The outcome of the U.S. elections has done nothing to deter the bosses from putting the crisis of their capitalist system onto the backs of working people. And it has done nothing to quell workers’ determination to use unions to fight their attempts to profit at our expense. As battles unfold at Milk-Bone, hotel chains, on the docks and elsewhere, workers seek to organize the broadest possible solidarity and respond to these struggles as a class.
Employers are trying to hold down wages while the prices of groceries, rent, child care and more have soared. They’re attempting to cut pensions, health care and other things workers must have to survive; to get more production out of fewer workers; to gut safety, threatening workers’ lives and limbs; and to foist exhausting schedules and forced overtime on us, wrecking havoc with family and political life.
The strikes taking place today are the foundation for workers advancing our interests as a class against the capitalists and their government.
As workers fight, we gain confidence in ourselves and strengthen our unity in the face of bosses’ never-ending attempts to try to turn us against one another. Employed or unemployed, immigrant or native-born, of whatever nationality or hue, we share common class interests. A victory in any of these fights means workers and the union come out better prepared to respond to the next assault, and to organize solidarity for whoever else needs it.
Experience on the picket line also helps workers recognize a vital fact — that all class struggles are political battles.
At the urging of the barons of business, the Canadian government intervened Nov. 12 against locked-out port workers in British Columbia and Quebec. Acting as a class, the capitalist ruling families want to impose binding arbitration on the unionists as they fight for better wages and schedules, jobs and safer conditions. Now is the time to redouble solidarity with the port workers’ struggle. All unions should demand government hands off!
Bring solidarity to fellow unionists, like striking members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union at Milk-Bone in Buffalo, New York, or members of Unite, the union striking at Oscar Mayer in Wrexham, North Wales.
Every reader of the Militant can help. Let your co-workers, fellow unionists, friends and family members know about the struggles you read about in the On The Picket Line column on page 5 of this issue. Send messages of support from your union, win contributions to the unions’ strike funds and visit their picket lines. Send notes to the Militant to get out the word about your actions. Let striking workers know they don’t fight alone!
Working-class solidarity is a weapon that can make a difference to the outcome of these fights and reinforce workers understanding that we are a large and potentially powerful class whose future depends on our acting on this reality.