CHICAGO, August 21—As the deadliest pandemic in history continues to wreak havoc on the international working class, U.S. food bosses seized the opportunity to capitalize on our classes’ despair, churning out sugary and salty goods, while raking record profits on the backs of overworked and underpaid workers.
 The latest example is the Nabisco factory workers strike. As many workers worldwide know from direct experience, racism, sexism and exploitation are baked right into this profit system. Just as dough needs yeast to rise, capitalism needs exploitation and racist divisions to function. Communists from the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought revolutionary politics to striking workers outside the Nabisco factory on the city’s southwest side. We distributed CHALLENGE newspapers, held signs, made conversation, and brought food to the multiracial group of picketers.
Our message to the striking workers is that regardless of what temporary crumbs the union can wrest from the bosses filthy bargaining table, it’s not enough. In the end, exploitation and its attendant ills- racism, sexism, long hours and ill health- are necessary for the capitalists in their quest for maximum profits.
PLP is proud to stand with striking workers in Chicago and everywhere in order to reject the sell out unions, toxic nationalism, capitalist misleaders and pitiful reforms in favor of an international communist future.
Exploitation under capitalism is how the cookie crumbles
Here at the Chicago plant, 300 workers have refused to keep enduring the grinding, racist, and deadly exploitation of the capitalist bosses. They are joining with hundreds of other Nabisco workers in other U.S. cities such as Richmond, Virginia and Portland, Oregon who are fighting back against unpredictable and long shifts, increased health insurance costs, and dangerous understaffing.
The relentless competition of their system forces the bosses to squeeze us as much as possible, at the cost of immeasurable worker suffering. During a pandemic, the company recorded profits of over $3 billion as a number of plants closed, while at others workers were forced to put in 16-hour shifts (CBS News, 8/20). Many worked six to seven days a week for several months. Now, they are being forced to give up overtime pay and concede to a two-tier healthcare system, which will reduce benefits for new workers and cut overall wages.
A number of workers view cutting wages and benefits as a betrayal, but for the bosses, these are necessary decisions based on profit. Under capitalism, all wage work is theft (see letter, page 6). This wage slavery must be abolished.
Pandemic exposes racist horrors
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has further exposed the horrors of the capitalist system. On top of the millions of mainly Black and Latin workers who have already died from a mostly preventable illness, we have seen some of the world’s wealthiest capitalists and companies collectively add $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began (Washington Post, 1/21). This sickening calculus demonstrates that bosses wealth is made possible by racism and sexism.
Horror stories of inhumane working conditions have surfaced in media reports. They paint a picture of how workers are treated amid a traumatic pandemic: from an injured Nabisco worker falling off her chair and being forced to work with a broken ankle (The Grio, 8/21), to Frito Lay workers dying of heart attacks on the factory floor (Washington Post, 7/21).
The strikers that we met on the picket line today, many of whom were Latin, Black, and women workers, shared their own personal stories of racist and sexist attacks from the bosses. They also shared their strong commitment to maintaining the strike and fighting on.
Labor fakers bake a toxic recipe
The union that officially represents the Nabisco workers, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) has some of the most reactionary politics that have come to represent the boss-led unions. They could hardly be bothered to mobilize the rank and file as the bosses shuttered plants, eliminated pensions and laid off hundreds.
They waited until the workers were on the ropes to finally call for a strike (Common Dreams, 8/20).They are also spreading the poison that is nationalism by painting Nabisco workers in Mexico as rivals who “took jobs” from workers in the U.S. Pitting workers from different countries against one another for the problems the profit system creates is a completely racist ideology that only serves the ruling capitalist class. Workers have every interest in uniting across the bosses’ artificial borders in a global fight against capitalist exploitation.
BCTGM or any other union will never call for this internationalism because they all seek to work within the confines of the capitalist system. To advance the needs of our class everywhere, we need a clean break with bosses, misleaders, and reformists. We need a mass PLP, fighting for communism and workers’ power!
Fight like Stella D’Oro, join PLP
PLP has supported and given leadership to countless strikes in our history because we understand them to be potential schools for communism. It is in the act of refusing our exploitation - withholding our labor from the bosses - building working-class unity that we grasp our own power and the vision of a worker-run society. Strikes also reveal the need for a revolutionary communist Party. We urge Nabisco workers to join us to help build the Party into a mass fighting force capable of destroying this rotten, crumbling system once and for all.
Supporting the Nabisco workers in their fight against racist and sexist attacks brings back memories of another strike that the Party supported, that of Stella D’Oro bakery workers in New York between 2009-10.
Majority immigrant and women workers maintained a two-front fight for 11 months against both bosses who wanted to close the factory and the treachery of the same BCTGM union hacks.
We don’t know how long the Nabisco strike will last, but we do know the PLP will continue to fight alongside our class to advance our struggle for a communist world where workers run things, and never need to settle for the bosses’ crumbs.