Strong backing by the labor movement, students, and organizations of the oppressed can send an unmistakable message to the bosses that they should agree to the workers' just demands.

The fact that these workers, many of them immigrants, have fought their way into the union, built up their organization, and waged a confident and effective strike speaks volumes about the strengthening of the working class in the United States. It also augers well for the potential for the forces starting to come together among proletarians to chart a broad social course for all working people.

The janitors' fight illustrates the problems the employers face, despite the bosses' successes over the past 25 years in pushing back the unions, imposing steep concessions, enforcing a brutal intensification of labor, and seeking, through use of immigrant labor, to divide the working class and create a humbled and docile section of the workforce subject to conditions of second-class citizens.

Instead, what the employers have brought into being is a stronger working class, one with experiences and traditions of struggle from every continent and country around the globe. While indeed facing conditions of super-exploitation, harassment, and deportation by the immigration police, and racist abuse, immigrant workers have fought back against each, asserted their humanity, and forged union and other organizations to defend their rights.

The struggles in Los Angeles and New York demonstrate the degree to which questions around unions, police brutality, democratic rights and political space, and national oppression are intertwined today. More and more those fighting in one struggle see a common ally with those who step forward in another; fighters welcome each other to their battles against a common enemy. Immigrant workers in the fields, meatpacking plants, garment shops, chicken factories, construction firms, and trucking companies are pushing forward and strengthening the unions.

The building workers' struggle is taking place amidst a rise in class-struggle actions across the country. Steelworkers are building on the success of the 4,000-strong rally to back locked-out union members at AK Steel; a strike by 2,500 Machinists against Lockheed Martin; a rally called by the United Mine Workers to defend health care for miners and their families; speakouts being organized by farmers at upcoming government hearings; and more. These actions are the tip of the iceberg of the thousands of shop floor skirmishes and conflicts inside the plants, mines, and mills every day across the country.

Unionists who have been part of struggles and are looking for more fights, union locals that have come out stronger from recent battles and have experience and numbers, and farmers taking to the streets to defend their land and right to farm, can all weigh in the balance in this new round of strikes and actions, with union power and a growing alliance of workers and farmers.  
 
 
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