LOS ANGELES, CA, November 21 — Hundreds of LAX airport workers and community supporters marched through the streets, blocking the main entrance to the airport for two hours. A community-based organization helped organize the march. They have been organizing workers at two different contract companies within the airport. They are fighting for benefits, healthcare, vacation, and better pay. Some have made multiple attempts to establish a union but have failed. During the voting the first time, contract workers were not even allowed to vote.

Airport subcontractor workers here are subject to bad or no health care, no pay raises, no sick days, no vacation, no jury duty pay, no free flights, long work hours or too few hours in the case of Ready Reserve workers. They are moving older workers out of the bag room and onto the ramp, where they have to stoop over all day. This is an obvious attempt to force older and better-paid workers to quit. They are also forced to manage entire flights without getting the higher pay of a lead.

The TSA “Totally Standing Around” agents and the airport police attack workers on a daily basis in the form of random pat-downs, check points to check ID and fingerprinting to check for explosive residue or gunpowder. They pull workers’ badges and add points to their airport records. The bosses push the idea that they are somehow protecting the “good” people from the “bad” people, but the end result is repression of the working class for the benefit of the ruling class. That is a sign of fascism.

Workers must unite and fight back against attacks from the TSA, the airport bosses and the airport police. Fight-back has been difficult, but lately the airport workers have been slowly organizing. The march that took place was only a tiny step towards true class struggle. The union will eventually let the workers down because their philosophy is to make a deal with the bosses. The result will be workers being screwed, either a little less or a little more. That is why the workers all over the world need communism, a society run by the working class in our interests, and not those of profit-hungry bosses. Our fight against the bosses is a fight we want to win. 

With this in mind, PLP will be distributing leaflets and selling CHALLENGE at the airport on a monthly basis. We will continue to be involved in the fight-back organized by the union, getting to know workers, so we can bring them our revolutionary outlook. The union’s fight is a start but it’s reformist. It won’t stop capitalism and its rotten system of exploitation. The fight needs to be for communism: a world without exploitation or a profit-driven wage system. We in PLP are determined to bring that idea to the workers here and everywhere.

What does it mean to remember Shantel Davis, the 23-year-old unarmed black woman killed by black NYPD Detective Phillip Atikins in Brooklyn on June 14?

As the six-month mark of Shantel’s murder approaches, family, friends and supporters fighting to send Atkins to prison plan to gather for a vigil on the site where she was murdered.

For the Progressive Labor Party, remembering Shantel means much more than only fighting for Atkins to serve time. The lasting justice for Shantel means fighting for an anti-racist communist world that would be worthy of her life. 

For the Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, remembering Shantel means reminding the mainly black and immigrant workers of East Flatbush that cops can get away with racist murder.

After six months of protests, including disrupting Ray Kelly’s speech at a forum and militant unpermitted demonstrations in front of the 67th police precient, Hynes has still not charged Atkins with any crime. The DA is sitting on numerous witnesses and videos that show Atkins shot her in cold blood. But publicly Hynes needs to reassure other cops who kill that the courts will look the other way. Privately Hynes promised Shantel’s family an investigation. 

The city’s rulers also want workers to forget the words of former NYPD narcotics detective Stephen Anderson who served under the same command as Atkins. Anderson recently testified in court that he and his superiors regularly planted evidence on innocent people to make arrests. In Shantel’s case the police and media want workers to believe the lies they created about Shantel’s supposedly lengthy (actually non-existent) criminal record to smear her name. 

Shantel’s family and friends remember that during the first seventeen years of her life Shantel devoted free time to care for the elderly, sick and disabled. But while her big close-knit loving family nurtured her to be kindhearted and generous, capitalism failed Shantel.

Shantel was one of millions of U.S. black youth that racist education set up for low wages and underemployment. For all of Shantel’s short life, PLP fought against the racist conditions of capitalism in East Flatbush, from school budget cuts to police brutality. Throughout the city we organized students around local and global struggles to smash a racist system that can never provide jobs for all.

Capitalist education forced her to give up on school. The year Shantel was due to graduate high school the unemployment rate among black youth in New York City was over 40 percent and Shantel dropped out. For several years Shantel cared for her elderly grandmother, a demanding skill that demonstrated Shantel’s aptitude. But to capitalism she was barely worth considering for most jobs.

Six months after Atkins killed Shantel PLP remembers that true justice for Shantel Davis means putting an end to the racist capitalist system that set Atkins loose to begin with. Today, in a period when revolution is not an immediate reality that means putting forward communist ideas of anti-racism, militancy and class solidarity in the fight to put Atkins behind bars. Making the growth of a fighting communist movement our benchmark for victory means that our class can advance whether or not the bosses decide to indict Atkins. 

Without building a long-term revolutionary movement, convicting Atkins could feed the deadly illusion that capitalism can be nice and can do without racist terror. If such false ideas are the heart of Shantel’s struggle we will have won the battle and lost the war. As long as capitalism exists police terror will continue to shatter working-class families. PLP fights to send Atkins away. But we also aim to win the class war against all of the racists bosses and their assassins whether or not we win the individual battle to put Atkins in jail.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, November 26 — Ten thousand garment workers barricaded roads, shut 50 factories and hurled stones at cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas as workers protested the November 24 fire that killed 124 workers at Tazreen Fashions here. Hundreds of workers were trapped inside, symptomatic of Bangladeshi garment factories that have become infamous for their lack of fire exits and stairwells. Over 100,000 outraged workers attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers whose bodies could not be identified” (New York Times, 12/7).

It’s common practice for the garment bosses to chain doors shut to prevent workers from taking breaks. Combined with poor maintenance practices and flammable materials and chemicals, these factories become firetraps. “More than 600 garment workers have died in such fires since 2005.” (NYT, 12/7)

Tazreen bosses told workers the fire alarm was a false one, to keep them working. Then they fled, but by the time workers realized what was occurring, the fire had snaked to the upper floors, blocking any exit routes. Some tried to escape by jumping out of windows.

Tazreen manufactures clothing for Walmart, Sears and the Gap, among other U.S. companies, all of whom make enormous profits from the poverty wages and hazards in these death traps. They are all aware of these conditions, making them complicit in the murders of these workers.

This latest factory fire is the worst in Bangladeshi history. As the families and friends of the trapped workers crowded around the inferno to offer whatever assistance they could, they knew who was to blame. Sabine Yasmine, one victim’s mother and a factory worker herself, moaned, “Where’s my soul? Where’s my son? I want the factory owner to be hanged! For him, many have died, many have gone.” (Associated Press, 11/25)

Yet factory owners are rarely punished for the deadly conditions they enforce in their workplaces. The garment industry is a massively profitable one in Bangladesh, exporting $20 billion annually, mainly to the U.S. and Europe. The Tazreen Fashions factory alone makes $37 million annually.

These massive profits flow from sweatshop conditions inside the 4,500 factories. Safety is ignored as workers are locked inside, working 60-hour weeks for around $37 a month. Workers opposing this murderous system are marked for death. Earlier this year a union organizer was found tortured and murdered outside the city. (AP, 11/25; New York Times, 11/25)

Such mass murder is common under capitalism, particularly in developing industrial economies. Just two months ago factory fires at a garment shop in Karachi and a shoe factory in Lahore, Pakistan killed a combined 314 people. Workers were trapped in the factories with no emergency exits and all doors locked to hold the workers imprisoned inside. Again, these sweatshops netted profits primarily for U.S. and European bosses. (CNN, 9/16; BBC, 9/11)

In 1993, a fire in the Kader Toy Factory in Thailand killed 188 workers and injured more than 500. It was the worst industrial disaster ever until the Karachi fire in 2012. The Kader factory, which made toys for Disney and Mattel, paid their workers slave wages and locked them into the building during the work-day. When the fire started, managers fled the scene, leaving the largely female workforce trapped inside to burn. (International Labor Organization, Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety)

Capitalists care only for profits. The fiery death of hundreds of workers is only part of the super-exploitation of the working class. Only a communist revolution to smash the capitalist class can end this mass murder of workers. Until that day it’s just a matter of time until the next big fire.

ALGIERS, December 5 — Workers and students are blocking buildings and striking for better conditions on the job and at the university against the socialist fig-leaf being used to hide a capitalist economy and the wealth of the bosses. Although a national liberation struggle gained independence from France in 1962, capitalism has remained in the name of socialism.

Large sectors of the economy were nationalized. Today, 90% of the banks are public, the hydrocarbon company is state-owned, and government spending represents two-thirds of non-hydrocarbon Gross Domestic Product. Yet almost one-fourth of the population lives in poverty. Twenty percent of the youth 15-24 are jobless. So the workers and students are fighting back.

Today, municipal workers in Zeribet El Oued struck, blockading the municipal popular assembly building demanding back pay, having gone unpaid for two to six months. The strike united temporary and permanent workers. “Whole families have been paralyzed by accounting and administrative malfunctions, which deprive us of our monthly income for months at a time,” said a public records worker.

Also today, forestry workers in Tlemcen walked out, demanding permanent hiring of temporary workers — in particular safety and security personnel — as well as for promotions that have been delayed, in particular for older workers.

There have been repeated student strikes in Boumerdè condemning the university bureaucracy, which has disorganized teaching and the functioning of different university departments. As of today, the commercial and economic sciences department and the school of hydrocarbons — Algeria is rich in oil and gas — have been blocked for over a week by strikers protesting disciplinary sanctions taken against 15 student strikers.

What is needed is a communist ideology to link all these struggles and to understand the need to fight for communism, not socialism’s state capitalism.