Like tens of thousands of workers around the country who have no union, the meat cutters are seeking to get organized and join one in order to defend themselves and their rights against this retail giant. Their struggle has forced a crack in the nonunion stance of the company and won them national recognition. Meat cutters in other Wal-Mart stores are starting to follow suit.

The labor movement can bring its weight to bear behind this fight and oppose the company's moves to break the incipient union organization before it gains a toehold. While Wal-Mart may have been planning to bring in case-ready meat for some time, the timing of its announcement, immediately following the first union representation victory in Jacksonville, Texas, was lost on no one. Now the company is challenging the right of current employees to even vote for a union because the company has plans in the future to eliminate their jobs.

Wal-Mart worries that if this small number of workers can stand up, organize, and vote in a union, then tens of thousands of other employees at this retail giant might get the same idea. The company has built a multibillion dollar empire on low wages, part-time work, arbitrary work rules, and substandard benefits.

At the same time, "Si se puede"--yes, it can be done, is the slogan of thousands of striking janitors in Los Angeles who are fighting for a wage increase and dignity. The janitors, and growing numbers of workers across the country, are resisting the bosses assaults on our living and working conditions. Thousands of janitors who work in downtown Chicago won their demands hours after walking off the job.

These struggles highlight broader developments in the labor movement and the change in thinking among many working people. They reflect a proletarian movement developing among fighters, who are extending a hand of solidarity from one struggle to the next.

"It's not good that these companies are making so much money while they're benefiting from the low wages they pay us," explained a janitor in California. Many of these workers earn the lowest pay among unionized workers in the United States. But they are refusing to remain a source of cheap labor for the bosses, while existing in substandard, crowded living conditions.

Class-conscious fighters can embrace these rising labor actions and reach out to vanguard layers with the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder titles like The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. As this book explains, these struggles "show why only the working class can lead humanity out of the social crisis endemic to capitalism in its decline."

The stock market's volatility reinforces what many workers sense: that this social system is heading toward social and economic devastation. Out of their continued resistance, growing class-struggle experience, and gaining of a scientific understanding of the road forward for working people will come a tested leadership and broad battalions of labor that can defend the interests of working people.  
 
 
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