WASHINGTON, DC, October 16 — The bosses and their union misleader allies continue to attack Metro Access workers here. These drivers handle special trips for the disabled and elderly. In most major cities, such para-transit systems are generally treated as stepchildren of the mass transit systems, with wages and benefits far below regular bus and train operators. The bosses rely on private contractors to provide these poverty-level jobs and on racism to super-exploit these mainly black workers. 

Here Metro Access is operated by MV Transportation, a contractor that is barely represented by ATU Local 1764. One DC Metro Access worker contacted a PLP member known for his long-time activism in the Metro transit union and said the workers wanted to leave their local because it didn’t serve their needs. However, the PL’er said it would be better for workers to organize a their own fight around a new contract for January 2013, including preparing to strike.

A group of eight workers met to map out such a contract and prepare for a strike. They made a priority elimination of the two-tier wage system which is dividing the workers. Nobody receives a decent wage. Under the current contract senior drivers make $17/hr while new employees are capped at $12/hr.

The group also discussed the issue of anti-communism since PLP is involved in this effort, and copies of CHALLENGE were shared with the workers. The campaign has just begun. MV Transportation has over 800 workers at two locations. The workers have organized a strong committee, but need to approach the entire workforce. They launched a web site to help in this effort: http://www.roaddawgsonline.com/ and prepared a flyer for mass distribution 

So far the union leadership has refused to meet with this rank-and-file committee. They’ve told the workers they should disband because the union president will “take care of the contract.” Exactly! Another sellout! That’s the problem! Let’s get organized to sharpen the anti-racist class struggle of these workers.

OAKLAND, CA ,October 16 — The coalition that organized the May Day March in the Bay Area is now mobilizing to support workers at the Mi Pueblo supermarket. PLP members are participating and joining the community boycott and picketing here on October 20.

Mi Pueblo has 21 stores and 3,200 employees, the majority of whom speak Spanish or are bi-lingual. The owner, Juvenal Chavez, expanded and got rich by selling traditional products from Latin America at high prices in immigrant neighborhoods while paying workers substandard wages. Many, both women and men, fought these conditions and have been fired. Meanwhile, Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is trying to unionize this workforce as part of a state-wide campaign, the Mercado Workers Coalition, aimed at non-union, immigrant supermarket workers. 

In August, Mi Pueblo announced the voluntary implementation of the Federal E-Verify program to check the immigration status of new employees. Recently Mi Pueblo revealed that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security is carrying out I-9 audits, called “silent raids.”

E-Verify, I-9 and ICE are all part of the fascist federal apparatus which is destroying the jobs, wages and living conditions of ALL workers in the U.S. It may appear to be aimed only at immigrants. Some politicians have argued that these “reforms” will open up more jobs for citizens. However, the experiences at Pacific Steel (over 200 fired; see CHALLENGE, 3/12), at Able Building Maintenance (450 fired) and at American Apparel (2,000 fired) show how “legal” citizen workers are hurt. Bosses like Juvenal Chavez can cooperate with ICE to fire long-time, “illegal” workers and then turn around and hire new “legal” citizen workers, currently unemployed and desperate for work, at an even lower wage. 

If we accept divisions among workers based on ethnicity, gender, national origin or migration status, we lose. However, when we recognize ourselves as one international working class and develop multi-ethnic unity and internationalism among all workers, we gain! Workers’ struggles have no borders! An attack on one worker is an attack on the whole working class. 

PLP believes that the boycott and pickets can mobilize and help organize this struggle.  The boycott might force Juvenal Chavez to make concessions and a union contract might give some immediate relief to arbitrary firings.

However, both are not sufficient to get at the root of the problem, the capitalist system, of which Juveal is a willing, profitable part. Underlying this struggle is capitalism’s creation of massive racist unemployment, massive migration around the globe, repressive laws, discrimination of all kinds and institutional racism. In the long run, we must organize to destroy capitalism, even as we fight for relief from today’s oppression. 

Join with us to build a new society, led by and for the international working class. 

Communist revolution opens the door to abolishing racism, sexism and national borders if we make international working-class unity part of today’s battles. In a truly communist society there’s no money, no production for sale and profit and no wages to create differences among workers. This is a world that finally realizes the potential for all to participate according to their ability and receive according to their needs, sharing the value the working class collectively produces.

JOHANNESBERG, SOUTH AFRICA, October 11 — The wildcat strikes and rebellions of 80,000 miners have spread across seven of this country’s nine provinces to include 30,000 truckers and a pending walkout of 190,000 government workers for higher wages. Port workers may soon join in. It is a massive assault on the racist apartheid system that still permeates South Africa in the form of the war between the two opposing classes.

Striking miners have mobilized to stop scabs; truckers have torched scab trucks. The bosses are retaliating with mass firings. When Anglo-American Platinum, the world’s top producer, fired 12,000 strikers after workers refused to attend company “hearings,” and said it would hire scabs to replace them, one worker declared that could happen only “over our dead bodies.” (Associated Press, 10/11) Another warned that, “Those who are dismissed will make sure there will be no operations and that [hiring of scabs] will cause a massacre just like at Marikana” (BBC News, 10/9) where, on August 16, cops murdered 34 miners. (See CHALLENGE, 9/19)

The rebellious Youth League, which is opposing the re-election of African National Congress (ANC) leader, President Jacob Zuma, said of the firing that Anglo-American Platinum “has made astronomical profits on the blood, sweat and tears of the very same workers that today the company can just fire with impunity” which it said is “a representation of white monopoly capital…uncaring of the plight of the poor.”

While workers were on a hill near the company’s Rustenberg mine protesting the firings — and demanding the indictment for murder of the racist police who massacred the Marikana miners —  cops fired rubber bullets and tear gas and murdered still another worker. The strikers have been out since September 12 and are demanding a monthly wage hike of up to 400 percent, from $500 to $2,000.

Bokoni Platinum fired another 2,160 strikers who wildcatted on October 1 and Gold Ore International fired 1,400 more at its Ezulwini operation.

Meanwhile, the original rock-drill operators at the Marikana mine rejected a company offer to return to negotiations which was accepted by the ANC-allied union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The wildcatters have held solid, with 96 percent staying out. (Reuters, 10/9) On October 3, 3,000 marched through the streets near the Lonmin mine, the largest protest since the racist massacre.

Under the current neo-Apartheid regime of the ANC, the country’s unemployment rate is 25 percent while President Zuma urges the miners to return to work, calling the strikes “illegal.” Zuma’s tiny black elite is allied with what the New York Times reported (10/14) is a “white-dominated capitalism [that has] remained in place.” The Times also said there are “reports that the government is paying for $27 million in renovations to Mr. Zuma’s private village home.”

A glaring example of this alliance occurred when miners, fired in June after a wildcat strike, joined those laid off two years ago to try to stop scabs entering the Gold One International mine, formerly managed by the Aurora company. It turns out that Aurora was bought two years ago by a group including Zuma’s nephew and a grandson of Zuma’s predecessor Nelson Mandela. The two allegedly never paid for the mine but stripped it of its assets, while failing to pay tens of thousands of dollars owed to miners thrown out of work. (AP, 10/11) Apartheid of the rich against the working class rolls on. 

Meanwhile, capitalism’s exploitation rules. The Times says (10/14), “Schools in townships and rural areas are a shambles. Hunger and disease still gnaw at the poorest. Unemployment is rife. [25 percent] And the misery is not equally shared: South Africa also has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality. A tiny wealthy black elite has emerged, while millions more remain in poverty.”

Any wonder that truck driver Morris Sello told the Times, “I am very disappointed in this government….They are stealing…and leaving us with nothing.” 

The strikers who have launched this massive movement are threatening the profits of a huge industry netting billions off their exploitation. South 

Africa has proven mineral reserves worth three trillion dollars. It holds the world’s largest reserves of manganese, chrome, and platinum and among the largest reserves of gold, diamonds, coal, aluminum, iron ore and vanadium. (The Examiner, 10/5)

South Africa produces 75 percent of the world’s platinum and is number four in chrome production. The struck Goldfields company is the world’s fourth largest gold producer.

It is our class that produces all this value reaped from our labor but most of which is stolen by the owners of the means of production as their profits. The militancy of these striking workers has shown the world a microcosm of the potential power of the working class to shut down that production and the flow of profits that come from those huge mineral resources. However, the bosses control state power, the government, and in this case have Zuma in their back pocket.

The working class needs to smash that state power and the profit system along with it. This can only happen if workers join and are led by their own revolutionary communist party whose goal is to do just that. We will establish a society run by and for the working class, without bosses, profits, racism, sexism and imperialist wars. That is the aim of the Progressive Labor Party which is establishing itself on five continents and must be brought to these miners and to all workers fighting the horrors of capitalism.

Workers at Wal-mart have spread their strikes and protests against the world’s largest private-sector employer — 1.4 million workers — to at least 28 stores in 12 states and counting, over the issues of poverty wages, exorbitant hours, wage theft, uncertain schedules, arbitrary firings, physical threats, unhealthy working conditions and lack of healthcare coverage.

The workers are planning a massive strike and protest for the biggest shopping day of the year, “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.

Immigrant workers have led the way, sparking the nationwide actions when they began a strike last June in the small town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, against C.J.’s Seafood, a Wal-mart supplier. They were “guest workers” from Mexico who were paid much less than the minimum wage, forced to work shifts up to 24 hours with no overtime pay, and threatened with beatings if their breaks lasted more than five minutes. Twice they were locked inside their workplace to force them to work from 2:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. without overtime compensation. And if they challenged any of these horrors, they were threatened with deportation. C.J.’s Seafood brings in an annual revenue of up to $50 million and sells 85 percent of its production to Wal-mart.

Soon the strikes spread to Wal-mart stores and warehouses throughout California. In early September, 30 workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma, Ca., walked out for 15 days to protest unsafe working conditions, reporting temperatures up to 120 degrees, no access to clean water or regular breaks and faulty work equipment. Another 60 walked out in L.A. on October 4, and 250 in Pecora, followed by workers striking or protesting in San Diego, Sacramento and Pico Rivera.

Workers vs. the SWAT Team

Meanwhile, workers at a Wal-mart contractor warehouse in Elmwood, Illinois, the company’s largest distribution center struck in mid-September seventy percent of all imported products Wal-mart sells in the U.S. move through that facility. When a mass protest of 600 blocked the warehouse, a Chicago SWAT team was called in and arrested 17 demonstrators. Those workers had sued for non-payment for all hours worked and for overtime and for being paid less than the minimum wage. They cited work-days varying from two hours to 16 hours, inhaling dust and chemical residue, enduring extreme temperatures, forced to lift 250-pound boxes with no help, and discrimination against women workers.

Workers have walked off the job since then in Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Hallandale Beach, Florida, Orlando and Washington D.C., and in Minnesota, Maryland and Kentucky. In Massachusetts, 300 protesters picketed 30 stores, demanding a $25,000 annual minimum wage plus healthcare coverage. The demonstrators were equally divided among union members, students and churchgoers. Two hundred Wal-mart workers descended on a company investor meeting at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, advancing their demands.

While Wal-mart has been claiming these workers’ charges were false and were a “publicity stunt,” saying that it involves just a tiny group of disgruntled employees, they are actually taking the movement very seriously, having distributed a secret memo to all managers on how to handle the strikes and protest. (Huffington Post, 10/14)

Wal-mart’s Reaps Super-profits From Workers’ Labor

Wal-mart’s profits are based on all this super-exploitation. It had an “operating income of $10.2 billion through July 3 of this year” and “expects to generate $9 billion in on-line sales alone in 2013. The heirs to founder Sam Walton rank among the richest people in the U.S. with a combined wealth reportedly matching 42 percent of the country’s population.” (Home Media Magazine, 10/12)

While many of the strikes and protests have been led by the rank and file, organizations such as the National Guestworker Alliance, “Our Walmart,” the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, “Making Change at Walmart” and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union all have been involved.

However, none of these groups have pointed out the real source of the workers’ oppression: capitalism. They are all trying to reform the profit system, an impossibility. Wal-mart is driven by the same force that drives all bosses — maximum profit. That’s why Wal-mart exploits workers in China and other low-wage countries, and uses the same methods in the U.S. Profits are the name of the game, and it’s an international operation. There are no borders when it comes to accumulating profit.

The Bosses’ Government is NOT Neutral

Moreover, governments are there to enforce this system, whether in Beijing or Washington, D.C. They are not neutral. That Chicago SWAT team was not called in to force Wal-mart to accede to the workers’ demands; they were ordered in to arrest them.

While workers may be urged to resort to help from the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce so-called labor laws, that agency’s Wage and Hour Division employs a meager staff of 1,038 investigators to cover more than 135 million workers in over 7.3 million companies, leaving each inspector responsible for one and a quarter million workers! Most of these workers will have died before an inspector reaches their workplace. Neither Obama nor Romney will change that since their job is to enforce the profit system.

PLP calls on all workers to support the Wal-mart strikers and protesters in their efforts to achieve their demands and to join their picket lines, to raise this need for support in all their unions, mass organization, communities where Wal-mart exists, churches, schools and on college campuses. But we should have no illusions — as long as capitalism exists, Wal-mart and all their profit-making competitors will refuse to give up their drive for maximum profits. That is the essence of capitalism.

Progressive Labor Party must bring this dual message to the rank-and-file Wal-mart workers, and win them to join a revolutionary communist party, PLP, which fights for the only real solution to their abominable conditions, a communist society, without bosses and profits, run by and for working class which produces all value.

Additional sources include the New York Times, Salon.com, Nation of Change, ABC News, Boston Business Journal, Florida Sun Sentinel.