WASHINGTON, DC, June 17 — The DC Metro transit bosses continue their racist attacks on the working class, both in the community and on the job.  They continue to push for service cuts and for privatization, which will hurt both the Metro workforce and workers throughout the region.
The Progressive Labor Party’s immediate strategy is to hit back on two fronts. In the short term, we are building an alliance among the riding public, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689, and other unions for jobs, lower fares, better service, and a single wage-and-benefit package for all transit workers. We are also fighting against DC Metro’s racist background checks. This alliance has the potential to push back these attacks and shut the region down. Our longer-term strategy is to win workers to a communist understanding of the need for revolution to destroy the entire capitalist system.
Some progress has been made on both fronts. Six people attended May Day from the committee that is organizing against the background checks. Seven workers have joined a Party study group to learn more about communism.  Several of them distribute CHALLENGE and advocate communist ideas with their friends. 
DC Metro policies on criminal background checks for new hires and current workers have come under renewed attack from both community organizations and rank-and-file workers.  Community groups in southeast Washington and active public health workers are circulating petitions to demand an end to these racist policies. Even the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is entering the fray by suing BMW and the Dollar Store for using background checks to discriminate against black workers. After much prodding by PLP members and other workers, Local 689 is coming around to engage in this fight. 
The DC government continues to advance its plans for privatizing parts of the city’s Metrobus system. In response, the union turned out at a budget hearing on expansion of the DC Circulator, the public-private service being used to replace Metrobus.  After our opposition was ignored by the DC City Council, union members went to a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force on Privatization, which was cancelled before we got there.  Instead of marching to a nearby transit hub and talking to the riding public about the threats of privatization, the union leadership dispersed the group over PL members’ objections. 
The union leadership continues to operate without a strategy to fight privatization. PLP’s approach is to build towards militant action and shut down the city. But the union leadership fears that our plan would jeopardize their cozy relationship with the city’s bosses and politicians. 
On the collective bargaining front, DC Metro continues to demand contract concessions from the union, using threats of further privatization and the loss of jobs. The union leadership’s stance is either to cave in to these concessions or to let the bosses’ arbitrator decide.
All of these attacks are an opportunity to intensify the class struggle.  For the first time in many years, workers see the seriousness of the rulers’ attacks. They understand that the union leadership has a losing strategy.
How can the Party come out ahead in this situation? When we sharpen the struggle, workers see how racism divides us. They see that the bosses have the power to beat us down in any reform struggle. Only by building our Party with the outlook of ending racism and seizing state power from the bosses can we really win. Our victory comes with building the revolutionary Party. If we can beat back the bosses’ immediate attacks in the process, so much the better!

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.

NEW YORK CITY, June 12 — Thousands of angry teachers, transit, fire, sanitation and other workers rallied today demanding new contracts. All city unions have been without new contracts, some for over two years. But instead of staging a city-wide general strike, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the NY Central Labor Council used this as a Democratic Party election rally for the upcoming mayoral election. Some went so far as to say they had come to City Hall to “evict” billionaire Bloomberg, even though he is leaving on his own, term-limited out, after 12 devastating years. The UFT gave out a sea of blue t-shirts that read, “Workers Count and Workers Vote.” That was also one of the main chants from the stage.
At the same time, based on our efforts to bring small blocks of workers and youth from our jobs and schools and the response of workers to CHALLENGE, the rally also showed the potential for building a base for communist revolution.
This demonstration was not the beginning of a real fight to restore needed services in hospitals, schools, and other vital areas. Rather, it was the first of a series of election rallies, winning workers to the idea that if you want a decent contract you better vote for the Democrats. This message was first delivered a few months ago on this very spot when a rally in support of striking school bus drivers and matrons ended after all the Democratic candidates signed a letter urging them to return to work with no contract. Many had no jobs to return to. Sadly, a number of school buses drove past this rally, with no blowing horns and no recognition from the traitors on stage. With hundreds of thousands of workers angry and without a contract, the union bosses were doing their best to keep the workers passive and dependent on this capitalist state. Whoever occupies City Hall, no closed hospitals or schools will be reopened. No racist cutbacks will be restored.
PLP is locked in a fight with the union leaders for the political leadership of workers and youth. When they say “politics is primary,” they mean that you have to vote for Democrats to get a contract with fewer give-backs and concessions. When the PLP says, “politics is primary,” we mean that workers must be armed politically to understand how the racist profit system works, how it is on a collision course for another world war, and how only communist revolution can provide a secure future for the international working class. To defeat the bosses, workers, soldiers and youth need to build a mass PLP.

BROOKLYN, NY, June 16 — “Healthcare Yes! Wall Street No! Racist [governor] Cuomo’s got to go!” This chant, started by members and friends of Progressive Labor Party and taken up eagerly by hundreds of mainly women hospital workers, rang out for the entire march fighting against closing of Downstate Hospital. Many union leaders and politicians looked decidedly uncomfortable. The speeches were more militant in response to the mood of the workers.Brookdale Hospital workers and Occupy rally to oust the racist administration Mdysis and fight their healthcare cuts in November 2011.
For a year, hospital workers and residents of the neighborhoods served by us have been fighting against the downsizing and/or closings of both Downstate Hospital and Long Island College Hospital (LICH).  Downstate, comprising 8,000 workers and nearly 2,000 medical students, is the fourth largest business in Brooklyn.
The hospital and NY State bosses have been waffling on their plans, partly in response to this fightback. In the current economic environment, Governor Cuomo and Sate University chancellors want to cut our wages and benefits; their plan has no good solutions for hospitals that serve a large percentage of Medicaid and uninsured patients. The Public Benefit Corporation experiment proposed in Downstate bosses’ “Sustainability Plan,” will referee the imposition of more and deeper cutbacks.
This is a despicable sexist, racist attack on the working class here. Both politicians and union leaders fear that our struggles will progress into more militant actions than just petitions. Hundreds of CHALLENGEs sold at the hospital were welcomed by workers.
At the frontline of this fight are women workers, most of whom are black and immigrant. Considering the sexist fact women bear most of, if not the sole, responsibility of raising children and taking care of their parents, we are at the forefront of the struggle for healthcare for our families. Those of us who may lose jobs at these hospitals are major, if not primary, wage-earners for our households. In spite of the unpaid labor in the house and the exploited wage labor in the hospitals, women workers are getting involved and taking leadership, often for the first time.
PLP has been deeply involved in organizing these hospital struggles. We were there when Brookdale Hospital workers took on the criminal hospital administration, Medisys. We were part of organizing the first demonstration last June at Downstate with Occupy Wall Street.  We have tried to help mobilize the neighborhood Red Hook residents (survivors of Superstorm Sandy) to fight for workers and patients at LICH. Throughout we have warned that this crisis in healthcare is caused by the capitalist need to move resources out of social services into its efforts to maintain control over its world empire.
Workers in all hospitals must stick together and enlist the support of our patients. We cannot rely on voting and politicians. Mass, rank-and-file, militant struggle is our only chance to push back these attacks. Finally we have always said that a system based on profits can never provide decent health care for the working class. That is why we fight to build a mass communist movement in this antisexist struggle.