The breadth of union support shown for striking Alabama coal miners against Warrior Met bosses at their April 6 rally shows the readiness of workers to throw support behind this fight. Inspired by the miners’ determination, more solidarity can be won. The fight to reverse the bosses’ attacks on miners’ wages, benefits and working conditions can be victorious if our unions expand solidarity.
Help get out the word, build delegations to the United Mine Workers picket lines in Brookwood. Invite strikers to come speak to unions in your area. Win contributions to their strike fund.
A victory in this struggle would show what workers can accomplish when we use our unions. It would advance the confidence of workers elsewhere to stand up to the bosses’ efforts to hold down wages while sharp price hikes wreak havoc on our families. It would encourage workers at Amazon, who have just won a victory on the road to gaining union recognition in Staten Island, and who are fighting to do the same in Bessemer, Alabama.
The employers act together to defend their class rule and maximize the profits they derive from exploiting us, both here and around the world. They use their state power, and their two parties — the Democrats and Republicans — to try and corral us. We saw this in the draconian court-ordered ban on all picketing at Warrior Met for months.
Whenever bosses talk about “our company’s interests,” they mean their profits, not our wages, safety on the job or schedules that allow for a family life. Whenever their government says “we” need to unite to preserve “America’s” place in the world, they mean the interests of the capitalist rulers, not the toiling majority, who they enlist as the cannon fodder in their wars.
Everything their government does abroad — from expanding its massive military and nuclear arms in Europe to imposing sanctions on Russia — is aimed at increasing their ability to profit at the expense of competitors and by exploiting working people worldwide. These dog-eat-dog profiteers aren’t our allies.
The working class needs our own foreign policy — rooted in our common interests with fellow workers worldwide. Today we champion the defense of Ukraine’s independence, call for Moscow to get out of Ukraine, and at the same time, call for an end to the crippling sanctions that fall on the backs of Russian workers and farmers.
These twin battles — building solidarity with workers abroad and here at home — go hand in hand. Politics today, as ever, is class against class. We need to rebuild our unions into a powerful social movement of millions that can mobilize our strength in action.
We need to break with the bosses’ ruling parties and build our own working-class party, a labor party, to help coordinate our labor struggles on the road to taking political power into our own hands.
Solidarity with the fighting miners at Warrior Met! Solidarity with the Ukrainian toilers battling to defend their sovereignty and independence!