Statement by Róger Calero, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New York mayor, Oct. 19.
The boss press is taking note of the growing number of strikes today — not to spread the word about these fights, but to alert the capitalist ruling families to the challenge threatening their profits.
The ruling propertied families and their hangers-on in the middle class fear actions by the working class will spread more broadly, help rebuild and strengthen the labor movement, and win allies.
Through today’s strikes, workers are holding off bosses’ attacks on wages, conditions, divisive two-tier contracts, and grueling speedup and schedules. After the strike, they return to work with a stronger union, determined to use it to defend themselves on the job and to offer solidarity to others.
The capitalist rulers and their political parties do everything they can to hide the truth about the conditions workers face, to blame higher prices on workers demanding pay raises, to try and isolate strikers as they are doing today by saying the strike at John Deere threatens farmers from bringing in the harvest.
Bosses insist workers must adjust — and make concessions — to assure the employing class stays “competitive,” at home and abroad. But more workers are saying, “No more concessions!” and they’re fighting.
It is becoming ever clearer to working people that all questions today have two sharply counterposed answers — one that benefits the handful of bosses and bankers and the other that defends the interests of the millions of working people. How our side — the working class — comes out of today’s skirmishes will determine how prepared we’ll be for the bigger battles the crisis of capitalism portends. The rulers are ready to deploy their cops, criminal “justice” system and military power.
We need to act as a class with common interests, an international class. To defend ourselves we not only need stronger unions, but our own political party, a labor party. Such a party would bind together workers and farmers, employed and unemployed, native-and foreign-born workers, men and women, and all nationalities in struggle. It would draw lessons from past examples of workers’ struggles, like that of the Cuban Revolution, where working people took political power into their own hands and have used it to advance the interests of working people worldwide. This is the course Socialist Workers Party candidates advance.
Spread the word about today’s labor battles, build participation on the picket lines, and help get the word out about the SWP! Join us!