Picket lines and other actions at airports across the country provide a good opportunity for meat packers, dockworkers, coal miners, workers in the auto and garment industries, and farmers who are themselves waging struggles to link up their common fights.

Building on the record of the Clinton years, President George Bush and Congress are pressing ahead the ruling-class assault against working people--both at home and abroad. This week both houses of Congress carried through a rapid, wholesale repeal of regulations that provided some measure of protection from repetitive motion diseases. Bush and the courts have stepped in to back the coal bosses in their suit to block implementation of new black lung rules and have intervened against the unions in several of the major disputes in the airlines.

Dockworkers in South Carolina are battling a drive to railroad five union members to jail by the state government, which is hoping to send a signal to all working people about what can happen to you if you organize and defend your union. And meat packers in Colorado had to deal with two workers being arrested by cops after the union members overwhelmingly voted down a proposed contract with Excel.

Pointing to this alliance of class forces workers confront at Northwest Airlines, a mechanic succinctly stated, "If you were Northwest would you negotiate now, or wait until the president intervened?" These workers have been working under a contract that expired four years ago. And they haven't had a contractual raise for nine years!

When workers take to the picket lines, the bosses are quick to seek court injunctions to halt or limit them. They often try to get the courts to impose huge fines on the unions in an effort to break or weaken them. The power of working class solidarity is the most effective answer to this drive by the bosses and their government against unions and workers' rights. As the resistance of working people against the effects of the crisis of capitalism deepens, they will more and more face the cop, court, and state and federal government assaults on their struggles. And these go hand-in-hand with attacks on democratic rights, the social wage, and other conquests of the struggles of workers and farmers. But the drive by the ruling class pushes working people in the United States together and helps all see the commonality in their existence across the artificial divides nurtured and created in class society. It also points to the need for the labor movement to champion the interests of all the exploited and oppressed, oppose Washington's aggression abroad, and fight to replace the capitalist government in Washington with one of workers and farmers.
 
 
Related article:
Workers at four airlines step up contract fights  
 
 
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