The Militant urges its readers to join on-the-job actions for safer working conditions and higher wages being organized on shop floors around the country. And to join with your co-workers to emulate the initiative and example set by those standing up to the bosses today.
Such fights are the only road for workers to protect themselves from the profit-driven speedup, disregard of safety and disdain pushed by the bosses, and to gain the self-confidence and class consciousness to advance. Send in reports of the workplace actions and protests you are involved in to the Militant. And join us to help get the Militant around.
Only by extending the struggles that take place now can we build the fighting labor movement we need — one that demands protection for all workers against the conditions we face.
The bosses, their parties and government have responded to the spread of coronavirus in the only way their system knows — by stepping up their exploitation of workers and our allies and leaving those thrown out of work to fend for themselves.
They say “we” have to work together to overcome a crisis they blame entirely on the outbreak of the virus. Their efforts to hide the real source of the crises we face — their capitalist system — aims to deter us from fighting to take back from the bosses the wealth that our labor alone produces. There is no “we” that unites workers and the propertied families that exploit us. The real crisis workers face is brought on by the workings of capitalism.
Bosses’ treatment of working people isn’t a “mistake,” it’s the product of their class values. City officials in Las Vegas prefer to “house” homeless workers in outdoor parking lots rather than in the thousands of empty hotel rooms there, which they consider useful only as a source of income for the owners. And the capitalist rulers have no moral compunction from shutting down 12-step programs for former alcoholics and addicts — programs they deem “nonessential” and have ordered closed.
The fight to end the social relations that produce these immoral conditions once and forever begins with the struggles workers are waging today on the shop floor. Go to work and join them!