Hard-fought labor battles at JBS in Greeley, Colorado, at the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, and by the United Farm Workers in California focus on matters that are vital for the working class as a whole, as the just-ended strike at ArcelorMittal in Shelby, Ohio, did.
Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union at JBS are fighting against speedup that threatens workers’ life and limb, for better pay and health care benefits, and to defend its largely immigrant membership. Bosses have locked out members of the United Steelworkers at BP in a move to cut union jobs, sharply slash workers’ pay and eliminate collective bargaining. USW members at ArcelorMittal walked out to oppose boss attempts to impose 12-hour shifts, cut overtime pay and limit health care for workers’ spouses.
Each of these struggles highlights the increasing severity of the employing class’s offensive against working people, and the crucial need for union solidarity. These assaults go side by side with the government’s drive against workers without papers, carried out to try to deepen divisions in the working class and to advance the bosses’ exploitation of all workers.
The capitalists’ assaults on workers at home — through intensifying speedup, lack of steady jobs and declining real wages — flow from the same thirst for profit that drives their wars abroad. Both are a product of the dog-eat-dog competition of national ruling classes to partition the world and maximize their plunder of resources and labor power. The U.S. imperialists are determined to shore up their world domination at the expense of their rivals, and to extend their exploitation of working people worldwide.
Democrats and Republicans talk about “our country’s wars.” There are none. These conflicts are fought to serve the same U.S. ruling class that is offloading the capitalist crisis onto workers’ backs at home. Workers are the one truly international class with no interest in exploitation or oppression of any kind, and a deep desire to live in peace.
Wars of conquest and growing Jew-hating violence are a permanent part of the imperialist epoch. They also breed deepening struggles by working people, opening the possibility for workers to chart a way forward.
The road to ending the horrors of imperialist war lies in workers building a party of our own, a revolutionary party with a tested leadership that can advance the working class in its tens of millions to take political power from the capitalist war makers, end capitalist exploitation and join the fight for a socialist world. To be part of that struggle — join the Socialist Workers Party.