.
That kind of unity is needed to win more than the new fight for his licenses and future as an educator; we know that the ruling-class attacks on our children and those who support them won’t end here. No matter which kind of schools our working-class children attend, charter or public, they are being taught ruling-class ideas, not the knowledge, skills and class-consciousness they need to make a revolution and a new society. No matter what school reforms the rulers institute, they cannot provide jobs for all the students who leave the schools, with or without diplomas. Racism gives the majority of Black, Latin and immigrant youth the “choice” between racist unemployment or fighting in the bosses’ imperialist wars.
It’s important to broaden this struggle into more than a fight for our friend: it must lead to one that ends the whole system that miseducates and abuses our children and our class. The only system that will provide a quality education for the world’s working class—that will produce the thinkers and doers that can run this world for the working class—is communism! That is why we must win parents, teachers and friends that have shown up to support this comrade to join us at May Day on April 30, and to continue the struggle onward!
BROOKLYN, April 13—Up and down the east coast, Verizon workers are on strike. This is the largest strike in the United States since Verizon workers last walked off the job in 2011. PLP salutes Verizon strikers who are defending gains won over the last 50 years of struggle not only for themselves, but also for all workers!
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
36,000 thousand workers are taking on a huge and powerful capitalist enterprise whose profits are between $1.5 to $1.8 billion per month. Hundreds of members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) marched in downtown Brooklyn chanting, “They say cut back? We say fight back!”
Starting conversations on the line, we had asked what the issues were. The workers raged at the Verizon bosses. While the top five executives earned over $250 million over the last few years, the workers face no raises, increased costs of health insurance, transfers from one job site to another away from their families and layoffs caused by outsourcing.
Several PLP members joined the picket lines in downtown Brooklyn. Our solidarity was warmly received and we had lively discussions. Most of the strikers here are Black women workers who were giving lively leadership to the picket line. They led the chants in time to the beat of conga drums. It is Black women workers who are hit the hardest by bosses’ attacks on the job and in communities where they live and it is Black women workers who fight the hardest against the racist profiteers. Many were checking out the latest issue of CHALLENGE we passed out on the line.
Verizon workers face the same attacks as workers in industries around the world. As long as capitalism rules the world, the greed of one set of bosses or another will suck the very blood from our veins.
Verizon Workers Fight For All Workers
One question we asked: why weren’t the Verizon wireless workers unionized? When wireless phones first came out, the CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) did not unionize the wireless workforce to allow Verizon to be competitive with other wireless service providers. This was a sellout idea. Now, keeping Verizon competitive against Sprint and AT&T is given as the reason that the unionized workers are faced with cuts. The Verizon “wireline” workers fighting for their non-union sister and brother wireless workers exemplifies a principle of communist leadership: an injury to one is an injury to all.
When their corporate attorneys aren’t hitting strikers with their Porsches like they did in Gaithesburg, Maryland on April 16, the bosses are outsourcing jobs, closing call centers, cutting the “wireline” workers, and hiring and super-exploiting low-wage, non-union contractors. All these cuts drag the unionized workforce down closer to the pay and benefits of the non-union wireless workforce. All in the name of capitalist “competition.”
Verizon and U.S. Imperialism
Where are their profits going? Not to the working class! Military spending is 56 percent of the U.S. budget and that number isn’t going to budge with more than 750 U.S. military bases worldwide, and escalating military tensions between the U.S. capitalists and their Chinese and Russian rivals from Syria to the South China Sea. The bosses’ servants, from Sanders and Clinton to Trump, Cruz and Kasich, may disagree on taxing the rich and taxing corporations, but wider imperialist wars mean higher taxes are on the way.
These escalating war costs and rising taxes are rippling throughout the U.S. economy. Competition between bosses in every sector of the economy is intensifying, including telecommunications. Verizon bosses know it- that’s why they’re attacking unionized workers now, to build a war chest of profits to take on their rivals as the costs of U.S. imperialism continue to rise.
For Verizon workers and all workers, our survival means we have got to fight back. On April 30, in Brooklyn, PLP is holding a May Day demonstration and March. We called on strikers to join us and to tell their story of struggle against the racist capitalist Verizon bosses. We invite them to learn from communists in PLP of the world we can win where racism, sexism and exploitation are ended forever- through communist revolution!
