http://themilitant.com/2018/8210/821020.html
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Vol. 82/No. 10 March 12, 2018
(front page, editorial)
Organize the unorganized! Build fighting unions!
“Look at the nonunion workers at Walmart,” Scott Whitt, a school bus
driver on strike alongside teachers and other school workers in West
Virginia, told the Militant. “They have no leg to stand on.”
It’s not only Walmart where bosses are stepping up their assaults and
indignities on workers.
“We’re not fighting just for teachers,” said one picket sign held by
striking West Virginia teachers. “We’re fighting for all workers in West
Virginia.” Their fight for better wages and health care is an example
for workers everywhere. The struggle has aspects of a broader social
movement. Teachers worked with parents and others in advance to make
sure the walkout would not harm those most in need. Day care centers and
meals were organized for the children.
The spirit of the teachers and school workers has made it possible to
win broad solidarity and gives a glimmer of how a fighting union
movement can unite working people against boss and government attacks.
It’s in the towns and mountains of West Virginia that a revolution began
in the United Mine Workers union in the late 1960s and ’70s, wresting
control of the union from the corrupt Tony Boyle machine. Mineworkers
won the right to read, discuss and vote on their contract. They set up
union safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe conditions.
The union led a social movement that fought for retirees, demanded and
won health care for those afflicted with black lung and joined broader
social protests.
But over time, union officials have retreated, like the leadership of
the rest of the labor movement, looking increasingly to their own
welfare and to deals with various capitalist politicians, not the
fighting capacity of the workers themselves. The unions have gotten
weaker as the crisis of the capitalist system has driven the bosses to
sharper attacks on our class. Today only 6 percent of private industry
workers are in the union.
More than 100 years ago, Karl Marx wrote that the unions must “act
deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad
interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and
political movement tending in that direction” and act “as the champions
and representatives of the whole working class.”
This is true more than ever today as the bosses make working people pay
for the crisis of capitalism and where workers in uniform are being sent
off as cannon fodder to die in their wars in Afghanistan, Syria and
others sure to come.
Socialist Workers Party members knocking on doors in working-class
neighborhoods find there is a serious discussion going on about what our
class needs to do to effectively challenge the employers’ assaults. We
need to learn to think socially and act politically to unite the working
class. We have to organize and strengthen unions that can speak for all
the oppressed and exploited. And we need to organize independently of
the two capitalist parties, with an eye to overthrowing capitalist rule
and take political power ourselves, as Cuban workers and farmers did in
1959.
The strike by teachers and other school workers in West Virginia is a
harbinger of bigger battles to come. We need to join in, build
solidarity with all of these fights, and deepen the discussion among
working people on the road forward.
Related articles:
W.Va. teachers: ‘We’re fighting for all workers’
School workers’ struggle wins broad support in W. Virginia
Bosses attacks unravel miners gains against black lung
Walmart winning ‘retail wars,’ putting squeeze on its worker
‘We can build unions that inspire workers to fight’
Ukraine miners fight bosses, government over back pay
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