Labor Briefing

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JOIN SOCIALIST ACTION! We support the struggles of those who are specially oppressed under capitalism— women, LGBT people, national minorities, etc. We support the right of self-determination Socialist Action is a national organization of activists committed to the emancipation for oppressed nationalities, including Blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans. We are of workers and the oppressed. We strive to revitalize the antiwar, environmental, labor, internationalists, and hold that workers of one country have more in common with workers anti-racist, feminist, student, and other social movements with a mass-action perspective. of another than with their own nation’s capitalist class. We seek to link struggles across Recognizing the divisions that exist on the left and within the workers’ movement, we seek national boundaries, and to build an international revolutionary movement that will facilitate to form united front type organizations around specific issues where various groups have the sharing of experiences and political lessons. We maintain fraternal relations with the agreement. In this way we seek to maximize our impact and demonstrate the power and Socialist Action believes that the capitalist state and its institutions are instruments of the In the process we hope to bring activists together from different backgrounds into a ruling class, and that therefore they cannot be used as tools of the working class but have revolutionary workers’ party that can successfully challenge the wealthy elite—whose profit- to be smashed. That is why we fight for revolution. When we fight for specific reforms, we driven system is driving down living standards and threatens all life on this planet. do so with the understanding that in the final analysis real social change can only come We are active partisans of the working class and believe in the need for independent about with the overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of a workers’ government, and the working-class politics—not alliances with the bosses’ parties. That is why we call for workers fight for socialism. Our ultimate goal is a truly democratic, environmentally sustainable, and in the U.S. to break from the Democratic and Republican parties to build a Labor Party egalitarian society organized to satisfy human needs rather than corporate greed. We invite you to join us in the struggle to make the world a better place!

SOCIALIST ACTION Closing news date: Feb. 4, 2018 Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly by Socialist Action Publishing Association, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.

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2 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2018 Transit Equity Day—Transporta­ tion recently surpassed electricity generation as the biggest source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. That makes expansion of public transit more im­ portant than ever in tackling global warming.

Safe, reliable, affordable transit has also historically been an important demand of the civil rights move­ ment. Feb. 5—the next workday after the birthday of the late Rosa Parks, who helped launch the pivotal 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended segregation in public transit—has been declared Transit Equity Day.

This initiative of the Labor Net­ work for Sustainability is being co-sponsored by the Amalgamated Transit Union, Greenpeace, Jobs with Justice, Institute for Policy Studies, Sierra Club, 350.org, among others. Local events will include Transit Town Hall meetings, leaflet distribu­ tion at bus stops and outdoor rallies in weather friendly venues in at least 14 U.S. cities. You can find more in­ formation at: labor4sustainability.org/ transit-equity-day/.

Stop Thief!—In addition to their enormous war machine contracts, Gen­ eral Dynamics runs the privatized call centers to assist Medicare, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act market clients. The Communications Workers of Amer­ ica represents tens of thousands of call center workers at other employers but don’t yet bargain for this group. Never­ theless, CWA has filed a claim of wage theft through the bogus classification of jobs on behalf of 1600 of these agents against the corporate giant. If the Wage and Hours Division of the Labor De­ effectiveness of mass action. based on the trade unions. designed, and laid out entirely by volunteer labor. Name City State Phone E-mail partment finds merit in the claim, the remedy would be back pay totaling more than $100 million.

Insult to Pigs—The stock market designation for Harley-Davidson is HOG. Perhaps unfairly to the swine, this association of greed is appropriate to the “iconic” motorcycle manufacturer. Twenty years ago, HOG took advan­ tage of generous federal, state, and lo­ cal incentives to build a state of the art assembly plant in Kansas City, with the Steelworkers and Machinists sharing bargaining for the new workforce.

Thirteen years later, HOG threatened to close the plant unless the unions agreed to grant draconian give-backs Editor: Michael Schreiber Canada Editor: Barry Weisleder Subscribe now!

Address Zip (Above) President Trump meets with Harley-Davidson execs and union reps at the White House in February 2017.

that included not only a five-year wage freeze and elimination of the eight-hour day but also a new classification of ca­ sual workers, used only as needed and paid a lower rate with no benefits. At the urging of the union bureaucracy, the workers reluctantly agreed.

Last year, HOG arranged a photo-op of President Trump sitting on their big­ gest model on the White House lawn. A few days after receiving this Make America Great Again endorsement, HOG announced that they were opening Fourth International.

• Buffalo, NY: [email protected] • Chicago: P.O. Box 578428 Chicago, IL 60657, [email protected] • Connecticut: (860) 478-5300 • Duluth, Minn.: [email protected]. www.thenorthernworker.blogspot.com • Kansas City: [email protected] (816) 221-3638 • LOUISVILLE, KY: [email protected], (502) 451-2193 • Minneapolis/St. Paul: (612) 802-1482, [email protected] • New York City: (212) 781-5157 • Philadelphia: (267) 989-9035 [email protected] Facebook: Red Philly Last month, just hours before the State of the Union Address, in which Trump would boast that employers will use their new taxcut gifts to create jobs and raise wages, HOG announced they were permanently closing the Kansas City plant, to be complet­ ed next year. Eight hundred jobs will be lost, and that will also have a big impact on local suppli­ ers, merchants, and taxes.

This is yet another bitter lesson that neither worker concessions nor government hand-outs can provide job security under “Free Enterprise.”

The Times They Are a Chang­ ing—A New York Times story be­ gan, “Journalists at The Los Ange­ les Times voted overwhelmingly to form a union despite aggres­ sive opposition from the paper’s management team, reversing more than a century of anti-union sentiment at one of the big­ gest newspapers in the country.” The vote for the CWA News Guild wasn’t close—248 to 44.

Drivers Not Drones—According to The Wall Street Journal, the Teamsters have already submitted 83 pages of de­ mands to begin negotiations for a new UPS contract covering 260,000 workers to replace the current one expiring in July. Proposed for the first time would be a ban on deliveries by drones or driv­ erless vehicles. Also included are hiring 10,000 new workers and eliminating deliveries after 9 p.m. n If you have a story appropriate for La­ bor Briefing, please contact billonasch@ kclabor.org • Providence: [email protected] (401) 952-5385 • Salem, Ore.: [email protected] (971) 312-7369 • San Francisco Bay Area:

P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, Ca 94610 (510) 268-9429, sfsocialistaction@ gmail.com • WASHINGTON, DC: [email protected], (202) 286-5493 National Office [email protected] (647) 986-1917 http://www.socialistaction.ca/

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Fred “Mitch” Linck is the Socialist Action candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. I time in Iraq, and how it can help us understand our want to talk a little about what I learned from my situation today.

By the time I was 17, there was no one who could tell me that joining the military was not the best thing I could do with my life. I joined shortly after high school, and it was not long before I was living my dream of going to Iraq to free a people from a “brutal dictator” and to bring them democracy. After I arrived, however, it was not long before I realized that everything I had been told, believed, and held as obvious was simply lies.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how I came to this, but one moment stands out when everything turned up­ side down. My unit and I were patrolling through the streets of Fallujah, Iraq. Some kids, maybe 15 or 16 years old, took a few shots at us from a rooftop and ran off. I was not much older than them, really—just 18. We took cover in a house, and the realization came over me that I had so much more in common with these kids than I did with anyone who had de­ cided we should be at war.

I came to see that being in Iraq, we were making things worse, not better. We were not making anyone safer. And that the things I had done were going to hurt for a long time. And that the scars I will carry are small in comparison to those of the society we deci­ mated in the Middle East.

As my time in the military came to a close, I started asking myself: For all the blood spilled in Iraq and Af­ ghanistan, did we make anyone’s lives better? For all the money spent did we make this world a more just or equitable place? For the 22 suicides that veterans commit each day from the trauma of fighting an un­ just war, is anyone safer?

No. But the rich made billions of dollars. They made it off weapons that blew up Iraqi infrastructure. They made it by controlling the flow of oil. They made it off no-bid contracts to repair the infrastructure that helps the rich suck ever more resources from the country. They made it from employing people like me as private contractors to protect the oil fields.

This is what the Iraq war was always about. It was about destabilizing the Middle East to ensure the dominance of American business. It was about profi­ teering from the destruction of countless lives, Iraqi and American. It was about protecting the American dollar. It was to further entrench the military indus­ trial complex in the Middle East.

And so, I discovered that the real aims of the war had nothing to do with why I decided to pick up a gun and fly thousands of miles from home to join it.

I did not want to go to war to make the rich richer. I did not want to go to war to defend a system that benefits when more people are sick or in prison. I did not want go to war to protect a system that lives by destroying our environment and bringing us always closer to total ecological collapse.

I did not want to go to war to protect a system and a class that lets some people take private helicopters to work while the people who produce their wealth, working people, have to take hours on a neglected public transit system every single day.

What I wanted, when I went to war, was to make a more just world. This is why most young people de­ cide to fight. But fighting in a war doesn’t let you de­ cide its purpose, or even your own role. When you fight for the American military you fight for the rule of American capitalism. Whether it is in Iraq, Afghani­ stan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Kosovo, Vietnam, or Ko­ rea, or anywhere else. street. You have no more real say in the aims of your job than I had in the invasion of Iraq.

You fight for your boss every day. You pay for your boss’s wars. You compete with other workers for your boss’s jobs. You compete with other cities and towns for your boss’s investments—investments made with profits created by you.

They have you fighting your allies: your fellow workers, here and around the globe. They have you serving your enemies: The banks, the corporations, the richest few thousand people on earth.

• Do you go to work to make the ultra-wealthy even richer?

• Do you pay taxes to imprison and deport your neighbors and family?

• Do you pay taxes to imprison and murder children in the streets?

• Do you pay taxes to send kids to kill people around the world?

• Do you go to work every day to destroy the basis of human life on this planet?

This is what the billionaires who run this society do with the wealth we make by our own hands, whether we like it or not.

We do what the bosses say on the job. We do what www.defense.gov (Top) U.S. soldiers patrol a street in Iraq.

(Below) Fred “Mitch” Linck.

on the job, in the streets, and on the campuses, we need to organize independently from their political leadership. We need to organize independently from their parties, the Republicans and Democrats. And if we’re to have a chance, if we’re serious, we need to organize our own party.

That’s because, to win our emancipation, working people cannot simply put a few top hats in jail and call it a day. We are compelled by our situation to cre­ ate a new society. This means realizing the liberation of women, of African Americans, of LGBTQI people, of Latinxs, the colonized, the immigrants, and the First Nation people. It means taking the great pro­ ductive forces we have created together and placing them under public ownership and the management of workers.

The Democrats and the Republicans do not care about us. My opponent, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, does not care about us. He does not care about you. He is a professional politician. Chris Mur­ phy and politicians like him make policies for the ultra-wealthy, not workers.

We need a party of our own—a party that fights ev­ ery day for the interests of those most exploited by capitalism. A party that has at its very core the idea of taking power from the capitalist class and putting it in the hands of workers.

That’s why I’m running as a socialist candidate for U.S. Senate against Chris Murphy. My party, Socialist Action, believes workers and oppressed people can build a truly democratic society organized to satisfy human needs, rather than corporate profit.

Help us bring this message to your coworkers, your campus, and your neighborhood. Volunteer, host a house party, or make a donation to help build this campaign. Vote Socialist Action in 2018! Vote Fred Linck for U.S. Senate in Connecticut. n

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