If there’s any way you can swing it, the Militant urges readers to join the Asarco copper strikers’ rally in Tucson, Arizona, Nov. 18! Their fight in Arizona and Texas deserves support and solidarity from working people everywhere. Speak out about their struggle and build support among your co-workers, your union, your church and in every other way possible. Send a contribution, a letter of support, join their picket lines. You can make a difference.
Like bosses everywhere, Asarco believes they can foster divisions among workers, encouraging each of us to think only of “me, myself and mine.” After nearly 10 years without any raises, Asarco proposes in its insulting “last, final and best” offer to give a paltry raise to about a third of the workers, those who are the highest paid. Workers said, “Hell no!” and went on strike.
The bosses want us to see other workers as our problem, not to see ourselves as part of a class, the vast majority, capable of fighting together against them and their rapacious class.
Asarco is hiring so-called replacement workers — scabs — to cross the picket lines. The employers and their press work hard to deter other workers learning about this fight and identifying with it as their own. Above all they try to prevent the mobilization of the solidarity necessary to sustain the strike.
As more workers learn about this labor battle, our solidarity can strengthen the strikers’ resolve.
Everything we do to break down the divisions the bosses sow — between employed and unemployed, native-born and immigrant, men and women, Black and Caucasian — strengthens fights today like the copper workers and helps us build the self-confidence and, most importantly, the class consciousness, necessary to fight and win.
We need to take our working-class battles onto the political plane. Not the self-defeating search for a “lesser evil” among the twin bosses’ parties, the Democrats and Republicans. We need to build a labor party to represent our class interests and those of all those oppressed and exploited by capitalist rule.
All out to Tucson Nov. 18!