CHICAGO—What its chair called “a time of upheaval and militancy in the labor movement” has prompted the Communist Party USA’s Labor Commission, in a two-day meeting in Chicago, to draft plans for mass action by the party and its allies in both unions and non-union working-class organizations across the country.
The plans, with a special emphasis on fighting the racism which is used to divide American workers, will be presented to the CPUSA’s National Board in the coming weeks and later to its national convention, next June. They will focus heavily on utilizing the 2024 elections to build a grand coalition to defeat the fascist threat—a threat which goes way beyond just Trump and his immediate supporters.
That threat, according to almost everyone in the youth-heavy crowd at the commission meeting, includes white supremacists, racists, xenophobes, and misogynists—all working in the interest of corporate power, which is determined to crush workers and their rights at every turn.
Participants noted that, along with the fight against fascism, workers are in an intense struggle against “vulture capitalism” and the divide-and-conquer tactics that include brand new forms of exploitation. They also noted, according to the commission’s chair, that a major problem for the entire working class is the “brutal and racist attacks” on Black and brown people and “increasing vigilante attacks by white mobs.”
There was emphasis on the importance of party clubs across the country and the need to bring issues discussed by the commission into those clubs. “They are the foundation of the party and enable us to counter the influence of finance capital over our workers. Wall Street is going for the highest profits regardless of the cost” to lives “or even the firms themselves,” the chair warned in his keynote address.
The upheaval and militancy among workers, it was noted, have spread from the continuing uprising of exploited rank-and-file workers, many of them “young and fearless.” Among them: Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, L.A. hotel workers, UPS Teamsters, Auto Workers, grad students, and grocery workers.
That attitude has spread to new leaders, such as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and UAW President Shawn Fain. Others include Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, the leaders of the independent Amazon Labor Union, Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry, and SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher.
“All have said ‘enough is enough,’” the keynoter said. And Fain, the new UAW leader, held vast membership meetings with his members who toil at the three Detroit auto makers in preparation for this year’s contract talks.
Then Fain “took the proposal from Stellantis”—formerly Fiat-Chrysler—“and threw it in the trash, saying ‘no more of this sh*t anymore.’”
The meeting featured workers’ stories, all meant to be used as examples of capitalist exploitation. First, the chair described how to put a successful coalition together. The recent Ohio referendum defeating GOP attempts to make amending the constitution more difficult was presented as an example of top-notch coalition building.
There, a coalition that included the state Democratic Party, abortion rights and civil rights groups, organized labor, and the CPUSA defeated a right-wing attempt to curb voters’ rights to amend the state constitution. “It’s a coalition that cares about democracy,” the chair explained. The right lost what was widely viewed as a proxy vote on the right to abortion, by 57%-43%.
More workers described corporate exploitation instances CPUSA can use as evidence, including:
- A downstate Illinois Starbucks worker’s day began at 5 am. The company standard for making coffee for customers “is literally impossible” because “the espresso shots” come out more slowly than Starbucks’s rules demand. “We’re picking up mats, scrubbing floors and bending over every 60 seconds getting items out of the fridge.”
- At Amazon, “we deal with horrible injuries,” said ALU member Justine Medina. One worker at their warehouse, JFK8 on Staten Island—where the union used safety and health issues to gain a breakthrough and significant election win—“broke his wrist” on the job. “They wouldn’t even give him ice,” Medina said.
“We had people passing out, broken bones. I’ve had people collapse and they [supervisors] make you walk around them…Pregnant workers don’t get any accommodation” on the job—a refusal which is illegal.
“We have to bring democracy to the workplace…It’s real democracy, not bourgeois democracy.” Meanwhile, Amazon continues to defy federal labor law by not recognizing ALU’s win at JFK8.
- In the Detroit public schools, we have “wage thefts, demoralized workplaces, principals and administrators who are supposed to fill in” when both teachers and substitutes are unavailable, a substitute said. And the kids are stuck in old buildings with no air conditioning sitting in 85-degree classrooms. “It’s just criminal I have to buy them fans I can afford to keep them cool.”
But at least one speaker described problems along the way, with weak or ineffective unions, signaling a need for continuing democratic reform within the labor movement itself—a reform the CPUSA has campaigned for a hundred years.
A Kroger worker and United Food and Commercial Workers member from West Phoenix, Ariz., said many of his colleagues “didn’t know they had a union,” much less that UFCW could raise the issue of rampant wage theft there. “I’m trying to rally the troops,” the worker added.
Still, “At what point do bad working conditions become crimes against humanity?” asked a homecare worker for the elderly in New York City’s Chinatown. “As capitalism creates crisis after crisis, it puts” both the responsibility and the blame “on workers.”
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