To the owners of Dakota Beef, and capitalists throughout this country, the increased resistance of workers to speedup on the line, unsafe working conditions, and low wages represents mob action against their "right" to literally turn blood and bone into increased profits under the whiplash of increasing competition.

"We have orders to fill and commitments to meet," summed up their arrogant reaction.

Fellow meat packers, garment workers, miners, and other working people who hear about what is being accomplished by the fight at Dakota Beef for decent working conditions and a union will see it differently. And they will see how shallow and temporary employer arrogance can turn out to be.

The intensification of labor in packinghouses across this country, threatening life and limb, has become notorious, especially since the mid-1980s after the owners were able to push back the union, drive through major concessions, and then take more. The bosses brought in thousands of immigrant workers, hoping to divide the workforce and weaken the union. Now they are beginning to reap the results.

The fight at Dakota Beef stands on the shoulders of other struggles by workers, working farmers, and the targets of discrimination and disrespect that for a couple years have broken out more and more often, with determination and staying power. These battles often take the rulers, and working people themselves, by surprise.

The employing class wants workers to think we are on our own each time we fight. But struggles by working people increasingly are being affected by ones that came before them, and in turn--regardless of immediate outcome--are having an impact on other fights that follow.

Examples of resistance--by coal miners, garment and textile workers, auto workers, longshoremen, steelworkers, farm workers, working farmers, opponents of police brutality, and others--are reflecting a sea change in U.S. politics and having a cumulative impact with each new battle.

On Martin Luther King Day this past January, 50,000 people, many of them Black workers, marched through the streets of Columbia, South Carolina, to demand that the Confederate battle flag be hauled down from atop the state capitol building. Encouraged by that action, dockworkers in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized on the wharves a few days later and battled the cops to stop a scab operation in the port there.

Farmers are organizing protest actions to press their demands for debt relief and government support to fight off foreclosure and enable them to keep farming. Black farmers and their supporters have organized protests to end discriminatory practices that have forced thousands off the land. Some 3,000 farmers and their allies took part in the March 21 Rally for Rural America in Washington, D.C.

Unlike for decades past, substantial actions were organized by workers on May Day this year in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, New York, and other cities. Those actions drew broad participation by immigrant workers bringing in their traditions of struggle--including celebrating the international workers' holiday--and strengthened a growing unity of the fighting working class in the United States.

Demonstrations organized by civil rights groups, unions, and other organizations in February and March took on Governor John Ellis Bush's "One Florida" anti-affirmative action initiative.

Working and retired miners, members of their families, and others in coal communities across the United States have been mobilizing to protect the rights of miners and their families to medical care. Capping some of the largest regional protest rallies ever seen in these communities, the miners took their protest to Washington on May 17 in an 8,000-person-strong march.

This developing social movement in the coalfields overlaps with a number of strikes and other actions by members of the United Mine Workers to defend their union. Miners in New Mexico and Wyoming are right now putting up a fight against Pittsburg and Midway Coal Company's attempts to cut medical care, pensions, and overtime pay. Over the past year other strikes by miners in Illinois and Colorado, and in the anthracite region in eastern Pennsylvania have set an example for other miners who will soon be up against the coal operators' demands.

In the Twin Cities an important fight for a new union contract is being waged by members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 17. The hotel workers already turned back an attempt by the bosses to use the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the hated la migra, to deport seven union militants during an earlier union organizing drive last October. As this issue of the Militant goes to press, hotel workers are building a June 9 rally in Minneapolis to win solidarity in anticipation of strike action to win a decent contract.

Meatpacking bosses around the country will be watching to see what happens at Dakota Beef, where workers are now trying to extend what they've won by organizing into the United Food and Commercial Workers union. At the same time, this fight provides a boost to organizing initiatives not only in the Midwest but beyond, and in many industries.

The struggles of nonunion workers are starting to make a mark in U.S. politics, getting the attention of the bosses, and strengthening the labor movement. Recent organizing victories by Wal-Mart meat cutters, North Carolina textile workers at Kannapolis, and 74,000 home health-care workers in Los Angeles are among the examples.

While many workers at Dakota Beef are new in the plant, it should be no surprise that this is happening at a factory where the union had been organized but was driven out by the employer nearly a decade ago after failure to win a contract. It is difficult to wipe out all residue of a union in the changed conditions unfolding in this country. The experience of workers who have gone through past struggles, combined with fresh forces ready to fight, can strengthen workers' ability to stand up to management pressure and intimidation.

Workers at Dakota Beef forged solidarity among themselves. Now they need solidarity from you. Union fighters, farmers involved in struggles, youth campaigning against police brutality should get the word out about their struggle. Linking up with others, like the hotel workers in Minnesota, is also the order of the day.

One way all working-class fighters can support this and other struggles is to get around the Militant, as well as our sister Spanish-language monthly, Perspectiva Mundial. Workers in struggle, and those involved in proletarian social protest actions, find a voice in the Militant and PM.

This week's Militant features articles on the meat packers' struggle in Minnesota, the miners' strikes in New Mexico and Wyoming, a strike by health-care workers in the province of Alberta in Canada, the fight for a decent contract by steelworkers in Ohio, and more. From the front page features, to the weekly columns, every issue presents news of working-class struggles that can be found nowhere else.

Simultaneous with the printing of this issue of the Militant, a special four-page supplement to Perspectiva Mundial is being produced containing the front-page news article on the Dakota Beef fight along with this editorial.

The working-class resistance is also increasing interest in how the conditions workers are facing came about, how workers here and abroad are tied together, and what kind of solutions are far-reaching enough to make a difference. The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and Capitalism's World Disorder, two books published by Pathfinder Press, not only provide an explanation of the objective roots of the world capitalist crisis and why it is deepening, but also the quarter-century-long record of concrete experience by revolutionary-minded workers of how to organize so struggles are not lost and energies not wasted. They are of growing interest to expanding layers of vanguard workers and farmers.

The struggles of miners in the coalfields, of meat packers in the Midwest, of farmers in the South and other parts of the country, are just beginning. What the bosses think of as "a mob" are working people fighting for human dignity. And each fight is now giving us more unity and strength to challenge their exploitation and the political power that perpetuates it.  
 
 
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